We’ve known now for years that eating a healthy diet is key to long-term health. The better you eat now will help you feel better, stay active, reduce injuries and provide a host of other health benefits.
Why? Because eating the right foods helps you maintain reasonable body weight. Staying in a healthy weight range is one of the biggest factors when it comes to health and avoiding things like diabetes, heart issues, and other problems. Healthy foods are low in sugar, don’t carry too many calories for what you are eating, and also provide vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats that your body needs.
On top of all of these benefits, many healthy foods contain natural peptides that are good for health. Peptides are short chains of amino acids that trigger some form of response in the body, whether it’s promoting healthy skin, managing appetite, and other functions.
So, how can you increase your natural peptide consumption? We’ll help you identify specific foods, and which peptides they have so you can make smarter choices about the food you eat and its impact on your health. Here is some information on natural peptides and what they do.
What Are Peptides?
Peptides are amino acid chains that are the building blocks of proteins. To be classified as a peptide, there must be at least two peptides (also known as a dipeptide) linked together with a peptide bond. Typically peptides have anywhere fewer than 50 amino acids chained together as a peptide, while anything over 50 is classified as a protein.
Peptides found in natural foods are usually inactive. They activate only when their parent proteins interact with digestive enzymes in the body or during fermentation. Many of the health benefits of proteins, for example, happen as a result of a peptide interacting with enzymes in the gastrointestinal system and then delivering benefits to the cardiovascular system, nervous system, etc.
In general, all dietary proteins have peptides, but they are found in higher quantities in foods like soybeans, milk, eggs, cheese, and other dairy products.
Let’s take a look at some of the natural peptides found in food and what they do. Soybeans & Other Beans – Soybeans seem to have found their way into a million different food products. They are in cookies, drinks, chips, bread, and a host of other products. While soybeans are among the beans with the highest amount of peptides in them, other types of