Why I Keep Telling My Mom to Eat More Meat: How Much Protein Really Matters

Here's how it started.

Lately, the thing I say to my mom most at meals is: eat more meat.

From what I've seen, my mom likes to fill a bowl with rice, pick at a few dishes, finish the rice quickly, and then say she's full. In fact she's barely touched the dishes or the meat. What she's wolfed down is basically all carbs.

Sometimes when I tell her to eat some meat, she barely moves. Then after the meal, she'll pick up her chopsticks and fish out the leftover ginger and garlic from the serving plates to eat.

So I started wondering: why doesn't she eat meat?

Why My Mom Doesn't Eat Meat

My first thought was habit. On a Chinese dinner table, rice is the star and meat is just one of the dishes. And for a dish, "goes great with rice" is the highest praise there is. That alone shows that for a lot of people, rice is the real main event of a meal.

At dinner I told my mom: if one bowl of rice plus a few bites of the dishes fills you up, you should eat half as much rice and twice as much of the dishes and meat.

She said: if I don't eat rice, I never feel full. Like your grandpa says, eat more rice and you'll stay full longer.

All of this shows that my mom's eating habits revolve around rice.

But when I thought about it more, it's actually a complicated question.

Besides habit, maybe my mom's appetite has gotten smaller, so a few mouthfuls of rice fill her up. Or maybe it's because she's frugal and wants to save the meat for the rest of the family. Picking the leftover ginger and garlic off the plates after the meal is probably for the same reason.

My grandma, when she was alive, was exactly like that. Always thinking about being good to others, never thinking about herself at all. After she passed, we'd often talk about how she always used to put meat into Grandpa's bowl.

I think this happens in a lot of Chinese families.

What Happens When You Don't Eat Enough Meat

So what happens if you don't eat meat, or don't eat enough of it?

I'll use myself as the example. I only started planning my diet in the last couple of years, and my body before I started working out was probably a snapshot of a lot of people's bodies.

The technical name for that body type is "central obesity."¹ The person doesn't look fat. Their arms, legs and torso don't look big. But the moment they take their shirt off, there's a big belly.

Back when I was in school, I'd say the vast majority of my classmates had this body type. The big belly comes from years of refined carbs and sugar-and-fat combos. The skinny arms and legs come from not eating enough protein and not exercising.

Does that sound like you?

But what I want to tell you is this: a diet built on carbs with too little protein brings far more than a belly. It sets off a whole chain reaction.

If you don't get enough protein for a long time, then in the long run your muscle mass will definitely be low, and it will keep trending down.

Worse, after thirty, you start gradually losing muscle. There's no avoiding it. Some studies estimate that after thirty, muscle mass drops by about 3% to 8% every decade, and after sixty it goes even faster.²

That's why a saying has caught on among young people: before thirty, your two most important assets are cash and muscle.

Staying active is the only way to hold on to as much muscle as possible in the long run, and eating enough protein is a non-negotiable part of that.

If you can't do that, low muscle mass over the long term plus aging shows up in lots of direct ways. The simplest is having no strength: you can't move things, lift things, carry things or hold on to things.

You might say: who still lifts and carries heavy stuff all the time these days?

True, maybe you don't carry things much. But what if, when you're old, you need to catch yourself?

Lots of older people end up in the hospital after a fall. They fall because their bodies are too weak, their balance is poor, and when they start to fall, their grip isn't strong enough to grab something to steady themselves.

Surveillance data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention show that falls are now the leading cause of injury deaths among people over 65 in China.³

More practically, if an older person breaks a bone and ends up in the hospital after a fall, how much protein they eat during recovery is closely tied to how fast and how well they recover.

That's why many doctors, when they talk with patients, still add "eat more meat." What they really mean is: eat more protein.

What's more, older people don't actually need less protein than young people.

As we age, the body responds less to protein. Eat the same serving of protein, and less of it goes into building muscle than in a young person. In nutrition science this is called "anabolic resistance."⁴ So the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism (ESPEN) recommends 1.0 to 1.2 g of protein per kg of bodyweight per day for healthy older adults, and even more for older adults who are ill or frail.⁵

But reality is the exact opposite. Lots of older people have smaller appetites and worse teeth, and they're used to being frugal. What they eat least of at the table is usually meat.

That's why I'm always telling my mom at the table to eat more meat.

How Much Protein to Eat

So how much protein should you eat, and how?

Huberman, a professor of neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine, covers this in detail in his book Protocols.⁶

The core of it is roughly this: eat 30 to 50 g of protein per meal, and your total daily protein should match your bodyweight in pounds, so 1 g of protein per pound of bodyweight. In kilograms, that's 2.2 g of protein per kg of bodyweight.

That's not really surprising. Plenty of people online now encourage everyone to eat protein equal to twice their bodyweight in kg.

But twice your bodyweight in protein isn't that easy for most people.

When I first started working out, it was extremely hard for me too. I think it only becomes easy once your muscle mass has gradually gone up and your training has settled into a steady rhythm.

For most ordinary people, getting protein equal to your bodyweight in kg is already very good.

The Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents (2022)⁷ recommend that adults eat 120 to 200 g a day of meat, poultry, seafood and eggs, with moderate amounts of fish, poultry, eggs and lean meat, and less fatty meat. Add the protein from staples, dairy and soy products, and over a day you get pretty close to 1 g per kg of bodyweight. The Chinese Nutrition Society's recommended intake is 65 g a day for adult men and 55 g for women, which also works out to about 1 g per kg.⁸

So it matters to understand what protein does and why it's important, but don't stress if you can't eat enough of it.

One reminder: if you have chronic kidney disease or a similar condition, follow your doctor's advice on how much protein to eat. Don't just push your intake up to match the numbers.

More Important Than How Much: CP:C

Beyond how much you eat, Huberman also writes about something pretty key: while getting enough protein, try to eat protein with a high CP:C.

What's CP:C? Simply put, it's the ratio of complete protein (CP) to calories (C).

And what's complete protein? Among the amino acids the human body needs, there are nine it can't make itself.⁹ Protein that contains all nine is called complete protein. The meat, fish, eggs and dairy we eat every day are basically all complete. Most plant proteins are missing one or two and need to be combined with other foods.

High CP:C means not many calories, but lots of complete protein.

For example, take foods that all have the same 150 kcal.¹⁰

From 150 kcal of scallops you get about 29 g of protein, from chicken about 28 g, and from lean beef about 25 g. These are all high CP:C.

From 150 kcal of tofu or eggs, though, we only get about 15 g of protein, so their CP:C isn't high. But compared with foods like peanut butter, or beans with rice, they already count as medium CP:C.

So CP:C is really a question of value for money. High-protein, low-calorie foods give you more for your calories.

My own protein mostly comes from a few things: eggs, lean pork, beef shank and chicken breast. All of these are medium CP:C or better, and I think that's plenty.

And something like chicken breast works perfectly well in place of pork in everyday home dishes, like stir-fried meat with green peppers or with onions.

I've been adjusting the share of protein in my diet for about two years now. Combined with exercise that isn't frequent but has never stopped, both my energy and my strength are clearly different from two years ago.

On energy, I can throw myself into work with more focus. On strength, I can easily pick up equipment I couldn't lift before. I have to admit, strength makes you freer. Not having strength and having it but not using it are two completely different things.

Back to the Table: Getting Parents to Eat More Meat

Finally, back to my mom: how do you get your parents to eat more meat?

The simplest approach is to make the protein foods at home high-CP:C ones as much as you can. Add eggs and milk to breakfast, and swap fatty meat for fish and shrimp. For parents with smaller appetites, a high-CP:C food gives them more protein per mouthful. If your parents have trouble with their teeth, you can also make softer dishes like steamed egg custard, fish, tofu and minced meat.

And it's not as hard as you might think. For most parents, at 1 g per kg of bodyweight, that's about 50 to 60 g of protein a day, spread over three meals:¹¹

• Breakfast: two eggs + a glass of milk (250 ml), about 20 g
• Lunch: a serving of lean meat or chicken breast (about 100 g raw), about 20 g
• Dinner: a serving of fish or shrimp (about 100 g raw), about 18 to 20 g

You don't even need to count the bits of protein from rice, vegetables and soy products. That's already enough for the day.

As for my mom's "eat more rice and you'll stay full longer," of the three macronutrients, protein is actually the most filling one.¹² For the same calories, meat and eggs keep you from getting hungry longer than rice does. So eating half a bowl less rice and a few more bites of meat won't make you hungry any sooner.

So if you can eat the dishes and meat first at every meal, and the rice last, even better.

And if, on top of that, you can encourage your parents to exercise and do some strength training, that's the best case of all.

Footnotes

1. By China's national standard, a waist circumference of ≥ 90 cm for adult men and ≥ 85 cm for adult women counts as central obesity. See the national health industry standard Criteria of Weight for Adults (WS/T 428-2013). ↩

2. Volpi E, Nazemi R, Fujita S. Muscle tissue changes with aging. Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care, 2004. ↩

3. National Center for Chronic and Noncommunicable Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention: cause-of-death surveillance data from the national disease surveillance system. ↩

4. Anabolic resistance: in older adults, muscle builds less in response to protein intake and strength training, so they need more protein to reach muscle protein synthesis similar to younger people. ↩

5. Deutz NEP, et al. Protein intake and exercise for optimal muscle function with aging: Recommendations from the ESPEN Expert Group. Clinical Nutrition, 2014. See also Bauer J, et al. Evidence-based recommendations for optimal dietary protein intake in older people: a position paper from the PROT-AGE Study Group. JAMDA, 2013. ↩

6. Andrew Huberman, Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. ↩

7. Chinese Nutrition Society. Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents (2022). People's Medical Publishing House, 2022. ↩

8. Chinese Nutrition Society. Chinese Dietary Reference Intakes (2023 Edition). ↩

9. The nine essential amino acids are histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan and valine. ↩

10. The figures below are approximate estimates based on the nutrient content of common foods. Actual values vary with the cut, variety and cooking method. ↩

11. Protein amounts are estimates. Meat is counted by raw weight, eggs at about 6 g each, and milk at about 3 g per 100 ml. 100 g of raw lean meat comes to about 70 g once cooked. ↩

12. Westerterp-Plantenga MS, et al. Dietary protein, weight loss, and weight maintenance. Annual Review of Nutrition, 2009. ↩