Protein – Essential Part of Diet
To many people a diet means simply eating less, cutting down the calories so that you are burning more calories than you have eaten.
Whilst it can be healthy to cut down calories to a degree more often it can be dangerous to your health. Crash diets especially do more harm than good.
More important than cutting down the amount you eat is making sure that you eat the right thing, that you give your body the building blocks it needs to energize it and keep it healthy.
When you are eating healthy you will start losing weight.
Protein – the forgotten essential
With diets you tend to hear a lot of talk about carbohydrates and fats. What type of carbs are good for you, what type of fats are bad?
What nutrients should you be taking etc. But amazingly few people talk about the role that protein can play in a diet. But that is a mistake, protein is amongst the most important parts of any diet.
Why is it so essential?
- Proteins are the basic building blocks of our body.
- Protein is essential for the creation of muscle, and lets not forget that muscle burns more calories due to its increased metabolism than fat, as well as looking more attractive and being healthier for our organs.
- Proteins are also essential for those organs. Not just for reducing the fat around the organs but for repairing them to.
- Our bodies defences use proteins to repair damaged areas, including our skin.
It is not just great for diets, those who are looking to lose weight by exercise will also find it an essential ingredient.
It is the major requirement for those who are looking to turn fat into muscle, being the main ingredient the body needs for building muscle.
Energy is another factor for those who are using exercise and protein is a wonderful source of energy.
But as opposed to sugars or many carbohydrates protein releases its energy over time, known as ‘slow release’, which allows us to keep going rather than suffer energy highs and crashes that can happen with other food types.
Too little protein
If you don’t get enough protein in your diet then you leave yourself upon to a number of drawbacks. Protein is essential to our energy levels and so leaving it out of our diets, or getting too little, can leave us feeling sluggish and tired.
The lack of amino-acids in a low protein diet can also lead to a problem with our immune systems, with the body unable to repair the damage to it from illness and disease.
For those who couple low protein with low calories diets then bone loss could well be an issue.
Easy to eat
The good news is that protein is easy to find and include in diets. Almost all meats contain large amounts of protein – chickens provide an affordable and strong source of protein.
Other meats and especially fish are also useful.
