When most people think of protein, they think of a few things: protein powders, and bodybuilders or people trying to put on muscle. But those aren’t the only people who need protein. So why is there so much confusion when it comes to talking about how much protein we really need?
First, let’s talk about WHY you need protein. What does protein do for the body?
Protein makes up a part of every single cell in your body. At the most basic level, protein is essential to repair cells and make new ones. So needless to say, it’s pretty important. But let’s remember here. When we’re talking about protein and recommendations for protein, we need to go for HIGH QUALITY protein – meaning protein that your body can break down, assimilate, and digest the nutrients from relatively easily.
Protein is a key component in satiation, blood sugar regulation and hormone stabilization, muscle growth and repair, etc. – which applies to kids who are growing, when you’re trying to build muscle, if you are pregnant, or when you’re trying recovery following an injury, severe burn, surgery, sickness – ex. l-glutamine, a key amino acid in fueling the gut lining). For athletes, people who do strength training, or people who are trying to maintain muscle as they get older (aka everyone), we know protein helps you recover from workouts by stimulating muscle protein synthesis and repair – it helps you build muscle mass (which increases your metabolic rate), and helps to prevent muscle loss, especially when protein is eaten in the meal following training, and consistently throughout the day.
A key thing to note is that unlike carbohydrates, your body doesn’t actually store protein, because it is not used as a source of energy – so we need to consume some kind of protein pretty much every day. Does it need to be massive amounts of protein every day? No. but if you’re constantly running a protein deficit, your body isn’t going to be able to do all those amazing things we talked about before, like blood sugar regulation, muscle building and repair, and injury recovery.
WHY is there so much confusion about protein?? How much protein do you really need?
According to the Institute of Medicine, we should get 10-35% of our daily energy intake from protein. But that’s a huge range! If you’re under-eating, or calculating your calorie needs based on an amount that is already too low for your body, your protein may be way too low.
Here’s where things get confusing – because protein advice comes from EVERYWHERE. Bodybuilders and physique competitors for decades have been saying you NEED *at least* 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight PER DAY to put on muscle (I’ve even heard some people say up to 2 grams of protein per pound of total body weight per day), and even higher numbers have been recommended for people trying to cut or lose weight.
Adding to the confusion, the government’s current dietary recommendations, aka the RDA (or recommended daily allowance) for adult women and men for protein is .8g/kg (0.36g per pound) and up to 1g/kg (0.45g per pound) of bodyweight per day. This is a number that 98% of the population needs as a bare minimum to meet nutrient requirements, maintain baseline health, and prevent deficiency.
For reference: For teenagers, the RDA is 0.85 g/kg/day for both girls and boys. For kids (ages 9-13), it’s 0.95g/kg/day. For pregnant and lactating women, the recommendation is to consume 25g of protein a day MORE than you were consuming before you got pregnant. The nutrition textbooks and common recommendations say this means 56 grams of protein a day for men aged 18 and up, and 46 grams of protein a day for all women age 14 and up. Assuming all these women are 125 lbs, that is. Meaning if you weight more than 125 lbs (aka most people) and you are following the recommendation for 46 grams of protein per day, you’re actually under-eating for your body’s nutrient needs. For a 150 lb. woman, this calculation yields around 55-70 grams of protein per day. For a 200 lb. woman, this yields about 72-90g per day. In food terms, around 60g of protein means about two eggs, and about two 3.5 oz servings of lean protein.
That’s not a lot of protein when we’re thinking about all the essential things it has to do in our bodies like we talked about above…
Let’s just think about our population for a second. For a lot of the nutrients recommended by the government’s standards, the RDA is damage control and disease prevention. If you want to be optimally healthy, you actually need MORE than the RDA in a lot of different categories. For example, vitamin D, which is a nutrient that *most* people are deficient in, especially in the winter. the RDA is 600 IU’s a day. If you have ever been to a good doctor or nutritionist, it is *extremely* rare that they would put you on 600 IU’s of vitamin D a day. It’s usually more like 2,000 or 5,000 (depending on how low your levels were to begin with), even more, depending on a lot of different factors. That is the amount you need to THRIVE, not the bare minimum of the RDA.
So when we’re talking about protein, it’s a similar situation. 0.8 – 1.0 g/kg of bodyweight is a good starting point for a minimum amount of protein your body needs to prevent nutrient deficiencies. **If you’re far from this number, start here! The goal is to make this realistic and sustainable – not something you do for a month and then can’t sustain.**
if you really want to thrive, put on muscle, or have Athletic goals to support your performance, you’re most likely going to need MORE protein than that.
FOR ATHLETES (aka people who are intentionally training multiple times per week with a goal of getting stronger/faster/better at their sport): There have been multiple studies over the past few years that maintain between 1.3 – 1.8 or 2 grams per kg of bodyweight is adequate for stimulating maximum protein synthesis (muscle building and repair) for athletes. Still, a huge range! But even then, protein requirements can differ BETWEEN athletes for the type of sport or training they participate in AND the amount of lean body mass they have. For endurance athletes, 1.2 to 1.4 g/kg body weight per day may suffice, while for hard training, very lean, strength or resistance training-focused athletes, protein can go up to 1.6 to 1.8 g/kg body weight per day (or around 1 – 1.4 gram of protein per lb of lean body mass) – because as you get leaner and are training harder, if protein drops too low (below 1 g/lb of body weight), strength and muscle loss will speed up. Keep in mind, this is *not most people*, myself included. The higher end of that range is for, say, Crossfit Games athletes, who have more abs than you can count.
Around 100g of protein a day is a pretty good middle of the line number to shoot for to start.
For generally active, exercising people, this is a great starting point to shoot for. A little less is fine – but remember, you don’t want to go below .8 – 1g/kg of total body weight. You may want a little more if you’re trying to build muscle or have specific athletic goals, around to 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body mass (meaning your body weight minus percentage of weight from body fat). For example. If we use a 150 lb female and she has 30% body fat, she has 45lbs of non-lean tissue, meaning she has (150lbs – 45lbs = ) 115 lbs of lean body mass. so for this person, a good recommendation for a hard training female athlete would be around 115g of protein a day, since that is the amount of lean body mass she has. (spoiler alert: this is almost the exact same as the 1.3-1.8g/kg according to the studies above).
An important thing to remember: just eating more protein won’t make you build more muscle or lose more weight.
For some people, consuming excess protein (meaning more protein than their body specifically needs given their current state of health and activity level) can actually lead to weight gain, and we’re not talking about muscle gain here.
Lean body mass is your muscle tissue + bone, not including your body fat, which is an important distinction here. We’re not talking 1 gram of protein per POUND OF BODY MASS (which can get really excessive and overload the body if you do this for too long). For the example above, that would be consuming 150g of protein for 150lbs of body weight. Even if you look at diets of weightlifters for whom being strong and building muscle IS THEIR JOB, the general recommendation for hard-training female athletes is about 1 g of protein per pound of lean body mass per day. Much less than this will reduce muscle growth, and impair muscle maintenance and recovery.
Take a step back. I am NOT saying that you need to count your protein every single day and make sure you hit that protein number every. Single. Day. or the world is going to end (because first of all, it won’t) or your muscle is literally going to fall off your body (because second of all, it won’t) because that can lead to (or trigger) disordered eating patterns. Unless you are an athlete training multiple times A DAY, almost every day, and you need to make sure you are hitting specific numbers *so you are getting enough food to support your training*, I don’t recommend counting every day.
For us regular people, it’s a good idea every once in a while to plug your food into a nutrient calculator just to see where you are in terms of protein, nutrients, etc., and adjust accordingly. Maybe you’ll realize you’ve been severely under-eating protein, and then you bump it up. Maybe you realize you haven’t been eating a lot of healthy fats lately, which could be contributing to brittle nails, dry, flaky skin, hair that breaks easily, and then you up your fats. Counting is a tool that can be used *every once in a while* to see where you’re at, but you shouldn’t rely on it every single day, because again, it can turn into disordered patterns that we do not want to fall into. The goal is: *without* tracking all the time, you’ll eventually be able to figure out about how much of each macronutrient (and in this case, protein), you need to feel full between meals, balance your blood sugar, achieve your goals, improve your performance in the gym, etc., and generally feel awesome like the bada** person you are.
PRO TIP (supported by many studies): spread your protein pretty equally throughout the day.
It is not a good idea to get it all in one sitting because your body will be like what the HECK just happened and will have a really hard time breaking it all down at once, so there’s no point in shoving your face with insane amounts of protein. Plus, for blood sugar balancing benefits and cravings regulation, it’s good idea to have a little protein in every meal AND snack because that will help with satiety and slow down digestion (you know, so you don’t get hungry 20 minutes after you eat. Story of my life it’s fiiine.)
So now you know *in general* what a good recommendation for protein is. Now, in order to find out what works best for YOU – start around that guideline, go a little up, go a little down, and see what your body responds best to. Because remember, we’re all different, and I can’t tell you exactly what protein intake is best for you.
Now, the important thing to discuss is…
What kind of protein is best? Is there a difference in how the body utilizes, digests, and absorbs different kinds of protein? Does it matter?
Animal-sourced proteins like eggs, meat, fish, and dairy (plus whey and casein) are highly bioavailable, aka very easy to break down for the body to digest and absorb and actually get into your cells to do all those amazing things we’ve been talking about. Animal proteins are also called COMPLETE because they contain all the essential amino acids – the ones the body can’t make on its own, meaning we have to consume them from food.
Plant proteins like those derived from beans, soy, lentils, nuts and seeds, and small amounts in rice and grains are LESS bioavailable, meaning they are harder to break down for the body to digest, absorb, and get those proteins and micronutrients FROM the plant proteins into your cells. That doesn’t mean we should discount them as a protein source, but it’s important to keep this in mind – because the body has to do more work and consume a higher quantity of these foods to get the same amount of protein we would from animal sources. WHY are they less bioavailable? Because if we think about plants in nature – they all have defense mechanisms. They don’t have claws like animals or the ability to defend themselves by actually fighting something off physically – so there are chemical barriers in plants like phytates, oxalates, outer shells, a husk, think the shell of the outside of a walnut.
Who is this most important for? If you have a compromised digestion, you have some inflammation going on, whether you’ve got some intestinal permeability, you have a “gluten problem” as my family likes to call it, or you have trouble digesting things – it’s a good idea to get most of your protein from animal sources because they are more bioavailable to the body and easier to break down.
Another thing to note is plant proteins are INCOMPLETE proteins, meaning they alone do not contain all the essential amino acids the body needs. Some people will do things called “protein combining”, like eating rice and beans together, because those two combined will have all the essential amino acids. But if you already have a compromised digestion, i wouldn’t recommend getting the majority of your protein from plants because it may create more digestive issues for you.
So let’s remember: everyone is different, based on their unique health history, age or current state of life they’re in, their goals, muscle mass, etc.
Meaning no one’s protein intake will be exactly the same, though we do have a good baseline to go off of.
In general, people who *need* MORE protein includes athletes trying to build muscle, people recovering from surgery, sickness, or injury, kids and teenagers (because they are growing!), people who are pregnant. People who don’t need AS MUCH protein as the ones listed above: sedentary people or people who don’t work out for the purpose of muscle building. People who would BENEFIT from more protein: those trying to regulate their blood sugar or INCREASE their insulin sensitivity, anyone with hormonal imbalances, women going through the pre-menopause to menopause transition, AND people in the middle age stage, so all the baby boomers right now and older, because getting a little extra protein after around the age of 50 will work against muscle loss that inevitably happens with aging. People who would benefit from LESS protein: people with severe kidney, renal, or severe GI issues.
What about supplements and protein powders?
First off, it’s worth mentioning that you should not rely on supplements in the form of protein powders as your main source of protein. However, they do have their own special time and place, and they can be essential for athletes right after a workout, can be very easily and quickly absorbed in the body. In my clinical nutrition practice, I commonly recommend that whenever people make smoothies, they add a protein source to slow down the blood sugar spiking capacity of the smoothie – which can help curb cravings and improve satiation. Meaning you won’t be hungry 30 minutes after you eat that smoothie. For the win.
Whey, casein, egg white protein, and beef protein are the most common animal-based protein supplements, and pea, rice, hemp, and soy are the most common plant-based ones. Whey and beef proteins are digested very quickly and have a NPU (net protein utilization, aka the amount of protein that can actually be used by the body) of 90% and around 70-80%, respectively, while egg protein digests much slower but does have an NPU of around 90%. Why is this important? For athletes trying to consume protein post-workout, a higher NPU means the protein will get to the muscles faster, for maximum muscle repair and growth. Since they are less bioavailable, plant proteins are slower to digest, and have fewer amino acids than the animal proteins alone – this is why, if you’re going plant-based, it’s a good idea to find a protein that combines multiple plant sources to ensure you get all the amino acids, as you would from beef, whey, casein or egg white protein.
The same way we need to be conscious about where and how our food is being sourced (organic, grass-fed, no antibiotics or chemical fillers, etc.) we should take these same steps when searching for a high quality protein supplement. Don’t just go to some random vitamin store and pick up some whey off the bottom shelf. If you’re doing whey or casein, they need to be organic, and grass-fed where possible, or there might be a sh*tstorm of chemicals, artificial sweeteners, and gross stuff in there that you definitely don’t want going into your body. For people who are paleo, avoiding dairy, or lactose intolerant, there used to only be plant protein options – which, to be honest, never digested well for me – but it was better than the WMID’s (weapons of mass intestinal destruction) that still happens to may people with casein and whey. Now, we’re lucky because now there are some really freaking fantastic animal-based (which we know is more bioavailable than plants) proteins that come from grass-fed, high-quality beef.
- ½ baked medium sweet potato (chilled)
- 1 small frozen banana
- 4 oz cold brew coffee
- 4 oz almond milk
- 1 scoop {your favorite protein powder}
- ¼ tsp cinnamon
- Small pinch sea salt
- Combine all ingredients in a high power blender, place the top on securely, and let ‘er rip, until the ingredients are well combined. Add extra liquid as needed to thin it out. Drink up!
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