The Thing About Protein in Midlife

Why are we so confused about protein?

 How much, when, where, the types of protein are questions that leave us baffled. This episode strips down the jargon of nutrition to its bare bones, offering a way out of diet myths.

As we age, our bodies don't just change; they converse with us, demanding different nutrients—proteins being paramount among them. During midlife, we focus on the critical role of high-quality proteins to prevent muscle loss, maintain bone density, and keep our hearts beating with vitality. I'll walk you through the maze of calculating your personal protein needs and draw the map that distinguishes between animal and plant proteins, ensuring you're equipped with the knowledge to make choices that resonate with your health goals.

It's not just about what's on your plate; it's about diversity and timing. I reveal how to transform meals into a symphony of nutrients and include a blog post with guides for calculating portions, the amount of protein in certain foods, and a sample meal plan to figure out how to fit it all into your day.   

Tune in and transform the way you think about nutrition, one protein-rich bite at a time.

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I wrote all the important stuff down so you don't have to. Click HERE for the blog post that includes a portion cheat sheet and protein guide.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:40

Hi everybody and welcome back. I've been thinking a lot lately about the general confusion around food, because would you agree with me that there is a lot of it what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, the time of day to eat it can make your head spin, and I've always said that eating real, healthy food is truly not difficult. It's what we do with the information that suddenly makes it so head-spinning. So for the next few weeks, I am getting back to the basics and hopefully we can all get back on track to make healthy eating simple and accessible for everyone. Being educated about food should be a requirement in school, honestly. So I'm going to do my best to show you how to interpret nutrition information so it is simple for you. We're going back to Nutrition 101. And, as you might know, my focus is on women in midlife and the menopause transition. But seriously, simple healthy eating applies to everyone, right? Just because you're in midlife, you have to eat with other people too, people who live in your household. So this episode will make reference more or less to women, but anyone can benefit from the information. Now there is so much misconception around what to eat, starting, more importantly, with our basic food groups. The subject of food has gotten so skewed these days and especially if you are, like me, a woman in midlife, it is peaking with confusion right now. We are at our most vulnerable right now, at this age, and the food stories we have grown up with and the food stories we can get fed now can have a major impact on us and the confusion we feel around how to eat and just to make peace with food. So let's set the record straight on what is the best way to eat to feel your best once and for all. I want to give a little bit of basic information about Nutrition 101 first, so you can feel good that how and what you eat is based on real, credible information, not some influencer on the internet. And, just as a side note, the wellness industry right now is peaking with misinformation. There's a lot of good information out there, don't get me wrong, but there is truthfully so much junk science that it is just really discouraging and, I know, just leads to more and more confusion. There's always been fad diets and gurus. I know that, but I have honestly never seen anything like it like I do now. So, as always, I am going to give you real talk based in science, not in fluff. I want you to be educated so you can feel good about what you're eating For the next few weeks.

Speaker 1: 3:29

I'm going to be talking about macronutrients. Those are protein, carbs and fat, which has somehow turned into another type of a diet. If you have heard about counting your macros, you know exactly what I'm talking about. This is just another way to package up a diet. I like simple, and eating should not suck the soul out of you. So, to be clear, we don't need to count macronutrients in order to lose weight, unless you want to and you want to take on the time to do that, that's fine. You do you. It would be very time consuming, though, and tedious, and while I love information and I am a big proponent of food journaling, tracking is just not for everyone. Let me tell you what I'm talking about when I use the word macros, or macronutrients.

Speaker 1: 4:20

In nutrition, there are five things that we need to take into account to make sure that we just stay alive. Those are protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, and water. These are our nutrients. Vitamins and minerals are in one category. If you're just saying to yourself right now, that sounds like six categories. Vitamins and minerals fall into one category. To yourself, right now, that sounds like six categories. Vitamins and minerals fall into one category. Protein, fats and carbs are called macronutrients because we need them in larger amounts, and vitamins and minerals and water are micronutrients because we need them in lesser amounts. And, to be clear, we need all of these nutrients to stay healthy and live. So when I see diets that eliminate an entire category of nutrients, like carbohydrates, for example, I cringe. We cannot survive without carbohydrates and we cannot go crazy on eating only protein or only fat. I've also wondered if most people even know what a carb, fat or protein even is. So I wanted to set the record straight today, and we're going to start today with protein.

Speaker 1: 5:33

So protein is one of the three macronutrients, along with carbohydrates and fats, that are essential for our bodies to function properly. Protein is made up of amino acids, often referred to as the building blocks of protein, which are used to build and repair your muscles, bones, skin and hair nails, our immune system. Protein even builds hormones. Protein helps us digest food. In short, protein does a lot. That is why it is an essential macronutrient. We cannot live without it. Now there are 20 of those amino acids, the building blocks I just mentioned that make up protein, and nine of them are called essential amino acids because we get them from the food we eat. The other 11 come from internally. We can make them and manufacture them inside of our bodies. But those nine amino acids we have to take in from food, so the nine come from outside sources and we want them to come from, of course, the very best, high quality foods. Right, we don't want to survive on junk food. We want the very best for our bodies. So I'm going to talk about those amino acids in just a minute.

Speaker 1: 6:54

Protein also takes longer to break down when we eat and digest our food, so it helps to keep you fuller longer in a good way. You might've heard me talking about making sure you have protein and fiber at every meal. That is because both fiber and protein are similar in their ability to keep you satiated and satisfied and full in a good way. So if you wanna feel satisfied at the end of a meal for longer, protein is a must. Fiber is also a must. I'll be talking about that when we talk about the carbohydrates podcast, and that'll be in a couple of weeks. So we know that protein is important for our health and our satiety with eating, and I want to talk now about proteins, specifically in midlife, as we get older.

Speaker 1: 7:48

The conundrum with getting older is that our metabolism, which is the energy burning machine in our body, starts to slow down, and the reality of this is that we need to take in less calories than to live on, but we are, at the same time, starting to have more protein needs because of muscle loss and for other requirements which I'll get into. Our protein requirements actually start to go up as we get older, which means we need to get really mindful of what we are eating and the calories we are consuming. This is the time to get real about upping your protein calories and decreasing your calories from processed carbs such as sugar and alcohol, and here's why protein plays an even greater role in maintaining our health and well-being into midlife and beyond. When we enter menopause and if you are not sure of what the definition of menopause is, that is not having your period for at least one year our bodies undergo a profound change, the most talked about being our loss of estrogen, the hormone estrogen is responsible for many functions in our bodies that go well beyond losing our periods and just having hot flashes. Muscle mass, our bone health and our heart health are just the start of the role estrogen plays in our bodies.

Speaker 1: 9:15

Loss of muscle, loss of bone and an uptick in heart-related issues like cholesterol might begin to happen. You might start seeing these kind of health issues occurring and with this loss, we need to call in the reinforcements, and one of those being high quality protein. There's a direct connection between our muscles, our bones, our heart and the protein and type of protein we consume. Remember those essential amino acids I mentioned before. They must come from your food. More and higher quality protein can help with all of this, particularly muscle loss, also known as sarcopenia. It can also help with our strength and our bone loss, which is also referred to osteoporosis. Plant-based proteins, which I will talk about next, help your heart by lowering blood pressure and LDL cholesterol levels, while raising HDL cholesterol, which is the good cholesterol. When you are losing more muscle and bone, you need to replace your muscle and bone. When you are struggling with blood pressure numbers and lab results, you might want to intervene with food first, rather than medications.

Speaker 1: 10:31

Muscle mass not only affects our strength, it also influences our metabolism. The more muscle, the faster your metabolism. The stronger your bones, the less chance you have of falling. The stronger your bones, the less chance you have of falling. We want to keep running and hiking and just moving as we get older. Right Muscle is made up of protein. Bone is also made up primarily of protein. Your heart is made up of cardiac muscle. That is protein.

Speaker 1: 10:59

So we definitely need our best high-quality protein, need our best high-quality protein. How much protein do we need, then? Because this is a big controversy. I think, out in social media and the internet, that we are deficient in protein. We're not deficient in protein, and I'll talk about why. It's clear, first, that protein is essential and we need more of it as we get older because things are changing in our bodies, especially from that loss in estrogen we are experiencing. We know we need to keep our bones and muscles strong so we can continue moving. We need our muscles in good standing so our metabolism can get a boost and then we can have a few extra calories in our day. We also know that estrogen is protective for heart health and, again, we need to do what we can to keep it strong. So how much protein do we actually need on a daily basis, especially if we know we need more of this important macronutrient. Our protein requirements largely depend on how much we weigh, our activity level and our calorie needs for the day. So it is worth it to do the math on this one. The very simple way is to first know how much you weigh and then how active you are, because protein needs are weight-based and activity-based. And then we need to do some simple math.

Speaker 1: 12:24

I will use myself as an example. I weigh 130 pounds and would consider myself moderately active, meaning I'm not an athlete, I'm not a marathon runner. I do exercise daily. I exercise as much as I can and I do do some strength training. A few times a week, I do stretching, but I am not at the peak of protein needs. I'm also in my garden, I'm walking my puppy, I'm hiking on weekends and just generally moving. So for a woman in midlife, somewhere in the middle with activity, a good rule of thumb is 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight. Again, 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight. If you are less active, you can calculate 0.6. If you are very active, you can calculate 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight and if you are an athlete, you can go up to 1.2 grams per pound of body weight, so it really is very individual.

Speaker 1: 13:29

Now don't worry about writing this all down. I'm going to link a blog in the show notes that you can refer to if you want all of this information. So it'll all be there for you in writing. You don't have to worry about taking notes. I know a lot of you are multitasking right now and walking or cooking or something while you're listening. So for me, 130 times 0.8 would equal 104 grams of protein. So let's just round that down to 100, because I like even numbers. One gram of protein is four calories, so I would need about 400 calories out of my day from good quality protein and this makes it about 25% of my daily calories, assuming I'm eating about 1,600 calories, which is about right for someone, my age and my activity level, and we'll talk about calories in another episode.

Speaker 1: 14:21

I want to reiterate that this protein calculation is for women in midlife and protein needs vary from person to person and by age. So if you're pregnant, if you are a younger athlete, if you are in college or have certain health issues and the like, you need to take those into consideration. This is when it would be a great idea to talk to an attritionist or a dietitian about your specific protein needs. Otherwise, if you are a woman in midlife, you can generally use my guide. I want to show you how to take that 100 grams or so of protein and distribute it throughout your day. The first thing you want to do is get some basic education on the types of protein and the amount of protein in certain foods. You might have heard me say a dozen times the phrase high quality protein, so let's talk about that too and what that means.

Speaker 1: 15:16

Protein comes from two different sources animals and plants. Animal protein is very high quality, meaning that all of those essential amino acids those nine amino acids I talked about are readily available in meat products, making it a complete protein. So when you have all nine of those amino acids, you have a complete protein. Animal protein is also rich in B vitamins, particularly vitamin B12, which is a vitamin you must get from your food. Animal protein is also typically high in minerals such as zinc, and some seafood has additional benefits like omega-3 fats, which are another nutrient we must get from our food. Seafood can also have high amounts of calcium and vitamin D, which are great because they're not very accessible from other sources of food. The downside to animal protein is the other type of fat, which is saturated fat, which is in all animal products. Now, saturated fat is well known to contribute to heart disease, and there are certainly leaner cuts of meats that have less fat, and those would be great choices to lean on. Now we know that animal protein is complete protein and that it comes with additional nutrition, like vitamin B12, zinc and omega-3 fats in seafood. We also know that we want to gravitate towards leaner cuts of meat and seafood.

Speaker 1: 16:45

Here are some great examples of animal-based proteins. You can say yes to salmon, sardines, shrimp and other shellfish, boneless, skinless chicken breast, pork tenderloin, eggs and egg whites or low-fat plain yogurt. Animal protein is high in protein too, so, for example, three ounces of pork tenderloin has almost 25 grams of protein. Three ounces is less than the palm of my hand. It's a quarter of what I would need in a day, so it's a really easy way to get a good amount of protein.

Speaker 1: 17:23

But before we get too excited about animal protein, let's put the spotlight on plant-based proteins. You have likely heard that eating plant-based is the way to go for your health. You may have even wondered what it would be like to go vegan, which is eating no animal products. Can we live on plant-based proteins and still get enough protein? I first wanna say that plant-based proteins are really good for you. They are typically full of healthy fats. They don't have saturated fat. They're also full of fiber, a lot of the times that fill-you-up nutrient I was talking about earlier, so here's a couple examples of what I am talking about Beans of all kinds, so, for example, black beans, chickpeas, lentils, edamame these are perfect examples of protein and fiber.

Speaker 1: 18:17

Nuts and seeds, such as almonds, walnuts, hemp seeds or flax seeds, have protein and healthy fats, and these healthy fats are beneficial to your heart. Whole grains like oatmeal or quinoa also contain protein and fiber, as well as important vitamins and minerals. Plant-based proteins, though, do not have all of those nine amino acids I was talking about, so you need to eat them in pairs. Beans have a few of the essential amino acids, and brown rice, for example, has the rest. So beans with grains Paired together they form the complete proteins, and we want complete proteins for our muscles, bones and heart. But you don't have to be vigilant about these pairings every time you eat beans or a whole grain. You might eat beans in a salad at lunch, for example, and then eat brown rice at dinner. That's totally okay, and I want to point out that there are some plant-based proteins that are actually complete proteins. Those would include soy products like tofu, tempeh and edamame, which are also full of phytoestrogens, which are plant-based estrogens. Quinoa, hemp seeds and buckwheat all have complete proteins in them, just not in huge amounts compared to animal products. The problem is the amount of protein in all of these foods. While plant-based proteins are so good for you, a serving of chickpeas and brown rice, which would be a half a cup of each, has about 10 grams of protein. Whole grains and beans tend to have more calories by weight than animal protein, so I believe the solution is to have a combination of both animal and plant sources in your day.

Speaker 1: 20:13

I want to give special mention to other sources of protein that I get asked about all the time too, as well as protein sources that I would recommend not leaning on as high quality sources. What I'm talking about is protein powders and protein bars. Are they good for you? Not so great. What is the deal with them? I'm going to get down to it right now.

Speaker 1: 20:32

First, protein powders. Protein powders are just that, the powdered version of protein from eggs, dairy or plants like soy or peas. Right now, you should know that if your protein powder or your protein bar comes from a plant source, you might be guessing right. It's not going to be a complete protein unless it's made out of soy. Protein powders and bars can be convenient I mean, they can be a good, quick way to get in some protein. But I want you to consider a few things. A couple very important things to consider with protein powders and bars is that they're usually loaded with alternative sweeteners like stevia. Artificial sweeteners, other sugars and a lot of chemicals have been found in some of these protein powders, such as lead and arsenic. So just beware when you are leaning on protein powders and bars for your protein sources. They are not the best quality for your protein.

Speaker 1: 21:40

If we don't need to count and track our protein, or if we don't want to, then how do we know we are getting enough protein in the day? Then how do we know we are getting enough protein in the day? In my blog post that I am going to be linking again in the show notes, I am listing a cheat sheet that has the amounts of protein per serving or portion and calories in a variety of different animal and plant sources. So definitely take a look at that sheet. It's really a good source.

Speaker 1: 22:13

One very good way to figure out portion sizes is to use your hands. This is very simple Use your hands as a measuring tool. Consider that a standard serving size of chicken, which is about three ounces, for example, is about 30 grams of protein, and that 30 grams of protein is about the size and thickness of the palm of your hand. So if, for example, I ate three smallish type chicken breasts and a half a cup of chickpeas, with a half a cup of brown rice in a day, I would meet my protein needs for the day. I'm not saying I would actually eat three chicken breasts in a day. I would meet my protein needs for the day. I'm not saying I would actually eat three chicken breasts in a day, but you get the point. To know how much protein you are consuming, you just need to educate yourself, okay, and you just need to have the visual. So on the blog as well, I am including a portion size cheat sheet for you, so you have an idea of what a serving of any of the proteins really actually looks like Okay.

Speaker 1: 23:17

So let's talk about some other strategies for meeting your protein needs. Number one be sure just to be mindful about including protein-rich foods at every meal, and so you want to aim to include a source of protein, such as lean meats, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy products, beans, legumes, nuts or seeds in every single meal and snack that you have. And talking about snacks, let's definitely make sure that there is protein in there, not just something a quick grab and go that can be Greek yogurt, some cheese, some nuts. Hummus with vegetables is one of my favorites. So if you need a snack in between your meals some people don't snack, some people definitely do make sure that there is some source of protein there. Number two let's try to mix it up. Don't be afraid to try new protein sources and mix up your meals to keep things interesting right. Interesting means we are going to eat the food.

Speaker 1: 24:25

Incorporate a variety of proteins from both animal and plant-based. If you're not used to eating tofu, if you've never had it, look up a few recipes and try it. I have recipes on my website. I will link them in those show notes and on the blog, and you might actually end up loving it. So just be open to trying different sources of protein.

Speaker 1: 24:48

The third way to just make sure that you get your protein in is to make sure you plan ahead. Plan your meals and snacks to include protein-rich food so you're not scrambling to find something at the last minute. Preparing meals in advance can also help ensure you have protein-rich options on hand and, as you know, I am a big believer in meal planning for healthy eating, because it's far too easy to order in or grab and go something convenient that is not so great for you. So meal planning to make sure you have protein is definitely essential. And my final strategy to make sure you meet your protein needs is, when cooking, incorporating protein-rich ingredients like beans, lentils, tofu or tempeh whole grains into your recipes to boost the content of protein in your meals. On the blog, I'm going to show you a sample menu with some recipe ideas for getting enough protein, even if you have dessert. So again, check out my link in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 25:55

Okay, so let's wrap it up. Here's the key points that I talked about today. Number one the importance of protein in midlife. Protein is crucial for maintaining muscle mass, bone health and overall well-being, especially as we age into midlife and beyond. Number two protein needs increase in midlife, muscle mass declines, changes in our metabolism, our health conditions. So I want you to aim for about 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day. Again, this is a very personal thing. Figure out what your needs are and go from there. Number three let's talk about the benefits of protein in midlife. Getting enough protein supports muscle strength, bone health, heart health, immune function, our energy levels and a million other benefits. So we absolutely need this important, essential nutrient all day long in our diets.

Speaker 1: 26:54

The best sources of protein include protein-rich foods from animal and plant sources, and that's lean meats, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy products, legumes, nuts and seeds, to ensure you are getting a wide range of nutrients. Remember that plant-based proteins offer a huge range of benefits that go beyond just protein. Right, there's fiber. There's other nutrients included in plant-based proteins that you want to definitely make sure that you're getting. Same goes with animal sources. There's B12. We can't get B12 from a vegan diet. We need to get that from animal-based proteins, healthy omega-3 fats, things like that.

Speaker 1: 27:42

So that's why it's important, I think, to have a wide range of variety when you're choosing your proteins. And finally, meal planning. We want to make sure we definitely plan our meals out for the day and for the week, so we ensure that we are getting enough protein to meet our needs through the day. Okay, so that wraps it up for me and protein, and I hope that you got a lot out of this episode. Be sure to go to the link in my show notes to get the blog so you can see all the other resources that I have on there, which includes the sources of protein, portion sizes and some additional recipes. Thanks so much for listening today and I'll see you next week.