On a bag of pork rinds that I have, I forget the serving size, but there are 7g of protein, 5g of fat, 0g of carbs. But next to the protein listing it says “not a significant source of protein” - given that the bag contains 70g of protein, I’d say that was pretty significant. So why is it labelled this way? Is there something about the protein that makes it undigestable and nutritionally unavailable or what?
The protein in pork rinds is mostly Collagen.
Glycine, hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine are not nutritionally exciting amino acids.
The recommended daily allowance for protein is 0.8 g per kilo of body weight, or 60 g or so for someone 160-170 lbs. A recommended serving of pork rinds gives you a little more than 10% of the RDA, and you would have to eat most of the bag to get your RDA.
I think it’s likely that if a food gives you less than a certain percentage of the RDA per serving of something, it will be labelled “not a significant source” for that substance.
It must be protein of poor quality. The FDA states:
However, I’m not really sure what “poor quality” protein is. Maybe it’s lacking some amino acids?
That’s not true of macronutrients (carbs, fat, protein), but only of minerals and vitamins.
Does this mean that it’s nutritionally useless? Or does it have some benefit?
Yup, or it’s made up of amino acids you don’t really need, like the glycine, hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine that makes up a large proportion of the amino acids in collagen.
How do you figure? There’s no RDA for fats or carbs, but there is for protein.
Is there? My bad, then.
Anyway, anything with 7g per serving wouldn’t qualify as “not as signficanct source…” because that’s more protein than 90%+ of food and they don’t carry that label.
Nearly so, yet a backing reference was remarkly hard to dig up. You’d think the government or someone would have a decent nutrition website.
Collagen is also the major protein in gelatin. Wiki has a bit on the nutritional qualities of that:
Not if the protein lacks essential amino acids. Protein needs to be
nearly “complete” (IIRC) to qualify as a significant source. That’s because if one tries to live on a diet which lacks even a single essential amino acid, eventually one will get malnourished.
Makes sense to me. The additional label is solely to tell you not to trust the number of protein grams, since it is misleading.
I assume the protein in his pork rinds can still be metabolized for energy, though, right? Very few Americans have anything like a protein deficiency, so it’s not vital that he make sure he gets more.
It’s not energy metabolism that I’m concerned with, but I was wondering if the protein would serve the same purpose as far as rebuilding muscle as such, or if it were biologically useless.
Pretty useless. Your body can burn it in a pinch, if you’re seriously malnourished and it’s the only energy source available. But for your body to use it to build something useful would be sorta like trying to build a car out of nothing but sheet metal.
So what amino acids or foods in combination could make pork rinds a complete protein?
What kind of protein do zombie threads need to eat?