Human Amino Acid Requirements: Counterpoint to Millward and the Importance of Tentative Revised Estimates

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Abstract
In an Issues and Opinions section, Millward (1997) presented a number of arguments in defense of his position that the comparisons made and conclusions drawn in our (McLarney et al. 1966) article on amino acid requirement patterns among various species and in support of the MIT amino acid scoring pattern, “...are largely irrelevant to human needs after the first 6–12 mo life.” In this context, it is curious that Millward also draws similar interspecies comparisons, between and among young and adults, in making his points and developing criticisms of our analysis. This appears to be contradictory. Also, he states, “Young and Pellett (1990) used the MIT scoring pattern to identify a lysine deficiency of cereal-based diets that they say require animal protein supplementation to rectify,” which we did not, nor did we (Young and El-Khoury 1995) state that “...growth patterns need not bear any relationship to tissue amino acid content” (Millward 1997). In the first case, we said that it was “...desirable for at least one third of dietary protein to originate from animal sources when total protein is limited,” and that “...when animal protein percentages are less than this, the well-known concept of protein complementation should be applied by increasing the availability and consumption of pulse proteins.” Indeed, we (Young et al. 1998) fully recognize that “...balanced vegetarian diets can fulfill these higher requirements (i.e., those proposed by Young et al. 1989, Young and El-Khoury, 1995), and so animal foods are not essential from a strictly physiological standpoint.” In the second case, the specific point we (Young and El-Khoury 1995) made was that “...the pattern of amino acids required for rat growth does not necessarily resemble any more precisely the amino acid composition of mixed body proteins (or pattern of oxidative amino acid losses) compared with that for maintenance in the preschool child...” or for that matter the adult pig (McLarney et al. 1996).
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