SHARE THIS
Protein diets have become very popular in recent decades, especially with people who want to lose a lot of weight and quickly. With protein diets, the amount of carbohydrates is kept to a minimum and replaced by proteins. The purpose of these diets is that you burn proteins and especially fats instead of carbohydrates, which would make you lose weight faster. Unfortunately, this way of losing weight is harmful to health in the long term.
THE NORM
We certainly need proteins so that our bodies continue to function well, but not too much. What is the norm then? We need an average of 0.8 grams of protein per kilo of body weight per day. If you eat healthy and varied, you will soon get enough protein, as you can see in the following example.
An adult who weighs 70 kilos requires an average of 56 grams (0.8 x 70) of proteins per day. One steak of 150 grams contains 36 grams of protein. If you eat two of them, you will get 72 grams of protein and you will soon be far beyond the norm. If you add up all the other proteins that you ingest every day, you can get too many proteins even with a normal diet.
The optimum daily protein content in our diet is approximately 20% of the total of proteins, carbohydrates and fats. For growing children and people who exercise intensively, this can be as high as 30%. We need no more than that, because our bodies cannot build up a supply of proteins (in the form of amino acids), in contrast to carbohydrates (glucose) and fats (fatty acids). That means that everything that is too much and cannot be used must be excreted again, which means that our liver and kidneys in particular are heavily overloaded.
Moreover, the focus must be on the variation with which you ingest all essential amino acids, but not on the quantity.
HARMFUL EFFECTS OF A LOT OF PROTEINS ON HEALTH
With protein diets, or low carbohydrate diets, the daily proportion of proteins is very high: it sometimes reaches values of up to 70%. When glucose is missing as fuel, our liver cells use proteins together with fats to get energy. However, the burning of proteins, especially animal proteins, produces ammonia, a toxic substance that the liver must immediately convert into urea. Unfortunately, in many people the liver is extremely overloaded by unhealthy food, an unhealthy lifestyle and a lot of stress, and therefore does not work optimally. In this case, too much protein can aggravate the damage and make our livers and our whole bodies very acidic, which means that we lose a lot of calcium and magnesium from our bones and literally poison ourselves.
Moreover, when eating meat, your tissue is also broken down and more toxic and harmful substances are released, which causes an enormous increase in uric acid levels. This can lead to gout and kidney stones. The function of your liver is also undermined and gallstones can arise. This disrupted bile production has consequences for the digestion of fats. If your body functions normally and you eat healthily according to the digestive requirements of your digestive system and with the right ratio of carbohydrates, proteins and fats, then your kidneys can excrete all the mentioned waste without problems. An excess of proteins can ultimately also be stored as fat if your excretory organs do not work properly, because you must remember that your body can’t store that excess as protein for later use. Then why would you force your body and distort its natural process of consuming nutrients?
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO AVOID ALL CARBOHYDRATES TO LOSE WEIGHT
If you want to lose weight, it is absolutely not necessary to ban all carbohydrates from your diet. About 60% of our daily diet must consist of carbohydrates. The trick is to choose the right carbohydrates and integrate them in your diet in a smart way so that they are optimally broken down and not stored as fat. Then the proteins you ingest can also perform their own task as building material, as it should be naturally, and not as fuel, which our bodies normally only do in emergency situations such as in times of stress.