High Quality Protein Is Essential For Maintaining A Healthy Weight
So what is high quality protein?
The Naturalized Human brings together the science and human experience of the mind-body-food connection and explores topics like biology, nutrition, growing food, wellness and living in harmony with our environment. I write weekly. Paid subscribers get access to exclusive content.
As we get older, it becomes increasingly clear that to live WELL as we age requires us to think a lot more carefully about what we eat and how we move. A diet high in ultra-processed and sugar-laden foods combined with lack of movement contribute to escalating disease states. People are dying from preventable diseases, rooted in inflammation, system malfunctions, immobility and toxic exposures.
But if we start from the beginning, and look at what creates health and wellness, the one thing we control every day is what we eat. Providing high quality food for your body is a top priority if you want to age well and maintain a healthy body weight.
Among the many things we need to thrive, high quality protein turns out to be a significant factor in maintaining body weight. Let’s take a look at just what that means when it comes to our food.
Why is protein pivotal for maintaining body weight?
The key macronutrients that humans consume are proteins, carbohydrates and fats.
According to a recent paper in the journal Obesity (2019), there is a growing body of research that suggests humans regulate protein consumption more strongly than carbohydrates or fats.
In a diet low on protein, we continue to eat foods to achieve our needed protein intake (called protein leveraging), despite the fact that this over-consumption of energy foods (carbohydrates and fats) can have health consequences like weight gain or insulin resistance (called the protein leverage hypothesis).
The Protein Leverage Hypothesis states “that dietary displacement of protein by fats and carbohydrates interacts with the strong human protein appetite to drive excess energy intake and obesity via PL” - and PL in this quote from the Obesity article stands for Protein Leveraging.
It works basically like this. You are an ancient human in the sense that your body evolved in an environment VERY different than the one we live in now. Our patterns of macronutrient intake evolved relative to the costs and benefits of obtaining food in that ancestral nutritional landscape. They have nothing to do with how easily we obtain food now, or how different that food is from an access and nutritional perspective.
The natural range of variation in human protein consumption is 10-25%, with 15-20% being the most common intake.
Prolonged exposure to diets below 10% protein leads to protein malnutrition. But on the other end of the scale, at greater than 25% protein consumption, the body has no real mechanism to store excess protein when we eat it. Once we hit our target protein level, which can vary depending on many factors like your age, activity, current health etc., the body has to break down the protein and eliminate the excess nitrogen. That is costly for our bodies.
Compare that to what happens when we eat excess carbohydrates and fats (excess energy) - that we can readily store as fat in our bodies and save it for the future when we might need that energy to survive.
So essentially, the Protein Leverage Hypothesis is saying that as our modern diets have become heavily laden with sugary sweets and excess fats, the amount of protein we eat is being diluted. We are wired to continue consuming foods until our protein needs get met. This overconsumption of poor quality food to meet our protein target may be a contributing factor to the obesity and diabetes crisis we are witnessing now.
There is a big difference in outcomes depending on whether our protein is being diluted by fiber (such as the protein from a nut or bean), or if it is being diluted by sugar and fat (such as fast food).
Animal sources of protein tend to be more bioavailable than plants where fiber plays a larger role in accessing the protein. Even though you often need to eat more plant protein compared to animal sources, that protein is “diluted” by fiber which has value in maintain a healthy gut microbiome.
But when your protein comes via ultra-processed food where most of the calories are coming from sugar and fat, the consequences of EATING MORE are likely to be weight gain and insulin resistance.
You might think that our ancestral tendency to prioritize protein would make us shy away from ultra-processed foods, since the protein is being diluted and excess energy creates it’s own healthy problems. However, part of the problem here is that the feedback loops you body relies on evolved in a very different nutritional landscape, where we could accurately assess the quality of the food we are eating.
Instead today, we are faced with foods that have been systematically designed to LIE to our bodies, and trigger our dopamine receptors to make the accurate assessment of food quality more than a little difficult. We get hooked on the sugar-fat BaZinga effect to our brains that these foods provide, but most are nutrient poor and protein deficient compared to quality, whole food sources of protein.
Overconsumption of foods in which the protein is diluted by sugar and fat contributes to weight gain and poor health consequences.
How does high quality protein help maintain healthy weight?
Since our bodies prioritize protein at a macronutrient level, the trick to staying at a healthy weight is to make sure we are getting enough high quality protein, without the trappings of high fat and sugar intake. Again natural whole foods with fiber offer a different health outcome than foods enhanced with sugar and fat.
According to Harvard Health (2023), the best sources of high quality protein include:
Lean meat
Fish
Beans, peas and lentils
Nuts and seeds
Dairy products like milk and yogurt
Eggs
Quinoa
Soy products
Include versions of these protein sources as WHOLE foods, rather than ultra processed foods that contain added sugars and fats to provide your body with the best nutrients for good health.
What are whole foods? (Try WWGD)
For anyone trying to improve their physical or mental health, the modern landscape of food choices is dizzying, confusing, and manipulative. As I have written about in my Eye of the Beholder series: A growing body of evidence suggests that ultra processed foods are
We all want to age well, and stay active as long as we can. Protein is a critical part of this equation. I know for myself, that as I have worked to eat more whole foods, and regularly include protein (from all kinds of sources) in my meals, that I no longer crave the sweet and junky foods I was addicted to just a year or two ago. I feel better and move better than ever before.
What’s your favorite protein-rich snack?
Sue- There's so much to like about this article. The inter-generational applicability. The deconstruction on the importance of lean protein. And both through the interweavings of your insightful words. There's a personal stake that you brought in that really elevates the piece. A great read.
Scrambled eggs mixed with refied black beans and salsa. Tons of protein and healthy fats.