How Much Protein Do You Need? Understanding Protein and Why It Matters

If you are in possession of a body made from skin, muscle, bone and all the other wonderful bits that make you you, I guarantee there is something in this blog series that will change the way you eat, or at least the way you think about eating.

Welcome to The Protein Chronicles.

A blog series for everybody who wants to understand protein.

Every. Body.

Right now, various systems within your body are constantly breaking down and rebuilding. As an owner-operator, putting a little effort into building maintenance just makes sense.

There will be three posts in this series, so make sure you check back to understand what protein can do for you, regardless of your activity level, body composition, performance goals, gender or age.

Protein Builds Stuff

Your body contains thousands of different proteins. They help build and maintain your muscles, skin, nails, hair, cell structures, organs, hormones and enzymes. In fact, proteins are involved in just about every process that keeps you functioning.

Some proteins are relatively small. Others, like myosin, a protein in our muscles that helps convert chemical energy into mechanical energy to generate force and movement, are made up of thousands of building blocks.

Your body is constantly breaking down and rebuilding proteins. This process is known as protein turnover, and it means we need a regular supply of the raw materials required to keep things running.

Essentially, we are always under construction, and we need regular deliveries of quality building materials.

Proteins are involved in virtually every metabolic process in the body. Suffice to say, they are rather important.

They also have one unique distinction among the three macronutrients: protein contains nitrogen, whereas carbohydrates and fats do not.

What Are Proteins Built With?

The building blocks of proteins are amino acids, each of which contains nitrogen.

Think of proteins as words and amino acids as the letters of the alphabet. With just 26 letters, we can create an extraordinary number of words by arranging them in different ways.

Your body does something similar.

There are 20 standard amino acids used to build proteins in the human body. Nine of these are essential amino acids.

Your DNA provides the instructions for arranging amino acids into the thousands of proteins your body needs to build and maintain you.

The nine essential amino acids are called essential because your body cannot make them in sufficient quantities, so you must obtain them through your diet. Getting enough of all nine is important for maintaining health and supporting the body’s ongoing repair and rebuilding processes.

I want to flag one of these essential amino acids because it is particularly important for those of us who want to protect our muscle mass.

And that should be every body.

Leucine

I’ll come back to leucine throughout this blog series.

Leucine is one of three essential amino acids known as the branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs). The other two are isoleucine and valine. They have a distinctive branched chemical structure, hence the name.

All three BCAAs are essential amino acids, but not all essential amino acids are BCAAs.

Here’s the important bit: if you focus on getting enough of all nine essential amino acids, you don’t need to single out BCAAs as a separate priority.

Sports marketing has helped muddy the waters here, and there is no shortage of supplements selling BCAAs alongside protein powders that already contain all nine essential amino acids.

For most people, a varied diet providing enough complete protein can supply what the body needs without the extra expense of a separate BCAA supplement.

As for the remaining 11 amino acids, your body can generally make these itself, which is why they are classified as non-essential.

Our job is relatively simple: choose foods that provide enough amino acids to give the body the materials it needs to keep building and rebuilding.

A Protein Bonus: Body Composition and Appetite

If you’re focused on body fat loss, protein has a couple of useful characteristics worth understanding.

First, protein has the highest thermic effect of the three macronutrients. This is the energy your body uses to digest, absorb and process the food you eat.

For protein, that can account for roughly 20–30% of its energy content. Compare this with carbohydrates, at around 5–10%, and fats, at approximately 0–3%.

In simple terms, if you eat 100 calories of protein, your body might use around 20–30 calories processing it. The actual figures vary, but protein has a higher processing cost than either carbohydrates or fats.

Over time, this can make a useful contribution to your overall energy balance.

Protein can also help you feel fuller for longer by influencing the hormones and signals involved in appetite and satiety. That can make it easier to manage hunger when you’re trying to change your body composition.

In one well-known 12-week study, participants who increased protein to 30% of their total energy intake consumed fewer calories and lost more weight than those on a lower-protein diet. The findings illustrate the potential value of protein, although individual results will vary.

Protein isn’t a magic bullet for fat loss. But it is an important part of the picture, particularly when your aim is to reduce body fat while maintaining valuable muscle tissue.

Why Protein Part Two Focuses on Muscle

The next instalment of The Protein Chronicles will focus on muscle tissue.

And that’s not simply because I work with athletes.

The quantity and quality of our muscle tissue have a significant influence on our strength, physical function, metabolic health and body composition. As we age, maintaining muscle becomes increasingly important.

Muscle is about much more than how we look or how much weight we can lift. It plays a fundamental role in how well we live, move and function.

The healthcare world is paying increasing attention to muscle-centric health, and rightly so.

You don’t have to be an athlete to benefit from understanding it.

Don’t Want to Wait for Part Two?

If you’d like to start putting some of this into practice now, here are a few things to consider.

1. Give your first meal of the day some protein.

Aim for around 30g of protein at breakfast or your first meal. This can be a useful starting point, particularly if you tend to leave most of your protein intake until the evening.

2. Build protein into your main meals.

Rather than relying on small amounts scattered throughout the day, make protein a deliberate part of each main meal. Distributing your intake across meals can help you meet your daily needs and support muscle protein synthesis.

3. Consider your total daily intake.

A useful starting range for many active adults is around 1.2–1.8g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. The right amount depends on factors such as your activity level, training demands, age, health and individual circumstances. Your needs may sit outside this range, so treat it as a starting point rather than a universal prescription.

4. If you eat a plant-based diet, pay attention to protein quality and quantity.

You can absolutely meet your protein needs with a well-planned vegetarian or vegan diet. However, protein content, digestibility and amino acid profiles vary between plant foods. Soy foods and, where useful, soy or pea protein isolates can help you meet your needs without having to eat enormous quantities of food.

The key is to look at the whole picture: the right amount of protein, a good variety of sources and a daily eating pattern that works for you.

You don’t need to get everything perfect. You just need to understand what your body needs and give it the opportunity to do what it does best.

And we’ll explore more of that in Part Two.

If nutrition is an area of your health that you find confusing, and you’d like to replace that confusion with confidence, I’d love to help.

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Ready to make your nutrition work harder for you?

Understanding what your body needs is a great place to start. Knowing how to put it into practice, in a way that fits your life, is where the real value lies.

If you’d like a little help making sense of your nutrition and working out what matters most for your health, body composition or performance, let’s talk.