The Very Real Risks of Consuming Too Much Protein

johnnylakis wrote: »

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/09/03/too-much-protein.aspx

From Dr Joseph Mercola....Eating more protein than your body needs can interfere with your health and fitness goals, including weight gain, extra body fat, stress on your kidneys, chronic dehydration, and leaching of important bone minerals.

Your body needs protein, the primary building block for cells, muscles, and bones. It also helps preserve lean muscle that is typically lost with age. High quality proteins from pasture raised animals are more easily used by your body than those from plants.

That said, there is an upper limit to how much protein your body can actually use. On average, Americans consume three to five times more protein than they need.

When you consume too much protein, your body must remove more nitrogen waste products from your blood, which stresses your kidneys.

Most people need 40 to 70 grams of protein per day (the CDC's general protein recommendation for adults is 46 g a day for women, and 56 g a day for men). Rarely does a person than this—the exception for those who are aggressively exercising (or competing) and pregnant women.

So if I consume 57 g of protein a day my kidneys will explode next week?

Sometimes there is a grain of truth to Mercola. Most times he is an alarmist.

johnnylakis wrote: »

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/09/03/too-much-protein.aspx

From Dr Joseph Mercola....Eating more protein than your body needs can interfere with your health and fitness goals, including weight gain, extra body fat, stress on your kidneys, chronic dehydration, and leaching of important bone minerals.

Your body needs protein, the primary building block for cells, muscles, and bones. It also helps preserve lean muscle that is typically lost with age. High quality proteins from pasture raised animals are more easily used by your body than those from plants.

That said, there is an upper limit to how much protein your body can actually use. On average, Americans consume three to five times more protein than they need.

When you consume too much protein, your body must remove more nitrogen waste products from your blood, which stresses your kidneys.

Most people need 40 to 70 grams of protein per day (the CDC's general protein recommendation for adults is 46 g a day for women, and 56 g a day for men). Rarely does a person than this—the exception for those who are aggressively exercising (or competing) and pregnant women.

All that is instantly shot down by our ancestors through the hunter/gatherer phase, who ate animals for food most heavily, even wild berries that have not gone through hybridization have significant protein and lesser carbs in them, for certain they would have gotten "too much" protein according to this article, but there is no evidence of them dying of kidney diseases, osteoporosis and becoming too fat (as would result according to the article above).

Patttience wrote: »

Well Mercola maya not be the best source of information but he wouldn't be the only person saying this. I agree too much protein is not healthy.

Too much of *anything* (including water) isn't healthy. You don't need to be a quack like Mercola to figure that one out!

The point is if someone's going to start a 'scare' thread, at least use a credible source for the basis of it.

michaelwithersone wrote: »

I imagine that link has been posted here by some one paid to increase the the in-bound links to his article to boost its rank on google. hence increasing the site traffic and money made from the site (he has a shop). You can pay a person who works in search engine optimisation business to post links to your articles / website in forums to help increase its search rank :-) The more replies you post - the more credible the inbound link will be and the better his google rank will be. So if you hate the article - try not to reply to it and they will be deprived some google rank hopefully!

Nope, because rel="nofollow"

johnnylakis wrote: »

That said, there is an upper limit to how much protein your body can actually use. On average, Americans consume three to five times more protein than they need.

When you consume too much protein, your body must remove more nitrogen waste products from your blood, which stresses your kidneys.

Most people need 40 to 70 grams of protein per day (the CDC's general protein recommendation for adults is 46 g a day for women, and 56 g a day for men). Rarely does a person than this—the exception for those who are aggressively exercising (or competing) and pregnant women.

Too much of anything is bad.

But I've never seen any evidence that more than the minimum (about .8 g/kg of bodyweight, or 45 g for me, at 125) would be "too much," and I have seen evidence that more is desirable if one is trying to build muscle or retain muscle at a deficit, up to about .6-.8 g/lb of bodyweight (for someone in the normal weight range). I've even seen some suggestions that more, especially near exercise, could be beneficial for someone older, as in over 40 or so.

Moreover, whether it's actually helpful or not, if it's not harmful the question becomes whether the person is better off eating it vs. increasing carbs or fat. There are warnings about eating too much sat fat too, and beyond that for some of us fat isn't that satiating. Protein is much more so, so I personally feel better getting a little excess protein (or a lot, if I use the minimum necessary number) vs. lots more fat or carbs. (And if I exchanged protein for carbs and kept my calories at the correct number and my fat where I feel good, I'm sure Mercola would claim I had an awful high carb diet, sigh.)

As for the ridiculous 3 to 5 times the protein we need, the average American eats about 15% protein. If a 180 lb man needs about 65 g of protein (.8*180/2.2), and is eating 3-5x that, or between 195 and 325 grams, and that's 15% of his overall calorie intake, that would mean his total calorie intake is between 5200 and 8667 calories, which is insanely high even compared to the insanely high real numbers. AND, of course, if he was eating that much, his protein intake would hardly be the first issue.

Therefore, I have to conclude that Mercola's claims make no sense.

Or, as someone else so succinctly put it: LOL, Mercola.