Warnings You're Not Eating Enough PROTEIN

Hello, L champions. Today we're going to talk about the top 10 signs you're not getting enough protein. And the first sign would be anything muscle related. That's the first thing people think of because muscles, of course, are made up of protein. So if you experience weakness, that could be a protein deficiency. If you have slow recovery, if you work out, then you're actually breaking down muscle fibers before they can regrow and get stronger. So those broken muscle fibers, they get into circulation and get recycled and you have to replace that with new protein. And then also muscle cramps can be related to protein because a low protein level means that you can't regulate your electrolytes as efficiently and of course, imbalanced electrolytes can cause muscle cramps. Number two is slow healing and that could be any type of injury that involves tissue made up of protein, which is most tissue. And also, of course, wounds. So the skin is made up of protein primarily. And if you get a wound and it won't heal, that could be a protein deficiency. Number three is hair, nail and skins. And these are made primarily of two proteins called keratin and collagen. And if you don't get enough protein, then you can't break that down into amino acids and build up these two proteins that make up these tissues. So you could get weak and brittle nails. As a result, you could get thin and brittle hair. And you could also get dry and flaky skin as well as various forms of skin rashes. And so far, I don't think there are any big surprises. Most people know those tissues are made up of protein, but then it gets interesting. Number four is digestive issues, which could also be due to protein deficiencies. So amylase, for example, that's a digestive enzyme made up of protein that you release in the mouth to break down starch. And then the next step from breaking down starch is that you make maltose, which is just two glucose molecules. And then you need a maltase to break that down into glucose. And of course, that's also an enzyme made up of protein. Lactase and sucrose, these are two sugars. Lactose and sucrose, they need enzymes to break them down. And we also have enzymes called pepsin and pepidasis. So these are enzymes to break down protein. Any kind of peptide, that's any protein, that's a few amino acids long. And then of course, we also need to break down fat. So there is also light paste, which is the enzyme that breaks that down. So all of these enzymes are made up of protein. And if you're severely protein deficient, then your digestion could suffer because you're just not making enough. But anytime you watch a video like this, it's super important that you focus on the big picture. Because some people, they just want the list. And they say, oh my god, I have that and I have that and I have that. And then they say, I have a protein deficiency. But things can be caused by many different things. There are many causes, many potential causes for every symptom. And even though this video is about protein, I'm here to tell you that whatever symptoms we're talking about is not very likely to be caused by a protein deficiency. That's just one more thing. But there are other causes that are probably more likely. So the reason I'm doing this video is to show you more about the importance of protein and the different things that protein does. And when most people say that they're not getting enough protein, they're talking about intake. They're talking about how much are you consuming. But in the end, what matters is how much do you absorb and how much do you utilize? Because if you're only absorbing or utilizing a small fraction of what you consume, then you can still be deficient. Even on a carnivore diet, you could be protein deficient. And the main factors that you want to keep in mind in this big picture as it relates to absorption is how well is your overall digestion working? What are your stress levels? Because anytime that you have a stress response, then you're going to shut down partially. You're going to reduce your digestion and therefore your absorption and utilization. And of course your microbiome, that's the whole set of bacteria in your digestive tract that help you process and absorb and utilize all that food you're eating. And here's an example of why we need to look at that big picture. So let's say that you are low on protein for whatever reason, whether it's a lack of proper intake or a poor digestion and absorption. Now we just saw in the previous example, now you can't make all the proper enzymes and therefore your digestion might suffer. But if your digestion is suffering, now you can't digest foods, you can't digest the protein. So now of course you get even lower in protein. So just eating more protein is not necessarily going to be enough. And now what if your quality of your biome is not so great? Now there's an imbalance of the species. You have an overgrowth of pathogens that create lipopolisaccharides and inflammation. And now as a result we have inflammation and that inflammation in turn is going to interfere with your digestion. So now we're just closing the loop one more way. And let's say now that your lifestyle involves a lot of stress or that you handle stress poorly. Now that's going to increase inflammation. It's going to decrease the quality of your biome of your balance in your gut. And it's going to further reduce the function of your digestion. Because anytime you stress, during fight flight, your body is not so concerned about making digestive enzymes. So this is why we cannot just treat symptoms. We can't just look at the end stage of a sequence and try to fix that. We got to look at the whole and we have to look for root causes. And sign number five is frequent infections. Because if you don't have adequate protein, now you may not be able to make enough antibodies. And what are those? They're large complex proteins that you probably recognize better as IgA, Immunoglobulin A, IgE, IgG, IgM. And these are super important for your immune system to identify antigens, allergens, and foreign intruders. Furthermore, a huge component of your immune cell, the white blood cells, of all cells in the body are made up of protein. And if you don't have enough, then you're not going to be able to make as much of those as you need. So all of these things are made up of protein. Number six could be hormone imbalances. Because again, we have more things made up of protein like the hormone insulin, human growth hormone, thyroid stimulating hormone. Those are probably ones that you've heard. I talk about those a lot on this channel. And then we have others like PTH, Parathyroid hormone, and Calcytonin. These are hormones that regulate calcium. And then we have some others you may have heard of like cortisol and aldosterone. And cortisol, of course, is a stress hormone that is very much involved with metabolic disease. If you have chronic stress, you're going to have high cortisol levels that create long-term chronic inflammation, but also drive up blood sugar and increase insulin as a result. And aldosterone is another adrenal hormone that helps regulate sodium and potassium. So all of these are critically important functions that could suffer if you don't have enough protein. So then I know the next question is, well, how much do we need? And the general recommendation is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. Or if you divide that by 2.2, get something like 0.36. And that would be how much protein you need in grams per pound of body weight. So if you weigh 150 pounds or 68 kilos, that would mean that the absolute least that you need would be 55 grams of protein per day. And if you're a little bit larger person, something like 200 pounds or 91 kilos, then that would mean you need 73 grams of protein. But these are just generalizations. These are the bare minimums if you don't have any high requirements for any particular reason. So what are the variables involved here? Well, age is one of them. So if you are very young, babies who grow, they put on new body tissue, they need a lot more protein than that program. Also, if you're old, then tissue might break down faster, plus you're not using protein as efficiently. You can't absorb it. Most digestion suffers as we age it. So whether you're young or or old, you could need a lot more than just the 0.8 grams per kilo. So let's talk about a few more variables and give you some examples. So let's say that you weigh 200 pounds and if you weigh more or less, then you just divide or multiply accordingly. But if you're sedentary, that is where these 0.8 grams per kilo come in. And like we said, that we mean you need about 73 grams of protein per day. But what if you're active? Now you're breaking down tissue faster. You have a higher turnover of tissue. So now the recommendation is somewhere between 1.2 and 2.0. So if you take the mid-range there, you see that you've actually doubled your protein requirement here. So somewhere between 109 and 182 grams of protein per day would be required then. And if you're an athlete, if you're a competitive athlete, if you're a bodybuilder, if you really push your body, now you could need as much as 1.6 to 2.2 or about 145 to 200 grams a day. Also, if you have some sort of health issue, including malabsorption, if your digestion isn't working appropriately, now you might need something at the level of an active person, like 1.2 to 2 grams and the numbers there would be the same. And let's do a couple more examples. Let's say that you are a smaller person, about 150. Then if you're sedentary, you would need about 54 grams. But let's say that you are a smaller person, maybe a female, and you get pregnant. Now you are building a lot of extra tissue in that baby. There's a raised requirement. So now you probably need 1.1 to 1.3 grams per kilogram of body weight, which puts you at about 75 to 89. But then there's also a lot of confusion about what protein is. So let's just take a couple of examples here. Sometimes you go to restaurant and you order a salad, and then they say, you can add a protein to your salad, and that would be add 6 ounces. That doesn't mean that you're getting 6 ounces of protein, which would be about 150 grams. So if you have chicken, for example, if you add that to your salad, chicken has about 22.5% protein. And now we're talking lean chicken breast, because if you take away the skin and the fat, now what's left has the highest percentage of protein. So to get 150 grams, let's just say that with all the examples that we had, they had a wide range, but somewhere in the middle there was about 150 grams of protein per day. Now you would need to eat 667 grams, about a pound and a half of chicken breast to get that 150 grams of protein, if chicken was all you ate, which of course it isn't. But we'll just use that, for example. Now if you eat meat like a fatty steak or ground beef, now that would be 20% fat. So that fat has no protein. It displaces some of the protein. So the remaining percentage of protein in the whole meal is about 17.5%. So now you would need to eat 850 grams of meat or right under two pounds. Beans are going to vary a bit. There'll be anywhere from five up to about nine, which is black beans at 8.9. And now you would need to eat 1,685, about 3.5 pounds of beans to get that protein. If you eat nuts, they're going to vary a bit, but let's put them on average, about 15% protein. That means you got to eat 1,000, 1 kilogram of nuts to get that. That's a little over two pounds. Seeds are usually a little higher because they're lower in fat than nuts. So something like pumpkin seed can have about 30%. Hemp seed is even a little bit higher, but that means you need to eat 500 grams of these pumpkin seeds to get 150 grams of protein. And one of my favorite foods is amazing in so many ways, but it doesn't have a whole lot of protein. So avocado has about 2% protein. So if you try to get all your protein from avocado, you would need to eat 7.5 kilograms. That would be somewhere around 25 pounds or 55 to 60 avocados. Now of course you're not going to eat just one type like this. Most people, you're much better off getting a variety. So the variety is the key. Each food has a different combination, different set of nutrients. So the more variety you get, the more likely you are to get a complete set of nutrients for your body. Let me do one more example that there's a lot of confusion about, which is the carnivore diet. I think that there's a lot of people who can benefit from a carnivore diet at least for a while. But some people think that a carnivore only eats protein. So let's give you a few examples here. So if you eat one pound of steak, a fatty steak, that's like a ribeye or 20% ground beef, you're looking at about 87 grams. It's a protein because this is not all protein. It has water and fat in it as well. If you eat four eggs, that gives you about 25 grams of protein. If you eat two tablespoons of butter, that's virtually nothing. If you eat 60 grams of cod liver, because you're a well-rounded carnivore. So you're trying to get a wide variety. And you know that cod liver has a lot of vitamin A and vitamin D. And that would give you three grams of protein because there's a lot of fat in that cod liver. And then you round this off with some fish. And today you're having macrol that's 150 grams, about six ounces. It's 28 grams of protein. And if we add all of this up, we get 2,300 calories and 143 grams of protein, which is actually even a little bit lower than the 150 that we use in the example as an average for a large person with more than just a sedentary need. So even though all these foods are called protein foods, the calories from protein actually only come up to about 25 percent. And the rest of it is going to be almost all fat. But typically these are still healthy fats because they're natural fats. Sign number seven could be fatigue as a result of a protein deficiency. And there's two reasons. One could be anemia because the protein that carries oxygen is called hemoglobin. So of course, if you don't have enough protein, then your hemoglobin production could suffer as well. So you lower your oxygen carrying capacity. And without oxygen, you can't make energy. But then the second reason we get back to these enzymes that are little catalysts that are made up of protein also. And a lot of our energy regulation is enzyme driven. And again, without adequate protein, then that energy regulation might suffer. Sign number eight is that our cognition, our mental capacity might suffer. So we might get brain fog. We could lose some clarity and focus. And we could experience mood swings because the brain operates on electrical signals, but also on neurotransmitters. And they're chemical messengers that basically are released to change our state of clarity and mood and so forth. So most of our mental activity that's not pure electricity is actually driven by these neurotransmitters that also have protein in them. Number nine is bone changes. And we could experience osteoporosis. Most people when they think about bones, they think calcium. But it turns out that bone is actually 30% protein. The matrix of the bone is protein. And then that protein gets mineralized. That bone matrix gets mineralized by calcium. And with osteoporosis, what that means is we lose bone density. We get brittle bones and therefore more prone to fractures. And we could also experience joint pain and degenerative joint disease because cartilage is also made up of protein. And now if you remember two of the hormones that we talked about under hormonal imbalances, they were PTH, parathyroid hormone and calcitonin. So those regulate the building and breaking down of bone, which both building and breaking down is super important to get strong and flexible and healthy bone. So that's one more factor. First, we are losing bone because it's made up of protein. But then we're losing the hormones also that might help regulate the healthy bone growth and breakdown. And sign number 10 is edema because there is a protein in your blood. Most abundant protein in your blood is called albumin. And it is there to maintain certain thickness. And when we have enough albumin, it acts as a sponge to pull water to it. But if we lose albumings, we don't have it. have enough protein, now we're losing this sponge function. We're losing what's called osmotic pressure. There's-- we're losing the pull of water into the blood vessel. And as you know, there's something called blood pressure. That means that the pressure of the blood is higher to keep driving that blood forward. It's higher than the surrounding tissue. And the main thing that compensates for that pressure to pull the water into the blood vessel is this albumin, which is a protein. So again, if we lose that, then the water can leak out into the surrounding tissues. And that's what edema is. It's a swelling. It's a thickening, a puffiness. And because of gravity, all this leaking fluid tends to build up, tends to accumulate around the ankles and below the knees. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. 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