Understanding Proteins

If you’re like many people, it can become a little overwhelming reading about what you should eat and what you should avoid eating. This is a “Nutrition for Dummies” section to hopefully create graphic images of terms you frequently encounter regarding nutrients.

Amino Acids, Peptides, Proteins

You’ve probably read that amino acids are the “building blocks” for the body, but then what? Here’s a good way to conceptualize how these three terms are related:

Think of an amino acid like a link of fine chain (think necklace chain);

Let’s make this link about 12 links long, laid out in a straight line;
oooooooooooo
This would be a specific amino acid, each link made up of specific atoms;

Let’s then get another length of similar chain, maybe the links are a little different  in shape and size, but it is still like a fine necklace chain;
oooooooo
This piece of chain could be a different length, and let’s say it is eight links long when laid out in a straight line;

Let’s get a third length of necklace chain, maybe a little different from the first two lengths about 15 links long:
ooooooooooooooo

If we were to attach these three links of chain together, they would look something like this:    oooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooo   which would be called a peptide.

If you then had a few bunches of these peptides in the palms of your hands and proceeded to squeeze and roll them together (like making a meatball), you would end up with a spheroid shape, maybe with a couple of chain links hanging from that three dimensional shape; This would be a protein. Depending on what peptides are strung together, that protein could be part of a muscle, blood vessel, cell membrane, or part of a memory.

Depending on how much force you used when you squeezed the links together, the spheroid would be somewhere between very fragile to very sturdy. Proteins are like that as well. They can be taken apart by force or chemicals. This is what happens during digestion, which begins in our mouths with saliva, and in the stomach with various acids and enzymes: the process of breaking down protein, to peptides back to amino acids. We can’t absorb proteins, so they must be in an amino acid form to provide nutritive value.