Where's The Beef? Where's The Health Benefit?

It seems that everywhere you turn you are bombarded with carb-bashing rhetoric. Stores and food companies are even selling only low-carb products. The anti- carb craze has everything to do with the recent resurgence in high-protein fad diets. So what should we know about protein if we are concerned with losing or maintaining weight? How much do we need? What happens if we don't get enough or if we get too much? And what does all of this have to do with successful weight loss?

How Much Protein Do You Need?

When you don't get enough protein in your diet, all your organs are affected -- from the kidneys to the heart. The immune system also suffers greatly, so you are more likely to get sick and get infections.

So how much protein do you really need?

Dangers of Eating Too Much Protein

* High protein can mean high fat

If you are getting a lot of your protein (as part of a high-protein diet) from fatty animal foods, you are not only eating a high-protein diet; you are most likely eating a high-fat diet, too. And higher fat means more calories and an increased risk for weight gain. According to the Institute of Medicine's Dietary Reference Intakes report, saturated fat, trans fats, and cholesterol in food increases the "bad" LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol levels; therefore, this type of diet increases your heart disease risk. Certainly eating less saturated fat is universally accepted sage dietary advice. The quickest way to minimize your intake of saturated fat is to:

• eat less animal fat (meat fat and butterfat) and certain oils (coconut, palm, and palm kernel oils)
• choose lean cuts of meat
• trim away any visible fat on meats
• eat smaller portions of meat

More Protein Dangers

It doesn't matter whether you get your protein from animals or plants -- they have the same effect on calcium loss through urine, says Linda Massey, PhD, a researcher and calcium and protein expert with Washington State University in Spokane. But some plants, like grains and legumes (beans), have a little something going for them: They contain high amounts of potassium, and potassium helps decrease urinary calcium. Milk products can help lessen this effect, too. The high amounts of calcium in milk and milk products help compensate for the calcium that will be lost in the urine due to the digestion/absorption of the protein in milk.

But What About All That Weight Loss?

One of the most popular features of the low-carb, high-protein diet is the quick weight loss. Don't be fooled here. You cannot physiologically lose more than 2 pounds of body fat a week. So what are all the pounds that people lose in the first few days of starting the diet? Water. To make up for the lack of dietary carbohydrates, the body uses its own carbohydrate stores in the liver and muscle tissue (called glycogen), which in the process also mobilizes water. Many of the early and rapid pounds lost are due to -- that's right -- excessive urination!

Can a Certain Type of Protein Lead to Weight Loss?

Apparently, it doesn't matter whether your protein primarily comes from lean beef or chicken. As long as you reduce your total calories by 500 a day and participate in an exercise program (in this study it was a walking fitness program), you will most likely enjoy some weight loss and improved cholesterol levels. This evidence comes from a recent study with overweight, sedentary, nonsmoking women conducted by the Rippe Lifestyle Institute in Shrewsbury, Mass.

A recent six-month trial demonstrated that replacing "some" dietary carbohydrate with protein improved weight loss -- but this was when the diet was still, overall, a reduced-fat diet.

Higher protein is in vogue these days because of the publicized success of quick weight loss. But studies also show that there might be long-term health consequences of such a diet, and slow but sure weight loss can take place with a healthy high-fiber, moderate-protein, and moderate-fat plan -- a way of eating that we can live with for the rest of our lives. Yes, we do need protein, but at levels of 15%, not 50%, of calories from fat. So when it comes to protein, it looks like moderation is the healthiest choice of all.

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