Inside the Debate Around Protein Quality
24 Sep 2014 | Riddet Institute
A key theme at the recent International Whey Conference related to protein quality and the advantage that dairy can offer, despite a substantial carbon footprint. Prof. Paul Moughan of Massey University’ Riddet Institute (New Zealand) recently chaired an expert panel led by the FAO, to look at the science behind describing and defining protein quality. His main point of discussion at the Conference was that not all food proteins are created equal nutritionally; whether milk, meat, egg, soy or bean.
This is Rob Wires at the International Weight Conference in Rotterdam, and I'm here with Professor Paul Mowen from Rori Institute in New Zealand, and Paul was speaking today about the issues around protein quality, which is a major debate taking part in the industry right now.
Can you explain a bit of background to this, please?
Thank you, Robin.
Dietary protein quality is a very important subject because not all food proteins are created equal nutritionally.
Some proteins.
Have a very high quality.
Other proteins have a lower quality.
And in terms of feeding humankind, we talk about a requirement for a given amount of high quality or balanced protein.
And we therefore need to know the respective qualities of specific individual food protein sources to allow us to know how to meet the total overall requirement.
It's important in the, developed world, increasing protein has been recognized as very important for the elderly and the need for higher protein intakes and intakes of higher-quality proteins.
Of course, it's terribly important in the developing world where often children are going to bed at night with insufficient food and insufficient protein.
There, where people are on the, on the borderline, the quality of the protein they consume is very, very important.
And what, what have been the findings in terms of comparing protein, because obviously there's been a system in place for a long time and that's there's calls now to review this.
I was recently the chairman of an expert consultation led by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN, the FAO, and this was to look at the science behind methods for.
Describing and defining protein quality.
The outcome of that is that previously we had a system in use called PDCAS, which stands for protein digestibility amino acid, corrected amino acid score.
This has now been replaced by a new score called DAS and essentially collects and brings into the scoring method all of the most recent science developed over the past 20 to 30 years and gives a far more accurate, more precise, a superior method of describing dietary protein quality.
So essentially the dias has been promulgated to replace the PDAs.
And the dairy industry has been particularly keen to ride upon this because dairy comes out pretty.
Yes, probably for the first time, dairy proteins, egg proteins, meat, meat proteins, and to some extent soy protein as.
Their superiority is shown better with the new scoring method, but it's not really about saying one protein source is better than another, in a commercial sense.
It's about using the best science to the most accurate assessment of various proteins.
It does happen that dairy, the superiority of dairy as a protein source comes to the fore in that sense, the dairy industry is very interested, in the new score, interested in promoting their proteins and the quality of their proteins in the most effective way.
What's the timeline in place for this, and when do you expect something to come through?
Dio has been promulgated and, and, and is accepted as the as the way to go theoretically.
Before it can be applied in practice, we need to develop a, a world data set or a data set of world foods with the, the data necessary to drive diets, which is the ideal amino acid digestibility values.
We don't have a lot of these for foods that are commonly consumed by man.
And that dataset, there's an urgency for that data set to be developed and to be made available to human nutritionists around the globe.
And that is the, if you like, the, the stumbling block currently to the full implementation of DIS is the paucity of those data used to drive that new superior measure of quality.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Robin.
