You probably need way more Protein

Transcript for my most recent video on Protein.

This is the transcript for my most recent video: You probably need way more Protein.

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Transcript

If you’re hungry all the time you probably need more protein. 

Why? 

Well, what drove an 11 month old boy to eat salt straight out of the salt shaker? 

Why did an infant in the 1920’s choose to drink straight cod liver oil, something that kids notoriously hate? 

Well here’s 1928 a study on newly weaned infants who completely decided their own diets. They were presented with a wide variety of meats, milk, eggs, fruits, vegetables, juice and cereals and they either pointed at or just grabbed what they wanted. If the babies could picked the right foods, they could get all the proteins, vitamins and minerals they needed. The infants ate in weird patterns - they ate a bit of everything and in one week they would eat “astonishingly large amounts of” beef, then the next week they might eat tons of eggs, and then focus on cereal the next week. Some days they ate as many as 7 eggs, 48 ounces of milk, or 4 bananas. They ate a wide variety of foods, even choosing to eat bone marrow, liver, kidneys and raw beef. 

In the end, the babies grew to be very healthy, had great digestion none were overweight. 5 babies entered the study with rickets but by the end, they had “beautifully” strong bones. The researchers analyzed the content of all 36,000 meals the babies ate and found they were indeed choosing a variety of foods that made for a nourishing and nutritionally complete diet. 

One child who was vitamin D deficient when first introduced to the study chose to drink straight cod liver oil which is rich in vitamin D. 

In a different 1940 study, an 11-month old boy who had a disease that prevented him from retaining sodium chose every day to eat an abnormal amount of salt all by himself. He ate the salt straight out of the salt-shaker and while he didn’t eat crackers, he licked the salt off of them. 

These old studies support this idea that our bodies can to some degree make us crave foods that we need the most. This is where something called the protein leverage hypothesis comes in. It basically says that because the body knows it requires a lot of protein, it will compel you to keep eating to get more protein. Eating the same number of calories, you will be hungrier on a low protein diet than you would be on a high protein diet. 

So for example you may be full for a while after a 400g ribeye steak but might be craving some snacks not too long after eating two Big Macs even though both those meals got you about 1140 calories. The difference is the ribeye steak is giving you 96 grams of protein but the Big Macs only gave you 52 grams of protein.

There’s actually a lot of evidence for this protein leverage idea.

“Every single human obesity study you will ever look at, ever, at all, period, in the history of medical literature - the more protein people ate, the better. Always. Completely. Like, there's no exception." -Dr. Ted Naiman

A study from just this year found that on average, each 1% increase in protein lowers total calorie intake by about 1%. A 2005 study found that people eating a 30% protein diet lost more weight and had lower hunger scores than people eating a 15% protein diet. A 2011 study found that people ate more calories if they ate a 10% protein diet instead of a 15% protein diet. In this study, the people on the low protein diet were craving more savory foods - their body was craving things that taste like they should have protein in them. 

Alex Hormozi clip - I’ve eaten 200g of protein every single day for 20 years

We understand that protein is very filling to some degree. I bet you could polish off 1500 calories of pizza and ice cream pretty easily, but 1500 calories of just lean beef will leave you sweating and struggling to swallow in between deep breaths.

There’s a couple ways protein blunts your appetite. One idea is what’s called the aminostatic hypothesis that says essentially the body is always trying to maintain a certain level of amino acids. When it senses there is not ‘enough’ amino acids present, it will make you hungry. Of course amino acids come from the protein we eat. 

This is a really cool graph from a quite old study that shows appetite and amino acid concentrations in the body are tightly linked. When amino acid concentrations go up, appetite goes down. When amino acids go down, appetite goes up.

Other research has found that eating protein simply increases the secretion of anorexigenic hormones, hormones associated with a reduction of appetite. For one example in a study where an amino acid mix reduced the appetite of obese adolescents, they surmised this was due to an increase in the appetite suppressing peptide GLP-1, and that GLP-1 is likely secreted in response to  the intestines sensing the presence of certain amino acids.

Look at a pictures or footage of a 1960’s beach and it’s pretty obvious that the obesity epidemic of today is a recent issue. 

Our food environment has definitely change. Could the issue be that we eat too much cheap food?

Reporting on USDA data, Vox claims that “Americans devote just 11 percent of their household spending to food, a smaller share than nearly every other country spends on food consumed at home alone.”  Now part of this is because America is a wealthy nation so people don’t have to spend so much on food, but considering America spends a lot less than say France or Norway, part of it is likely due to the fact that Americans simply buy food that is cheaper to produce. 

I don’t think you’d be surprised to hear that cheaper food makes you fat. Cheap processed food is loaded with additives, sugar, processed carbohydrates and seed oils, but what it doesn’t have much of is protein. Protein is not cheap. Protein is the most expensive macronutrient. This study on 106 supermarket foods found that the cost of food increases with food protein density, - the more protein a food had the more expensive it was. Fat and carbohydrates however, are really cheap.

NLSY79 data suggests that as income goes down, obesity goes up.

So of course cheap foods have all kinds of negative attributes, but maybe cheap, low-protein foods are driving people to be fat by keeping them hungry because they’re not getting enough protein.

Dr. Ted Naiman has a philosophy on maintaining a healthy weight that is really simple. You just need to improve your protein to energy ratio. In this framework, you can think about macronutrients like this: We need protein to build our muscles, maintain our cellular machinery and so on: it builds us up and maintains our biological machinery. Fat and carbs we’ll consider as just an energy source. 

So you want to get plenty of grams of protein per calorie of fat and carbs. Protein : energy. You want a higher protein to energy ratio.

For example, a ribeye steak has plenty of protein and plenty of fat but no carbs, so its P:E ratio is 0.7. 

Lean beef has no carbs and even less fat, so its P:E ratio is 1.0 .  

Then of course things with tons of calories relative to protein are going to have really low protein to energy ratios - potatoes and peanuts have a protein to energy ratio of 0.2 . 

Another way to think about this is if you want a healthy lean body with a high protein to energy ratio, you should eat foods that have a high protein to energy ratio. A healthy body would  have plenty of skeletal muscle and not so much fat on their body. The more overweight and unhealthy you become, the lower the protein to energy ratio of your body will become. 

So here’s the next question: Too little protein is definitely a thing, but what is “too much” protein?

The RDA for protein is set at 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. That would mean that if you’re a 70kg or 154 pound man, you only need 56 grams of protein. Two big macs and a handful of almonds should do the trick. However, what some don’t realize is that the RDA is the minimum protein required intake to prevent deficiencies, it is not the optimal protein intake.

Recent research has found that at least double the RDA of 0.8g/kg is likely where you want to be. This paper argues that at least 1.2g/kg to 1.6g/kg of protein is better for health.

There’s something called the “Acceptable Macronutrient Distribution Range” which is set based on epidemiological evidences that suggest consumption within these ranges plays a role in reducing risk of chronic diseases. (S) As you can see in the chart, while the average American is at least above the lower end of the AMDR, they are far from the upper end. So, we could stand to get more protein. 

However, what amount of protein is too much?

Well… that hasn’t even been established.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon states that we haven’t seen any negative effects from upper limits of protein - 3.3g per kilogram, which is 4 times the RDA. One study having women eating over four times the RDA as much as 3.4g/kg per day did experience any negative health effects. The U.S. and Canadian Dietary Reference Intake review concluded that there was not sufficient evidence by 2005 to establish a an upper limit for how much protein can be safely consumed.

“In 20 years of medical practice, I have never once looked at a patient and said ‘you’re eating too much protein.’” -Ted Naiman

Maybe you’ve heard of this idea that protein is bad for the kidneys and liver?

Dr. Stuart Phillips, a professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Skeletal Muscle Health said that this idea is totally bogus. “There’s no data. There’s no data that link the two. None. Not a scrap.”

He explains that the the idea that protein is bad for the kidneys came from the fact that people who already have kidney disease do better on lower protein diets. Though, it’s the disease that made the kidneys unable to properly handle protein, not the other way around. That would be like saying people with prostate cancer have trouble peeing so water causes prostate cancer.

At the end of the day, it should be totally expected that protein increases satiety. Of course your body is urging you to get a certain amount of minerals, nutrition and protein … so if you haven’t gotten the protein your body needs, why would it signal you to stop eating?

Protein is obviously a very vital nutrient. It’s much more than just the brick and mortar used to build muscle. Of course our bodies don’t require “protein,” but the amino acids that protein is composed of.

The review article Amino acids: metabolism, functions, and nutrition lays out that Amino Acids:

・Act as cell signaling molecules
・Regulate of gene expression.
・Act key precursors for syntheses of hormones and important biological substances like dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and thyroid hormones just to name a few

Further, Dietary supplementation with amino acids is expected to be beneficial in ameliorating (1)obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, the metabolic syndrome, and infertility;

(2) and Amino acids are beneficial not just for optimizing muscle growth but also preventing excess fat accumulation in the body.

Amino acids have all kinds of important functions, there’s a whole academic journal dedicated to them. 

One other thing about hunger - it’s well known that we have a hunger for salt. When anything from a rabbit or pigeon to a kangaroo, monkey or human doesn’t get enough sodium from salt, it will develop a marked craving for salty things. So what people might not realize is that when they’re craving salty, calorie rich snacks, they might be able to extinguish that hunger by simply getting some salt. 

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