The Importance of Amino Acids

Several months ago one of my favourite podcasts, ATP Science, did an episode on the importance of amino acids – not just for those on a plant-based diet, but for everyone. They did a lot of research into the amino acid products that are on the market and decided that there were just too many gaps that needed filling. Luckily for us, they thought a clean, vegan product deserved an entrance, so spent over a year diving down rabbit holes in order to come up with something worthy.

To take it back to basics for a second, amino acids are the building blocks of protein and play a critical role in your body’s processes. They're needed for vital functions like the building of proteins and synthesis of hormones and neurotransmitters. Your body requires 20 various amino acids in order to grow and function effectively. Though all 20 of these amino acids are significant for your health, only nine amino acids are classified as essential. These 9 essential amino acids are:

• Histidine

• Isoleucine

• Leucine

• Lysine

• Methionine

• Phenylalanine

• Threonine

• Tryptophan

• Valine

Alongside being deemed ‘essential’ what also makes these 9 different is that we are unable to convert or synthesise these on our own; instead, they must come purely from our diet.

Whilst cases of vegans being protein deficient are few and far between, there IS a difference in the amino acid profiles between plant-based sources of protein and animal-based sources of protein. In the plant proteins there is less of the anabolic amino acids such as leucine (which makes up 50% of what we call BCAA (branched chain amino acids), methionine, lysine, histidine and hydroxyproline.

All of these have aminos have important functions but hydroxyproline is one I’d like to call out as it is used to make collagen in our bodies. Collagen itself is incredibly important as it is the major component of connective tissues that constitute many parts of our body, such as tendons, ligaments, skin and muscles. Plants do not contain collagen and because of this, hydroxyproline is almost completely absent in a plant-based diet. Proline and Vitamin C CAN make hydroxyproline (so I guess it is technically not ‘essential’), but there is quite a low amount of proline in the standard plant-based diet. Plants simply don’t contain enough, and you would have to be eating bucketloads of it to get an adequate amount.

Anyway, that’s enough science for today. What ATP Science learned is that there is a distinct lack of clean, vegan aminos on the market. It horrified me to hear that even products that claim to be clean, or plant-based, is often untrue. In their due diligence they discovered that what raw manufacturers and distributors said was frequently a load of rubbish – they’d even write papers based on what you wanted to hear. They went down a series of rabbit holes trying to find out which suppliers actually provided vegan products. In the end, they ended up using synthesised or fermented plant sources to create an incredible amino acid supplement that is vegan friendly. So why don’t all companies do this, I hear you ask? Because it’s over 300% more expensive. And as we know, price does matter.

I was mightily impressed when I found out about all the work done by the ATP team, so I grabbed myself a jar of their amino acids to test them out. This article is by no means sponsored – I just think it is incredible that we have companies and products like this entering the market, and my honest opinion is that I feel BOOSTED after incorporating these into my diet! Way to go guys!