Happy New Year and welcome to episode number 699 of the Nutrition Deepa Podcast.

I'm your host Monica Reinegel, and today's show, like so many episodes before it, was

suggested by a listener.

Kathy writes, 20 years ago, we were told that we were eating too much protein, but now

the advice is to eat more protein, especially for middle-aged women, what changed in that

time.

Well, for the record, Kathy, there are still a lot of people claiming that we are eating

too much protein, but we need to look a bit closer at what they mean by too much.

They often mean that we're eating more than the minimum recommended amount of protein,

and in the developed world, that is generally true.

Most Americans eat about one and a half to two times as much protein as is absolutely

essential to keep our bodies functioning.

However, Americans are still eating substantially below the upper end of the recommended range

for protein.

And this is an important point, because when you hear people say that we're eating too

much protein, it sounds like we're exceeding the recommended limits, and that is simply

not the case.

But by the same token, when people say that we need to be eating more protein, we need

to ask more than what?

It may sound like they're suggesting that we should increase the amount of protein we

are currently eating, but they may simply be pointing out that there are benefits to

eating more than the recommended minimum, which, again, most of us are already doing.

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