Dieticians are constantly asked by their vegetarian/vegan patients on how to increase their protein intake. This is a result of the constant bombardment of advertisements for milk, eggs and meat which use protein as their main sales gimmick. Fake news is the norm in food selling: high protein diets based on meat/milk are recommended for putting on muscle or losing weight and vegans are constantly told that they will suffer from protein deficiency.
The truth is that protein deficiency is extremely rare except in actual starvation as every cell contains protein. In fact, today we have the opposite— people suffering from diseases of protein excess, such as acidity, osteoporosis, gout, chronic kidney disease, and cancers.
Protein is essential for life—it is a building block of every human cell and important in growth and tissue repair. It exists in every plant and animal product. In fact, most people tend to get too much of this rather than too little. Protein deficiency can wreak havoc on the body.
But, protein deficiency goes hand-in-hand with total energy deficiency. In simple terms, you cannot be protein deficient unless you are already starving from lack of food or on a diet of pizza and ice-cream. How much protein do you need? The recommended daily allowance used to be 0.8 grams per kg of body weight. This translates to 66 grams of protein per day for an adult weighing 75 kg. But recommended amounts have more than halved in the past 20 years or so as several chronic diseases have been linked to eating too much animal (not plant) protein. The average adult needs to consume between 45 and 55.5 grams of protein per day (COMA, 1991). Only 8 per cent of your diet needs to be protein (WHO, Hegsted, 1968; Irwin and Hegsted, 1975; Scrimshaw, 1976; COMA, 1991). Even this value includes a large safety margin, as people’s real needs are even lower.
This story is from the May 2021 edition of TerraGreen.
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This story is from the May 2021 edition of TerraGreen.
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