Hi, I’m Ann-Sophie, a 33-year-old founder and lawyer. Recently, I decided to walk the talk and track my protein intake for a week after learning about its role in women’s health. Going into this week, I felt pretty confident that the protein in my diet was optimal: Greek yogurt with berries for breakfast (10 g), a salad with chicken for lunch (20 g), and salmon with vegetables for dinner (25 g). Total: 55 grams. I exclude snacks here because a lot of snacks are light on protein, and we don’t need to air all my dirty laundry here, snacks were my ‘happy place’. Nonetheless looking at my core meals, “not bad”, I thought—a “high-protein” diet by most standards.
We know the current RDA guidelines of 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day—was designed decades ago to prevent deficiency diseases, not to optimize health. It’s the minimum needed to “get by,” not the amount needed to thrive. Experts now agree that 1.2–1.6 g/kg/day is a more realistic baseline for maintaining health in adults, especially women (Morton et al., 2018). So I did the math. At 68 kilograms, current research suggests I should be eating between 80 and 110 grams of protein daily for optimal health and fertility. In other words, I’d been missing the mark by the equivalent of minimum an entire meal’s worth of protein—every single day, for years.