A nutritionist’s guide to 30g of protein and over 10g of fibre in every meal | Dominique Ludwig

Rupy Aujla (0:00)

I'm Dr. Rupy, and on this show, I help you feel more in control of your health through food and lifestyle medicine.

I've been talking a lot about eating more protein recently, and sometimes it feels like you have to choose a side, protein or fiber, it's confusing. Thankfully, we have clear communicators like Dominique Ludwig, that are giving no-nonsense nutrition advice and simple strategies to help us all eat enough protein, because obviously it's very important, but also enough fiber and variety in our diet every week. And if we're able to eat in this way consistently, not only do we feel better day to day, but we eat according to our biology and symptoms of ill health like joint pain and fatigue can melt away. Dominique is an accredited nutritionist and registered nutritional therapy practitioner with over 30 years experience helping people feel their best. She's the author of the brilliant new cookbook, No-Nonsense Nutrition. And on today's podcast, you'll learn about the 30-30-30 method, a quick hack to build balanced plates with enough protein, fiber and nutrient rich ingredients, as well as how to lose weight if you need to lose weight without counting calories.

Dominique, so glad that you're here so we can have this conversation in person. What did you have for breakfast today? I want to know because I reckon it's pretty similar to what I had.

Dominique Ludwig (1:43)

I had Greek yogurt with some kefir. I had some milled flax seeds. I had blueberries and a drizzle of almond butter. So typical for a nutritionist, right?

Rupy Aujla (1:53)

Yeah, and it's just like your Instagram as well. That's what I love because every time you make a recipe on Instagram, I just think that's literally what I have. You have your flax, you have your chia. I love shelled hemp seeds. We're going to get into all these a little bit later on because they're just so nutritious. And one of the things I really wanted to unpack actually was the whole calories and all that kind of stuff that we'll definitely get to. But I thought we'd start with a big question around a particular macronutrient that is getting a lot of attention, and that's protein.

Why does protein matter more after the age of 30, and how much protein do you actually recommend at every meal?

Dominique Ludwig (2:32)

Okay. That's a big question, so we're going to have to unpack that probably slowly.

Rupy Aujla (2:35)

Yeah.

Dominique Ludwig (2:36)

So all the macronutrients matter, and we sometimes pull one out as being more important than the other. But really, it's the combination of all of them together. But protein is really important. It's the building blocks of our body. It's important for our muscle mass, our bone mass, our enzymes, our neurotransmitters, everything is dependent on protein. So we need to be eating it every day. And one of the things I always explain to people is we don't have a store of protein. It's not like we've got a little cupboard in our armpit, the way we can just get the amino acids out when we need them. We need to be eating them every day. And so that's really important. So is there a certain age where you need a bit more? Well, we didn't use to think this, but now we've changed our tune on it a little bit, we've understood the science a bit more. So what happens as we get older is that we often need more protein to have the same metabolic effect as we had in our maybe 20s and 30s. It's a bit like having, imagine like a hearing aid and your muscles are turning down the volume. So you're not able to utilize protein quite as efficiently. So our needs, it's not that we're absorbing less, it's just that we're needing a little more to get that same anabolic effects, which means we're building muscle.

So that's one of the reasons it becomes really important as we get older. And also muscle mass as we age is so important. It's our balance, it's our stability, it's burning more energy for us, it's stopping us from falling over, which gives us anxiety and we often never get back to that fitness level again. And also it's down to our bone density. People often forget that there's protein in our bones. Like the scaffolding that the minerals are all stuck in. So it's forming a lot of our bone density too. So really important. I think we can unpack that a bit more because there's a lot more to talk about with protein. How much do we need? So this is quite hotly debated.

If I'm doing a normal nutrition program, I normally sit people around 1.4 grams of protein per kilo of body weight once they've hit sort of midlife perimenopause give or take. If I'm with someone who's doing a lot of exercise, I might go higher. I don't generally go as high as 2 grams per kilo of body weight, although there's a lot of respectable nutritionists that do that. I tend not to. And the reason I don't do that is because I often find when you over-prioritize one nutrient, you start to shove another one off the plate. So you start to hyper fixate about the amount of chicken and cottage cheese you're eating. But then somehow you're so full that you're not managing to eat the beans, the beans and the vegetables, you're not hitting your fiber target. So I think it's a balance, and I think it's trying to get everything in balance, that you've got what you need. But if you go too hard on one, you're going to miss out on another.