Protein

It is absolutely necessary for our body to have protein come in through the food you eat. We use protein all of the time. I wanted to start out by showing you this reference:

Click Here for information on Protein in the diet

Go and visit this page. Much of the information is excellent.

There are some issues that you might run into when looking for information about protein, such as:

Complete vs. Incomplete protein sources (that contain the 9 essential amino acids): https://www.everydayhealth.com/diet-nutrition/incomplete-vs-complete-protein-whats-the-difference/

There are plenty of other resources that talk about protein, several provide very good information. However, some of these resources provide a wide range of what percentage of calories comes from protein. These websites/resources (especially ones from our Federal government) state that 10-35% of your diet should be from protein, which seems like a wide range. If you go and find the reference that this recommendation comes from and then look at the panel members who wrote the recommendation, you may begin to notice a pattern... who funds the panel members. There are multiple members of the panel who receive money from the "Milk" or "Meat" lobbies in or around Washington DC. Both milk and meat (from cows for example) provides lots of protein. So it would only be natural for these lobbies to push that recommendations from the U.S. Government include lots of protein.

In actuality, you only need about 15% of your total diet to be from protein. It really depends on how much you weigh and how much exercise you do. If you eat more protein than what you body can use, the excess will be turned into fat in your liver and stored as fat in the body. Below, the information is a basic guide on how much protein you need:

If you want to break this down further, you can look at it from a "grams" of protein perspective. For someone who doesn't really exercise, if at all, their protein requirement is about 0.9 grams of protein per day per kilogram of body weight.

If someone completes a great amount of weight training (breaking down protein tissue), then he/she probably needs about twice as much protein or 1.7 to 1.8 grams of protein per day per kilogram of body weight.