Column IJsbrand Velzeboer: Protein facts

Egg whites are hot. Or rather, proteins—the trendy name for this essential building block—are good for you! It gives you tight muscles, at least, that’s what the countless social media influencers would have you believe. What they conveniently forget to mention is that you’ll have to train like crazy to get the perfect six-pack.

That being said, it’s true that proteins are the building blocks of your body. They’re THE go-to repair kit for damage, though your body has to put in quite some effort to digest them. Even if you’re a couch potato doing absolutely nothing, about 70% of your energy intake still goes to your resting metabolism. On the bright side, proteins are also known to suppress appetite—useful information if you're trying to lose weight.

You can do some pretty interesting things with proteins. When heated, they turn brown and develop flavor—the Maillard reaction. They also whip up into beautiful white foam, perfect for meringues or tiramisu. And if you toss them into hot frying oil, they help clean the pan. In industrial food processing, however, this foam can be a nuisance. In that case, add a little soybean oil or candle wax, and the foam disappears. Proteins are even used as foaming agents in biodegradable cleaning products.
They’re also great at binding water—1% protein can hold 4% water. That little fact can be worth a lot of money to food producers; by adding cheap soy proteins to fish, for example. This trick is easy to detect, but if a producer uses protein fragments, also known as hydrolysates, it gets a lot harder to trace. Only the really shady producers take that route.

And that brings us to the darker side of this building block: proteins can stink—badly. They’re rich in nitrogen and sulfur, and when they break down, strong odors can develop. With cheese, for example, we’re dealing with controlled decay, which produces ammonia-like compounds—volatile bases—that give French cheeses their characteristic (or, depending on who you ask, pungent) smell. When meat spoils, it can go one of two ways. Either it sours due to lactic acid bacteria, giving off a mild buttery scent, or protein breakdown kicks in due to putrefying bacteria. In the first case, it’s not too bad. In the second… pfff. I wouldn’t eat it. Unless you’re looking for an extreme weight-loss method.

IJsbrand Velzeboer
Food Technologist
Scienta Nova