10 Signs You're Not Eating Enough PROTEIN

Hello Health Champions. Today, we're going to  talk about the top 10 signs you're not getting enough protein. 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 get into circulation and get recycled, and you  have to replace that with new protein. 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.

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, nails, and skin.  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, thin and brittle hair, and dry and flaky  skin as well as various forms of skin rashes. 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. Amylase, for example, is a digestive enzyme made up of  protein that you release in the mouth to break down starch. The next step from breaking down  starch is that you make maltose, which is just two glucose molecules, and then you need maltase  to break that down into glucose.

Of course, that's also an enzyme made up of protein. Lactase  and sucrase are two sugars, lactose and sucrose, that need enzymes to break them down. We also  have enzymes called pepsin and peptidases, which are enzymes to break down protein.

Any kind  of peptide is any protein that's a few amino acids long. Of course, we also need to break down fat,  so there is also lipase, which is the enzyme that breaks that down. 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.

Anytime you watch a video like this, it's  super important that you focus on the big picture because some people just want the  list. 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 potential causes for every symptom. Even though this video is about protein,  I'm here to tell you that whatever symptoms we're talking about are 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.

The reason I'm doing this video is to show you more about the importance of protein  and the different things that protein does. When most people say that they're not getting enough  protein, they're talking about intake. They're talking about how much you are consuming.

But in  the end, what matters is how much you absorb and how much you utilize. 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.

The main factors that you want to keep in mind in  this big picture as it relates to absorption are: 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, absorb, and utilize all that food you're eating.

Here's an example of why we need to look at that  big picture. Let's say that you are low on protein for whatever reason, whether it's a lack of proper  intake or poor digestion and absorption. Now, we just saw in the previous example that you can't  make all the proper enzymes and therefore your digestion might suffer.

If your digestion  is suffering, now you can't digest foods, you can't digest the protein, so of course,  you get even lower in protein. Just eating more protein is not necessarily going to be enough.  Now, what if the quality of your biome is not so great?

There's an imbalance of the species,  you have an overgrowth of pathogens that create lipopolysaccharides and inflammation. As a result,  we have inflammation, and that inflammation, in turn, is going to interfere with your  digestion. Now we're just closing the loop one more way.

Let's say that your lifestyle  involves a lot of stress or that you handle stress poorly. That's going to increase inflammation,  decrease the quality of your biome or the balance in your gut, and further reduce the function  of your digestion. Anytime you're stressed, you're in fight or flight, and your body is not  so concerned about making digestive enzymes.

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've got to look at the  whole and we have to look for root causes.

Sign number five is frequent infections.  If you don't have adequate protein, you may not be able to make enough antibodies.  Antibodies are large complex proteins that you probably recognize better as IG, immunoglobulin  A, 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 cells, the  white blood cells of all cells in the body, are made up of protein. If you don't have  enough, then you're not going to be able to make as many of those as you need. All  of these things are made up of protein.

Number six could be hormone imbalances. Again,  we have more things made up of protein like the hormone insulin, human growth hormone, and  thyroid-stimulating hormone. Those are probably ones that you've heard about.

I talk about those a  lot on this channel. Then we have others like PTH, parathyroid hormone, and calcitonin. These are  hormones that regulate calcium.

We have some others you may have heard of like cortisol  and aldosterone. 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.

Aldosterone is another adrenal hormone that helps regulate  sodium and potassium. All of these are critically important functions that could  suffer if you don't have enough protein. I know the next question is, well, how much do we  need?

The general recommendation is 0. 8 grams per kilogram of body weight, or if you divide that  by 2. 2, you get something like 0.

36. That would be how much protein you need in grams per pound  of body weight. If you weigh 150 lbs or 68 kilos, that would mean that the absolute least you need  would be 55 grams of protein per day.

If you're a little bit larger, something like 200 lbs or  91 kilos, then that would mean you need 73 grams of protein. These are just generalizations, these  are the bare minimums if you don't have any high requirements for any particular reason. What  are the variables involved here?

Age is one of them. If you are very young, babies who  grow and put on new body tissue need a lot more protein than that per gram. Also, if you're  old, tissue might break down faster plus you're not using protein as efficiently.

You can't  absorb it. Most digestion suffers as we age, so whether you're young or old, you could need  a lot more than just the 0. 8 grams per kilo.

Let's talk about a few more variables and give you  some examples. Let's say that you weigh 200 lbs, and if you weigh more or less, then you just  divide or multiply accordingly. If you're sedentary, that is where these 0.

8 grams per kilo  come in, and like we said, that would 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. 

The recommendation is somewhere between 1. 2 and 2. 0.

If you take the mid-range there, you see that  you've actually doubled your protein requirement. Somewhere between 109 and 182 grams of protein  per day would be required. If you're an athlete, a competitive athlete, a bodybuilder, or if  you really push your body, you could need as much as 1.

6 to 2. 2, or about 145 to 200 grams  a day. If you have some sort of health issue including malabsorption, if your digestion isn't  working appropriately, 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. Let's do a couple more examples. Let's say that  you are a smaller person, about 150 lbs.

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 grams. There's also a lot of confusion about what protein  is, so let's take a couple of examples.

Sometimes you go to a restaurant and order a salad, and they  say you can add a protein to your salad, and that would be 6 ounces. That doesn't mean that you're  getting 6 ounces of protein, which would be about 150 grams. If you have chicken, for example, if  you add that to your salad, chicken has about 22% protein.

We're talking lean chicken breast because  if you take away the skin and the fat, what's left has the highest percentage of protein. To get 150  grams, with all the examples we had, there was a wide range, but somewhere in the middle there was  about 150 grams of protein per day. 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 examples.

If you eat meat like a fatty steak or ground beef,  that would be 20% fat. 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%.

You would need to eat 850 grams of meat or  right under 2 lbs. Beans are going to vary a bit; they'll be anywhere from five up to about  nine, which is black beans at 8. 9%.

You would need to eat 1,685 grams, about 3. 2 lbs,  of beans to get that protein. If you eat nuts, they're going to vary a bit, but let's put them  on average at about 15% protein.

That means you've got to eat 1,000 grams, 1 kilogram of nuts, to  get that. That's a little over 2 lbs. Seeds are usually a little higher because they're lower in  fat than nuts, so something like pumpkin seeds can have about 30%, and hemp seeds are even a  little bit higher.

That means you need to eat 500 grams of these pumpkin seeds to get 150 grams  of protein. One of my favorite foods is amazing in so many ways, but it doesn't have a whole  lot of protein. Avocado has about 2% protein, so if you try to get all your protein from  avocado, you would need to eat 7.

2 kilograms, which would be somewhere around 25 lbs or 55 to 60  avocados. Of course, you're not going to eat just one type like this. Most people are much better  off getting a variety.

Variety is the key. Each food has a different combination, a 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 where there's a lot of  confusion, which is the carnivore diet.

I think that there are 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. Let's give you a few examples here. If you eat one pound of steak, a fatty steak like  a ribeye or 20% ground beef, you're looking at about 87 grams of 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 2 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, then that would give you 3 grams  of protein because there's a lot of fat in that cod liver.

Then you round this off with  some fish, and today you're having mackerel, that's 150 grams or about 6 ounces, and it's  28 grams of protein. If we add all of this up, we get 2300 calories and 143 grams of protein,  which is actually even a little bit lower than the 150 that we used in the example as an  average for a large person with more than just a sedentary need. Even though all  these foods are called protein foods, the calories from protein actually only come  up to about 25%, 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. 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.

The second reason is 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. Again, without adequate protein, that  energy regulation might suffer. Sign number eight is that our cognition, our  mental capacity, might suffer.

We might get brain fog, lose some clarity and focus, and experience  mood swings because the brain operates on electrical signals but also on neurotransmitters.  They're chemical messengers that are released to change our state of clarity and mood and so  forth. 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. We could experience  osteoporosis. Most people, when they think about bones, 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. With osteoporosis, we lose bone density, we get  brittle bones, and therefore we're more prone to fractures.

We could also experience joint pain  and degenerative joint disease because cartilage is also made up of protein. Now, if you remember,  two of the hormones that we talked about under hormonal imbalances were PTH, parathyroid  hormone, and calcitonin. Those regulate the building and breaking down of bone, which are  both super important to get strong, flexible, and healthy bone.

That's one more factor. First,  we're losing bone because it's made up of protein, but then we're losing the hormones that might help  regulate the healthy bone growth and breakdown. Sign number ten is edema because there is  a protein in your blood.

The most abundant protein in your blood is called albumin, and  it is there to maintain certain thickness. When we have enough albumin, it acts as  a sponge to pull water to it. If we lose albumin because we don't have enough protein, now  we're losing this sponge function.

We're losing what's called osmotic pressure. We're losing the  pull of water into the blood vessel. 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. The main thing that compensates for that pressure to pull the  water into the blood vessel is this albumin, which is a protein. If we lose that, then the  water can leak out into the surrounding tissues, and that's what edema is.

It's a swelling, a  thickening, a puffiness, and because of gravity, all this leaking fluid tends to build up and  accumulate around the ankles and below the knees. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love  that one. If you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works,  make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so  you never miss a life-saving video.