How Much Protein Do You Need?

How do you make sense of all the conflicting parts of the protein puzzle?

This article is a broad overview of the issues relating to protein and how to make sense of them when deciding if you have enough in your diet…

Recommended Daily Amount (RDA)

Every nutritional authority, government health departments for example, set recommended intakes of all the various dietary nutrients.

Often, they call these the ‘Recommended Daily Amounts’ but sometimes you’ll see RNI – Reference Nutrient Intake or DRV – Dietary Reference Value. The RDA is a good place to start when thinking about how much protein you need in your diet.

Although the estimated average need for dietary protein is 0.6g/Kg bodyweight, all the nutritional bodies I’ve seen have set a nominal figure of 0.8g of protein per kilo bodyweight. This extra bit is to cover the needs of about 98% of the population.

Some people use this fact to use the 0.6 figure in their sums but this is an error in my opinion. The 0.6 figure is an average. How do you know you’re not one of the 0.8 people?

I think it’s important to understand that the recommendations should be seen in the light of the diet they are intended to apply to; a largely cooked diet high in grains and starchy carbohydrates, relatively low in fruits and veg (by evolutionary standards and by comparison to other primates) and containing some animal sources of protein.

Incidentally, protein needs don’t relate directly to bodyweight but ‘lean body mass’ — basically, everything that isn’t fat. Of course, the bodyweight is used so as not to complicate the issue — very few people know what their lean body mass is.

It Depends on Your Diet as a Whole

It’s a fundamental flaw of nutritional theory to apply the results of studying one type of diet to a totally different sort of diet.

Since the number of factors affecting any nutritional study are massive, who knows what will happen if you tweak just one of these factors? What about 5, 10, 20? In nutrition as in life, everything affects everything else.

Its not what protein (or any other nutrient) you eat that matters, it’s how much you absorb. The biological value system (BV) is a way of demonstrating how useful a given food is for protein. Animal foods top these charts.

This is why the RDA figure for vegetarians and vegans is higher at 0.9-1.0g/Kg. So it’s not possible to take this 0.8 figure and apply it universally. As well as the BV of the foods you eat…

It Depends on Your Circumstances

The protein requirements for active people, athletes, pregnancy and lactation are higher still. They can generally be explained simply, when you consider that the overall calorie increases of these groups will automatically mean more protein.

However if you fit into one of the categories that need extra protein, it’s worth knowing the figure that applies to you, and factoring up again if you’re vegetarian or vegan.

The Scientific Nitty-Gritty

How is it that both sides of the protein debate can provide reams of scientific evidence in the form of studies to support their theories? Clearly something is missing, a vital clue or clues to make sense of the seemingly conflicting evidence. A lot of the problems come from studying the trees and not the forest.

Because of the massive number of factors involved, the only sane approach is to study the effect of a dietary strategy as a whole. Therefore I would strongly recommend viewing scientific information within a much wider context.

For example, a recent study showing lycopene to be increased in cooked tomatoes has been plastered all over the media. Everyone concludes that cooked tomatoes are better. Not only that but it’s also used as a supposedly convincing argument that cooking is a good thing.

Suddenly everyone seems to have forgotten that cooking also destroys many vitamins and other factors.

Evolutionary Clues

The evidence for human ancestors is clear; they ate a lot of animal foods. So do the majority of tribal peoples alive today, who are also largely free of the diseases of civilization.

Also, when looking at primate diets, as well as eating small amounts of animal protein, primates eat huge amounts of raw vegetation and get a hell of a lot of protein from that.

Longevity Clues

The study of the elderly Okinawans is probably the most reliable information we have about long-lived people. But get this — Barry Sears, author of the Zone Diet, is using the study to claim it’s a zone favorable diet. So clearly the Okinawan diet is not low in protein.

John Robbins book, “Healthy at 100″, uses the Okinawan studies and looks at other long-lived peoples. He shows that this model does produce excellent results. The basic model is based on grains, lots and lots of fruits and veg with small amounts animal foods, nuts and seeds.

The Okinawans get part of their protein needs from tofu — a vegetarian source made from soya beans.

T. C. Campbell’s advice would be very similar to John Robbins. T. C. led the team that conducted the largest epidemiological study ever – “The China Study”. The study found correlations between the amount of animal foods in the diet and diseases such as heart disease and cancer.

Very convincing you might think but in nutrition it’s very easy to add 2 + 2 and get 5.

Acid-Alkali Balance — The Missing Piece of the Puzzle?

All foods can be classified as to whether they leave an acid or alkali residue in the body. I think one of the causes of confusion is studying the effect of protein in an already acid-forming diet of primarily grains.

Whereas in the pre-agricultural diet, only 500 generations ago, animal foods and nuts and seeds — acid-forming foods — are balanced exclusively with vegetable matter — alkali-forming foods.

This begs the question; are the adverse effects of protein sometimes observed in scientific studies actually due to ‘high’ protein or the diet as a whole? It seems fair to say that high protein foods in a diet low in fruits and veg is going to compound the problems of acid-alkali balance.

The often debated calcium-loss issue associated with high protein diets suddenly makes a lot more sense when you consider the acid-alkali situation. The calcium lost in urine is due to acidosis, not specifically protein. Protein is only one factor, as is calcium intake. You hear a lot about calcium loss but what really matters is calcium balance – how much is lost vs how much is absorbed from the diet.

Once you remove grains from the diet, suddenly a lot more protein can be included, whilst the optimal acid-alkali balance maintained.

Thinking Naturally

If you consider the diets of bonobos — our closest living primate relative — the approx 5% figure of animal foods is further enhanced by them eating large amounts of THV (vegetation).

There’s a very good argument that as humans are so closely related to bonobos, we’d do well to model their diet. I agree — it’s a good starting point.

The problem is that we’re not accustomed to eating that much veg, so we need to up the protein from other sources to balance things out. There’s also evidence that over the last few millions of years, our biology has adapted somewhat to a diet higher in animal foods than our primate cousins.

This fits perfectly with evolutionary theory that our increased brain size is due to increased amounts of animal foods in our diet.

If You’re Going to Use a Model, Use the Whole Model

So, in the final analysis protein is only one part of a dietary model that must be taken and studied as a whole to get meaningful results.

It’s a big error to think of nutrition in little bits. Consider the effect of the whole diet on the whole person. You could do a lot worse than looking at the long-lived people and copy their lifestyles but I think the optimal diet is even better…

A low grain, high raw diet with massive amount of fruits and veg and sufficient protein and essential fats.

If you want natural, then the natural human diet is clear to me. We replaced the THV in chimp-like diets with animal sources of protein and fats, enabling brain development.

I believe this model would produce even better results than any model based on grains. Of course, these animal foods would have been eaten raw, so we must adapt the to the modern world.

If, understandably, we don’t want to eat animals for ethical reasons, we must at least, further adapt this model to include high quality sources of protein and essential fats.

I must say though that any diet not including animal foods at least in small quantities is an unknown quantity and people following raw vegan diets are pioneers, venturing into largely unknown territory.

Raw Vegan Mathematical Errors

The big question for animal lovers is… “How can I be sure to get enough protein in a raw vegan diet?”

I personally would advise shooting for the RDA, given lack of specific data on raw vegan diet protein needs.

Consider the RDA is 0.8g/Kg bodyweight. Now for me that works out at 56g of protein at 70Kg –providing I’m not pregnant or lactating — which I’m not. :-)

I need 2200 calories approx on a typical mixed cooked diet…

56g protein at 4 calories per gram of protein is 224 calories from protein in my diet. This is often expressed as a percentage which is…

(224/2200)*100=10.18%

So I need 10% protein.

Well amazing, because this is what T.C.Campbell recommends and he ‘prefers’ to talk in ‘percentage of calories’. All fine and dandy you might think…

But no… on a raw vegan diet, I don’t need 2200 calories but only approximately 1400 calories to maintain my weight. This is because a raw food diet, properly combined, is far more efficient. 10% protein now is 140 calories from protein or 35g. Now you see this is a long way off the 56g RDA.

And let’s not forget the figure of 0.8g/Kg is for meat eaters, whose protein sources have a higher biological value. Also, the 0.8 figure does not include the needs of active people and sportsmen who need more.

So let’s redo these sums properly…

According to Harvard University Health Services, vegetarians and vegans will need 0.9-1.0g protein per Kg bodyweight (assuming they’re NOT active in sports). Using the higher figure, fair enough for vegans I think, that works out at 70g or 280 calories from protein using me as an example.

I know from experience that I need approximately 1400 calories a day eating raw food properly combined, so…

(280/1400)*100=20% protein

If you consider that a meat-eating (higher BV) athlete may need not 0.8g/Kg but up to 1.7g/Kg bodyweight you can see the massive error in talking percentages and oversimplification of the sums by some people.

For example, on one raw food website I saw…

“So, if you eat 2000 calories at 10% protein, you’ll get 50g of protein which is plenty”

Errors;

• Very unlikely you are eating 2000 calories of raw food.
• Using percentages is misleading – What if you’re on a fat loss diet?
• Assumes everyone needs 0.8g/Kg which is wrong.
• Assumes a raw vegan diet is 10% protein. 10% is probably more or less right for a cooked vegan diet including grains, pulses etc. but a raw vegan diet needs a bit more planning to get to 10%.

“BUT ARH” I hear you say, “You say it’s wrong to use data from one diet and apply it to a completely different diet… but then you Mike, are using standard protein data and applying it to a raw vegan diet!”

Well yes… hands up, it’s true but given the total lack of any other kind of information and given our animal eating, high protein past, I personally wouldn’t leave protein to chance.

And so I think it’s best to use the recommended daily amounts.

The likely picture however is that raw vegan diets do need less actual grams of protein due to not cooking and the efficiency of food combining but how much less? Who knows? 20% would seem to be a reasonable figure (I just made that up) but who knows?

In the coming years, I’m sure plenty of research will be done into natural and raw diets and we can have better data to work with.

So, in a nutshell, I think a lot of confusion is caused by the acid-alkali balance not being taken into account when considering protein in diets. More confusion comes from studying the trees and not the forest and then misinterpreting scientific results.

We need more research based on the effect of whole diets on whole people. Then we’ll have better data to work with.

Given the lack of studies relating to specific dietary systems, I think it wise at the moment to shoot for the RDA’s based on individual circumstances… that is taking into account activity levels, specific sports training, pregnancy, age and so on.

Bottom Line

Know your protein needs in terms of grams per day and design your individual diet plan with that in mind. See Are You Getting Enough Protein in a Raw Vegan Diet? for more details about the specific issues relating to raw vegans.

How do you plan your diet? Write out your typical daily intended diet with approximate grams of each food. The you can use nutrition tools such as fitday.com or the USDA database to look at various aspects including the protein content.

Another way you could do it is to log your diet for 3 days and enter that data into fitday.com.

But the best option is to simply follow the diet in Habit Guide…

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