How Much Protein Should I Eat? The Protein Leverage Hypothesis

If you’ve done any amount of reading in the health world, you’re aware of how many conflicting opinions there are on any given topic. The question of how much protein we should consume is no exception

Hello, fasters and feasters. Today’s letter is all about the feast. After all, we fast so that we can feast. But it’s important that the feast doesn’t undo all that hard work we did fasting. I hope today’s info will equip you to make your feasts work for you and not against you. Food is a gift that is meant to satisfy and fuel us, not leave us with cravings, guilt, or feeling sluggish. My goal is that you will learn how to fast and feast in a way that gives you health and freedom.

Soon after my main hobby became reading about health, I realized I needed to develop principles to allow me to discern between vastly different opinions coming from what seemed like equally reliable experts.

One principle that has served me well is that I tend to trust theories based on experiential data over untested theories. This is how I navigate the widely different views of how much protein we should consume.

I listened to a podcast recently where the interviewer kept saying that the average person gets plenty of protein. He was basing this statement on a theoretical determination of how much protein the average person needs.

However, a family practice physician in Seattle, Dr. Ted Naiman, has experientially found that his patients gained huge benefits from doubling their protein consumption.

I tend to side with the physician who has his boots on the ground and has seen in real time the effects of his theories. The problem with scientists sitting in a lab and theoretically determining how much protein everyone needs is that this fails to take into account that the human body is incredibly complex.

Meet Dr. Ted Naiman

Although Dr. Naiman received a mainstream medical education which included little training in nutrition, he educated himself after medical school on the importance that diet plays in disease. He had many patients who were overweight and was concerned with how this was negatively affecting their health.

At first, he recommended that all of his overweight patients go on the keto diet. Keto can be distinguished from a basic a low-carb diet in that it emphasizes eating a high amount of dietary fat, often 75% calories from fat, 20% from protein, and 5% from carbs. Not every person who claims to eat keto follows these macros exactly, but that seems to be the general consensus.

Dr. Naiman found that many of his patients lost 10-15 lbs within the first few months on keto but then completely stopped losing weight. This didn’t just happen to a few of his patients, it happened to nearly all of them. Many of them needed to lose 50 or even 100 lbs, so plateauing after losing only 15 lbs was a problem.

Dr. Naiman began doing extensive research on the proper human diet, and he kept running across evidence that showed that if you fed any creature, whether human or lab rat, a diet high in carbs and fat (donuts, cookies, ice cream) you could easily make them fat. He then reasoned that protein was the leverage. If lowering the protein percentage in the diet could make people gain fat, could raising the protein make them lose fat? The research seemed to indicate this was the case.

He began recommending that his patients continue to eat very low carb but replace much of the fat they were consuming with protein. His patients began to see amazing results.

To be clear, Dr. Naiman is not afraid of fat, as many people in the ‘90s were. He does not believe that saturated fat causes heart disease and will clog your arteries. He simply sees value in replacing some dietary fat with protein.

Ted Naiman’s Protein Leverage Hypothesis