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Pro Tips on Protein

This stems from a request from one of y'all to review protein supplements.  I thought it might be a better idea to start with the idea of protein and if it needs supplementing.

A few years ago, I took a course on the Whole Food Plant Based Diet run by Cornell and through the T. Colin Campbell Center for nutrition Studies and one of the many things that have come out of that have been a new view on protein which is in contrast to the menu at my favorite BBQ place in Texas (Kreuz Market) which has a separate entrance door for vegetarians at the front that leads right back outside.

I think we all come from generations where you would be asked what your protein is when it was time for a meal and the answers ranged from chicken to pork to fish to beef to maybe some type of dairy product or eggs.  The idea all the while being that more protein is better for you and will make you stronger.  I still get this voice in my head when it's meal time or to justify eating something terrible for me (curse you and your delicious chicken, General Tso) because it has protein in it.

While it's true that you do need protein coming in to keep your body running, how much has been widely debated, in part because of all the money that is involved in the protein industry.  Think about how much sway the Dairy, Beef, Chicken, Pork and Seafood lobbyists might have when the government has come up with recommended daily allowances and also all the marketing that has come along with it.

The RDA for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram of bodyweight.  The actual number that's needed is 2 standard deviations below that, around 0.5-0.6, but they adjust it upwards for safety's sake so that 98% of people will get what they need.  For an average person, that comes out to somewhere between 45-55 grams of protein per day.  Now because this is weight based, it can be skewed as our national weight keeps going up, but it's based more on what an ideal body weight should be for a person's height.

The average person actually eats about 70% more protein than that every day, far more than their RDA.  The downstream effects from this are thought to be increased risks of cancers, kidney disease, heart disease, maybe Alzheimers, and environmental destruction relating to the food and land use/abuse to raise the massive quantity of animals needed since there is so much waste involved in the industrial food machine.

So I think for most halfway healthy people, zero indication or benefit to using protein supplements.  I'm more a proponent of the whole foods plant based diet, which you can learn much more about here.

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