Welcome back to Blasphemous Nutrition! I am your host, Aimee, and the last time I tried to do a cartwheel I fell on my face. Nothing else has been as motivating to get me back in the gym.
Protein is all the rage right now, and I, for one, am glad to see it have some time in the limelight. We’ve been so myopically focused on the carb vs fat debate for nearly 4 generations and protein has been in the corner, all this while, being neglected.
I talk about how the current recommendations for protein may actually be half of what we need for optimal health in Nutrition and Your Brain Part 2: What to Eat for Depression and Anxiety, and encourage you to go back to that for a read/listen if you’ve not yet done so.
However, working to get enough protein can be a challenge for many, particularly if they are accustomed to several small meals a day, if they struggle with low stomach acid, are taking medications that suppress appetite or have had bariatric surgery. Additionally, taking the time to source out protein is a problem for those who rely mostly on dining out for their meals. Most restaurant and fast food meals leave us short of what is needed when they adhere to the standard serving size of 3-4 ounces.
If You Find Yourself Too full:
If appetite is the limiting factor, there are several things you can do:
Add variety: We’ve all had the experience of going to a potluck, buffet restaurant, or holiday dinner and been so tempted by the variety that we’ve eaten too much. However, when it comes to protein, adding variety can be just the thing you need to get over the hump! It’s often easier to get your needed protein when it is a mix of say, 3 ounces of chicken and 2 ounces of shrimp instead of 5 ounces of just chicken, or adding 3 ounces of ham to 2 eggs instead of trying to choke down 5 eggs in the morning. Mix and match your proteins at the same meal to increase nutrient density while keeping the meal interest alive!
Go for softer proteins: Some people find it easier when choosing softer proteins such as cottage cheese, greek yogurt, scrambled eggs, and ground meats, especially in the morning when your appetite might not have fully risen with the sun. Try these when you are struggling to get enough protein from other sources.
Choose leaner for more protein per bite: Our leanest protein sources, such as white fish, chicken breast, shrimp, and egg whites, have little to no fat and so each bite contains more protein compared to other meats such as pork shoulder or a rib eye steak. Sometimes a simple switch to more lean protein sources can bump you up to your goal when included at 1-2 meals. I rarely recommend people use exclusively lean proteins as this can backfire due to food boredom and fat is, after all, quite good for you!
Supplementing with protein powder is a great way to get those last 20-30 grams in. Making a protein smoothie in the morning or adding it to your greek yogurt, creating little treats with protein powder to fill in the gaps in an exciting way – these are all means to increase protein with a processed food that can actually be an ally in ensuring you have enough protein to reach your goals. I recently created a couple of recipe guides with nearly 100 recipes using protein powder in breakfasts, snacks, and desserts that you might find helpful!
Lack of meal prep
Time to prep meals, or a sudden unexpected derailment, can throw you off your protein game! In times like these, letting others do the heavy lifting can help you out.
Choose pre-cooked, frozen or refrigerated proteins and have them on hand for emergencies. I always keep frozen fish and precooked shrimp in the freezer and often have deli slices of ham or turkey in the fridge as an emergency snack. You can place turkey or ham slices on a chard or lettuce leaf, add mustard or pesto or another flavor enhancer and perhaps some additional produce like avocado, tomato, or sprouts, roll it up and chow down! It takes less than 5 minutes to do and is quite filling.
Double the protein serving when dining out, unless at steakhouse or seafood restaurant. Most restaurants, especially ethnic restaurants, only add 2-3 ounces of protein in a curry, stir-fry, or soup. Ask to have the protein doubled, or if dining at a steak or seafood house, choose an option where the weight of the protein food is listed (an 8 ounce steak or 6 ounce filet of salmon, for instance) to ensure you get enough.
Make shelf-stable protein sources your snacking go-to: jerky, meat sticks, canned fish, — but be mindful of shelf-stable sausages, like pepperoni sticks, fuets, and summer sausages; these often have just as much fat as protein and provide less than you’d think because they are so fatty. Always look at the label!
Poor sources:
We are told that nuts, seeds, and beans are quality sources of protein. If you eliminate all animal protein, these become quality sources of protein. But to put beans and nuts in the same category as eggs or meat is misleading and part of the problem we have with getting enough protein to protect muscle as we age.
Nuts and seeds are predominately fats (60-80%) with some protein and a little carbohydrate. Beans are mostly carbohydrate (60%) with some protein and a trace of fat. Neither of these are comparable to meat. And do not even get me started on broccoli, which I see touted for its high protein content on social media infographics. Many times these protein sources get advertised as being high in protein through massaging the math just so.
There are five different ways we can express how much of a nutrient is in a food. Influencers with an agenda will typically, knowingly or not, use whichever method best supports their position.
- Percent of Calories: This method calculates the proportion of calories from protein by dividing protein calories by the total calories in a food item. It highlights how much of the food’s energy, which we call calories, comes from protein. If a protein bar claims to be 25% protein and has 200 calories, using this method we’d discover that 50 calories came from protein, which would be 12.5 grams of protein in the bar, as a gram of protein has 4 calories. You’ll shortly see how this gets twisted to mislead people.
- Calorie-Matched Servings: Compares foods based on the grams of protein per 100 calories. This method allows you to compare protein content when consuming the same amount of calories from different foods. This can be helpful when people are focused on calories to ensure they do not accidentally exceed a defined calorie target or end up underconsuming energy. I rarely use it in the real world though, because calories are not my primary focus in nutrition.
- Mass-Matched Servings: Measures the amount of protein per 100 grams of food, focusing on how much protein you get relative to the weight of the food, independent of its calorie count. We’ll see an example of this shortly. Using 100 grams is the typical example used to assess nutrients on food labels in the UK and Europe, which is largely useless when assessing packaged foods because a serving of any packaged food is rarely 100 grams. Sometimes a package will also include the actual serving size, sometimes not, which annoys me to no end because hardly anyone weighs out foods before eating them. Hey – My Australian readers! Can you comment below and tell me if your labeling follows this method?
- Volume-Matched Servings: Compares the protein content per cup or other volume measures, showing how much protein is present per volume. This is most helpful for foods like liquids that we typically measure in cups, like yogurt or orange juice. With chopped or diced foods it becomes a little less reliable since the size of the dice can make a huge difference. One of the benefits though is that it is much easier to estimate a cup serving in our head than it is 100 grams of something.
- Typical Serving Size: This compares the protein content based on the standard serving size typically recommended for each food, which may vary between items. This is probably the most reflective of the real world. For instance, if the goal is to get 20 grams of protein at a meal, you could say that a standard serving size of some Greek Yogurts will do that for you. However, a standard serving of broccoli is considered half a cup cooked or 1 cup raw (and you now know this is a little problematic) and weighs between 70 and 90 grams, depending upon which authority you ask. In doing my research for my Master’s paper, I settled upon an 85 gram serving for vegetables as most research used between 80 and 90 grams as a serving. An 85 gram serving of broccoli contains 2 grams of protein and is close to what you get when you measure out 1 cup of diced florets.
Each method offers a different perspective on protein content, depending on whether you are comparing calories, weight, or serving size. This is what makes it easy to use math to confuse people.
In the case of broccoli, you might have seen online that broccoli is 43% protein. That sounds fantastic! Very strong source of protein, right? Especially when compared to 85% lean ground beef, which is only 35% protein. Vegans love this fact and use it to convince people that broccoli is either better than meat or a quality source of protein by itself.
Here’s the catch – broccoli is 43% protein by calories, which…when you think of how many calories is in broccoli, you quickly realize that won’t amount to much. And it doesn’t. 3.5 ounces or 100 grams of broccoli contains about 3 grams of protein and 35 calories. 3.5 or 100 grams of 85% lean ground beef contains 26 grams of protein. But let’s look at this even closer. A typical serving of 85% ground beef according to most official standards is about 3 ounces or 90 grams and contains 17 grams of protein. To get the same grams of protein from broccoli, one would need to eat 570 grams of broccoli, which is equal to 20 ounces!
When we look at beans, we fare a bit better than broccoli in terms of being able to conceive of eating enough protein from these sources, but you need to have a hearty appetite! 100 grams of lean white fish such as cod contains 23 grams of protein. 100 grams of cooked garbanzo beans contains 9 grams of protein. So, again, if you are aiming to get 100 grams of protein per day you’re looking at eating quite a lot more beans than fish and that will be hard to do. To be more precise, it takes 440 grams or just shy of one pound of cooked cod to get to 100 grams of protein, which if we were going to stay on the garbanzo train would take 1125 grams (nearly 2.5 pounds)!
To be more realistic, 750 grams or 1.7 pounds of extra firm tofu is needed to get to 100 grams of protein. Tofu is going to be the most concentrated source of whole food plant-based protein. Vegetarians often end up supplementing with protein powder and vegans really struggle to get sufficient protein without supplementation for this reason. The carbohydrates from starch and fiber in plant proteins displaces the protein per bite, which is why it is so much easier to use animal foods to get enough protein, as they lack both fiber and carbs.
You’ll see the same thing happen if you start looking at using nuts and seeds as a primary source of protein – you have to eat so much to make a dent in your dietary requirements than most people can stomach, particularly if you are:
- under 18 or over 40 years old
- if you are active
- if you are trying to lose weight without sacrificing muscle
- or if you are in the perimenopausal or postmenopausal phase of life.
And this does not even go into the argument against vegetable protein as an incomplete source of amino acids to meet human needs as compared to animal protein sources.
Amino acids are the building blocks for all protein structures in the body, from enzymes to muscles. I think of them as tiny little legos that our body uses to make all the things. Just as we need different sizes and shapes of legos to build a structure, so too do we need different amino acids to build a healthy, functioning body; 20 different kinds to be exact. Our gorgeous, miraculous bodies can make 11 of these 20 amino acids all on its own, most of the time. Some are conditionally essential, but that is a topic for another time. There are 9 amino acids which are deemed essential – we are always unable to make these ourselves and must get them from our food sources.
Nearly all animal foods – meat, milk, and eggs – contain all 9 essential amino acids in sufficient ratios and quantities to meet human bodily demands. Plant foods are considered ‘incomplete proteins’ because they contain insufficient amounts of one or more of these essential amino acids.
If you’ve been alive as long as I have, you may remember the concept of protein combining from the vegetarian movement of the 1970s. The idea was that you can be a healthy vegetarian if you make sure to combine your proteins in such a way as to meet your essential amino acids at each meal. Grains needed to be combined with grains with seeds, nuts or legumes to provide all the needed amino acids in sufficient quantity – corn and beans, rice and beans, toast and peanut butter, and so on.
This micromanaging of amino acids at each meal was ultimately unnecessary, so long as one consumes a varied diet. However, total protein needs may not be adequate among many who adopt a meatless diet, and if there are additional dietary restrictions, the risk of amino acid insufficiency increases. This is an area of nutrition knowledge that is still not well explored. We know what overt protein deficiency looks like, but the ramifications of amino acid insufficiency or chronic suboptimal intakes has yet to be fully teased out.
There are many places I can go from here, but I want to remain on the notion of ensuring we get sufficient protein to age well, stay healthy and strong and independent as we age.
In unprocessed form, most plant foods do not contain sufficient leucine to send the signal to the body to keep or build muscle. Leucine is an amino acid that sends a signal to the body to maintain muscle mass, or increase muscle mass. We want this messenger to be present in the system multiple times a day, not whizzing by barely whispering, but loudly announcing to the rest of the body not to forget that muscle mass is important!
How much leucine do we need present in a meal to send a loud enough message? 2.5 to 3.0 grams per meal with at least 25 to 35 grams of total protein in that meal. The older you are or the harder you are working your body with your workouts, the higher on that end you want to go.
It takes about 4-6 ounces of animal protein to get this amount, or about 8-10 ounces of extra firm tofu. If you are petite vegan female, or you’ve had gastric bypass surgery, you may be wondering how you’ll accomplish this multiple times a day!
This is where protein powders can be extremely helpful.
For the meatless crowd, many plant-based protein contain pea protein, which contains sufficient leucine per 30 grams of protein in the supplement. Additionally, sport blends of dairy-free proteins will have added an amino acid profile specifically for supporting muscle mass retention and gain. So when choosing a plant-based protein, look for a sport blend or make sure that the amount of amino acids are listed on the label. Remember, you want at least 2.5 grams of leucine per serving, and closer to 3 grams if over 65, menopausal, undergoing a very low calorie diet or really beating yourself up in your athletic training.
Whey protein, casein protein or egg protein naturally contain enough essential amino acids, including leucine, that you needn’t worry.
Collagen protein powder and beef protein isolate unfortunately do not contain sufficient leucine per serving. It takes about 3 servings of each of these to get to 2.5 grams of leucine, unless the protein powder has been fortified with branched chain amino acids.
An extra bit of trickery here is food labels, especially in Europe, will list nutrition facts per 100 grams of that food and omit the nutrition facts for a serving of that food. Someone somewhere made the brainiac decision to simplify things by standardizing the nutrition label to reflect the nutrients in 100 grams of foods rather than how much food one might typically eat. It is one of the great shames of that continent to waste space on a label with such data, which then requires one to do loads of mathematical gymnastics to ascertain the macros a serving actually contains. In the case of protein powders, a serving is typically 30 grams, not 100, so if one looks at a label on a canister of beef protein isolate and sees it contains 2.6 grams of leucine, they may think they are getting enough if they don’t take the extra step and figure out a serving of this protein powder is only 30 grams.
So, to recap –
If you are struggling to get enough protein you first want to assess why. If it’s simply hard to eat enough, choose more dense animal sources that are low in fat like egg whites, cottage cheese, white fish or skinless poultry or supplement with protein powder if you are strapped for time.
If you struggle with having enough protein on hand through homemade meals, ask for double the protein when dining out, add in protein-based snack foods and consider some time-saving options like prepared or frozen protein sources to have in the house at all times.
I hope this episode makes it easier for you to understand how to better get your protein in. If you have any personal tips to share, comment below! As always, remember to share this episode with a friend or family member who may be struggling to get protein in, or who may have recently been mislead through some online shenanigans promoting broccoli as some kind of protein miracle. Until next time my Blasphemous Buddies!
Resources:
Rondanelli M, Nichetti M, Peroni G, Faliva MA, Naso M, Gasparri C, Perna S, Oberto L, Di Paolo E, Riva A, Petrangolini G, Guerreschi G, Tartara A. Where to Find Leucine in Food and How to Feed Elderly With Sarcopenia in Order to Counteract Loss of Muscle Mass: Practical Advice. Front Nutr. 2021 Jan 26;7:622391. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2020.622391. PMID: 33585538; PMCID: PMC7874106.
Cronometer was used to ascertain protein status of all foods mentioned. To explore Cronometer, go here.
