HOW MUCH PROTEIN?

Today's newsletter relates to a previous edition about semaglutide and weight loss. Click here and scroll down for previous newsletters.

1. Counselling Conundrum: a real question from a patient

2. Concise Conclusion: a straight-forward patient-friendly answer

3. Quick Wrap-up

Clearly, there are nuances that may not be captured in this format. The goal here is to provide you with helpful counselling tips which often draw from multiple sources or those which are not commonly accessed by busy healthcare providers serving the community.

Counselling Conundrum: "If I want to gain muscle, how much protein should I be eating? I have heard that the recommended daily intake is 0.8 g of protein per kilogram of body weight. Is that right?"

Concise Conclusion: Unfortunately, recommended daily intakes are not designed to get you to your best health; they're more of a bare minimum. I would recommend you take 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight (or 1 gram per pound of body weight). This should allow you to build as much muscle as you can, along with weight-bearing exercises.

Quick Wrap-up: This is a common misconception; RDAs are most definitely not recommended intakes for optimal health. Rather, they were primarily designed to prevent malnutrition. The optimal range is typically cited as 1.6-2.4 kg/day (and higher for the elderly as their response to protein is inferior to their younger counterparts), which we tend to simplify to 2 g/kg or 1 g/lb of body weight.

Dive Deeper

1) Protein ingestion to stimulate myofibrillar protein synthesis requires greater relative protein intakes in healthy older versus younger men - PubMed (nih.gov)

We hope you have found this useful. We would appreciate your reply to this email with any feedback or topic suggestions you can; it will be the key to making this newsletter the best it can be.