How Much Protein Do You Really Need?

i’ll take the uh protein question uh since that’s been kind of my area of interest
so how much protein do we need well the rda did a series of studies and reviews of these over many many years which i had a catalog in my book they came up using nitrogen utilization studies so you measure how much nitrogen you take in how much nitrogen you put out to kind of come up with an idea of how much nitrogen we need

and then you then build a normal curve you know what a normal curve is right so some people needed a certain amount other people’s needed a certain amount they wanted to make sure that people got before they give a recommended daily allowance they want to make sure that enough people got all the protein that they needed

uh in order to get proper utilization and not get what’s called catabolic where you’re breaking down protein and so they recommended roughly 56 grams for an adult male 46 for a female now you got to remember that’s two standard deviations above the normal because they want to make sure they got everybody or over 90 of the population so probably we need less than that less than those recommendations but to be safe those are the not those are not the minimum you need that’s the be safe we got you covered 56 grams for a male and 46 grams per female

mit kind of came out with a study saying that wasn’t an effective way of looking at this and they looked at something called muscle protein stimulation studies using radioactive labeled amino acids and that utilization and that brought the number up a bit though they never provided much studies showing that we were deficient at those levels

in fact people eat way more than that 56 grams for a male and 46 grams for a female depending on whether you look at the nhanes data or what you’re looking at it’s 70 to 100 sometimes 120 bodybuilders are going for 180 over that 56 grams and the muscle protein studies are basically get us that formula usually here which is 0.8 grams per kilogram lean body mass not your weight but what your lean fat free masses

people have now say 0.8 per pound or 0.8 per total weight which is inaccurate so people are way over eating both the rda’s recommendations and even the the further studies if you’re exercising yes you need more how much oh my god there’s about 10 million studies on this and a lot of argument in the exercise physiology world they’re saying between 1.8 and 2.2 seems to be the same there’s no difference

there’s some studies saying 1.6 grams per kilogram lean body mass there’s a lot at 1.2 i will tell you if you’re an olympic athlete and you’re trying to get that 0.5 seconds in order to get the gold maybe you need slightly more but when you look at the studies showing the increased protein and not look at muscle protein synthesis but rather look at actual muscle size or actual weight lifted it makes such a miniscule difference that i don’t know why you would take on the risk of higher protein for that tiny little minuscule difference

so typically i go with if you’re an athlete 1.2 grams per kilogram lean body mass not your weight if you’re a regular person going about your day walking normally i like the rda and i think it works well

as far as can you get enough on a plant-based protein is that enough obviously it’s enough there’s uh very good studies on long-term vegans as we’ve talked about showing that they actually live longer and unless you’re getting the only studies i’ve seen with protein deficiency have all been kenyan studies and things like that where you’re living with people with subsistence eating nothing but cereal barely getting their protein and if they do they’re getting it basically with low calories too

in my practice and i don’t know if any prac anybody’s seen anybody suffering from low protein that wasn’t low calories has anybody ever seen that before i i just haven’t seen it so oh and as far as as far as children are concerned they can certainly do it too the only thing i call shown with children is you got to make sure the children are eating a varied diet

protein is very important you do need protein it’s so important it happens to be in just about everything we eat so you can get it with plants but you got to make sure that they are getting the more plant concentrated proteins such as legumes so if you’ve got a kid who doesn’t want to eat legumes at all and doesn’t want to eat any nuts at all well you got a little bit of an issue where you do need to make sure they’re getting enough protein what’s that yeah you can’t do that yeah you’re not going to bed until you eat your lentils

hit the button um i’ll just continue on the protein conversation because i i have i i completely agree with with everything you said but i i would simply add that that i i have seen a couple of instances where people aren’t getting quite enough protein

and so one is in teenagers who often are become very passionate about animal rights and and the environment which is a wonderful thing but they kind of do a switch from eating burgers and fries and coke to just eating the fries and coke and and so they’re eating an awful lot of sugar and an awful lot of fat

and on some occasions i’ve seen some getting 20 to 30 grams of protein a day and for a growing teenager that’s not enough so they need to add in more concentrated protein sources such as legumes and tofu and and things like that nuts and seeds and so forth

the second group of course we know about people not getting enough calories like people with eating disorders but the other group that that that may not get enough protein are people that are eating pretty much exclusively fruit and some fruits have very uh low uh protein concentration

so on average people probably need you know around 10 percent of calories from protein depending on the person but many fruits are much lower than that so it’s possible in that situation and i’ve seen it on a number of occasions people doing a raw diet where it’s it’s mainly fruits some vegetables and a lot of oils and in that case they they need to add more nuts and seeds they may need to add some sprouted lentils and things like that

brenda what was their phenotypic presentation i mean how you present how are you diagnosing them with protein deficiency uh so so what we often see in in the in the raw food folks i mean in children sometimes you just see them not not thriving as they should but in uh in the other folks we see hair loss

and and this is really quite common in the raw world where people really start losing a lot of hair their nails aren’t growing well or they they have problems with them they have problems skin problems their skin almost looks thin and and weak and and so we have to remember that protein is uh and we see bone loss and i know that that is a bit of a controversial subject but of course protein is necessary for building the matrix of bones

and so you can be too low and in fact there was an adventist health health study 2 study looking at 65 000 women that found that those eating a few legumes had a much higher rate of risk fracture than those eating more legumes and getting more protein in their diet so there is a sort of a level at which below you don’t want to go too much below

and so i’ve i’ve working with raw food people i have seen that and when we add a little protein to the diet they they they tend to overcome some of these issues

i want to joel before you take on another question two references to add to this protein discussion and one anecdote one of the references is by christopher gardner at stanford university really nice report advances in nutrition about a year ago making perfectly clear that all plants contain all of the essential amino acids that’s just sort of been a myth in nutrition for a very long time

we followed that up working together with others and wrote a paper arguing for a modernization of the definition of protein quality because we talk about the quality of protein independently of the quality of the food and that misleads people all right so the idea that meat is high quality protein if you look at the concentration amino acids

but if the meat is going to make you more prone to death and disease and not do any favors the food is not high quality and if you can get all those same proteins the levels you need from plants that are actually good for you and good for the planet and all of that that’s a higher quality source of protein

the anecdote just very quickly is last night before my panel i wanted to get something to eat in the lobby and they had a quinoa salad at this little uh atrium restaurant out here i said okay well that that looks okay and the the server asked me uh would you like protein with that that’s actually that is my least favorite question yeah yeah uh quinoa is a pretty good source of protein actually and she said really yeah so that the quinoa was the source of protein

gardner was pretty interesting at aclm he went through his diet and looked and he actually went and looked at it did he have any because he was eating a plant-based diet did he have any amino acid deficiencies and he couldn’t find that he had a single amino acid deficiency

but the the meat based industry is starting to jump on this terminology of protein quality assuming that having higher leucine is therefore good for you but we know that higher leucine increases igf-1 and stimulates mtor which leads to possible cancer and aging and so having more of a certain mass amino acid is not necessarily better