Category: protein

Food Order

An interesting question is whether there is any advantage in eating the macronutrients — fat, carbs, protein — in any sequence?

There is a lot of evidence that having fat in one’s meal aids the digestion of various vitamins and minerals. Without the presence of fat, these nutrients are digested, but not as well as they would have been had there been some fat available.

Fat also has no impact at all on insulin, and if you eat a meal that includes some fat, the carbs, which will spike insulin, will spike it much less severely because of the presence of fat. You do want to lower insulin spikes as much as possible.

There is also a good deal of evidence that protein is very satiating, and also slows down digestion because the protein compounds require a lot of work by digestive enzymes to break them down, which is a good thing.

So on balance, eating fat/protein at the start of a meal would appear to be the best strategy, and nothing fills that bill better than a handful of mixed nuts — high in both fat and protein. Perhaps you should start all your major meals with a source of fat/protein like nuts to improve your digestion.

Strength and Old Age

Protein

Most people eat too much protein. A fairly large percentage of the population eats twice as much as necessary.

The food industry is constantly pushing extra protein in their processed foods, but this is quite unnecessary for the majority of people. And excessive protein in one’s diet can have very serious health consequences, including kidney stones.

Don’t believe the hype about protein from the food industry. More nonsense.

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Weight Loss Tricks

Having a very low-fat diet helps because it generally translates into a lower-calorie diet.

Bumping up the amount of protein in your diet helps because the body burns much more calories in digesting protein than it does digesting carbohydrates or fats.

Eating a whole-foods, plant-based diet helps because the body requires a certain level of nutrition, and so if your diet is highly nutritious, the body will be satisfied with fewer calories.

All these are subtle strategies to facilitate losing weight.

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Over 60?

Most nutritionists recommend that people over 60 increase the amount of protein in their diet, as the older have less ability to metabolize protein, so the same amount of protein means less is actually absorbed by the digestion of the body. As a consequence, to get adequate amounts those who are over 60 have to increase the amount of protein in their diet to actually utilize the same amount that their bodies metabolized when they were younger.

The only question is how much should be the increase? On the high end is the recommendation that those over 60 should have 1 gram of protein for each pound of weight. So someone over 60 at 150 pounds would need 150 grams of protein in their diet. This seems a bit excessive to me, but there is no way of knowing what the right amount for the increase should be.

But the risk, if you are not getting enough protein when older than 60, is that poor absorption would reduce this amount still further, and therefore possibly lead to serious muscle loss — muscle loss being a cardinal issue for people over 60.

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