Proteins in Nutrition.

... Proteins in Nutrition Proteins are very large molecules made of amino acids, of which there are twenty. Eight of these amino acids are "essential," meaning that they cannot be synthesized in the body even though they are necessary for life. Essential amino acids must be consumed from sources outside the body. Early in the twentieth century, studies of rats revealed that this rodent grows better using animal sources of protein. Knowing nothing of humans, which are harder to study because they live so much longer, grow to adulthood so much slower, and metabolize food so much slower, nutritional scientists applied what they had learned about rats to humans. The conclusion was that animal sources of protein were superior to plant sources for human nutrition because of the higher concentration of protein. In the early 1950s, definitive studies were conducted on human beings, and the eight essential amino acids were

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