I was recently at Costco waiting for my tire to be repaired, and saw a canister of "plant based" protein in the returns cart. The customer's reason for return:

I was recently at Costco waiting for my tire to be repaired, and saw a canister of "plant based" protein in the returns cart. The customer's reason for return: "tasted like sand". Proteins are composed of amino acids. Some amino acids are more important than others. Glycine is the simplest amino acid, and also has anti-stress properties. Other amino acids are excitatory. The main protein sources for the latest round of "plant based" protein products are pea protein and brown rice protein. Soybeans were used decades ago, but fell out of fashion on account of soy's phytoestrogen load. The process of separating seed protein from the starch is not incredibly complex. But someone said that seed protein is folded up for storage, and is not especially useful to our bodies anyways. Native Americans knew to boil their corn seeds in wood ash (alkaline material) - Nixtamalization - which I understands unfolds the proteins to make them more useful to humans. All corn tortillas are made with 'trace of lime', which means that corn has been properly boiled in a alkaline solution to be more edible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization The most abundant amino acid in gelatin is glycine. Second-place is proline. I don't grok the biochemistry, but I think it reasonable to propose that glycine is a much more reasonable foundation for the body's protein sources than the excitatory amino acids. The richest amino acid in the plant based protein powders I've looked at is glutamic acid. "[Glutamic acid is] the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter in the vertebrate nervous system." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamic_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamic_acid (emphasis added) "Glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, especially in the spinal cord, brainstem, and retina. When glycine receptors are activated, chloride enters the neuron via ionotropic receptors, causing an inhibitory postsynaptic potential (IPSP)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycine#As_a_neurotransmitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycine#As_a_neurotransmitter (emphasis added) I recently blogged to tell people to make soup from their turkey carcass: https://radialappliance.teslabox.com/2023/11/cayce-approved-protein-sources/ https://radialappliance.teslabox.com/2023/11/cayce-approved-... I, for one, welcome Italy's defense of traditional food wisdom.