- 10 Dec, 2025 *
This is not nutrition advice.
The internet says I need to eat more protein. And not just the youtube guys who make videos with no shirt on and happen to sell protein powder. Reasonable advice seems to suggest that the average active adult needs somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8 grams of protein per pound of total bodyweight per day.
Why? Even if you don’t want to become The Hulk, eating more protein can help you feel healthy and set you up well for old age. As we age we naturally lose muscle, so in our older age we’re more likely to become frail and have injuries or decreased function. Eating more protein (and staying active) helps maintain more muscle mass into old age. Apparently it also improves bone health which is obviously also useful later in life. But wa…
- 10 Dec, 2025 *
This is not nutrition advice.
The internet says I need to eat more protein. And not just the youtube guys who make videos with no shirt on and happen to sell protein powder. Reasonable advice seems to suggest that the average active adult needs somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8 grams of protein per pound of total bodyweight per day.
Why? Even if you don’t want to become The Hulk, eating more protein can help you feel healthy and set you up well for old age. As we age we naturally lose muscle, so in our older age we’re more likely to become frail and have injuries or decreased function. Eating more protein (and staying active) helps maintain more muscle mass into old age. Apparently it also improves bone health which is obviously also useful later in life. But wait there’s more, I read that protein helps give people more stable energy throughout the day and better antibody production. Protein, ye magical elixir!!
I’m always skeptical of nutrition research largely because there’s often so little consensus and because it can be annoying to be told what to eat/not eat. So don’t be surprised if new research comes out tomorrow (or already exists) that says eating lots of protein causes _. Anyway this time, after some light fact checking1, I bought the story and started looking into how to eat more protein.
I weigh roughly 170 lbs which puts me at needing 85g - 136g per day. As a vegetarian, that kind of protein doesn’t just fall on your head. I love pasta and bread so I’ve always known that they have a lot of protein, but it wasn’t until now that I realized the fallacy in my thinking that they are dependable protein sources. Sure, there may be 8-12g of protein per serving of pasta, but there’s also 200-300 calories. If you were to try and get 100g of protein from pasta alone, you would need to eat 2600 calories worth of it. Not very efficient! That got me curious - which foods have high protein and low calories? I started reading all the nutrition labels in the house and building an intuition for which foods could help me get more protein without taking in too much energy. Which brings us to the list 👇
Foods ranked by calorie/protein ratios
Lower means more calorically efficient
| Food | kcal / g_protein |
|---|---|
| Whey isolate protein | 4 |
| Pea protein | 5 |
| Egg whites | 5 |
| Spirulina (Dried) | 5 |
| Skyr or Greek yogurt (Nonfat) | 6 |
| Nutritional yeast | 6 |
| Soy sauce | 7 |
| Cottage cheese (2%) | 8 |
| Spinach | 8 |
| Tofu (Firm) | 9 |
| Skim milk | 10 |
| Tempeh | 10 |
| Eggs | 11 |
| Parmesan Reggiano | 11 |
| Regular 1% yogurt | 12 |
| Broccoli | 12 |
| 1% milk | 12 |
| Red lentils | 13 |
| Green lentils | 13 |
| Cauliflower | 13 |
| Kidney beans | 15 |
| Paneer | 15 |
| Green peas | 15 |
| 2% milk | 15 |
| Cheddar cheese | 16 |
| Chickpeas | 18 |
| Pumpkin seeds | 19 |
| Tomato | 20 |
| Peanuts | 22 |
| Guava | 26 |
| Pasta | 26 |
| Bread (averaged for different types) | 27 |
| Almonds | 27 |
| Sunflower seeds | 28 |
| Oatmeal | 28 |
| Cashews | 30 |
| Oat milk | 38 |
| Walnuts | 43 |
| Potato | 46 |
| Rice (White) | 48 |
| Sweet potato | 54 |
| Avocado | 80 |
Most of this wasn’t too surprising: eggs, milk, tofu, greek yogurt, legumes all rank high. But there were a couple surprises for me: spinach, broccoli, and parmesan are all ranked above lentils, chick peas, and kidney beans?? Famous protein source peanut butter ranks below tomato? Excuse me, soy sauce!? The list is uni-dimensional - do not try and eat an entire meal of nutritional yeast and soy sauce, and yes avocado and sweet potato are still very good for you. Another caveat is volume. Many vegetables are very low calorie by weight, you would need to eat nearly two pounds of spinach just to get 20g of protein. Overall the list helped me think about which foods I could build meals around: eating lots of eggs, always having greek yogurt and skyr on hand etc.
To make things simple for myself I took the unoriginal route of making daily smoothies. I get 50%+ of my daily protein in the morning by blending whey protein powder, soy milk, spinach, blueberries, banana, cinnamon, walnut, and peanut butter (pb is still great don’t let the list fool you). I still eat most of the same foods as before, but I’m taking less pasta and bread now.
This is not nutrition advice. If that’s what you’re looking for, let me to refer you to the classic Michael Pollan quote:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Dietary protein intake and human health, International Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: protein and exercise↩