The Three Nutrients You Need More Of on a High-Protein Diet

Being a lean, mean, muscle machine is cool until it wrecks your sleep or ruins your skin. Here's how to make sure that doesn't happen.

Theres’s a lot of buzz going around about whether protein will wreck your arteries or destroy the planet, but there’s consensus in the fitness community that if you want to be a lean, mean, muscle machine, you need a high-protein diet.

One of the arguments in favor of protein for longevity is that the people in the highest 50% of lean mass live longer than the people in the lower half.

Further, we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the obesity crisis is a major driver of the most common health problems, and protein plays an important role in weight loss. Protein is the most satiating macronutrient, up to around 15% of calories, which would be 1.3 grams per kilogram bodyweight for a 70-kilogram (154-pound) male maintaining stable weight on a 2418-Calorie diet.

More importantly, when you lose “weight” you lose not only fat, but lean mass. And lean mass does not just mean muscle. It means internal organs and bones, too. Protein helps preserve lean mass during weight loss. In meta-analysis, the amount of protein needed to preserve lean mass during weight loss is consistently higher than the RDA of 0.8 grams per kilogram, with 1.3 grams per kilogram being favored. This has been shown to specifically preserve bone mass as well.

One stunning finding from a short-term study showed that if you double this to 2.4 grams per kilogram bodyweight, you can cut calories by 40% and gain lean mass while simultaneously losing fat mass.

Yet these high levels of protein will stress your requirements for two vitamins and a mineral. Without them, you could find your anxiety levels rising, break out in acne or eczema, feel on edge all the time, or start to have poorer and shorter sleep.

If these things are happening, you definitely are becoming less healthy, and that’s definitely not going to make you live longer.

Indeed, since these nutrients are needed for healthy energy metabolism, it probably isn’t going to help you avoid diabetes either, even if you’re losing weight.

In this article, we cover just how much of these extra nutrients you need, and how to get them.

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