Gut-health protein-rich 1-day menu
How to get 75g of protein in one day for strength and sustained energy - plus lots of goodies for your gut
Many of you are smashing your 30 plants a week and dolloping fermented foods for your probiotics on meals wherever you can for your gut health.
But many of you tell me protein is the bit you need more focus on.
I can understand why.
Protein takes 4-5 hours to digest so keeps us full and avoiding snack attacks. Great for satiety, sustained energy, and weight management (due to something called thermogenesis - we burn a lot of calories digesting it).
It is the raw material our body uses to make hormones and neurotransmitters - so may help with sleep, mood and metabolism also.
And the big one: it keeps us strong and fit. From our thirties onwards we lose muscle. Eating protein and doing strength training helps slow this.
Obviously everyone is different, but it is estimated that we lose on average between 0.4 to 0.8kg of muscle per decade which accelerates with age.
So imagine if you’re at the upper end of that, the body losing almost a kilo (or two pounds) each decade.
How much protein should we aim for each day?
The text books, say 0.75g per kilogram of our body weight for regular every day life - not taking into account exercise or ageing.
However, some science quarters (see below) suggest 1.2g per kilogram particulary after age 50, when muscle decline (aka sarcopenia) speeds up, particularly in women.
To work out how much you need to aim for each day, do this calculation:
Your weight in kilos multiplied by 1.2g.
Let’s take a woman whose weight is 70kg. If we times this by 1.2g we see she needs 84g of protein per day.
If you have plain porridge with oat milk for breakfast, and pasta and tomato sauce for lunch, and jacket potato and beans for dinner you’re getting nowhere near that (probably 16g-20g in the whole day!). Not even enough to cover your basic health. So it’s worth paying attention to.
And for those of you using apppetite-curbing drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic, and Mounjaro, eating protein to stop muscle decline is particuarly relevant (as you’ll want to maintain muscle, and lose fat, NOT both).
So I’ve designed a one-day menu - aiming for around 75g of protein throughout the day and packing in colour and fibre and some live foods to feed your microbiome for health (immune, cognition, skin, digestion, heart etc) too.
I’ll share with you what is going through my head with each choice and my tips for making each meal as easy, tasty and time-saving as possible, plus looking after your gut health too. There are links to recipes or explainers how to make or assemble (or buy) the options.
Btw these calculations are rough calculations and vary from database to database or app you might check on, or back of a pack you look on, so they are just a general idea.
Here goes…(and do let me know if you’d like more articles like this in the comments below).