You’ve decided a protein supplement might be useful. You’ve done battle with the wall of tubs in the nutrition shop, resisted the one promising some sort of “maximum anabolic matrix”, and finally made it home with something that looks as though it belongs in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gym locker.

Now what?

How much are you actually supposed to take? Should you have a full scoop every day? With breakfast? After exercise? Before bed? And are you adding protein because you genuinely need it, or simply because you now own 5lb of the stuff?

When I first checked the protein in my supposedly exemplary breakfast of muesli, Fruit ’n’ Fibre, nuts, seeds and milk, I found I was getting just 14g. Adding enough yoghurt, toast and peanut butter to bring it up to target worked, but also turned breakfast into rather more food (and calories) than I wanted. A small amount of protein powder solved the problem neatly.

That’s the sort of use we’re looking at today.

We’ve already covered how much protein you need at different stages of life, when supplements might be useful, and how to choose one without getting buried in marketing. This time, we’re getting practical.

We’ll work out where your normal diet is actually short, how much protein you need to add, and when food, part of a scoop or an occasional extra serving makes the most sense.

Start with what you actually need, not what the tub tells you

Meet Elsa and Carl.

They’re both retired. Most days you’ll find them out hiking or planning their next travel adventure. But recently, a few creaky knees and morning aches have made them pause. If they want to keep living the life they love, staying strong needs to become more intentional.

They’ve been reading about sarcopenia: the gradual loss of muscle mass and strength that accelerates as we age. One reason it accelerates is something called anabolic resistance. As we get older, our muscles become less responsive to the same protein stimulus. The amino acids are still arriving, but the signal to build muscle gets weaker. That means older adults generally need to be more deliberate about both the quantity and distribution of their protein intake.

Elsa and Carl have seen several articles suggesting they should aim for about 1.2g of protein per kilogram of body weight each day, spread across meals containing roughly 30–40g of protein each.

There’s good evidence behind that number. In a US study of adults aged 70–79, those consuming around 1.2g/kg/day lost about 40% less muscle over three years than those eating around 0.8g/kg/day. That’s an observational finding, so we can’t assume protein intake alone caused the difference, but it’s consistent with a wider body of evidence pointing in the same direction.

A quick bit of arithmetic makes their targets concrete:

• Elsa weighs 65kg (143lb). At 1.2g/kg, she needs about 78g of protein a day.

• Carl weighs 78kg (172lb). For him, the target is about 94g a day.

You might notice that these numbers don’t line up perfectly. Elsa’s daily target is about 78g, yet 30–40g at each of three meals would add up to 90–120g.

That’s because the two recommendations are answering slightly different questions. The 1.2g/kg figure is a guide to how much protein you need across the whole day. The 30–40g figure is about getting enough protein at a meal to stimulate muscle protein synthesis effectively. A more technical way of expressing the latter is around 0.4g/kg per meal, but I wouldn’t suggest getting the calculator out before every meal.

Think of 1.2g/kg as your daily target and 30–40g as a useful meal-sized target, particularly when you’re trying to protect muscle as you get older. They’re guides, not numbers that have to reconcile perfectly.

The couple think they eat a pretty healthy diet. But they have no idea whether the arithmetic actually works. So before changing anything, they download the free Cronometer app and log their normal meals for three days.

Breakfast was the weak spot

Breakfast comes as an unpleasant surprise.

Their generous bowl of muesli with berries and milk looks like a textbook healthy breakfast. Their grandchildren horrify them by starting the day with Pop-Tarts, and Elsa and Carl have always felt just a little superior.

But Cronometer tells a different story. Their breakfast gives them less than 17g of protein and just 0.8g of leucine. That’s a long way from 30–40g of protein, especially at breakfast, after an overnight fast when muscles have been broken down to supply amino acids for the body’s repair processes.

Why does leucine matter?

Leucine is one of the essential amino acids that make up protein, and it plays a particularly important role in muscle because it helps switch on muscle protein synthesis. In younger adults, around 2–2.5g of leucine at a meal is usually enough to produce a strong response. But once we get into our mid-sixties and beyond, anabolic resistance means it takes more.

A review of 38 studies found that in older adults, approximately 3–4g of leucine was associated with a doubling of muscle protein synthesis. That’s a useful range to aim for.

Adding a couple of spoonfuls of Greek yoghurt helped, but getting breakfast all the way to 30–40g would mean adding a substantial bowlful. They liked their breakfast as it was. This seemed like exactly the sort of gap a protein supplement was designed to fill.

Carl chose an ordinary whey concentrate. Whey is particularly rich in leucine, as animal proteins generally provide more leucine per gram of protein than plant proteins, making it easy to increase both their protein and leucine intake without needing a large serving. They considered a plant protein, but whey seemed the simpler choice here.

They found a 2lb tub of chocolate-flavoured whey concentrate for $38. The store assistant tried to upsell them to a fancy “pro” formula at more than sixty dollars, but they knew what they had would work just as well.

Here’s how the numbers work:

• One 30g scoop of their whey provides 25g protein + 2.5g leucine.

• 200ml (7oz) of milk adds 6.7g protein + 0.7g leucine.

• Their existing breakfast contributes <17g protein + 0.8g leucine.

A full scoop plus milk would take breakfast to roughly 49g of protein and 4.1g of leucine, which was more than they needed. They settled on two-thirds of a scoop, bringing breakfast to about 40g of protein and 3.2g of leucine - right on target.

Once you measure the gaps, different meals need different solutions

Once they both retired, Elsa and Carl made lunch their biggest meal of the day. Not only is this better metabolically than a big dinner, but they both found they slept better with a lighter evening meal. Their lunches usually hit their protein targets already, or were easily nudged there:

• Salmon, potatoes and green vegetables: around 28g of protein. Some Greek yoghurt and fruit for dessert pushes it comfortably over 30g.

• Chicken breast, quinoa and vegetables: already around 30g.

• Tuna and bean salad with wholegrain bread: again, around 30g.

There’s no useful role for protein powder when ordinary food already does the job.

Dinner is deliberately light. Typical meals include:

• Lentil soup and bread: 21–22g of protein.

• Baked potato and cottage cheese: 18–20g.

• Soup with cheese on toast: 20–21g.

These dinners could do with about 10g more protein. But rather than reach for another shake, Elsa and Carl made a list of ordinary foods providing roughly 10g of protein and stuck it on the inside of a kitchen cabinet door. Now they simply pick something from the list to boost dinner when it needs it.

If you’d like the 10g protein top-up cheat sheet for inside your kitchen cabinet door, you can download it here as a printable PDF:

10g protein top-up cheat sheet - US letter

10g protein top-up cheat sheet - A4

Elsa usually manages to reach her 78g a day without too much difficulty. Carl sometimes struggles. His appetite isn’t always what it used to be, and since they eat broadly the same meals, he often doesn’t get the extra 16g he needs to hit his higher target.

Carl read about a small study in men aged around 60, in which a bedtime dose of 25g milk protein concentrate cut overnight net protein loss by 99% compared with controls.

That sounds dramatic, but it was a small study looking at what happened overnight, not whether the men preserved more muscle over months or years.

Even so, the finding fits with other research showing that protein before bed can increase overnight muscle protein synthesis. Carl uses that evidence pragmatically. On days when he’s still short of his daily protein target, he has half a scoop of casein (a slowly absorbed milk protein) in the evening.

Why resistance exercise still matters

Elsa and Carl have always felt good about how much they walk. But their reading around muscle maintenance taught them the uncomfortable truth that walking isn’t enough. Aerobic exercise like walking and swimming is excellent for your cardiovascular system, but it’s resistance exercise that tells your body to maintain and build muscle.

Muscles are metabolically expensive tissues, and your body won’t invest in building more without a good reason. Resistance exercise is that reason. Consuming extra protein without strength training is like having bricks delivered every day when you forgot to hire the builders.

The couple subscribed to several YouTube channels specialising in strength exercises for older adults, and they now spend about 40 minutes, three times a week, exercising together in front of the TV. What started off feeling mildly ridiculous has become part of their routine, and both have already noticed firmer muscles.

What this means for your health

Once Elsa and Carl had logged a few ordinary days, the pattern became much clearer. They didn’t need more protein everywhere; they needed to fix a few specific gaps.

Their experience can be applied to most of us:

• Start by finding out where you’re short. Track a few representative days and compare what you’re eating with your daily protein target. You may find that one meal repeatedly falls short while the others are already doing perfectly well.

• The size of the gap tells you what to do next. If you’re missing a substantial amount of protein, a small serving of protein powder may be the easiest way to make it up. If dinner is only 10g short, ordinary food will often do just as well.

• Protein intake is only part of maintaining muscle. Your total across the day matters, and spreading it across meals with enough leucine becomes increasingly useful as you get older. Resistance exercise still provides the stimulus that tells your body to maintain and build muscle.

As always, your responses are anonymous, but they really help me tailor future content to what’s most helpful to you. Please take a moment to click a button.

HEALTH TWEAK OF THE WEEK

Protein powder works best when you treat it as a targeted gap-filler rather than a daily addition to an otherwise unchanged diet. Work out your daily protein target: around 1.2g per kg of body weight for older adults aiming to preserve muscle.

Identify where your normal meals consistently fall short, then use the smallest practical fix to close only those gaps.

1. Audit three ordinary days. Calculate your daily protein target, then log what you normally eat using a free app like Cronometer. Don’t change your diet while you’re measuring it. Look for the meals or days that repeatedly fall short, and note how large the gap is each time.

2. Fill only the gaps you find. Aim roughly for 30–40g of protein per meal if you’re an older adult. If you’re substantially short and making up the difference with food would turn the meal into something much larger than you want, protein powder is a convenient option, and you may not need a full scoop. A smaller shortfall of around 10g is often easy to make up with ordinary food. Meals that already hit the target can be left alone.

3. Give the protein somewhere useful to go. Pair adequate protein intake with regular resistance exercise: two to three sessions per week of around 30–40 minutes is a reasonable starting point. If your daily total still falls short on some days, an occasional evening protein supplement can help bridge the remaining gap, but treat it as a backup rather than a nightly habit.

You should now have a clearer idea of whether protein powder has a useful place in your diet. Once you know roughly what you need and where you tend to fall short, filling those gaps becomes fairly straightforward without turning every meal into a nutrition project.

🎧 Prefer to listen while wondering whether that full scoop is actually doing anything useful?

🎙️ This week’s One Health Tweak a Week podcast is about how to put protein powder to work once you’ve actually brought the tub home.

You’ll hear:

• How to work out roughly how much protein you need each day, and why older adults also benefit from paying attention to how it’s spread across meals

• How a seemingly healthy breakfast can turn out to be a surprisingly weak source of protein

• Why leucine matters more as we get older, and why whey can be particularly useful when you have a substantial gap to fill

• How to decide whether a shortfall calls for food, part of a scoop, or occasionally some protein later in the day

• Why all this works much better alongside regular resistance exercise

👉 Good company for your next walk, commute, or while discovering that the serving size on the tub is a suggestion rather than a commandment.

👉 Listen now!

(Episodes are free for now. Paid subscribers support the deeper research - and unlock practical tools to help you improve your health without turning it into a second job.)

🧭 Before you go

💬 Have you ever actually tracked how much protein you eat across a normal day? If so, where was your biggest surprise - breakfast, lunch, dinner, or the daily total?

Leave a comment

📤 Know someone who takes a scoop of protein powder every day but has never worked out how much protein they actually need? This might save them quite a lot of unnecessary shaking.

Share

👥 Paid corner - If you’re trying to work out where your own protein intake is falling short, drop me a message in our private chat. We can look at your usual meals and work out where food is enough and where a supplement might genuinely make life easier.

Until next Saturday - keep the protein where you need it, keep lifting something heavier than the remote control, and don’t let the serving scoop run your diet.

– Ben

If you missed the issue on how to choose the best protein powder for you, you can find it here:

In this episode, we look at how to use protein supplements in a practical, targeted way. We follow an active retired couple as they work out their daily protein needs, track what they normally eat and discover that they don’t need more protein at every meal. Breakfast is the main weak spot, lunch is usually fine, and dinner often needs only a small top-up.

We work through the numbers, including why a partial scoop may make more sense than blindly following the serving size on the tub, and explain why leucine becomes more important as we get older. We also tackle a common source of confusion: how a daily target of around 1.2g/kg fits with recommendations to aim for roughly 30–40g of protein at a meal.

Finally, we look at when an evening protein supplement might be useful, why food is often the better answer for smaller gaps, and why resistance exercise still matters if the goal is to preserve muscle and strength.

The aim is to give you a simple blueprint for working out where protein powder genuinely helps, and where it doesn’t.

If you’d like the 10g protein top-up cheat sheet for inside your kitchen cabinet door, you can download it here as a printable PDF:

10g protein top-up cheat sheet - US letter
10g protein top-up cheat sheet - A4

I eat quite a lot of legumes these days. But put me in front of a supermarket wall of kidney beans, chickpeas, lentils, cannellini beans and half a dozen varieties I barely recognise, and I still have a nagging sense that there must be a right one to buy.

What I cook depends more on what happens to be sitting in my kitchen cabinets than any culinary vision.

I couldn’t have given you a confident explanation of why cannellini beans should go into one dish and borlotti beans into another. I’m better at it now, after writing this article, but I’m certainly not about to challenge an Italian grandmother to a bean identification contest.

Last week, we made the case for eating more legumes, particularly when they replace foods such as red and processed meat or eggs.

Those eating the most had a 4–6% lower risk of dying prematurely from any cause. And the figures were substantially bigger when legumes replaced red or processed meat or eggs: estimated reductions of 7–10% in all-cause mortality, 12–23% in cardiovascular disease and 12–14% in type 2 diabetes.

So this week, let’s deal with the obvious next question: if you’re going to eat more of them, which should you choose?

Surely one bean is healthier than the others?

I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time comparing beans, and what I’ve found makes bean shopping easier.

Calories, protein and fibre: a surprisingly flat playing field

I checked the nutritional questions people most commonly search for about legumes online. The big three were overwhelmingly calories, protein and fibre.

Let’s start with calories, because this one can be disposed of fairly quickly.

Across the cooked legumes I compared, most fell into a fairly narrow range of roughly 105–140kcal per 100g. That’s 3.5oz, or a little less than half a cup.

We’re not comparing cucumber with cheesecake here, so I wouldn’t choose tonight’s dinner on the basis of these differences.

Protein is a little less uniform, but only a little.

Lentils and borlotti, or cranberry, beans do particularly well, with split peas also towards the top of the pack. If you’re deliberately trying to squeeze a little more protein into your diet, that’s worth knowing.

So, a few pull ahead, but the whole field is fairly tightly bunched. Lentils may win, but not by enough to plan your shopping list around them.

Fibre tells much the same story.

Again, lentils, borlotti beans and split peas sit towards the top, but they’re not in a different nutritional universe from everything else.

There is an important caveat here. When I compared several nutrition databases while preparing these figures, the values for individual legumes differed more than I’d expected. Variety, origin and preparation are all likely reasons.

So don’t get too attached to the precise rankings. The numbers vary between sources, but the overall pattern is consistent. All the legumes I looked at are nutritionally substantial.

Beyond protein and fibre

Protein and fibre get most of the attention, but legumes also bring a useful package of vitamins and minerals. Across the group, you’ll find folate, iron, magnesium, potassium, copper and manganese, alongside very little saturated fat, but there’s no clear winner.

One practical detail to keep in mind is that the iron in legumes is non-haem, which means it’s not as easily absorbed as the iron in meat. If legumes are becoming an important source of iron in your diet, pairing them with vitamin C-rich foods such as tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, or citrus is an easy habit to build into your meals and boosts absorption.

But the useful nutritional unit is still legumes as a food group, rather than whichever bean happens to edge ahead on this week’s spreadsheet.

Dried or canned?

There is, however, one choice in the bean aisle where the nutritional difference becomes a little more apparent.

Dried versus canned.

I prefer beans I’ve cooked from dried. The texture is usually better, and I think they taste better too. My problem is planning.

Quite often I’ll find myself with some unexpected time to cook, but without the time machine required to travel back to the previous evening and tell myself to soak the beans.

Since I was writing about beans, I wanted to find out whether dried and canned are nutritionally equivalent.

Fortunately, a group of French researchers compared beans that had been soaked and boiled with canned versions. The canned beans generally contained somewhat less of several measured nutrients, with protein reductions of around 17–30% in their comparisons.

Some nutrients are lost during processing, and some leach into the liquid in the can. Canning also reduced phytate and lectin in the researchers’ analysis, and that’s a good thing.

Does that 17–30% protein difference matter?

For many readers, probably not much. If beans are one of several protein sources, I’d be reluctant to turn this into yet another dietary optimisation project.

It becomes more relevant if legumes are doing a lot of your protein heavy lifting. That might include someone eating a predominantly plant-based diet, particularly later in life when protein requirements are higher. In that situation, getting more protein from the same volume of food can make life easier.

So dried beans get a modest gold star.

However, convenience counts. If dried beans mean that you cook beans twice a month while canned beans mean you eat them several times a week, I wouldn’t lose a moment’s sleep over the difference.

Use dried when you have the time and prefer them. Keep canned beans around for the evenings when yesterday’s soaking plan somehow failed to materialise.

Preparing dried beans safely

There is one aspect of dried-bean preparation that isn’t just culinary fussiness.

They need to be cooked properly.

Raw and undercooked beans can contain enough lectins to make you distinctly unwell - plants use them to deal with pesky insects. Heat deals with the problem, but recommendations vary on exactly how much preparation is required.

WHO guidance recommends soaking dried beans for 12 hours and boiling them for at least 10 minutes. FDA guidance recommends soaking for at least 5 hours and boiling them for at least 30 minutes, while also noting that around 10 minutes of boiling is sufficient to inactivate lectins.

Essentially, soak dried beans (usually overnight), then give them a proper boil.

Don’t put raw soaked beans straight into a slow cooker and assume that several hours of gentle warmth will do the same job. Some slow cookers may not get hot enough.

Canned beans have already been thoroughly heat-treated, so you don’t need to worry about this when opening a tin.

What about baked beans and hummus?

For anyone who’s not yet enthusiastically simmering lentils on a Saturday afternoon, two of the easiest introductory foods are probably baked beans and hummus.

There are Heinz baked beans in my cupboard. My one attempt at making Boston baked beans produced a result that didn’t justify the amount of optimism I’d invested in it.

It’s worth checking the label. Formulations differ considerably between products and countries, particularly in how much sugar is added. UK Heinz baked beans contain about 4.3% added sugar. I found US versions with as much as 15% sugar.

This was also how I discovered apple pie-flavoured baked beans in an American supermarket.

Fellow Brits may need a moment.

American food manufacturers have a strange habit of looking at a perfectly respectable savoury food and asking, “But could it be dessert?”

Hummus is an easy way to get chickpeas into your routine, but it’s worth checking the ingredients. Western diets already tend to provide plenty of omega-6 and relatively little omega-3, and many commercial hummus products add substantial amounts of sunflower or soybean oil.

If hummus is going to become a regular part of your diet, I’d look for one made primarily with extra-virgin olive oil instead, or make your own. It’s easy, and I think it tastes considerably better anyway.

Last week I asked how often you eat beans, lentils or chickpeas. Here’s what you told me:

• One in five of you eat legumes every day or most days

• Just over half of you eat legumes at least weekly: about a quarter 1–2 times a week and another quarter 3–5 times. About a quarter eat them less than once a week.

• Only 1 in 20 never eat legumes.

Only 1 in 10 found legumes upset their stomach too much, while 1 in 8 thought they took too much preparation.

A whopping 43% of you, almost half, said what held you back from eating more was not knowing good legume recipes

That sounds to me like a call to action!

Share a recipe we should all try

I’ve already admitted that I’m still something of a bean amateur. But I know many of you cook with beans, lentils, and chickpeas regularly and have a few dishes you come back to again and again.

So let’s pool that knowledge.

If you have a legume-based recipe that’s easy enough for someone relatively new to this kind of cooking and delicious enough to make again, please share it in the comments, either as the recipe itself or a link.

The aim is to give everyone reading this a collection of tried-and-tested ideas from other readers, especially dishes that might help turn beans and lentils from something we should eat into something we actually want in the weekly rotation.

To get us started, I asked a couple of fellow writers for their suggestions.

Author and YouTuber writes Mediterranean Minutes from her home in Spain. It’s full of delicious recipes all built around the Mediterranean diet.

Caroline’s delicious suggestions were:

• Herb and spice white beans

• Mashed butter beans

Caroline also shared one of her excellent and very popular meal plans. Look for the PDF download in the post.

• Healthy menu meal plan

Another writer whose recipes I love is , Harvard cancer doc and wellness writer. Ellen’s recipes are that rare combination of healthy and aspirational - the kind of food you can serve to impress at a dinner party.

Ellen shared a couple of delicious recipes for cannellini beans and chickpeas.

• Orecchiette with Rabe and White Beans

• Roasted Vegetable Couscous and Chickpea Bowl

I’d highly recommend checking out both Caroline’s and Ellen’s newsletters.

What this means for your health

Once you stop trying to rank legumes nutritionally, the useful differences become culinary. What do you want them to do in the dish?

Red lentils and yellow or red split peas soften and partly break down, so they’re ideal when you want them to disappear into soups, dals, curries, ragù or sauces. Green and brown lentils stay more distinct; Puy or French lentils are firmer and earthier still.

For creaminess, think cannellini or butter beans. If you want more bite and a more substantial presence, chickpeas, kidney beans, black beans and pinto beans work naturally in chilli, curries, salads, tacos and grain bowls. Black beans, adzuki and mung beans are useful when you want the bean itself to contribute more character.

For someone still slightly bean-sceptical, I’d probably start with red lentils. They need no soaking, cook quickly and can almost vanish into the surrounding sauce. Chickpeas are the opposite sort of gateway: more obvious, but extraordinarily versatile, working intact or puréed.

My own shift towards eating less meat and more legumes started because I was thinking about long-term health. What surprised me was that I eventually began to prefer many of the legume-based meals.

If you want a dietary change to last, don’t build it around food you think you ought to eat. There are too many delicious curries, dals, ragùs, soups, chillies and stews in the world to choke down beans and kale as though someone has prescribed them as penance.

HEALTH TWEAK OF THE WEEK

There’s no compelling reason to hunt for the healthiest legume. Common beans, lentils, chickpeas and split peas are all nutritionally useful, and the modest differences between them matter much less than whether you enjoy eating them regularly. Dried beans have a measurable nutritional edge in composition studies, but canned beans remain an excellent option when convenience is what gets them onto your plate.

1. Choose according to what you’re cooking.

Red lentils work well when you want them to soften into a curry, soup or sauce. Cannellini and butter beans are creamier, while chickpeas, kidney beans, black beans and pinto beans have more bite and tend to hold their shape.

You don’t need to memorise all of that. Just start with the sort of meal you already enjoy and choose a legume that fits it.

2. Keep a convenient option around.

Use dried beans when you have the time and prefer the taste and texture. I still keep canned beans in the cupboard because they’re much more useful when dinner wasn’t planned 12 hours earlier.

If they’re packed in brine, rinse them before using, or choose a no-added-salt version. And if you’re cooking dried beans, soak them and boil them properly rather than relying on a slow cooker alone.

3. Start with one dish that genuinely appeals to you.

For your first few experiments, forget about choosing the recipe that looks the most virtuous. Pick one that makes you think, That looks yummy.

A red-lentil curry or soup is an easy place to start. Lentil ragù works well if you’d rather the legumes blend into something familiar, while creamy white-bean dishes are a good option if you want the beans to be more obvious.

If you enjoy the result, put it into your regular rotation. Once you’ve found one or two legume dishes you actually look forward to, eating them more often becomes natural.

🎧 Prefer to listen while wondering why the bean aisle suddenly seems to require specialist knowledge?

🎙️ This week’s One Health Tweak a Week podcast is about choosing legumes without turning dinner into another optimisation project: which beans and lentils are nutritionally strongest, whether dried really beat canned, and which varieties work best in different dishes.

You’ll hear:

• Why the nutritional differences between most common legumes are smaller than you might expect

• Which beans and lentils have a modest edge for protein and fibre

• Whether dried beans are genuinely better than canned, and when the difference might matter

• The simple preparation rule that makes dried beans safe to eat

• Why choosing by taste, texture and what you’re cooking matters more than finding the nutritional winner

👉 Good company for your next walk, commute, or while looking at six nearly identical tins of beans and wondering whether choosing the wrong one could possibly matter this much.

👉 Listen now!

(Episodes are free for now. Paid subscribers support the deeper research - and unlock practical tools to help you improve your health without turning it into a second job.)

🧭 Before you go

💬 What’s the legume dish you’d genuinely be pleased to eat again next week? It could be a dal, chilli, hummus, lentil ragù, baked beans on toast, or something considerably more sophisticated than anything currently emerging from my kitchen.

Leave a comment

📤 Know someone who wants to eat more beans or lentils but gets stuck at the what on earth do I buy? stage? Forward this to them.

Share

👥 Paid corner - If there’s a bean, lentil or chickpea dish you make regularly and genuinely love, share it in our private chat. I’d like to build up a collection of reader-tested ideas that are delicious enough to earn a permanent place in the rotation.

Until next Saturday - buy whichever bean suits dinner, keep a tin or two for emergencies, and don’t lose sleep over whether cannellini narrowly beat chickpeas on somebody’s nutrient spreadsheet.

– Ben

In this episode, we take a practical look at how the main legumes compare nutritionally, including calories, protein, fibre and key micronutrients. We’ll see why there probably isn’t a single “best” bean, although lentils, borlotti beans and split peas do have a modest edge in a few areas.

We also look at the one comparison where the differences are more noticeable: dried versus canned beans. We’ll cover what canning does to protein and other nutrients, when that might matter, and why convenience still deserves a place in the decision.

Then we get into the useful bit: which legumes work best in soups, curries, chilli, ragù, salads and creamy dishes, plus how to prepare dried beans safely.

The aim isn’t to optimise your bean cupboard. It’s to help you find a few legume-based meals you genuinely enjoy enough to make again.

Beans are almost universally considered healthy. They feature in every reputable healthy-eating pattern: Mediterranean, DASH, AHEI. And yet they occupy a strangely marginal place in most Western diets.

If your main experience of “eating more beans” involves tipping a tin of something grey and slightly slimy into a saucepan, warming it through and wondering why vegetarians do this to themselves, you’re not alone. There are dozens of varieties to choose from; most of us have tried about three, and the results haven’t always been inspiring.

The consumption figures reflect this. Americans and Canadians average about 21g of legumes a day. Australians manage 26g. Even the UK, the highest consumer in Europe, only reaches 45g. Compare that with New Zealand at 68g, Israel at 75 g, or Afghanistan at 123g. At least some of us know how to eat beans!

(If any New Zealand readers can explain why you eat so many more beans and lentils than your Australian neighbours, I’d genuinely love to know.)

I eat legumes fairly regularly, but I’d still call myself a bean amateur. I’ve also been curious about the fact that while legumes appear in virtually every healthy-eating pattern, when you look closely at the research, the effects aren’t always as dramatic as their reputation might suggest. That prompted this deeper look.

So I dug into the science to find out what legumes actually do for our health.

And I ended up thinking we may have been asking the wrong question.

The science

There are good reasons to expect legumes to be healthy

Legumes are an unusual nutritional package. They deliver meaningful protein alongside fibre and resistant carbohydrate, minerals and polyphenols, while providing very little saturated fat.

That protein-fibre combination is particularly useful. Protein has become something of an obsession lately, and most younger adults eating a mixed diet don’t need to spend much time trying to maximise it. But it becomes more important as we get older, and it deserves more attention in vegetarian and vegan diets.

Legumes can help provide it without giving up the fibre and other components of minimally processed plant foods.

There are plausible reasons why that package might improve metabolic health. Soluble fibre and phytosterols can help lower cholesterol, while resistant carbohydrate reaches the colon and feeds gut bacteria.

That sounds impressive, but the more important test is whether people who eat more legumes actually live longer or develop less disease.

The long-term signal is favourable, but not dramatic

When I’m evaluating a food’s health credentials, I like to start with the ultimate test: is eating more of it associated with a lower risk of dying prematurely?

For legumes, the answer is yes, but modestly.

In a meta-analysis of 32 studies involving 1,141,793 participants, those eating the most legumes had a 6% lower risk of premature death from any cause compared with those eating the least.

A comprehensive 2024 review found a broadly similar figure: roughly 4% lower all-cause mortality among higher consumers. The researchers calculated that for someone aged 30–50, increasing legume consumption to 100g per day long-term might lead to an extra year of life expectancy.

An earlier modelling study took this further. Using the best available data on specific foods and life expectancy, Norwegian researchers estimated that a 20-year-old switching from typical intake (essentially zero) to optimal legume consumption (200g cooked per day) might increase their life expectancy by 2.2–2.5 years. For a 60-year-old making the same change, the figure was 1.6 years.

I love this graph. It shows that predicted gains can be measured in years, not weeks, and that there are potential benefits at whatever age you start eating more. It’s never too late to eat healthier.

It’s important to note that these are statistical models, not guaranteed extra birthdays, and that 200g isn’t a universally accepted optimal dose of legumes. But they illustrate how a modest difference in risk, sustained over decades, could become meaningful.

These aren’t huge effects, but I don’t think that’s a reason to dismiss them. Few individual foods are likely to transform your chances of healthy ageing. But it looks like legumes are one of the foods that nudge the odds in the right direction.

Cardiovascular evidence is less tidy

If legumes really do contribute to lower premature mortality, cardiovascular disease would be an obvious route.

One comprehensive review found that those eating the most legumes had an 8% lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 10% lower risk of coronary heart disease, though the researchers rated their certainty as low.

A meta-analysis of 26 studies found broadly similar figures: 6% lower cardiovascular disease and 10% lower coronary heart disease among highest consumers.

However, a meta-analysis of 47 studies involving more than 2 million participants found no significant association between legume consumption and cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease or stroke.

So I don’t think the evidence supports saying that eating more beans has been shown to prevent heart disease. They might, but the jury’s out, and observational studies can’t prove cause and effect.

What is more consistent is the effect on intermediate markers. In that same 47-study analysis, those eating the most legumes had LDL cholesterol roughly 0.15mmol/l (about 5%) lower than those eating the least. Fasting glucose also tends to be modestly lower (by about 0.09–0.19mmol/l).

These effects are plausible: soluble fibre binds bile acids, phytosterols inhibit cholesterol absorption, and both fibre and polyphenols may support a healthier gut microbiome.

So the pattern is a little mixed. Legumes provide excellent nutrition, and there’s a modest reduction in the risk of dying prematurely. But favourable changes in blood lipids aren’t consistently matched by a reliably lower risk of cardiovascular disease. There’s also some interesting evidence that high legume consumption might be linked to a lower risk of colon cancer, but again it’s not consistent enough for me to state it as fact.

So, what if the real advantage of legumes becomes clearer when we stop asking what happens when we add them and ask what happens when they replace something else?

The case becomes more compelling when legumes replace something

Legumes work two ways simultaneously. They bring protein, fibre, resistant carbohydrate and useful plant compounds into the diet, while displacing foods with more saturated fat and less favourable long-term health profiles.

German researchers collated 24 prospective studies and examined substitution effects specifically.

• Replacing 50g of unprocessed red meat daily with legumes was associated with a 7% lower risk of premature death from any cause.

• Replacing 50g of processed meat: 9% lower mortality, 23% lower cardiovascular disease, 15% lower coronary heart disease, 12% lower type 2 diabetes.

• Replacing 1 egg per day: 10% lower mortality, 12% lower cardiovascular disease, 14% lower type 2 diabetes.

Again, these are observational substitution analyses, not proof of causation. But the consistency across endpoints and food types is notable.

A Finnish trial offered experimental support. Over six weeks, 107 men ate either a high red and processed meat diet or one where legume-based foods replaced most of the meat. Both groups consumed similar protein and carbohydrate. But the legume group took in more fibre and polyunsaturated fat, and less saturated fat and cholesterol.

LDL cholesterol fell by 0.19mmol/l (~6%) in the legume group, while it rose by 0.16mmol/l (~5%) in the meat group. The legume group also lost more weight (1kg vs 300g).

A separate meta-analysis of 60 randomised trials calculated that each 1mmol/l fall in LDL lowers the relative risk of a major cardiovascular event by about 22%. A 6% LDL reduction might, therefore, plausibly translate to a 3–4% lower risk over several years, though that extrapolation remains hypothetical.

The evidence, then, suggests that rather than finding room to add a spoonful of beans or lentils to the plate, we’ll reap greater rewards by removing some red or processed meat, or eggs first, and using legumes as a replacement, not a side dish.

But what about the dreaded “anti-nutrients”?

No discussion of legumes survives very long on the internet before someone raises “anti-nutrients”.

I dislike the term because it takes a real piece of biochemistry and turns it into a verdict on the whole food.

Phytates are a good example. Plants use them to store phosphorus, and their chemical structure allows them to bind minerals including iron, zinc and calcium in the gut. That can become important when a diet is already marginal in those minerals and depends heavily on a narrow range of phytate-rich staples. This is principally a problem in poor rural communities in developing countries; it’s much less likely to matter if you’re eating a varied, nutrient-sufficient diet in Seattle or Frankfurt.

For most of us eating a varied, nutrient-sufficient diet, it’s a very different proposition. Gut bacteria can break phytates down, food preparation reduces them, and vitamin C can help offset their effect on iron absorption. Diets rich in whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds are intrinsically high in phytates, yet are consistently associated with good health. That’s not what you’d expect to see if phytates were harmful.

Phytates also have potentially beneficial properties (antioxidant properties, reduced levels of inflammatory compounds and associations with lower risk of kidney stones and arterial calcification), which makes the blanket “anti-nutrient” label look even less helpful.

Oxalates deserve a little more attention if you’re particularly susceptible to kidney stones or have a condition, like inflammatory bowel disease, that increases oxalate absorption. But soaking and boiling reduce them substantially, while commercial canning removes around 86–93%.

Lectins are the genuine practical exception. Raw or undercooked beans can cause acute gastrointestinal illness. Thorough boiling removes almost all lectins, and canned beans are safe: you’d need to eat roughly a thousand full cans to reach the dose associated with symptoms. Slow cooking or microwaving alone may not reach high enough temperatures, so either boil dried beans first, or use canned.

Which brings me to a confession.

I’m a keen gardener, and this year I have a good crop of runner beans. As they taste delicious, I’d been munching on some while pottering about in the garden. On several occasions I found myself making unexpected and rather urgent trips to the bathroom, completely baffled as to what was upsetting my usually cast-iron stomach. It was only while researching this issue that I learned runner beans should never be eaten raw.

So, while I haven’t changed my mind about “anti-nutrients”, I have acquired a new respect for the much simpler advice to cook beans before eating them. Lesson learned.

And then there’s gas

The other reason people hesitate is gas. Legumes contain lots of fibre and resistant starch, which reach the colon undigested and get fermented by gut bacteria. One product of that fermentation is gas. For many people, the assumption that more beans equals more flatulence is enough to put them off.

The reality is more reassuring than you’d think. In a study where participants ate half a cup of beans daily for 8–12 weeks, about 35% experienced flatulence and 13% bloating in the first week, but for most, it was a single occasion. Symptoms usually resolved within a few weeks as the body adapted.

At this point, I’m left reflecting on what my life has come to that I’m creating graphs about flatulence!

Anyway, the practical answer is simple: if you currently eat very few legumes, build up gradually rather than going from almost none to a heroic bowl of beans every day.

What this means for your health

Legumes deserve their healthy reputation. The nutritional package is excellent, and higher consumption is consistently associated with modestly better long-term health outcomes.

But their direct, independent effects are mostly modest, and cardiovascular findings are genuinely inconsistent. If you’re expecting beans alone to dramatically lower your disease risk, the evidence doesn’t quite support that.

The substitution evidence changes the practical picture. Much of their usefulness seems to come from doing two things at once: bringing fibre-rich plant food into the diet while displacing some red or processed meat or eggs. In practice, that means thinking about where legumes can replace something already on your plate.

“Anti-nutrient” concerns don’t overturn that conclusion for most people eating a varied diet. The one universal safety rule I’ll no longer ignore is to cook beans properly.

I don’t think the evidence identifies a magic dose. My own target is to work towards roughly 100g of cooked legumes per day on average. That’s deliberately ambitious compared with typical Western intakes, but realistic enough to create regular opportunities for substitution.

As always, your responses are anonymous, but they really help me tailor future content to what’s most helpful to you. Please take a moment to click a button.

HEALTH TWEAK OF THE WEEK

Legumes deserve a much bigger place in most of our diets.

Higher legume intake is associated with a 4–6% lower risk of dying prematurely. That may not sound enormous, but healthy ageing is built by stacking exactly these sorts of modest advantages over decades, and legumes also bring a particularly useful combination of protein, fibre, resistant carbohydrate and polyphenols with very little saturated fat.

Better still, you can increase the potential benefit by using them to replace some red or processed meat, or eggs, rather than simply adding them to what you already eat.

1. Work towards ~100g (3.5 oz) cooked legumes per day on average.
That’s roughly half a cup, and well above typical Western intake. If you’re starting from very little, build up over a few weeks. Think weekly average rather than compulsory daily quota: four days at 150g (5 oz) and three at zero gets you there. Increasing gradually also gives your gut time to adapt and minimises any initial discomfort.

2. Get there mainly through substitution.
Rather than adding beans on top of everything else, use them to replace some of the red or processed meat, or an egg-based meal, you’d normally eat. A bean chilli instead of a beef one, lentils in a bolognese, or chickpeas/garbanzos in place of some of the chicken. Three ~100g swaps this week is an easy starting point.

3. Prepare them properly.
Canned legumes are already safely cooked: convenient, affordable and perfectly fine. If cooking dried beans, boil them thoroughly: don’t rely solely on slow cooking, which may not reach high enough temperatures to remove lectins. And whatever you do, don’t eat them raw. Trust me on that one.

Don’t worry about optimising which legumes to choose just yet. Next week, we’ll look at the practical side: which beans give you the best nutritional return, how to make them genuinely enjoyable and how to build them into meals that actually make you want to eat them again.

🎧 Prefer to listen while deciding whether your next chilli really needs quite so much beef?

🎙️ This week’s One Health Tweak a Week podcast takes a closer look at beans, lentils and chickpeas: why they deserve their healthy reputation, where the evidence is less impressive than you might expect, and why their biggest advantage may be what they replace.

You’ll hear:

• Why higher legume intake is associated with a 4–6% lower risk of premature death

• Why the evidence for preventing cardiovascular disease is more mixed, despite favourable effects on LDL cholesterol

• Why replacing some red or processed meat, or eggs, with legumes may be more useful than simply adding beans to what you already eat

• Whether you really need to worry about “anti-nutrients”, lectins and gas

• Why I now have considerably more respect for the advice not to eat raw runner beans

👉 Good company for your next walk, commute, or while staring at a tin of chickpeas and wondering whether lunch really has to involve hummus again.

👉 Listen now!

(Episodes are free for now. Paid subscribers support the deeper research - and unlock practical tools to help you improve your health without turning it into a second job.)

🧭 Before you go

💬 How often do legumes make it onto your plate at the moment? Are you already eating beans or lentils several times a week, or are they still something you buy with good intentions and rediscover six months later at the back of the cupboard?

Leave a comment

📤 Know someone who still thinks beans are mainly vegetarian penance, or who has been frightened off them by warnings about “anti-nutrients”? Forward this to them.

Share

👥 Paid corner - If you’re trying to eat more legumes but aren’t sure where they fit into your existing meals, drop me a message in our private chat and I’ll help you think through some realistic swaps.

Until next Saturday - eat more legumes, preferably in place of something rather than on top of it, and cook the beans before sampling them in the garden.

– Ben

In this episode, we look at the evidence linking higher legume intake with a lower risk of premature death, including statistical models suggesting that relatively modest reductions in risk could add up over decades. We also examine the cardiovascular evidence, which is more mixed than you might expect, and the more consistent effects on LDL cholesterol and other metabolic markers.

The most interesting part of the story, though, may be what legumes replace. Studies suggest that swapping some red or processed meat, or eggs, for beans, lentils or chickpeas could offer greater benefits than simply adding legumes to your existing diet. We’ll look at why, and whether you can make those swaps without sacrificing protein.

We also tackle two of the main reasons people hesitate to eat more legumes: concerns about so-called “anti-nutrients” and the fear of digestive discomfort. Most of those worries are overblown, although there are a few important preparation rules worth knowing.

The practical goal: work towards roughly 100g of cooked legumes a day, mainly by using them as a replacement food.

In a recent issue, we looked at who might benefit from a protein supplement.

The most likely beneficiaries are older adults struggling to reach 30 to 40g of protein per meal, plant-based eaters fighting food volume, people trying to preserve muscle while losing weight, and anyone recovering from illness or surgery.

Of course, whole foods should always come first, but there’s undoubtedly a place for a protein supplement to top up any remaining gap.

However, if you’ve ever walked into a sports nutrition store, you’ll know how intimidating those places can be. The shelves are stacked with tubs so large they look like you’d need a 3-month weights program just to lift them. Neon labels and shouty fonts promise lean muscle, fat loss, and peak performance.

Confused, you look around for help. An assistant with bulging biceps steers you toward a tub called AnaboCore Maxx. He carries it to the till for you, and that’s where you discover it costs enough for a fancy dinner for two. You take it home, not quite sure what you just bought, or what to do with it.

Or was that just me!

Thankfully, it’s almost all hype and marketing in what is, after all, a huge industry. Choosing a protein supplement to meet your needs is pretty simple, and that’s what we’re looking at today.

We’re only looking at protein powders. Ignore protein bars and things like high protein breakfast cereals, snacks and puddings. They’re just ultra-processed foods with a little whey and a price hike.

By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly what to look for, what to avoid, and how to choose a protein powder that actually fits your goals, not the store assistant’s commission.

Your first decision: animal or plant protein?

Milk whey protein is by far the most common protein supplement. It’s popular for good reason: it’s absorbed fast, well tolerated by most, and has a relatively high leucine content (around 11%). As we’ve discussed before, leucine is the key amino acid that flips the muscle-building switch.

There are other animal-derived protein supplements, including:

• Casein, another milk protein that’s absorbed more slowly than whey.

• Beef protein and egg white powders, which are quite uncommon.

• Collagen, the darling of wellness influencers.

You may also have seen collagen supplements promoted as miracle powders for skin, joints, gut health, even muscle. But collagen is a bit of an outlier in the protein world.

Collagen is a poor choice if your aim is to build or maintain muscle. It lacks the essential amino acid tryptophan, but more importantly, it contains very little leucine and has a much less favourable essential amino-acid profile than whey, soy or pea protein. In studies comparing them directly, collagen stimulates muscle protein synthesis much less effectively.

While whey is quickly digested to produce a short, high spike of amino acids in the bloodstream, casein is digested much more slowly. It’s sometimes taken at night to prevent the body from breaking down muscle to release amino acids for overnight repair and maintenance.

For most people, the straightforward option is whey.

If whey works well, why might someone choose a plant protein instead?

• Firstly, of course, you may not want to use animal products, or you may avoid dairy.

• If you have IBS, lactose intolerance, or general digestive issues, plant proteins can be easier to tolerate.

• Because plant proteins are digested more slowly, they can keep you fuller for longer and help with appetite control.

• Plant proteins are produced with less environmental impact. Less CO₂, less water, and no cows.

• And, very importantly given the current cost of living, they’re cheaper.

The most common plant protein options are pea protein, soy protein, and plant protein blends, like pea and rice.

You may hear people say that plant proteins are ‘incomplete’, (meaning they don’t contain all of the essential amino acids we must get from the diet because our body can’t manufacture them) as though that makes them second-rate. In practice, that only matters if you’re getting most of your protein from that single source, which we’re not.

• Soy protein is complete. You’ll get the same amino acids as in whey, just in slightly different ratios.

• Pea protein is low in methionine, but methionine is abundant in nuts, seeds, and whole grains. If you’re eating a decent diet and topping up with a pea protein supplement, you’ll get plenty. A recent trial showed that pea protein stimulated muscle growth just as effectively as whey.

• Many plant protein blends (like pea + rice) are designed to complement each other and provide all essential amino acids in sufficient amounts.

So, once you’ve decided on whey or a plant protein, how do you decide which pack to take home?

If whey, which whey?

You may have confidently decided that whey is right for you. That confidence may ebb away once you walk into the store and are faced with yet another decision tree: do you want whey concentrate, whey isolate or whey hydrolysate? Or maybe a combination?

This is the unnecessary upsell that drives extra spending you don’t need.

• Whey protein concentrate: This is the best choice for most of us. It’s typically around 80% protein. It’s often creamier and better tasting than purer forms, and it’s the cheapest whey option. It does contain some lactose, fat and carbs, so if you need to avoid those, then it’s not the best choice for you.

• Whey protein isolate: This typically contains about 90% protein and is usually very low in lactose and fat. It mixes to a thinner consistency, and some are designed to resemble juice. It usually costs 25-30% more than whey concentrate. It’s a good option if you’re lactose intolerant or get bloated from concentrate.

• Whey protein hydrolysate: This is also about 90% protein, but it’s been processed to be absorbed slightly faster. It’s often bitter-tasting, so usually mixed with flavourings and sweeteners or blended with other forms. It’s almost twice the price of whey concentrate. You only need hydrolysate if your doctor or elite athletic coach says so; otherwise, it’s pointless.

You’ll often see blends of these three. These are usually more about marketing than meaningful nutritional advantage. It’s a reason to price the product higher.

For most of us, then, whey concentrate is the sensible choice; pay extra for isolate if lactose intolerance gives you a reason to, and ignore hydrolysate unless you have a very specific need for it.

Now let’s see how the different supplements stack up against one another, and how you can choose between them.

Do some supplements give you more protein?

Since the principal reason to take a protein supplement is to get extra protein, you want to be sure that supplement delivers.

In reality, they’re much the same.

The graph above should reassure you that, despite what the marketing might suggest, there’s little to choose between them when it comes to protein content. A 30g scoop (there’s nearly always one in the pack) delivers 23-27g of protein.

Most of the time, you’re not trying to replace an entire meal with a scoop of powder - you’re just topping up to hit optimal protein targets for muscle building.

Here’s what the science suggests we need:

• For younger and middle-aged adults: 20–25g of protein per meal

• For adults around 60 and above: 30–40g per meal

If, for example, your breakfast provides 14g of protein, you’d need:

• 6–11g more if you’re under 60

• 16–26g more if you’re over 60

That’s where a protein supplement comes in handy: not as a full meal, but as a simple top-up that ensures you’re hitting the sweet spot for muscle protein synthesis.

Leucine: the spark for muscle protein synthesis

Leucine is the spark that lights the fire of muscle protein synthesis.

It’s not just another amino acid - it’s the key trigger that tells your body: “Time to build muscle.” To get the full benefit from your protein, you need to hit the per-meal leucine threshold:

• Around 2g for younger adults

• 3–4g for those in their sixties and beyond

Here’s how different supplements compare.

Whey protein comes out on top here. Plant proteins contain around a third less leucine.

If you’re under 60, you’ll get the 2g of leucine you need from a single 30g scoop of any of these protein supplements.

If you’re over 60, you’ll need a bit more: One heaped scoop of whey (35-40g), or 1.5 to 2 scoops of a plant-based protein.

But remember, we’re topping up, not replacing a meal. Those figures assume the powder is providing the leucine all by itself. In real life, we’re topping up a meal, so the leucine already in your food counts too.

Making sure you get value for money

While most of us are, of course, happy to invest in our health, we also want to be sure we’re getting value for money. There’s certainly a risk here of spending more than you need to.

As the graph shows, there’s a three-fold difference in price between the cheapest and most expensive formulations - and that’s before we compare generic vs prestige brand prices.

Plant protein clearly has the advantage here, and you can also see the contrast between whey concentrate (ideal for almost everyone) and the more processed isolate and hydrolysate forms.

What else is in there?

There’s no escaping the fact that protein powders are ultraprocessed food, so ideally we want to avoid any unnecessary additives.

Here’s what we often find on the ingredients panel, and my take on them:

• Artificial sweeteners: For those of you who’ve been reading One Health Tweak a Week for a while, you’ll know I’m not a fan of artificial sweeteners. Many have been variously linked to higher risks of premature death, cardiovascular disease and some cancers. The strength of evidence varies between sweeteners and outcomes, but taken together I think there’s enough concern to avoid consuming them unnecessarily.

  
  And in this context, they’re unnecessary. If you’re going to rely on a protein powder regularly, perhaps for years, why choose one containing artificial sweeteners when you can simply buy an unflavoured or stevia-sweetened version instead?

  
  That greatly restricts the available flavours, but then if I have a craving for lemon meringue pie, I’ll make a real one.
  

• Salt: Soy protein is the standout here. Many soy powders contain much higher levels of salt/sodium. In some cases, a single scoop can contain 800mg salt / 320mg sodium. That’s a lot. If you have high blood pressure or if you’re taking multiple scoops of powder throughout the day, this is something to be aware of. Brands differ, so check the nutrition label of the one you’re considering.
  

• Maltodextrin: This is essentially a high-calorie filler. You mostly see it in the mass gainer brands - designed to provide protein and calories - or as a filler in cheaper brands.
  

• Stabilisers: Lecithin is an emulsifier that helps the powder mix more easily. Silicon dioxide and calcium silicate absorb moisture to prevent clumping. These are widely used, well-studied, and not associated with health risks.
  

• Gums: These are added to give that thick, milkshake-like texture people expect. Examples are guar gum, xanthan gum, or carrageenan. They’re generally considered safe, but if you’re prone to bloating or digestive sensitivity, they may be worth avoiding.

I often get asked about heavy metals in protein powders. Testing has repeatedly found trace amounts of lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury in some products, and recent US surveys have reported surprisingly high levels in a minority of them.

But interpreting those results is much harder than the headlines suggest.

For one thing, these metals occur naturally in soil and therefore turn up in much of our food. What matters is how much extra you might get from a protein supplement.

Studies also disagree about which powders are most affected. Large US surveys have found considerably more lead and cadmium in plant-based powders than in whey, while studies from other countries haven’t replicated that or even shown the opposite.

Even the definition of an “unsafe” amount varies enormously. Consumer Reports uses an exceptionally stringent threshold for lead, then reports that some supplements contain levels many times higher than this. There is no safe level of lead intake, but we ingest it from food and the environment every day, which makes some of the more alarming headlines difficult to translate into actual health risk.

At the same time, for older adults in particular, there are significant risks to health and longevity from not getting enough protein.

So my approach is very practical. Don’t use more protein powder than you need. Work out roughly how much protein your meal already contains and use enough powder to close the gap. You don’t need to automatically take a full scoop just because there’s one in the tub.

And I’d avoid high-dose mass-gainer or bulking products. These involve taking far larger quantities of powder, and they’ve often had higher levels of heavy metals.

For someone adding half a scoop or a scoop to breakfast every day because they’re falling short on protein, I don’t think the evidence currently justifies giving up a useful protein supplement because of heavy-metal fears.

Where protein supplements fit

For some people, getting enough protein from food is easy. For others, it’s more of a challenge.

Older adults need more protein per meal at the same time as appetite starts to fall. People losing weight are trying to preserve muscle while eating fewer calories. Those recovering from illness or surgery may also struggle to eat enough.

Maintaining muscle as we age is about much more than looking strong. It helps preserve mobility, reduces the risk of frailty, and makes it more likely that we can continue living independently.

In those situations, a protein supplement can be genuinely useful. Adding 10 or 20g of protein to a meal can help close a gap that would otherwise persist day after day.

There are sensible reasons to pay attention to the type of protein you choose, what else is in the powder, and how much you use. But if your usual meals are consistently falling short of the protein you need, a supplement can be a practical way to bring them up to target and help protect the muscle you’ll rely on later in life.

As always, your responses are anonymous, but they really help me tailor future content to what’s most helpful to you. Please take a moment to click a button.

HEALTH TWEAK OF THE WEEK

Ideally, you’d meet all your daily protein requirements from whole foods, but sometimes that’s easier said than done.

The people most likely to struggle are older adults trying to eat 30–40g of protein per meal in the face of declining appetites, those eating a plant-based diet who may need formidable volumes of food to reach those targets, people trying to lose weight without losing muscle, and anyone recovering from illness or surgery.

In these situations, a protein supplement can be a quick and easy way to top up a meal. You don’t necessarily need a full scoop: work out roughly how much protein your usual meal provides, then add enough powder to close the gap. Do that a few times, and you’ll soon have a good feel for how much your regular meals need.

If you’re not sure how much protein is in a typical meal, free tools like Cronometer help you work that out easily.

First, choose your protein

• If you’re comfortable with dairy and want a good all-round choice: whey concentrate.

• If lactose is a problem: whey isolate or a plant protein.

• If you prefer plant protein: pea, soy, rice or a blended plant protein can all work well.

• If you’re looking for the lowest cost: pea, rice, soy or a blended plant protein.

• Don’t use collagen as your main protein top-up: it’s low in leucine and doesn’t provide all nine essential amino acids.

Then check the label

Look beyond the promises on the front of the tub.

• Compare how much protein you’re actually getting. I use a standard 30g serving when comparing products, but double-check as some products have a different scoop size.

• If you have high blood pressure or are restricting salt, check the sodium or salt content, particularly with soy powders, which can sometimes contain surprisingly large amounts.

• If you’d rather avoid artificial sweeteners, choose unflavoured or stevia-sweetened products.

• Avoid mass gainers or bulking powders.

• Don’t assume expensive means better. For most people, there’s little reason to pay extra for whey hydrolysates or elaborate “performance” formulations.

Once you’ve found a protein you tolerate, enjoy and can afford, there’s very little reason to keep shopping around. You just need the one that reliably helps you hit your protein target when food alone falls short.

🎧 Prefer to listen while inspecting the back of a protein tub with new suspicion?

🎙️ This week’s One Health Tweak a Week podcast is about how to choose a protein supplement without getting buried in marketing, jargon, or tubs too big to fit in your shopping cart.

You’ll hear:

• Why whey concentrate is usually all most people need, and when isolate or plant protein may make more sense

• Why whey, plant proteins and the various forms of whey are less different than the marketing suggests

• What to look for in the ingredients list, including salt, sweeteners, mass-gainer fillers and heavy-metal concerns

• Why the smartest approach is usually to top up the protein already in your meal, rather than automatically taking a full scoop

👉 Good company for your next walk, commute, or while wondering how something called “Ultra Anabolic Matrix” managed to make it into your shopping basket.

👉 Listen now

(Episodes are free for now. Paid subscribers support the deeper research - and unlock practical tools to help you improve your health without turning it into a second job.)

🧭 Before you go

💬 If you use a protein supplement already, what did you end up choosing - whey, pea, soy, a blend, or something else? And was that a deliberate choice, or simply the one that happened to be on the shelf?

Leave a comment

📤 Know someone staring blankly at a wall of protein powders, wondering whether isolate, hydrolysate or “maximum anabolic performance” is worth paying extra for? Forward this to them.

Share

👥 Paid corner - If you’re unsure whether you actually need a protein supplement, or how much would make sense alongside your usual meals, drop me a message in our private chat, and I’ll help you think it through.

Until next Saturday - get enough protein, ignore most of the marketing, and make the supplement fit your diet rather than the other way around.

– Ben

In this episode, we break down the choices and show which differences are meaningful and which are mostly marketing.

We’ll look at why whey concentrate is usually the simplest dairy option, when whey isolate makes sense, and why plant proteins can work perfectly well despite the familiar claim that they’re “incomplete”. We’ll also look at leucine, why it matters more as we age, and how much protein powder you may actually need once you take the protein already in your meal into account.

We also cover what to look for on the label, including sodium, artificial sweeteners and unnecessary additives, plus the recent concerns about lead, cadmium and other heavy metals in protein powders.

The aim is simple: to help you choose a protein supplement that fits your needs, without paying for marketing you don’t need - and without taking more powder than is useful.

Eat enough ultra-processed food and, on the inside, your body starts to look like it belongs to someone older.

That’s the consistent finding from several large studies measuring what researchers call biological age. In contrast to your chronological age, it’s the age your body most closely resembles, based on blood tests, organ function and other markers.

The differences are modest, but they show up in the US, the UK, Italy and Spain, across different populations and different measurement tools, and they may increase your risk of dying sooner. They add another line to what’s already a very long rap sheet for ultra-processed foods (UPF).

I’m quite good at avoiding ultra-processed food, apart from the Fruit ‘n’ Fibre I mix with my breakfast muesli, the supermarket chicken tikka masala rescued with brown rice and vegetables, and the packet biscuits (cookies, for readers across the Pond) I’m unable to resist. Perhaps one day I’ll retire and spend my afternoons baking them from scratch.

This is how ultra-processed food works its way into an otherwise sensible diet, through small negotiations with time, energy and convenience.

So, how concerned should we be that ultra-processed foods might make us age faster?

Biological age is an estimate, not a real clock running inside your body

So, what exactly is “biological age?”

There’s no hidden clock ticking away inside you that researchers can read off. Instead, biological-age tools take a collection of age-related signals and compare them against data from large numbers of volunteers. They then say, in effect, “Your results look like what we’d typically expect in someone who is x years old.” The output is usually the gap between that estimated age and your actual age.

Think of it like estimating someone’s age from their face. You look at wrinkles, age spots, skin texture and hair colour, and your brain makes a guess. Some of those features are genuinely caused by ageing, but others reflect sun exposure, smoking, alcohol or genetics. You’re estimating from a series of clues, and that estimate is only partly about how many years the person has been walking the earth.

Biological-age tools work the same way, just with blood tests or molecular data instead of crow’s feet.

There are three broad approaches:

• Blood-based algorithms combine markers of inflammation, kidney function, blood sugar, immune activity and other systems into a single score.

• DNA-methylation clocks measure chemical tags attached to DNA. The pattern of these tags changes with age, and can be compared against a reference dataset.

• Telomere-length assays measure the protective caps at chromosome ends, which shorten as cells divide over a lifetime.

The more useful tools go beyond guessing chronological age. They’re designed to predict outcomes such as premature death, diabetes or declining organ function. There’s no single agreed standard, so different tools may give the same person somewhat different results.

So, a study can find that a group is “six months biologically older,” and that can help show the effects of a certain exposure, but it’s harder to interpret the results of a single individual. With that in mind, here’s what the studies show.

US reliance on ultra-processed food and its consequences

The study that illustrates the relationship most clearly comes from the US. Researchers analysed data from 16,055 adults in a large national health survey, using a blood-test-based algorithm called PhenoAge to estimate biological age.

The baseline figures show just how much UPF dominates the American diet. The average proportion of daily calories from ultra-processed food was 54%. Even the lowest-consuming fifth of participants still got about 30% of their energy from UPF, while the highest fifth averaged 77%. For many people in this study, ultra-processed food wasn’t a guilty pleasure; it was the majority of the diet.

The headline finding was that those eating the most UPF appeared 0.86 biological years older than those eating the least. The more UPF people ate, the bigger the effect: each additional 10% of energy from UPF was associated with 0.21 extra biological years. The association appeared stronger in adults aged 60 and over.

When researchers accounted for overall diet quality, that figure dropped to 0.14 years per 10%, suggesting that poorer nutrition explains part of the link, but not all of it.

To put that 0.21-year figure in perspective, earlier research has linked a PhenoAge gap of that size with an almost 2% higher risk of death over the following two years. That mortality figure comes from separate work, not from deaths observed in this study, but it gives a sense of the possible implications.

There are reasons to be cautious with our interpretation. Diet and biological age were measured at the same point in time, so we can’t establish which came first. Even the “lowest” group averaged about 30% of energy from UPF, so this wasn’t a comparison against a pristine, minimally processed diet. And 34% of participants had obesity, with rates climbing in step with UPF consumption.

Different populations and ageing tools point in the same direction

What strengthens these results is that several more studies, using different populations and different tools, have similar findings.

A second US analysis of 12,079 adults from the same national survey used a related but different algorithm. The highest consumers by weight appeared 0.6 biological years older than the lowest, and the researchers estimated that higher body weight accounted for about 28% of that difference.

Curiously, the relationship appeared when UPF was measured by weight but not by share of calories, which seems odd. The researchers suggested this might be because a larger physical quantity of UPF brings greater exposure to preservatives, sweeteners and other additives, regardless of calorie count. It’s an interesting idea, though at the moment it’s just speculation.

Across the Atlantic, UK Biobank provided the largest dataset, with 57,128 people, including both one-time measurements and data that followed participants over several years. The highest consumers appeared 0.38 years older in the snapshot and 0.53 years older when tracked over time. Body fat was estimated to account for 26–37% of the difference. The fact that the finding held up over time strengthens the case, though it doesn’t rule out other unmeasured differences between the groups.

The Italian Moli-sani Study again showed this link. Among 22,495 middle-aged and older adults, biological age was estimated from 36 blood markers. The highest consumers appeared 0.34 years older than the lowest.

The Italian participants consumed significantly less ultra-processed food. Average UPF intake was roughly 18% of energy, far below the 54% US average.

The relationship wasn’t a straight line: there was little difference below about 10–12% of energy from UPF, but the gap widened above that point. And when researchers accounted for Mediterranean diet quality, it explained just 9.1% of the difference, once again suggesting that something beyond nutritional content may be involved.

Taken together, four analyses involving more than 100,000 participants all point to differences of roughly 0.3–0.9 biological years between the highest and lowest UPF consumers. Despite differing tools, populations and proportions of UPF consumed the signal is remarkably consistent across the studies.

There’s also a piece of supporting evidence from a different ageing measure. In a Spanish study of almost 900 older adults, those eating more than 3 portions of UPF daily were 82% more likely to have short telomeres, the protective caps on chromosome ends that shorten as cells divide.

I find telomere data less compelling on its own, because telomere length is strongly influenced by genetics, early-life experiences and the type of tissue being measured. Still, it’s yet another finding pointing in the same direction.

While the findings are consistent, they don’t prove that UPF caused the ageing. These are observational studies, and there may be other differences between people who eat a lot of UPF and those who don’t that the researchers couldn’t fully account for. Still, it’s a striking and consistent signal.

Excess body fat explains part of the picture, but other factors are at play

Part of the explanation seems to be weight gain.

Ultra-processed foods tend to be energy-dense and low in fibre. They don’t fill us up, so it’s easy for us to overeat them. Across the studies, higher body weight consistently accounted for roughly a quarter to a third of the link between UPF and accelerated biological age: about 28% in one US analysis and 26–37% in the UK Biobank study.

But body fat and poor nutritional quality together don’t explain the whole picture. After taking these into account, the researchers found they only explained part of the effect. So what else might be going on?

Several plausible pathways have been proposed, though none has been confirmed as a direct contributor to the biological-age differences seen in these studies:

• Disruption of the food’s natural structure in ways that may affect fullness and how the body processes nutrients.

• Compounds generated by high-temperature industrial processing, including advanced glycation end products, acrylamide, furans and acrolein, which are linked to cell damage and inflammation.

• Chemicals leached from plastic packaging, including phthalates and bisphenols.

• Changes to gut bacteria and the intestinal lining that may increase inflammation.

Let’s not forget that ultra-processed food has been linked to much more beyond accelerated ageing.

High UPF intake has been linked with premature death from any cause, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, overweight and obesity, poorer mental health and possibly some cancers.

For older adults, the these effects may be particularly relevant. An analysis combining results from 29 studies linked the highest UPF consumption with a 40% greater risk of frailty, with each additional 100g per day associated with a 3% higher risk.

And, in a catch-22, fatigue, chronic illness, dental problems and cognitive decline can make cooking from scratch harder, increasing reliance on convenient foods, which may in turn worsen the very conditions that led to them.

So, excess body fat is perhaps the single largest factor, and poorer nutritional quality adds to it when UPF displaces healthier foods. Beyond that, the mechanisms are plausible but unproven, and we can’t yet say which specific characteristics of ultra-processed food are responsible for the rest.

What this means for your health

Given the magnitude of ills now associated with ultra-processed food, I suspect accelerated biological ageing is a bit player. The more compelling reasons to cut back remain the links with premature death, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity and frailty.

Still, the biological-age research does something useful in that it takes familiar effects on inflammation, blood sugar and organ function, and translates them into a concept that’s easy to grasp: Your body takes on the profile normally seen in someone a little older.

While that might sound insignificant, as we saw, previous studies have suggested that may be linked to around a 2+% higher risk of dying over the next couple of years. When you think of it that way, it no longer feels insignificant.

I’m not about to turf my Fruit ‘n’ Fibre and biscuits into the trash can - you’d have to prize the biscuits from my cold, dead hands! The bigger concern is what happens when ultra-processed food supplies the foundation of the diet.

And remember, roughly 57–58% of daily energy in the US and UK, and over 40% in much of Western Europe, already comes from ultra-processed foods. Italy does better at around 10–20%, and UPF consumption is growing in countries like South Africa (40%), Japan (30%) and Mexico (25–30%). [Source.]

So, while I don’t suggest we need to purge our kitchens of every single item of ultra-processed food, most evidence suggests that reducing how much you habitually eat might materially affect how long you live and how healthy you are.

As always, your responses are anonymous, but they really help me tailor future content to what’s most helpful to you. Please take a moment to click a button.

HEALTH TWEAK OF THE WEEK

Diets in which ultra-processed food dominates are consistently associated with modestly older biological-age profiles across US, UK, Italian and Spanish populations.

Separate studies suggest that such accelerated ageing is associated with an increased risk of dying over the next couple of years, and this just adds to UPF’s rap sheet, which already includes higher risk of premature death, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, mental health issues and perhaps even some cancers.

Cutting back on ultra-processed food is clearly wise, but the goal isn’t to eliminate every packaged food. It’s to reduce the proportion of your everyday diet supplied by ultra-processed products, starting with the one you eat most often or in the largest quantity.

1. Find your biggest repeat source. Look at 3 ordinary days and identify the packaged product you reach for most often or in the largest quantity: the breakfast cereal, the daily biscuits, the default ready meal, the go-to sugary drink. That’s your starting point.

2. Replace one default UPF at a time. Switch that single product for a less-processed option on most days:

• Sweetened cereal or cereal mix → plain oats or muesli, with fruit, nuts and seeds.

• Packet biscuits → fruit, yoghurt, nuts or wholegrain toast for some snacks.

• Ready meals → keep them when you genuinely need them, but rotate with simple meals built around beans, lentils, fish, poultry, frozen vegetables or whole grains.

You don’t need to change everything at once. Make one replacement routine before choosing the next.

3. Keep convenience in its proper role. It’s fine to use ultra-processed food to bridge an occasional gap. The problem is when it quietly supplies most breakfasts, lunches, snacks and evening meals.

• Add vegetables, legumes or whole grains to improve the overall meal, not because they cancel out the UPF on the plate.

• Once the first swap feels routine, choose the next most frequent source.

The supermarket chicken tikka masala that saves me on the odd occasion when I’m running late and have nothing else to hand can stay. Maybe it’s the packet cereal I eat 300+ mornings a year that deserves another look.

🎧 Prefer to listen while sniffing out UPF in the kitchen cabinets?

🎙️ This week’s One Health Tweak a Week podcast looks at ultra-processed food and the emerging research on biological ageing.

You’ll hear:

• What researchers actually mean when they say your body looks “biologically older”

• Why several large US, UK and Italian studies have found broadly similar links between higher UPF intake and accelerated biological age

• How much older the highest consumers appeared, and why differences measured in months rather than years can still be informative

• How body fat and overall diet quality explain part of the association, with other possible mechanisms still uncertain

• How to spot the ultra-processed foods that contribute most to your own diet, without turning every packet in the kitchen into a nutritional crime scene

👉 A good companion for your next walk, commute, or an exploratory rummage through the breakfast cupboard.

👉 Listen now!

(Episodes are free for now. Paid subscribers support the deeper research behind them, along with the practical tools I’m developing to make that research useful in everyday life.)

🧭 Before you go

💬 Which ultra-processed food has become such a routine part of your diet that you barely think about it anymore?
Mine may well be the packet cereal I eat most mornings.

Leave a comment

📤 Know someone whose kitchen contains a few similarly well-established regulars? Send this their way.

Leave a comment

👥 Paid corner - If you’d like another pair of eyes on where ultra-processed food is contributing most to your own diet, drop me a note in our private chat. We can look at the foods you actually eat and work out which changes are likely to be worth the effort.

Until next Saturday, may your ready meals remain occasional, and your breakfast cupboard be filled with whole foods.

– Ben

Several recent studies suggest it might. Across large US, UK and Italian datasets, people eating the most ultra-processed food tended to have biological-age profiles several months older than those eating the least.

In this episode, we look at what “biological age” actually means, how researchers estimate it using blood biomarkers, DNA methylation and telomere length, and why these measures are useful without being precise personal clocks.

We’ll then work through the strongest studies, including one involving more than 16,000 US adults in which each additional 10% of daily energy from ultra-processed food was associated with 0.21 extra biological years.

We’ll also explore what may be driving the association. Excess body fat appears to explain roughly a quarter to a third of the effect, while poorer diet quality accounts for only part of the remainder. Other possibilities, including inflammation, altered food structure, microbiome changes and chemicals from processing or packaging, remain plausible but unproven.

This isn’t an argument for dietary purity. The practical question is which ultra-processed foods you eat most often, and which of those would be easiest to replace.

I’ve been feeling a little guilty since the last egg issue (and not just because I accidentally sent the newsletter on Thursday instead of Saturday!)

In that issue, I laid out the evidence linking regular whole-egg consumption to a higher risk of premature death. For those of us eating a typical Western diet, each additional half egg per day was associated with a 7% higher risk. The data were clear enough that I couldn’t soften them, and I don’t think you should ignore them either.

But eggs aren’t just a line on a nutrition spreadsheet. They’re warm, satisfying, endlessly adaptable, and one of the quickest meals you can put together.

They’re also a reliable way to boost protein, something many of us are concerned about.

Asking you to eat fewer eggs without showing you what could fill the space on the plate didn’t feel terribly helpful. But then I only had five minutes of your time. Now I have five more!

So, what should you eat instead?

The good news is that the answer isn’t just “something less harmful.” Replacing eggs with the right foods is associated with additional meaningful reductions in the risk of premature death, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

A bowl of almonds might contain the same amount of protein, but it doesn’t feel much like an omelette. A better way of thinking about swaps is to replace the function the egg-based meal was serving: the speed, the warmth, the protein, the satisfaction. And once you start thinking about it that way, the options open up considerably.

The lowest-friction switch: fewer yolks, more whites

If you’re not ready to abandon egg-based meals entirely, you don’t have to.

Eggs are effectively two different foods sharing the same shell. The yolk carries the cholesterol and most of the fat, while the white is mostly protein and water.

In a study of more than 520,000 Americans aged 50–71, followed for 15–16 years, researchers estimated that replacing half a whole egg per day with egg whites was associated with a 6% lower risk of premature death. That’s compared with a 7% higher risk for each additional half whole egg consumed per day.

What’s really eye-catching is that those who ate only egg whites had a 7% lower mortality risk than people who didn’t eat eggs at all. In other words, egg whites are associated with benefits of their own.

The pattern held broadly across disease categories. In almost every outcome the researchers examined, whole eggs were associated with higher risk and egg whites with lower risk.

You can see that in the graph below, where anything above the line represents an increased risk, while anything below it signifies reduced risk.

One egg white provides about 3.6g of complete, highly absorbable protein (and 0.35g of leucine, for protein experts who know enough to care about leucine). So a meal built around one whole egg with two or three additional whites preserves much of the warmth, flavour and convenience of the original dish, with similar protein and much less cholesterol.

It’s important to say these are observational associations in an older American population eating largely Western diets. They don’t prove that egg whites caused the lower risks, but the contrast is striking enough to make egg whites a very reasonable bridge for anyone who enjoys egg-based meals.

The strongest signals: nuts, legumes, whole grains and fish

If you’re happy to move beyond egg-based meals entirely, the data suggest some replacements are substantially better than others.

From that same study of more than 520,000 adults, the estimated reductions in premature death from replacing just half an egg per day with other foods were:

• Egg whites: 6% lower

• Dairy products: 7% lower

• Poultry: 8% lower

• Fish: 9% lower

• Legumes: 10% lower

• Nuts: 13% lower

A separate meta-analysis of 24 prospective studies provides further insights, this time looking at what happened when an entire daily egg was replaced. Replacing one egg per day with nuts was associated with:

• 15% lower premature deaths from any cause

• 17% lower risk of cardiovascular disease

• 16% lower cardiovascular mortality

• 18% lower risk of type 2 diabetes

Replacing eggs with legumes was associated with a 10% lower risk of premature death from any cause and a 12% lower cardiovascular disease risk. And replacing eggs with whole grains was associated with a striking 21% lower risk of type 2 diabetes.

A related analysis of more than 215,000 US adults followed for up to 32 years found that replacing one daily egg with yoghurt, whole grains, nuts, milk or cheese was associated with a 9–19% lower risk of type 2 diabetes.

So, this isn’t just damage limitation, since each of these replacements brings something eggs don’t.

For example, nuts and seeds deliver unsaturated fats and fibre, while legumes combine fibre with plant protein. Whole grains bring fibre and minerals, while oily fish have loads of omega-3 fats. The foods most strongly associated with benefits in the substitution data are precisely the ones that fill nutritional gaps an egg-centred meal wasn’t addressing.

Don’t read these percentages as a precise league table. The broad direction is consistent, but the exact ranking of, say, fish versus poultry depends on the study.

Not all swaps are good swaps

The health effect of eating fewer eggs depends entirely on what fills the space.

In a study of more than 215,000 US adults followed for up to 32 years, researchers estimated that replacing one egg per day with processed meat was associated with a 15% higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Swapping to red meat was associated with a 10% higher risk. Swapping to full-fat milk was linked to an 11% higher risk.

By contrast, replacing eggs with fish, poultry, legumes, nuts, whole grains or reduced-fat dairy was not associated with any increase in cardiovascular risk.

So a sausage isn’t a health upgrade from an egg. And just because poultry does well isn’t an excuse to resort to chicken nuggets. Processed poultry still belongs to the processed-meat conversation.

Also, lower-fat and full-fat dairy aren’t interchangeable here. The benefits seen with dairy came only from the reduced-fat versions.

Protein adds up across the meal

One concern I hear often is, “If I eat fewer eggs, where will I get my protein?”

If eggs have become one of your reliable ways to reach a protein target, losing them may feel like solving one nutritional problem only to create another.

One large whole egg provides about 6.24g of protein. That’s a useful amount, but it doesn’t need to come from a single replacement food. Protein accumulates across the meal.

It’s not that hard to replace the protein from an egg. Roughly 6g of protein comes from any one of these:

• 28g/1oz chicken breast (uncooked weight)

• 31g/1.1oz salmon

• 71g/2.5oz Greek yoghurt

• 54g/1.9oz cottage cheese

• 52g/1.8oz edamame

• 29g/1oz almonds

• 46g/1.6oz rolled oats

• 89g/3.1oz canned chickpeas

• 1 slice wholegrain bread

Rather than think about one-for-one swaps, think about the meal as a whole. It then becomes much easier to see how you replace an egg’s protein.

Good combinations might be:

• A bowl of Greek yoghurt with nuts and seeds

• Oats with yogurt and berries

• Beans or cottage cheese on wholegrain toast

• Tofu with edamame and vegetables, or

• Beans or lentils with whole grains

For a selection of high-protein breakfast and brunch recipes, have a look at one of my earlier articles.

What this means for your health

Seeing that rather stark statistic, which says that, on average, for someone eating a Western diet, each additional half-egg daily increases the risk of premature death by 7%, provides a pretty strong incentive to eat fewer eggs.

Rather than just looking at a list of protein-rich foods and wondering what to swap, first consider what the egg was doing for you.

Was it providing speed? Warmth? Something savoury and satisfying at the end of a long day? The replacement should match the function, not just the nutrient profile.

Perhaps the easiest option is to preserve your egg-based meals by using fewer yolks and more whites: one whole egg with two or three additional whites gives you more protein than two whole eggs, at a fraction of the cholesterol.

The second option, and the one that’s associated with the greater additional health benefits, is to bring in foods you may currently eat too little of: nuts, legumes, whole grains, fish, lower-fat dairy, fruit and vegetables.

Fewer whole eggs doesn’t have to mean no whole eggs. For me, two yolks a week feels like a sensible maximum. As we discussed last week, eggs are very context-dependent.

HEALTH TWEAK OF THE WEEK

Replacing whole eggs with egg whites, nuts, legumes, fish, whole grains or lower-fat dairy is associated with lower risks of premature death, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

The benefits come not just from removing the yolk, but from adding foods that bring fibre, unsaturated fats, omega-3 fats and plant protein. But avoid replacing eggs with processed meat, red meat or full-fat dairy, which are associated with higher cardiovascular risk.

1. Preserve the egg meal with fewer yolks. Use one whole egg with 2–3 additional whites for an omelette or scramble. Add spinach and lower-fat cream cheese, or salmon and grilled peppers, to turn it into a substantial breakfast, lunch or light evening meal. The whites restore volume and protein without adding another yolk.

2. Match the replacement to what you need.

• Quick and familiar: nut butter on wholegrain toast.

• Cool and protein-rich: Greek yoghurt with nuts, seeds and berries.

• Warm breakfast: oats with nuts, seeds or yoghurt.

• Warm and savoury: tofu scramble with vegetables.

• Substantial lunch or supper: beans or lentils with whole grains.

• Minimal prep: cottage cheese on wholegrain toast.

• Fish option: sardines, tuna or salmon with whole grains and vegetables.

3. Let the whole meal do the protein work. You don’t need one ingredient to replace all the protein from an egg. Combine Greek yoghurt with nuts and seeds; oats with yoghurt; beans or lentils with whole grains; or one whole egg with extra whites. Favour nuts, legumes, whole grains, fish and lower-fat dairy over processed meat, red meat or full-fat dairy.

The useful part of this change is how much it can add to the rest of the meal. A few extra whites keep familiar egg dishes on the table, while nuts, legumes, whole grains, fish and yoghurt bring in fibre, better fats and more variety across the week. You still get something quick, satisfying and rich in protein, but the meal now carries a little more nutritional weight.

🎧 Prefer to listen while whipping up an egg white omelette?

🎙️ This week’s One Health Tweak a Week podcast looks at what to eat when you’re cutting back on whole eggs.

You’ll hear:

• Why using fewer yolks and more egg whites is the simplest way to keep familiar egg-based meals

• Which replacements are linked to lower risks of premature death, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes

• Why nuts, legumes, whole grains, fish and lower-fat dairy tend to come out well in substitution studies

• Why swapping eggs for processed meat, red meat or full-fat dairy may be a step in the wrong direction

• How to build quick, satisfying meals that still provide plenty of protein

👉 Ideal for your next walk, commute, or while looking into the fridge and discovering that “eat fewer eggs” was the easy part of the advice.

👉 Listen now!

(Episodes are free for now. Paid subscribers support the deeper research, and the practical tools I’m building to help you act on what you learn, rather than simply collect another interesting health fact.)

🧭 Before you go

💬 Which egg-based meal would be hardest for you to replace: breakfast, lunch or a quick evening meal?
And what would you genuinely look forward to eating instead?

Leave a comment

📤 Know someone who relies on eggs for a quick meal or for protein? Send this their way.

Share

👥 Paid corner - Trying to work out how fewer eggs would fit with your protein needs, cholesterol results or usual meals? Drop me a note in our private chat, and we can think through some practical replacements that would suit the way you actually eat.

Until next Saturday, may your breakfasts remain satisfying, and your fridge contain at least one genuinely useful alternative.

– Ben

If you missed the previous egg issue, you can find it here:

In this episode, we move beyond generic lists of “healthy alternatives” and look at the different jobs eggs perform in real life. They’re quick, warm, savoury, satisfying and a convenient source of protein. Any useful replacement needs to account for that.

We start with the lowest-friction option: keeping egg-based meals but using fewer yolks and more whites. From there, we look at substitution studies comparing eggs with nuts, legumes, whole grains, fish, poultry, and lower-fat dairy, and why some of these swaps are associated with lower risks of premature death, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes.

We also cover the less helpful replacements. Swapping eggs for processed meat, red meat or full-fat dairy may move risk in the wrong direction.

Finally, we tackle the protein question. You don’t need one ingredient to reproduce everything an egg provides. Protein adds up across the meal, whether that’s yoghurt with nuts and seeds, beans with whole grains, tofu with edamame, or one whole egg with extra whites.

The aim is to find meals that are practical, satisfying and genuinely worth looking forward to.

There’s one kind of comment from readers that I always keep front of mind. Here’s one of them, “I take almost all of your tweaks and incorporate them into my own life… I send them on to family too.”

Comments like that are a huge compliment, but they also bring a great sense of responsibility. They’re the antithesis of a licence to knock out an issue of O…

Read more

In this episode, we look at why the health effects of eggs depend on far more than whether you eat them at all. How many do you eat - one occasionally or several every morning? Do you eat the whole egg or mostly the whites? Are they boiled or fried? Do they arrive with vegetables and wholegrain toast, or with bacon, sausages and butter?

Your wider diet matters too. So do your age, cholesterol response and metabolic health; whether you have diabetes or cardiovascular disease; and even where in the world you live. These differences help explain why some large studies appear reassuring while others link regular egg consumption with greater cardiovascular and mortality risk.

We separate what eggs genuinely offer from what their yolks bring with them, examine why dietary cholesterol never became irrelevant, and ask whether reassuring averages can conceal the risk to an individual listener.

The useful answer lies beyond “eggs are healthy” or “eggs are harmful”. We work through the evidence and arrive at a practical way to decide how often whole eggs belong in your own diet - without turning breakfast into a nutritional battlefield.

Honestly, I dread writing about eggs.

The comments always flood in, and there are usually some raised voices in the mix. Eggs have become a battlefield. Some people have a deep emotional attachment to their morning egg ritual, while others look at the yolk and see a bright yellow cholesterol grenade sitting in the middle of breakfast.

My working life isn’…

Read more

It’s clear from your comments and questions that many of you are focused on protein right now.

And rightly so. If you’re over 50, keeping your protein intake up is one of the most evidence-backed things you can do to protect muscle, strength and independence as you age.

If you’re younger, the message is a little different: you probably don’t need to chas…

Read more

That matters, especially in midlife and later life, when maintaining muscle, strength and independence becomes increasingly important. But there’s another question that gets far less attention: where is that protein coming from?

In this episode of One Health Tweak a Week, we look at the evidence behind the 18g protein swap: replacing roughly one daily serving of animal protein with plant protein. Across several large, long-running studies, that kind of shift is linked with a lower risk of dying prematurely, especially when plant proteins replace processed meat, red meat and egg-heavy meals.

This isn’t an argument for going vegan, and it isn’t anti-protein advice. For older adults, getting enough protein remains a priority. For younger adults, the message is a little different: don’t necessarily chase ever-higher protein targets, but do pay attention to the mix.

We’ll look at why the protein source matters, which swaps offer the greatest likely benefit, and how to add more beans, lentils, chickpeas, tofu, soy foods, nuts, seeds, and whole grains without accidentally cutting your protein intake.

The upgrade is simple: eat a better protein pattern

I’ll be honest: there are times I enjoy a good browse around the grocery store, looking for something new to try, and briefly imagining the exciting meals I might prepare if I bought the jar of fermented chilli paste.

But most weeks, I just want to get in and out before I accidentally buy three different kinds of crackers and artisanal cheese from caves …

Read more

Following Helen, a sensible midlife shopper trying to buy food for a reasonably healthy week, we explore how grocery stores quietly reshape what we notice, reach for and justify. The episode looks at oversized shopping carts, fresh produce at the entrance, bakery smells, scattered essentials, aisle-end “specials”, free samples, bulk deals and health-halo packaging that makes ultra-processed snacks look like acts of self-care.

The point isn’t that shoppers are gullible, or that one packet of muffins or family bag of chips ruins anyone’s health. It’s that the foods we bring home become the choices available to our tired, hungry, busy future selves. The grocery store changes what we buy today; our cupboards change what we eat for the rest of the week.

You’ll also hear practical ways to shop more consciously without becoming joyless about it: write a real list, choose the right basket or cart, plan treats rather than collecting ambush treats, treat aisle-end offers as adverts, question health-halo claims, and avoid bulk-buying foods you don’t want to eat in bulk.

I remember Linda McCartney’s frozen veggie sausages arriving in the supermarket freezer aisle sometime in the early 1990s. They felt like the future: principled, ethically sound, faintly revolutionary. Then you ate one.

The future, it turned out, tasted like salty mush.

Three decades on, the category has changed beyond recognition. Today’s plant-based me…

Read more