What Is Protein?
Protein is found throughout the body—in muscle, bone, skin, hair, and virtually every other body part or tissue. It makes up the enzymes that power many chemical reactions and the hemoglobin that carries oxygen in your blood. At least 10,000 different proteins make you what you are and keep you that way.
Protein is made from twenty-plus basic building blocks called amino acids. Because we don’t store amino acids, our bodies make them in two different ways: either from scratch, or by modifying others. Nine amino acids—histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, and valine—known as the essential amino acids, must come from food.
How Much Protein Do I Need?
The National Academy of Medicine recommends that adults get a minimum of 0.8 grams of protein for every kilogram of body weight per day, or just over 7 grams for every 20 pounds of body weight.
For a 140-pound person, that means about 50 grams of protein each day.
For a 200-pound person, that means about 70 grams of protein each day.
The National Academy of Medicine also sets a wide range for acceptable protein intake—anywhere from 10% to 35% of calories each day. Beyond that, there’s relatively little solid information on the ideal amount of protein in the diet or the healthiest target for calories contributed by protein. In an analysis conducted at Harvard among more than 130,000 men and women who were followed for up to 32 years, the percentage of calories from total protein intake was not related to overall mortality or to specific causes of death. However, the source of protein was important.The concept of health as a balance between a person and the environment, the unity of soul and body, and the natural origin of disease, was the backbone of the perception of health in ancient Greece. Similar concepts existed in ancient Indian and Chinese medicine (4,5). In the 5th century BC, Pindar defined health as “harmonious functioning of the organs”, emphasizing the physical dimension of health, the physical body and the overall functionality, accompanied by the feeling of comfort and absence of pain. Even today, his definition bears importance as a prerequisite for the overall health and wellness. Plato (429-347 BC) in his “Dialogues” pointed out that a perfect human society could be achieved by harmonizing the interests of the individual and the community, and that the ideal of ancient Greek philosophy “a healthy mind in a healthy body” could be achieved if people established internal harmony and harmony with the physical and the social environment. According to Aristotle’s teaching, man is a social being by his very nature; he tends to live in communities with the duty to respect the moral standards and ethical rules. Aristotle emphasized the necessity for regulating the relations in the society to achieve harmonious functioning and preservation of health of its members. Democritus connected health with behavior, wandering why people prayed to God for health, which was essentially under their own control. Hippocrates explained health in connection with the environmental factors and lifestyle. Hippocrates was the creator of the concept of “positive health”, which depended on the primary human constitution (we consider it today as genetics), diet, and exercise. He thought that proper diet and exercise were essential for health, and that seasons’ changes had a profound effect on the mind and body, resulting in different types of predominant diseases during the winter (respiratory tract diseases) and summer (digestive tract diseases) (4,5). A lot might be said about the long standing philosophical discussion about body and soul, and in present society between body and mind, as an active dichotomy (Plato and Hellenism) or as an integrated unity (usually reference to Aristotle), which is important to know about in the current online environment.In the Middle Ages, health perception was strongly influenced by religion and the church. After Roman Empire fell apart, the church was left as an only important infrastructure providing care for the people and collecting the knowledge on remedies, eg, herbs grown in monastery gardens . The “forgotten” knowledge of antiquity was re-discovered during the Renaissance and re-framed up to the present. During the period of Industrial Revolution, health became an economic category, which was to allow good condition and working ability and reduce lost work days due to illness. Accordingly, the value of health was such as enabling economic profit. The health was intertwined with Darwinian understandings of strength and being the fittest, where meaning of life was tied to physical survival. Another health aspect considered the ability of the individual to adapt to the influences from the environment to the extent that the individual could tolerate and resist. When the adjustment is over, the disease occurs as a natural consequence. This approach first reflected only biological mechanisms of adaptation, later adding on influences from the environment, which needed to be governed and modified All modern concepts of health recognize health as more than the absence of disease, implying a maximum capacity of the individual for self-realization and self-fulfillment. This should equilibrate the human inner forces and possibilities with the feeling of pleasure or dissatisfaction in their relations with the environment . Social medicine and public health approach to health advocate that we should not only observe the health of the individuals, but also the health of the groups and the community, as a result of the interaction of the individuals with the social environment.
The holistic concept of health is contained in the expression of wholeness. Health is a relative state in which one is able to function well physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually to express the full range of one’s unique potentialities within the environment in which one lives. Both health and illness are dynamic processes and each person is located on a graduated scale or continuous spectrum (continuum) ranging from wellness and optimal functioning in every aspect of one’s life, at one end, to illness culminating in death, at the other .
The theory of salutogenesis takes a different view of what creates health and what factors support health, as opposed to the conventional approach of pathogenesis to study the factors that cause disease . To find the “origins of health”, one needs to search for factors that support the human health and welfare .
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