I've seen GCB state that proteins should be around 1/12 of the diet. I keep finding more and more evidence to limit protein as there seems to be no need for excess protein once nitrogen balance is achieved.
I wonder why both GCB and Iguana have a bias against us raw paleos who consume much animal products. Is it simply because of the amount of animal protein that is a problem? What would you fellows say about a diet that limits animal protein to around 10% and supplies the vast majority of the rest of the calories from raw animal fats and also additional vegetation as needed?
Basically, is it the protein that is the problem or just the amount of animal matter in the diet that you think is the problem. I really am starting to believe that excess protein is a much bigger problem than we suspect, but that animal fat is not at all the problem. In the Clara Davis study, bone marrow(not sure if raw) was the highest chosen food for one of the infants.
Indeed, the problem of animal fats is not at all comparable to that of proteins, which are long chains of amino-acids; they contain up to more than a thousand of them. Proteins are recognized by the immune system as foreign to the organism. Normally, the digestive enzymes break them into small sections to release the amino-acids, which are not recognized anymore as foreign and do not trigger an immune system reaction. They can then be used to build the human proteins necessary to our organism (these not being antigenic).
What happens then when proteins are badly digested in consequence of a denatured or unbalanced nutrition? Some escape the digestive enzymes and are not split into elementary amino-acids, that is to say they remain whole, or that sections including several amino-acids remain. However, a chain of 6 or 7 amino-acids can already have a structure foreign to the human body and trigger an immune system reaction (it constitutes by definition an antigen).
The problem of fats concerns much less the immune system, because these are much simpler molecules being only very seldom antigens. The consequences of an excess of lipids are primarily metabolic: fatty skin and hair, fat tissues formation, obesity, etc.
But badly digested proteins penetrating repeatedly in the circulating masses (lymph or blood) will put the immune system in alarm. This can cause an “intolerance”, i.e. exaggerated reactions against these molecules or against others more or less resembling, or alternatively a “tolerance”, or paralysis of the immune system against looking alike molecules.
From the elementary concepts admitted in immunology, one can thus predict that by absorbing regularly excessive amounts of meat, some of these molecules escape the enzymatic mechanisms of assimilation and induce either intolerances or tolerances. In the first case, the symptoms will be allergies, even autoimmune diseases. In the second case, it can be feared that the immune system “tolerates” some cancerous cells, being unable to recognize anymore the membrane’s proteins by which it identifies them under normal circumstances.
The question is therefore to know what can increase the passage in the blood of badly degraded proteins:
1. digestive overload: if the meat quantity to be digested exceeds the enzymatic potential, one can expect an increase in incompletely degraded residues;
2. bad associations: proteins to which other molecules (for example AGE’s) are joined are unlikely to correspond to the enzymes in charge of their degradation and incompletely degraded residues will result.
3. food processing or other denaturations.
The occasional presence of significant quantities of incompletely degraded molecules hardly poses problem: the immune system is there to take care and eliminate them by sticking antibodies to their antigenic sites. A large occasional meat meal or other animal proteins should certainly pose no problem. On the other hand, to multiply the meat meals beyond a certain frequency (for example every day) will induce a
repeated penetration of the same antigens, with allergic, autoimmune or cancerous disorders as foreseeable consequences.
The problem is similar with the consumption of denatured cereals or dairy products, main sources of antigenic proteins in traditional food. But it would be a pity to jump out of the frying pan into the fire in favor of a carnivorous trend that could, in the long run, harm the whole paleo diet movement.
