how many amino acids are considered by scientists to be essential?
Essential amino acids. There are nine amino acids that your body canât make. They are called essential amino acids, meaning you must have them to live. They are found in foods like milk, eggs and meat and also a wide variety of plants. This is part of why you canât survive on a diet of just corn chips for very long. Essential amino acids were actually discovered in an experiment testing something very similar to a corn chip diet. Scientists fed rats a diet that had only corn protein in it and observed the results.