How Much Protein Should I Eat Daily? – All About Health Today

Most adults need about 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, which is 56 grams if you weigh 70 kg (154 lb). If you lift weights, are over 65, or are dieting, the evidence supports 1.2 to 1.6 g/kg instead. Here is how to find your number.

What is the short answer?

The official recommended dietary allowance is 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. That figure is a minimum set to prevent deficiency in healthy sedentary adults, not an optimum for people who train, are losing weight, or are over 65. Researchers who study protein requirements have argued for years that the RDA is a floor rather than a target, because it was derived from nitrogen-balance studies that systematically underestimate what preserves muscle in real life (Phillips, 2016).

The practical formula is simple. Take your body weight in kilograms, multiply it by the number that matches your situation, and you have your daily target in grams. To convert pounds to kilograms, divide by 2.2.

Here is what that looks like across common body weights. The middle column is what most healthy adults should treat as a floor; the right-hand columns are where the evidence points for people who are training or trying to hold onto muscle while losing fat.

How much protein do you need? Read the dose ladder

Rather than argue about one number, it helps to see the range as a ladder. Each rung describes a different job your body is doing, and each has its own evidence base. Find the rung that matches your situation and use the grams per kilogram beside it.

Two things are worth saying plainly. First, the ladder is not a competition — the top rung is not better for a person whose goal is simply to be healthy. Second, the numbers describe daily intake averaged over a week, not a requirement you have to hit before midnight on any single day.

Does it matter when you eat protein?

Somewhat, but less than the internet suggests. Muscle protein synthesis responds to each dose of protein, and that response appears to max out at roughly 0.4 grams per kilogram per meal in young adults. A review of the dose-response literature concluded that spreading intake across four meals of about 0.4 g/kg each lands close to the 1.6 g/kg daily target that the training evidence supports (Schoenfeld & Aragon, 2018).

For a 70 kg adult, that is about 28 grams of protein per meal, four times a day. In practice, most people already hit the daily total but concentrate almost all of it at dinner, which leaves breakfast and lunch well short.

What about the anabolic window after training?

The 30-minute window is a marketing invention more than a physiological deadline. What the evidence supports is that total daily protein intake and consistent training drive adaptation, and that eating protein within a few hours of training is sufficient. If you train fasted first thing in the morning, getting 25 to 30 grams in shortly afterwards is a sensible habit rather than an emergency. If you had a meal two hours before training, you are already covered.

What does 30 grams of protein look like?

The number on a label and the number on your plate are not the same thing, because foods differ enormously in how much protein they deliver per calorie. Two hundred grams of firm tofu and 100 grams of chicken breast both land near 30 grams of protein, but the tofu carries roughly 80 more calories to get there.

That matters if you are dieting. It matters less if you are simply trying to eat enough, in which case the higher-calorie sources are often easier to fit in.

If you are training seriously, the calorie cost of your protein sources interacts with your overall energy budget — the same reason aerobic base work and protein intake are usually planned together rather than separately.

Does high protein damage your kidneys?

For people with healthy kidneys, the evidence does not support the claim. A 12-month randomised trial in adults consuming higher protein intakes found no difference in kidney function compared with lower intakes (Devries, 2018). The persistent worry comes from an observed effect rather than a demonstrated harm: higher protein intake raises glomerular filtration rate, which is the kidney working harder, not the kidney being damaged.

A 2024 review of athletes and bodybuilders examined that distinction directly, asking whether the hyperfiltration seen with very high protein intakes translates into chronic kidney disease. It concluded that the picture is not settled for people with pre-existing risk factors, while acknowledging that in healthy individuals the adaptation appears reversible and physiological rather than pathological (de Lorenzo, 2024).

There is also a bone-health myth to retire. A meta-analysis from the National Osteoporosis Foundation found that higher protein intake was not associated with harm to bone and may carry a small benefit for bone mineral density (Shams-White, 2017).

Can you get enough protein from plants?

Yes, with attention to quantity and distribution. A 2025 controlled trial compared a well-balanced vegan diet with an omnivorous diet and found no compromise in daily mixed muscle protein synthesis rates (Domić, 2025). Plant proteins are generally lower in leucine and less digestible, so the practical adjustment is to eat slightly more total protein and to spread it across meals rather than concentrate it.

A review of plant proteins and exercise reached the same conclusion from the performance side: plant-based diets can support training adaptations when protein dose, quality, and total intake are managed rather than assumed (Kerksick, 2021).

How do you improve plant protein quality?

• Combine complementary sources. Legumes are low in methionine, grains are low in lysine; together they cover both.
• Use isolates where convenience matters. Soy, pea, and blended plant protein powders carry a higher protein density than whole foods.
• Raise the total by roughly 10 to 20 percent. This compensates for lower digestibility and leucine content.
• Anchor breakfast. Plant-based diets usually fail on protein at breakfast, not at dinner.

If you are building a plant-forward diet, the practical breakdown of which sources carry the most usable protein is covered in the plant protein ranking guide, and the micronutrients that need watching on a plant-heavy diet are covered in this overview of common deficiencies.

Does more protein help with weight loss?

Modestly, and mostly through adherence rather than metabolism. A meta-analysis of energy-restricted diets found that higher-protein groups lost more total weight and more fat mass, and retained more lean mass, than standard-protein groups on the same calories (Wycherley, 2012). The effect sizes were real but not large, and the lean-mass preservation is the more valuable half of the result.

Part of the mechanism is satiety. A systematic review of protein and appetite-regulating hormones found that protein intake increases fullness signalling and reduces subsequent energy intake, with the effect varying by dose and by how much of the diet is protein (Kohanmoo, 2020). If you are stuck at a plateau, higher protein at breakfast is one of the few changes that reliably reduces what you eat later in the day — the rest of that problem is covered in this breakdown of weight-loss plateaus.

Two caveats are worth stating. Body composition changes around menopause make fat loss harder to achieve on the same intake for reasons that are hormonal rather than moral, and where fat sits matters independently of how much there is — the difference between subcutaneous and visceral fat is a metabolic one, not cosmetic.

How much protein do older adults need, in practice?

The recommendation from the ladder above — 1.0 to 1.2 g/kg for healthy older adults — only works if it is actually eaten, and survey data consistently shows older adults under-consuming protein at breakfast. Three changes do most of the work:

• Move protein earlier. A 30-gram breakfast instead of 8 grams changes the day more than a larger dinner.
• Train against it. Protein without resistance exercise slows decline but does not reverse it; the combination is what the trial evidence supports. The specific strength work is covered in this guide to preventing muscle loss after 40.
• Do not cut protein while cutting calories. Weight loss after 60 removes muscle as well as fat unless protein intake stays high.

Ageing muscle also loses its ability to respond to small doses of protein, which is why the older-adult target sits above the RDA rather than at it. The broader biology of that decline is covered in the hallmarks of ageing, and the minerals that interact with protein metabolism — including the different forms of magnesium — are worth reviewing if you are also supplementing.

Common questions about protein intake