SuperLife by Darin Olien

Author:Darin Olien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers

How Much Protein Is Safe?

So what can we do to avoid all that potential damage?

The obvious answer is to lighten up on the protein—to get all we need, but no more. Unfortunately, there’s no consistent advice out there on how much protein is healthy for us. Even reputable sources of nutritional information tell us to eat too much. It’s going to come back to haunt us.

Some so-called experts recommend that we get between 25 and 30 percent of our daily calories from protein. For most of us, that’s too much to eat on a regular basis. Your needs may rise or fall, depending on your activity levels or what else you’re eating. Many people are unaware of this interesting fact: our bodies actually recycle and reuse somewhere between 100 and 300 grams of protein daily—yet more evidence that we evolved in a world where protein was scarce. According to scientists, we excrete only around 6 percent of the protein we ingest every day. The rest remains with us. We have more protein available than we realize.

I believe we should be eating around one-third of a gram of protein for every pound of body weight. A 150-pound person should get around 50 grams a day, or a little under two ounces.

What contains two ounces of protein? Top round beef is about one-third protein, so a six-ounce steak equals all the protein our 150-pound person needs in a day. An egg contains 12.5 grams of protein, so four eggs would be enough, even if you didn’t get another bit from anything else you ate. Two four-ounce skinless chicken breasts provide just under 50 grams. Same for two cans of tuna.

Or we could get most or all of our protein from nonflesh sources—vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and some dairy, like yogurt.

Let’s imagine a day where, among other things, we eat almonds, hummus, spinach, brown rice, kale, yogurt, peas, black beans, and pumpkin seeds. One ounce of almonds equals roughly 6 grams of protein. Three ounces of hummus contains 7.4 grams. Three ounces of spinach contains 2.8 grams. In one cup of kale, 2 grams. In a cup of black beans, 14.5 grams. In a cup of brown rice, 5 grams. Peas, 7.5 grams per cup. Pumpkin seeds, 6 grams per half cup. And let’s throw in a little nutrient-dense quinoa, worth about 8 grams of protein per cooked cup.

There—all the protein we need in a day, about 50 grams, from nutrient-dense, whole healthy foods. Foods that give us many other beneficial things as well, and little metabolic stress. We could come up with an entirely different list of foods and end up with the same amount of healthy protein, and without any of the saturated fats or other sketchy substances found in meat, fish, and eggs.

Here’s another way to compute it: somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of our total calories should come from protein. If we’re eating 2,000 calories a day, that’s around 200 or 300 calories’ worth of protein.

There

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