RAWSOME

I finally found a way to maintain my weight loss without counting calories. I eat when I'm hungry and eat as much as I want. I've gone raw vegan; I eat 100% raw, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. For many years I believed complete proteins had to be obtained from animal sources or by strict and careful food combining to balance amino acids at each meal, I was convinced that animal-based proteins were better and easier to assimilate. With all my food sensitivities and now with my RA situation, I can no longer hold onto that view.

Last night I could see the situation with extreme clarity. We assimilate proteins as single amino acids, not as conglomerates of amino acids, as we find in animal products. When we eat animal protein, the animal has assembled the separate amino acids into protein structures that constitute it's flesh, milk, or eggs. When we eat those structures, we have to break them down into their separate, single amino acids in order to feed our blood, where they are then used as separate amino acids, to repair or build our own protein structures.
Look at it this way:

I could tell you I want you to build me a Lego ship, but first you have to make it from a few Lego airplanes, which you must take apart before you can make your ship. Or, I could give you the separate Legos, and ask you to make the ship. You don't have to take apart the the airplanes for Lego parts before you build your ship. This is like taking apart the chicken breast proteins before making your human skin, hair or muscle tissues.

Plant sources of protein are already mostly broken down and if we juice the plants, the amino acids are even more easily assimilated. There is no need for extensive dismantling and breakdown first, as there is when we eat animal proteins. You cut out one of the major steps to getting what you really needed in the first place, separate amino acids instead of already glued together amino acid creations, fashioned into steer muscle or egg whites that we have to disassemble in order to make our HUMAN body parts.

When things go wrong during the disassembling of say, egg or dairy, or parts of the protein in your steak, they can enter the blood stream only partially broken down, causing allergies and food sensitivities, which also leads to RA and other problems. I have developed sensitivities to egg whites, almonds, and dairy whey, all foods I used heavily during my body building days of daily weight lifting at the gym. They over-tax the immune system, especially the lymph glands. I'm now going through lymph drainage massage to address my own over-taxed lymph system. Cooking these animal protein creations harms or destroys some of the amino acids they carried, causing you to receive less than the complete protein (amino acid collection or profile) you anticipated.

GO DIRECT. Take out he middle-man of animals. You really don't need to take in all the amino acids that comprise your muscles or hair in one food product. A mix of living, raw plant foods really does provide the amino acids for skin, hair and organs. There is no such thing as a plant with zero protein content. Only factory-refined foods are made into dead, almost pure carbohydrate food products of starch or sugar.