“Smart homes” are becoming commonplace. Home automation may turn on a light when you enter a room or pull into your driveway, and turn it off when there is no activity. Smart camera doorbells can tell a phone app when you apparently have a package delivered on your front doorstep. Thermostats can be programmed to cool and heat on a schedule, and some even respond to outdoor temperature, weather forecasts, and power company usage alerts. Dishwashers, ovens, and washing machines can be set to delayed start or remote control from a phone app, and smart cookers can run programs to adjust the cooking for a particular type of food, using sensors to keep the temperature within specified limits.
These devices rely on limits and thresholds. When there is no activity, the light won’t come on or the doorbell won’t register a package being left, but when there is activity above a certain threshold, they respond. Thermostats sense when the temperature is within the programmed limits and adjust your heating or cooling accordingly. All these devices have programming that responds to preset triggers or limits. If you get the limits right when you program them, you get good results.
Some devices, like a two-stage heating and cooling system, will go to a second level of temperature control when the limits are exceeded in an attempt to bring the temperature back in range. They have a special mechanism that they can activate when the normal process is insufficient to bring conditions back within the programmed thresholds. Since activating the second stage costs more energy, they reserve stage two for when it is really needed.
Your multi-stage metabolism
We have smart bodies, with intelligence that far exceeds that of smart homes. These bodies attempt to keep their operation within certain limits — this is called homeostasis, meaning they attempt to keep a status quo. When we get too warm, we sweat to cause cooling as the moisture evaporates from our skin. When we are too cold, metabolism ramps up to generate more internal heat. Like the two-stage furnace, these bodies can go to even greater extents to maintain stasis, but at some cost. For instance, if your body is too cold and a little shivering isn’t enough to bring its internal temperature into a safety zone, it will reduce blood flow to your hands and feet, concentrating its available heat on critical organs. Your body has many stages to preserve homeostasis. Some are more subtle and you may not realize they are happening, but when they have to kick in, there is a real cost to your body. If you keep your body outside the first stage limits for long periods, your health will suffer.
Unfortunately for us, modern society has made living beyond stage one commonplace in many ways. Sugar is everywhere, causing many people to build insulin resistance and even diabetes as their body constantly attempts to deal with the overage of sugar. Yes, your body will go to stage two to deal with the excess sugar as it ramps up insulin, but your body eventually fails to respond to the frequent overload. At least most everyone knows that too much sugar is bad for them. The same can be said for salt: modern convenience food is usually overloaded with salt, and that excess burdens the body over time, but most of us know that too much salt is not good. They may not know why it’s bad, but accept that it is. There is a third excess, however, that most people don’t believe is unhealthy. In fact, society keeps telling them to eat more of it. Many of us are responding to it with stage two, where their bodies have too much of it and their health is suffering as a consequence, and yet this excess does not get the blame.
That excess, for many people today, is protein.
In poor countries, animal protein is often more of a rarity than in industrialized countries. Modern meat processing has made meat convenient and readily available for consumption. In Blue Zone countries, which are areas of the world where people tend to live longer than average and maintain good health longer, people generally eat a 95% – 100% plant-based diet. When they eat animal protein, it is a delicacy, being eaten for special celebrations or in small amounts to flavor dishes. No one is telling them to eat more protein, and they are doing just fine. So what is all this hype about protein?
If you were to truly have no protein in your diet, you would indeed have a health crisis. Much of your body is protein, and there is a low threshold for dietary protein, below which health problems occur. How many of us are below that low threshold? True protein deficiency is almost non-existent in America. Where it does occur, it’s usually a result of general starvation. It’s actually quite hard to craft a protein deficient diet, one that provides enough calories to live yet crashes below the protein limit the body needs long term. Protein is everywhere, because amino acids are everywhere, and amino acids are the components of protein. People in the Blue Zones manage to eat enough protein to live longer than the average person in America, with very little or no animal protein.
Setting the stage
What happens when someone gets too little protein, below the lower limit to sustain them? It won’t immediately crash their health, and in fact may help it if not sustained too long. The “smart body” knows when it needs more protein and isn’t getting it: it goes out and looks for internal sources. This may sound bad, having the body steal from itself the protein it needs. But something called autophagy kicks in, where the body goes looking for defective protein first, breaks it into amino acids, and then uses them to build new protein (usually without the defects). This is stage two of your body taking care of you, and in the process it clears out garbage protein from all over your body.
Autophagy is vital to health. An overfed body is a lazy body. Autophagy is work, but it is vital. There is an entire medical publication devoted to it: in a review article published in Autophagy(, researchers in British Columbia, Canada highlight the benefits of autophagy that have been discovered with multiple research studies. Animal studies have shown that blocking autophagy decreases lifespan, while calorie restricted diets that increase autophagy also increase lifespan. Studies of neurodegenerative disorders show the cause to be “an accumulation of mutant proteins that aggregate and interfere with cell trafficking and the normal function of cytoplasmic proteins.” There is no other mechanism to clear these aggregates — only autophagy. Promoting autophagy is therefore vital to basic health and longevity.
When your body is getting sufficient protein, but not excess, autophagy occurs.
How about when you get too much protein? When that happens, stage two of your body’s protein management kicks in. Initially your body just burns the excess protein for fuel and turns extra amino acids into sugar which stores as fat. This stage of protein management comes with a cost in the form of acid buildup and kidney load. Prolonged protein excess can even cause kidney failure. But the acid load irritates the body, which responds to the irritation with inflammation. Inflammation that is systemic, that is throughout the body, eventually results in chronic disease.
This is well researched. As an example, in a study published in Nature Metabolism, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine combined animal and human studies to determine the impact of excessive dietary protein on atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. They discovered a “stage two” reaction, where a diet of which over 22% of the calories were from protein would clearly trigger atherosclerosis. It did so by promoting inflammation, which is carried out by the immune system. Their research showed that “consuming more than 22% of daily dietary calories through protein can negatively affect macrophages that are responsible for clearing out cellular debris, leading to the accumulation of a ‘graveyard’ of those cells inside the vessel walls and worsening of atherosclerotic plaques over time.”
Research studies need things to happen over a specific study period; the longer the period, the harder it is to conduct the study. A 22% threshold for invoking the stage two level of reaction — the immune system response — caused a rapid reaction, fast enough to see in the study. But how about lower amounts? The USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) recommended daily allowance states that 10% of calories from protein is sufficient for a relatively active adult. The average American gets at least 16%, and those that buy into the notion that more protein is better are likely consuming much more. They still have a protein excess that is inflammatory, though it may take years to build disease. Any excess is inflammatory.
Amino breakdown
Just what is protein? All proteins are combinations of various amino acids. Different proteins require different amounts of each amino acid. If your body wants to produce collagen, it used 19 amino acids with proline and glycine in the highest proportions. There are 29 total amino acids used in the human body to make protein, and not all amino acids are needed equally. When the body wants to make a certain protein, it looks for the needed amino acids to make it. Many amino acids can be manufactured from others if they are not available, so it may not even need availability of some of the aminos because it can construct them. Protein synthesis happens constantly in the body, so it is constantly processing available amino acids. Now, if an amino acid that is required for a particular protein simply isn’t available and can’t be manufactured, that will prevent that protein from being produced. But autophagy stands ready to go out and scrounge some of that amino acid, so protein synthesis is rarely disrupted. That also means that real protein deficiency is rare, because you are only deficient when your body can’t produce a protein that it needs.
Knowing what protein really is helps cut through the confusion about “complete protein.” Animal products are touted as being complete protein, including all the essential amino acids, thus assuring that your body has all the amino acids needed to make any protein. However, the nine essential amino acids are “conserved” in the body, and most of the proteins that your body makes require lower amounts of the essentials. As in the example of collagen, the most in-demand aminos are non-essential and can be manufactured if not available. Running too low on any of the essential amino acids is hard to do except on a starvation diet. Eating animal products because they are complete proteins is simply overkill.
Interestingly, the protein source matters too. Plant proteins are less inflammatory. This is simple: plants carry less toxins, because they are the lowest on the food chain and do not compound the toxins from anything lower on the chain, and they are rich in nutrients if raw, fresh, and from a good source. Red meat has a compound called N-glycolylneuraminic acid which is directly inflammatory, but all animal products cause acidity. And you can easily get lots of protein from plants with a good mix of greens, vegetables, seeds, and nuts, plus the amino acid profiles of a plant diet more closely resembles what you body really needs, in the right proportions. Excess amino acids can’t be stored, so if not used fairly quickly, the excess aminos get turned into sugar and converted into fat or consumed as fuel.
Finally, how do you know how much protein you are getting? You can look up how many grams of protein is in a particular food. How does that relate to calories? About 4 calories per gram. So how much is a gram in units we understand? There are 453.6 grams per pound. So if you take the USDA recommendation of 10% of your calories coming from protein (still twice as high as needed to promote autophagy), and you are on a 2000 calorie diet, you would aim for 50 grams, or 1.764 ounces of protein. The only way to get in the vicinity of 50 grams requires a largely plant-based diet.
Not only do you want to reduce your diet to only 50 grams of protein per day, a healing target would be closer to 25 grams, or less than one ounce of protein. This is best to activate autophagy.
If you are getting a typical American’s share of protein, you can cut that in half and still get plenty, and significantly reduce your inflammation. Even with half the USDA minimum recommendation, you can get enough in most cases, and you may go to your second stage of promoting health, minimizing your inflammation, and recycling old proteins that are blocking your best metabolism.
Dr. Nemec’s Review
What is important here?
1. Excess protein is inflammatory, and inflammation is the root of all the disease. The researchers found it to be the source of atherosclerosis, which is the basis of heart attacks and strokes. Inflammation is the root of cancer, auto-immune disease, and practically every disease known.
2. Excessive protein is neurotoxic, meaning it destroys nerve cells — that applies to neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s Parkinson’s ALS, just to name a few. The other aspect of the nervous system is your brain. If you destroy nerve cells with excessive protein then you will reduce cognitive function — you will develop brain fog. You will even throw your emotional state into a roller coaster of imbalance, all because of too much protein.
What’s the real deal?
It’s not what the media is pushing out. You know what the world promotes — at least in America — is that more protein is better. Better for what? It’s not better for inflammation. It’s not better for your brain or your nervous system. It surely isn’t better for longevity because it shuts off autophagy. So who is it better for? According to the research, only starving people. Have you seen any starving people lately in the United States? I think not. Quite the contrary, obesity is in epidemic proportions. There is absolutely no protein deficiency in this country — only calorie and protein excess.
Autophagy, autophagy and more autophagy
One of the single, most important mechanisms for longevity, health, and healing is autophagy. This is the physiology at the cellular level that ensures longevity and health. Autophagy, simply defined, is recycling. We can call it cellular recycling.
Why do we recycle in the United States? We’re needing more resources because of over consumption, while we are toxifying our world. Recycling just makes sense. If I drink water from a plastic bottle, why not keep reusing the plastic bottle over and over again, instead of using resources to make a new bottle? That bottle is going to end up toxifying a landfill, which then toxifies the groundwater, and eventually our health. The simple answer that just makes common sense is to recycle, and by doing so we will all live longer and be healthier — and we will not be poisoning our world, our water.
Absolutely no choice
Without autophagy, we’re headed for self-destruction, with inflammation and disease production at progressively earlier ages with more permanent disability. Since autophagy is recycling at the cellular level, what is it recycling? All worn out and dysfunctional cellular components. And what are the majority of those components made of? PROTEIN!
Excess protein in the diet equals little to no autophagy. Low protein diet equals maximum autophagy.
Little to no autophagy equals decreased longevity, decreased lifespan, and most importantly decreased health span. Maximum autophagy equals maximum longevity, lifespan, health span, and the highest quality and functionality in life.
This is why all research is in agreement that calorie restriction, including protein restriction, increases longevity.
Less is best.
This is the new paradigm shift: less protein, more recycling, more autophagy, higher level of health, greater longevity.
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(1) Hannigan, Adrienne M, and Sharon M Gorski. “Macroautophagy: the key ingredient to a healthy diet?.” Autophagy vol. 5,2 (2009): 140-51. doi:10.4161/auto.5.2.7529, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3135626/
(2) Zhang, X., Kapoor, D., Jeong, SJ. et al. Identification of a leucine-mediated threshold effect governing macrophage mTOR signalling and cardiovascular risk. Nat Metab, 2024 DOI: 10.1038/s42255-024-00984-2
