How much protein do you really need?

• by Yahoo!Green, on Mon Aug 8, 2011 2:48pm PDT

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By Sarah B. Weir and Lori Bongiorno
Posted Mon Aug 8, 2011 2:04pm PDT More from Green Picks blog

Guess how much protein is in a juicy, 8-ounce cheeseburger washed down with a milkshake? This single meal contains two to three times as much as most people need per day.

It’s no great surprise that Americans chow down on a lot of protein. We love beef and consume about 67 pounds per capita annually (that’s four times the international average). The popularity of low-carb regimes such as Atkins has also made meat the go-to food for dieters.

In fact, the average person eats about double the amount of protein that their body requires, according to the results of 2007-2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

How to fulfill your daily protein requirement

The human body uses protein to repair damaged cells and to build new ones. Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at NYU and author of What to Eat, estimates that the average adult man needs about 65 grams of protein a day and the average adult female needs about 55 grams. Some sources, such as the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization say you can maintain a healthy diet with even less.

What does this actually mean in terms of food choices? The National Institutes of Health explains that most people can meet their daily protein requirement by eating two to three small servings of a protein-rich food a day.

Examples of a single serving of protein include:

• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons of peanut butter
• 2-3 ounces of red meat, poultry, or fish (about the size of a deck of cards)
• ½ cup of cooked dried beans such as black beans or chickpeas

Whole grains, seeds, and some vegetables also contain protein, so consuming enough is not difficult even if you don’t eat meat. Vegetarians and vegans can easily get what they need by balancing complimentary proteins such as corn and beans or rice and tofu. Nutritionists used to recommend combining foods at the same meal, but research now shows that is unnecessary.

Are there drawbacks to eating more protein?

Eating large amounts of red and processed meats is associated with higher rates of heart disease and cancer, and most nutritionists such as Marion Nestle recommend cutting back on meat, especially on fatty cuts.

However, it’s less well known that your protein choices can have a substantial impact on the environment. Meat and dairy production requires tremendous amounts of fuel, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers, and generates greenhouse gases. The Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) recently published Meat Eater’s Guide points out that if you ate once less burger a week it would be the environmentally-positive equivalent of taking your car off the road for 320 miles.

Meat is also expensive. Not all proteins are created equal -- neither at the doctor’s office, nor the cash register. Here’s a comparison of three typical proteins:

Porterhouse steak
Serving size: 4 ounces
Protein: 22 grams
EWG carbon footprint rating: 2 nd worst out of 20 analyzed
Cost: 4 dollars
Fat: 22 grams
Saturated fat: 9 grams

Farm-raised salmon
Serving size: 4 ounces
Protein: 22 grams
EWG carbon footprint rating: 5th worst
Cost: 3 dollars
Fat: 10 grams
Saturated fat: 2 grams

Lentils
Serving size: 1 cup
Protein: 17.9 grams
EWG carbon footprint rating: best
Cost: 20 cents
Fat: zero
Saturated fat: zero

Many people find meat to be a delicious and satisfying component of their diet that they don’t want to sacrifice. But if you want to save money, eat a nutritionally sound diet, and are concerned about the impact meat and dairy production has on the planet, consider reducing your consumption.

Here are some tips from the EWG's Meat Eater’s Guide:

• Reduce portion sizes by eating one less burger or steak each week, or participate in Meatless Mondays by skipping meat (and cheese if you can swing it) just one day a week.
• Choose the healthiest protein sources when you can. Beans, low-fat yogurt, and nuts are all high in protein and low-impact.
• When you do eat meat and cheese, eat the highest quality that you can afford. (One way to save money is to eat less, but better quality meat and dairy products.) Here’s a guide decoding the labels, from cage-free to grass-fed.
• Don’t waste meat. Uneaten meat accounts for about 20 percent of meat’s greenhouse gas emissions.

You don’t have to become a vegetarian or go to other extremes. These small changes will help reduce your impact, while providing plenty of protein in your diet.

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Related: veggies, tips, pollution, health, food and drink

The Surprising Habits That Can Sink a Marriage

Dan Farrall / Getty Images

By Tara Parker-Pope

Can you spot a good marriage? I was pretty sure I could, starting with my own. My husband and I rarely argued, we had similar careers, we shared common interests. Things weren't perfect, but we seemed to be humming along in harmony better than most other couples we knew. In fact, nobody was more surprised than we were when our 17-year marriage ended in a New Jersey divorce court.

RELATED: Feel the Heat: How to Be Irresistible to Your Partner

It turns out, though, that the signs of trouble had been there all along, if only I'd known what to look for. Instead, I was judging my marriage by the wrong standards—which, I've since learned, most of us do. In one now-famous study, researchers asked therapists, married couples, and others to watch videotaped conversations of ten couples and try to identify the relationships that had ultimately ended in divorce. The results were abysmal—even the therapists guessed wrong half the time.

So how can you diagnose the health of your relationship? Armed with huge volumes of data on married couples, scientists have identified some simple but powerful indicators that can help couples recognize marital strife long before their relationship hits the skids.

QUIZ: How Well Do You Really Know Your Partner?
The Way You Were
Imagine a couple that go hiking on their first date. In a happy marriage, the wife might tell the story this way: "We got terribly lost that day. It took us hours to find our way back, but we laughed about how neither of us had a good sense of direction. After that, we knew better than to plan another hiking trip!"

RELATED: 11 Ways to Ruin a Summer Vacation

But if the relationship was stressed, she might tell the story this way: "He lost the map, and it took hours to find our way back. After that, I never wanted to go hiking again." Same story, but instead of reflecting a sense of togetherness—using pronouns like "we" and "us"—it's laced with negativity. Research has shown that analyzing what's known as the marital narrative—the way you talk about the good and bad times of your early years together—is about 90 percent accurate in predicting which marriages will succeed or fail.

RELATED: What's Your Love Type?

Had I been paying attention, my own how-we-met story could have told me a lot about how I was feeling in my marriage. Early in the relationship, when asked about our first date, I recounted a magical evening that ended with a walk around the Texas capitol building in Austin. I often laughed about the fact that I was limping the whole time because I'd recently had surgery on my foot. But later in my marriage, I changed the story slightly, always adding, "Of course, he didn't even notice."

RELATED: It's All About Timing: How to Make Sure Love Lasts

Fight or Flight
When my husband and I first married, I felt lucky that we almost never fought. But studies show it's a mistake to judge the quality of a relationship by how much or how little you argue, particularly in the early years.

University of Washington researchers studied newlywed couples and learned, not surprisingly, that those who rarely argued were happier in the relationship than those who fought often. But three years later, the findings had reversed. Couples with an early history of bickering had worked out their problems and were more likely to be in stable marriages. The couples who'd avoided conflict early on were more likely to be in troubled relationships or already divorced.

RELATED: 12 Simple Ways to Have Better Sex
Obviously, fighting that includes violence or verbal abuse is never acceptable. But most marital spats represent an opportunity to resolve conflicts and make things better. "We need to learn to tolerate conflict in our relationships," says Carolyn Cowan, a longtime marriage and family researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

KEEP READING: 3 More Surprising Habits That Can Sink a Marriage
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Related: relationships, marriage, love

An Easy Trick for Cutting Down on Junk Food Purchases

by Sarah Lorge Butler
Friday, August 5, 2011

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A new study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, reveals one way to curtail the purchase of Bavarian Espresso ice cream, Chips Ahoy and Coke, three items which, sad to say, currently occupy space in my kitchen.
What's the trick? Pay with cash, not credit or debit.

More from CBSMoneyWatch.com: • How to Beat Sneaky Supermarket Tricks • Best Way to Lose 20 Pounds • Why Your Dentist Costs So Much

Can it really be that easy to eliminate our family's ice cream sandwiches? I spoke to Manoj Thomas, assistant professor of marketing at Cornell and one of the authors on the study, for clarification.
"We found people had a larger proportion of unhealthy food items in their baskets when they paid by either credit card or debit card, compared to when they paid in cash," he says. This happens only with "vice" products, like cheesecake, cookies, and ice cream -- not yogurt, oatmeal or bread. For "healthy" products, he says, people spent the same amount, cash or credit.
I enjoy talking to people like Thomas, academics who study the data from our shoppers' club cards and devise experiments to test our behavior at the supermarket. Insights into how a shopping brain operates can help those of us trying to save money, shrink our waistlines, or both. Here's what Thomas said about the two major takeaways from his study:
"There are two distinct types of purchasing decisions, and most people don't realize that. The way I make a decision to buy a cookie is altogether different than the way I make a decision to buy oatmeal. I'm not aware of it, but in my mind, the process is very different. If I buy oatmeal, I'm thinking, 'What is the price of it, do I have more at home in my pantry, which brand is healthier?' It's very deliberate, and my decision is governed more by my thought process.
"But when I'm buying a cheesecake or ice cream, it's less deliberate, and it's also an interplay of how I feel about that product. I stand there, I think, 'How will I feel eating that cheesecake? Well, should I or should I not?' Sometimes you think less about it and succumb to your feeling. It's in those situations, that if you know you pay in cash, you become less susceptible to impulses. But all purchase decisions are not categorized by the same process."
The second big takeaway, Thomas says, is how prone we are to environmental influences that most times we're not even aware of. "Who would have thought that mode of payment would influence what we buy?" he says.
"Things in the environment that change the way we feel can influence what we buy. So if you really want to be a prudent shopper, you should try to have things in your environment that make you think more about your purchases. Go with a list in your hand, shop with people who are responsible, those kinds of things."
The list-in-hand strategy is well documented, but shopping with people who are responsible? Guess that eliminates anyone in my family. I'll be waiting for Thomas's study on what happens in the brain when you're shopping with kids in the cart.
___

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