Are you getting enough protein? Do you know how much you should get and what the best sources are? If this sounds like a question plaguing your mind, this article is for you. I’ll explain exactly how much protein we need in our diets and tell you about some great sources of protein that might surprise you!
What is protein?
Protein is a macronutrient, which means it’s one of the three primary nutrients all animals need to survive.
Protein comprises amino acids, and there are nine essential amino acids: histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, cystine, phenylalanine, tyrosine (which make up tyrosine), threonine, tryptophan, and valine. Your body cannot produce these nine amino acids; they must be consumed through food sources.
The majority of protein in the human diet comes from animal products such as meat, fish, and poultry; eggs; milk products such as cheese and yogurt; legumes like beans and peanuts (legumes have higher amounts of non-essential amino acids than other plant-based foods); nuts; seeds like flaxseeds or chia seeds because these contain lesser amounts of protein than most other plant foods.
You can also get some from vegetables if you eat them in large quantities—for example, cabbage contains about 4 grams per cup cooked! Aside from meat, many different types of proteins (including meat) contain the same amount of calcium as dairy, so don’t stop eating green vegetables.
How much do we need?
Protein is essential for your body’s growth, repair, and maintenance. So how much do you need?
The recommended daily intake (RDI) of protein for an adult aged 19 to 64 years is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight (0.36 grams/pound). This means that a person weighing 70 kilograms (154 pounds) needs to eat 56 grams of protein daily.
An easy way to calculate how much protein you need based on your activity level is the “strength training” recommendation from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: 1 gram per kilogram per day for strength training, meaning someone weighing 70 kilograms should aim for 70 grams each day if they do regular strength exercises like lifting weights or high-intensity cardio workouts like CrossFit WODs (Workout Of the Day). If you don’t exercise regularly, follow the RDI guidelines instead.
Why is protein essential?
Protein is essential for several reasons, but it’s not just because it’s a source of protein for your muscles. It’s also because it helps support lean body mass, positively impacting endurance and athletic performance.
Protein is crucial because it is the essential macronutrient for building muscle. People often focus on increasing lean body mass rather than muscle strength. Protein makes thin muscle cells and helps muscles grow and repair the damage. Your body needs more protein to keep itself running correctly as you age.
Protein is an important nutrient that helps tissues, like muscles, bones, and organs, grow and heal. Proteins aid in protein synthesis within the body. They promote lean muscle mass, a protective layer of fat surrounding the body’s organs and joints that burns more energy and helps keep you feeling energetic. Protein is essential for the production of hormones, enzymes, and antibodies. Protein is required for a robust immune system and healthy muscles.
Why do you need protein?
Protein is an essential nutrient. It’s used to build, maintain and repair muscles, skin, hair, and other tissues in the body. Protein also provides energy for the body to carry out daily tasks such as walking and thinking.
Makes up our muscles.
To put it simply, protein makes up our muscles. Protein makes up every single cell in your body—including the ones that make up your muscle tissue.
Muscles are essential to keep you moving around and doing everything you need throughout the day. Without them, we would be pretty much immobile. They also help us burn more calories than if we didn’t have any in our bodies! And guess what? They are also extremely important for our metabolism!
And because these little guys are so necessary for our health overall, we must get enough of them daily (and not just by eating chicken).
It helps keep your blood sugar stable.
In the short term, protein can help you feel fuller for longer. This is because it takes longer to digest than carbohydrates and fat, which means it stays in your system longer. It also makes you feel full by triggering the release of hormones involved in satiety.
Keeps you full longer.
Protein is a good source of satiating or filling nutrients. This means it helps you feel full longer and can aid in weight loss. Protein takes longer to digest than carbs, making you feel fuller for longer. This makes it easier to control your hunger. A study in the journal Appetite found that people who ate a high-protein breakfast felt fuller all day than those who ate a high-carbohydrate breakfast with the same number of calories.
Different sources of protein are more or less suitable for you than others
Protein is one of the essential nutrients you consume. It’s found in all animal products, legumes, and grains — but not all foods contain protein.
The best protein sources provide a good balance of amino acids (the building blocks that make proteins). Your diet is balanced if you get enough of each type to build new proteins.
Your body needs more essential amino acids than non-essential ones because it can’t manufacture certain ones. So they must be acquired through food sources (hence “essential”). This list includes tryptophan (or “trypto”), which helps regulate sleep patterns; phenylalanine (or “phenyl”), which helps with brain function; tyrosine (or “tyr”), which supports healthy thyroid function. Leucine (“loo”) promotes muscle growth and fat loss by signaling your body to slow down after eating meals full of carbohydrates like pasta or white bread. Lysine (“lyse”) is an antioxidant that has been shown to lower triglyceride levels in high-cholesterol people’s blood. This makes it a great choice for people with heart disease-related diseases like diabetes mellitus type 2!
How Much Protein is Enough?
Research by Dr. Geraint Lewis and others at King’s College London found that your body needs around 20-25 grams daily to reach normal protein levels. Many people tend to underestimate how much protein is required by their bodies. Many people don’t get enough protein, which they can’t turn into the right forms during the day. This can make it harder for them to do well in strength training or mixed martial arts exercises.
The amount of protein required for maintaining adequate nitrogen balance varies with age and sex. The ideal amount for healthy adults is about 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day (about half a pound for a 130-pound person). The RDA for protein is about 0.8 grams per kilogram per day for adults and females aged 19 through 64, 0.6 grams per kilogram per day for males aged 19 through 64, and 0.4 grams per kilogram per day for females aged 19 through 64.
High-protein foods are foods that have a high amount of dietary protein per volume of food (e.g., legume sauces, cottage cheese, meat, baked beans) and that are convenient to cook and eat because of their quickness to prepare, such as soybeans, nuts, chicken, turkey, cheese, and beef.
Strength training, explicitly weight-lifting, puts enormous stress on the muscles. For example, the intense focus on the muscles involved in the bench press, or round pushup, is directly related to the hearing thresholds of the participating athletes and their overall cardiovascular fitness, which is inherent to the exercise itself.
Protein deficiency
Protein deficiency is a significant problem among older people or people with chronic illnesses. It can cause muscle stiffness, joint pain, dementia, osteoporosis, and infertility.
As our world population grows, protein deficiency is becoming a growing problem. The World Health Organization has put forward a list of six globally recognized nutritional requirements for maintaining health, including high intakes of key nutrients essential for building and maintaining lean body mass, including protein.
The body needs protein to repair cells and tissues damaged by germs or disease. Protein helps convert carbohydrates into energy in the form of carbohydrates and fats. Carbs are broken down into sugars by the liver. Sugar is then stored as fat in fat cells. These fat cells can become tumors if they do not get enough protein.
Women require about 60g of protein per day; men need between 65g and 130g- Don’t skimp on protein – Make sure your protein comes from healthy sources: high in fiber and healthy fats, low in saturated fat and cholesterol.
How much protein do I need?
The current recommended daily allowance of protein from the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine is 0.36 grams per pound of body weight (or 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram). For a 150-pound woman, that’s 54 grams. Twenty-four grams is generally the minimum protein required daily for good health. Beyond these two recommended daily protein intake levels, how much protein should you consume?
The primary role of protein is to aid in protein synthesis, which allows your body to build new muscle. If too much is consumed, your body may deteriorate quickly. Therefore, consuming more than the minimum amount of protein your body requires is impossible.
Most adults worldwide get less than the recommended daily allowance of protein because malnutrition causes our bodies to break down muscle tissue instead of tissue designed for growth.
Similar to how you wouldn’t drink 12 cups of coffee (no matter how “strong” or “super” your coffee tastes), you shouldn’t drink the minimum daily amount of protein unless you’re training like a machine twenty-four six times per day.
So, what is your current protein intake? Well, if you’re consuming approximately 35 grams of protein per day – it is best to advise you to stop reading this article and get up and move around for at least an hour.
And please consume as much high-quality, slow-digesting protein (eggs, milk, hemp, legumes, coconut) as possible.
Protein serves a variety of functions in your body. It contributes to muscle protein synthesis and tissue repair and boosts metabolism, to name a few.
For each of these functions, more is better. When considering the amount of protein to consume each day, eat your protein at the following levels:
Weight management and body composition are often negatively impacted by simple calorie restrictions. Our brains need protein to survive.
Furthermore, the reduced availability of 24-hour energy production may lead to increased food cravings.
Sources of high-quality protein for people on a budget
Many great options exist if you’re looking to add more protein to your diet on a budget. When it comes to protein, quality is more important than quantity. You’ll get better value if you buy high-quality protein sources instead of ramen, cake, and other processed foods. We’ve busted a lot of myths about protein consumption over the years, including, but not limited to, the following:
When it comes to business, doing your research is essential first. While it’s great to try and be a “have what it takes” person, you don’t want to become reliant on one source of protein. If you’re not a health nut or you’ve never been curious enough to dig into nutrition, it might be time to leap. There are tons of excellent protein sources, and depending on the type of protein you want, you can find it in many different places. Remember, where you get your protein is far more critical than how much it gives you.
The best source of animal protein is the red meat variety. Research conducted at the University of Aberdeen in 2013 concluded that people who ate red meat were likelier to develop heart disease than those who ate a higher percentage of non-meat protein. It’s no surprise that red meat has been linked to heart disease. Why is this the case? Your arteries become clogged with plaque, which clogs them up better than healthy cholesterol. This can cause severe damage to your heart.
Harvard Health Publishing recently published a study showing that big arteries in the legs become clogged when pigs are fed a diet high in saturated fat. As a result, cholesterol glides into the ventricles of the streets instead, causing them to stop even more.
Tips for getting enough protein in your diet
There are many ways to get enough protein in your diet. The first is to have a protein source at every meal. If you need extra help ensuring you get enough protein, protein powders, protein bars, and veggie burgers can help.
If you have trouble making sure you get enough protein, we have suggestions from five of the best companies that make protein supplements. We recommend that you begin with a lean, quality source of protein, such as eggs. Eggs are one of the most popular foods for getting enough protein because they are a complete protein source with all nine essential amino acids.
Eggs contain 4-8 g of protein per yolk and thus are an excellent protein source that is easy to integrate into your diet.
Pro Tip: When buying eggs, always check the labeling to see if they contain essential amino acids as additional protein. For example, if the egg’s label states that the eggs have LAA, the eggs are also a complete protein.
For an additional boost, we suggest purchasing amino acid-dense food as often as possible during the runs or the races. These foods can help supply your body with other building blocks and amino acids vital to energizing you.
Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins and can be found in beans, grains, and starches. Also, you may need more or less amino acids to recover well depending on the type of carbs you eat during a run or race.
Choose complex carbohydrates when you choose carbohydrates to fuel your body during a run or race. Specifically, complex carbohydrates include sugars, desserts, cakes, and brownies. We want to avoid simple carbohydrates: fruits, vegetables, white bread, and pasta.
Experiment with varying carb sources to see what works best for you.
Top 10 High-Protein Foods for a Healthy Diet
| Food | Type | Protein Amount (per 100 grams) |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken Breast | Poultry | 31 grams |
| Turkey Breast | Poultry | 29 grams |
| Tuna | Seafood | 30 grams |
| Salmon | Seafood | 25 grams |
| Greek Yogurt | Dairy | 10 grams |
| Cottage Cheese | Dairy | 12 grams |
| Eggs | Animal Product | 13 grams |
| Lentils | Legumes | 9 grams |
| Chickpeas | Legumes | 9 grams |
| Almonds | Nuts | 21 grams |
This table presents a diverse range of healthy foods that are excellent sources of protein, including poultry, seafood, dairy, legumes, and nuts. By incorporating these foods into meals and snacks, individuals can easily meet their daily protein requirements and support overall health and fitness goals.
Good sources of vegan proteins
Many vegan protein sources include legumes, quinoa, nuts, seeds, soy products, and spinach.
Ideally, we’d get all the necessary amino acids our bodies need. Still, while many plant-based proteins are complete protein sources, they are not complete without a few essential amino acids. That’s why not everyone can get all the essential amino acids their body needs from a plant-based diet. These essential amino acids (EAs) can be obtained through various methods. Plant-based nutrition is the most common (and healthy) way to get these essential amino acids from a plant-based diet.
The most common method is through animal products and some sources of animal ingredients. However, not everyone can consume all the essential amino acids their body needs.
It’s important to know that animal products can be useful in some situations and harmful in others. Some animal products may be consumed as stand-alone foods or alongside other foods. No matter where we go with these products, we must know where and how animals are raised. Plant-based nutrition doesn’t exclude the contributions of animal products to our diet.
Since all white/lactose-intolerant individuals can become intolerant to certain animal products, it’s essential to learn how to avoid them altogether.
Eating specific, complete, and incomplete proteins from plant sources does not come without risks. The foods you eat contain raw materials that have been processed before consumption. They may also contain microorganisms such as bacteria, molds, and parasites. These microorganisms can cause problems that range from mild (like cramping and pain in the intestines) to severe (like vomiting). That said, avoiding raw ingredients that harm our health, such as shellfish, eggs, and natural animal or plant products, is essential.
FAQs
Conclusion
Protein is essential for muscle growth and fat loss and helps regulate sleep patterns, brain function, and thyroid health.
High-quality protein sources include eggs, fish, nuts, legumes, and dairy products.
Harvard Health Publishing recently published a study showing that a diet high in saturated fat can cause cholesterol to build up in the arteries of the legs.
This comprehensive list of protein-rich foods can be included in daily meals and snacks to meet protein requirements. Following the advice outlined in this article, individuals can confidently ensure they get enough protein to support their overall health and fitness goals.
References
Do you eat enough protein? – Harvard Health
September 9, 2015 Obtain the moderate amount of protein you need from a variety of nutritious foods—not just meat. To meet your daily protein needs, combine small to medium portions …
14 Easy Ways to Increase Your Protein Intake – Healthline
Getting enough at each meal is also important. Several researchers recommend consuming a minimum of 20–30 grams of protein at each meal. Studies show that this amount promotes fullness and… …
Daily Protein Requirements: Are You Getting Enough? – WebMD
Adult women need about 46 grams a day (71 grams, if pregnant or breastfeeding) You should get at least 10% of your daily calories, but not more than 35%, from …
Protein Calculator: How Much Protein Do I Need? – Bodybuilding.com
If you’re struggling to get enough protein, consider these time-tested strategies: Eat 3-4 solid meals a day, each containing 20-40 grams of protein. If you’re vegetarian, pair complementary proteins …
Are you getting enough protein? 7 ways to eat more every day
It’s not just those groups who need protein, though: The average adult should get about 0.8 to 1 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight ( PDF) — if …
Alex is a passionate fitness enthusiast dedicated to helping people lead healthier, more active lifestyles. He encourages small – sustainable changes over drastic transformations and works with people to create customized wellness plans. His mission is to help others benefit from the most effective methods available, sharing tips, strategies, and health & fitness tools on Gearuptofit.com to inspire people to live their best lives.