7.1: Prelude to Putting Amino Acids to Work

It’s helpful to learn something about protein needs, and about their components—amino acids. But we’ve seen only part of the picture, until we’ve learned a bit about the relationship to DNA and the genetic code.

We’ve been told that protein is an essential nutrient, one that’s intimately involved in our basic life processes of growth, repair, and reproduction. But how does this all come about? How do our bodies make the proteins needed for these functions? How is information passed along specifying what’s needed?

In fact, the breakthrough discovery of the genetic process has led the way for much of our understanding of how our bodies function at the most elemental levels—how we fight disease, pass on inherited traits and disabilities, and how we conceive and produce our children.

We will find that the story of the formation of proteins leads to an understanding of many basic health concepts, helping us to make wiser choices in what we choose to eat.

Much of life may be thought of as the building up, breaking down, and rebuilding of proteins. And it’s through this ceaseless taking-apart and putting-together that food allows us to grow and reproduce, to act and know and feel.

That miracle is happening at every moment at dazzling speed, not only within us but within all of life—plant and animal. This work of life takes place within cells—life’s basic unit.

So we begin by getting a broad view of the cell before focusing in on its genetic material—the blueprints to make protein. Step-by-step we look at how these blueprints are used to assemble amino acids into protein. The bulk of our requirement for dietary protein is for this protein synthesis. Having considered the details of how proteins are made and used, the chapter then shows how this information can help us answer questions of dietary protein and health.