Lastly, I want to talk about all of these interesting pizza emojis all over the amino acid sheet. As you see, there are, I think, 9 of these that have pizza on them. So what does that mean? Well, it turns out that many of these amino acids, your body can make itself. So your body could take proteins and turn them and turn one amino acid into another amino acid. But there is a certain group of amino acids that are called essential amino acids. Now, what does essential mean? They are actually essential for survival. If you do not eat this protein, this amino acid, you will not have it in your body and you will probably die. So that's why it's important for us to be intaking protein all the time through the foods that we eat so that we can get some of our essential amino acids. Once again, these are amino acids that your body cannot synthesize on its own. We need to get it from an external food source, some other animal that made that amino acid that we then take in and use it ourselves. Basically, our bodies got lazy and said, hey, if I'm always getting food that has this amino acid, why do I need to keep making it? I'll just keep getting it from other animals. And that's actually what happened scientifically. So, these are a set of amino acids that you may need to memorize. Okay?
Now, the thing that's tricky is that there are a bunch of different special cases where in certain types of diseases, you might need this amino acid or you might need this amino acid. And some professors actually include that in their list of essential amino acids. So if you need to memorize your list of amino acids, of essential amino acids, what I'm going to show you the ones with the pizza slices are the ones that are universally accepted like on Wikipedia. These are the ones that everyone agrees are essential. Now, your professor or your textbook may add a few to this list, but they're more for special cases. It's like, oh, if you have this type of disease, then you need this amino acid, etcetera. Okay? So we're going to go over is the how many is this? It looks like 9 essential amino acids, but I'm just letting you know that your list might be 10 or 11 or 12 depending on the special cases that your book or your text or your professor wants you to learn. Okay? So we're just going to scroll really quick and just look at them just so we can get a big picture. What we see is that the essential ones are on some of them in the hydrophobic, in the side chains, the nonpolars. That would be valine, leucine, isoleucine, methionine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine. So 6 of them are in the non-polars. Okay? Then over here in the polar, we just have threonine. So threonine is essential. And then over here in our basics, 2 of them are essential. Histidine and arginine are essential. Okay? So these are the 9 that are the most agreed upon that you need to take in from other animals or plants or whatever in order to live. Okay?
Now, how are you going to remember these? The way I like to think about it is that, thankfully, a lot of these letters come together, are next to each other in the alphabet. So, what I would do is I would remember "favorites". So "favorite" stands for phenylalanine, valine, and threonine. So all these letters by the way are the actual letters that they use in their symbols. Okay? And then you've got histidine, isoleucine, skip J, lysine, leucine, methionine, and then W is just a random letter at the end that's tryptophan, but W, you would just flip the M, and then it's the same letters M just flipped. Okay? So now, I know that sounds kind of it's not that maybe it doesn't sound that helpful, but the way I like to think about it is like maybe the way you could think about it is like it's your favorite part of the alphabet but you're skipping J. So you're going from H all the way to M but you're skipping J and then you're adding W at the end. I bet there are some missed opportunities here with how easy this would be to memorize. Like, I'm already thinking it possibly use, like, H and M or, like, your favorite J. Like, I don't know. Like, there are a lot of different directions you could go. I'll leave this one up to you. You may not even need to know this. You may not need to memorize it. But in case you do, it's pretty easy. You can already like I'm already like memorizing it and I didn't even know this like a minute ago. Okay? So favorite and then all letters except for J and then you flip the M at the end. Okay? So those are your essential amino acids, at least the most commonly agreed upon. Let's go ahead and move on to the next video.