How many times have we heard, "you need to keep your energy up, get some protein." ? Or we order a salad at a restaurant and the waiter asks "do you want a protein with that?".
The waiter is partially right because leafy greens, the primary stuff of a good salad, have lots of vitamins and minerals, but are low in "available energy". And available energy is the nutrient we need on an immediate basis, every day. We can actually wait for vitamins and minerals, our body stores them, and if our stores are (ideally) not depleted we're good to go. But we need energy with every meal, it's the primary reason we get hungry.
The waiter is wrong because the energy is not coming from protein, it is coming from fat.
Let's back up a bit here. Vitamins and minerals are "micronutrients", so called because the actual quantities we consume are (microscopically) tiny. They do not provide "available energy", they have other longer term functions.
Macronutrients on the other hand do contain "available energy", and we need them every day to have abundant energy.
The formal name for available energy is "calories"...you've heard of those...don't forget there are "good" calories and "bad" calories. Hostess cupcakes have calories, but are also laced with toxins, and devoid of vitamins and minerals. Good calories are whole foods consumed in (or close to) their original state.
The three macronutrients are carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. The confusion about protein is that of the three macronutrients it has the least "available energy", and is used primarily on a longer term basis to build tissues and bones. We do not use protein for available energy under normal circumstances.
The two macronutrients with high levels of available energy are carbs and fats. And let's not forget there is such a thing as "good carbs", all plants are carbohydrates. In fact the use of the word "carbs" to designate junk foods is actually a misuse of the word, a more accurate term for junk foods would be "toxic substances".
Keeping the discussion to whole foods (good calories) the available energy in the restaurant salad comes from fat, not protein. And these are the fats in animal products, which frequently have more calories coming from fat than protein. To oversimplify a bit, the protein is stored for later use, and the fat is used for energy.
It is also not difficult to get more protein than is healthy, and the effects of that on health are not good:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4045293/
There is another source of available energy in typical salads, the vegetable oils used in the dressings. I'm not going to get into that problem here...suffice it to say veg oils are a "junk food" devoid of micronutrient content.
So yes, there is a lot of available energy in junk foods, but these calories, like the hostess cupcakes, are laced with toxins, devoid of micronutrients, and really bad for us. So don't eat that junk:)
Since we are talking about salads let's mention a whole food that has plenty of available energy - fruit. A fruit salad can even be on a bed of greens, which adds a lot of minerals to the vitamin rich fruits, making a nutrient dense meal with plenty of available energy. It can be very simple to prepare, and it really doesn't even need a dressing! (Just be sure the fruits you use are ripe and delicious.)
terrific and clarifying!
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