How much protein do you actually need a day?
Most protein advice online is written for American bodybuilders or lifted straight from a supplement label. Australia has its own official numbers, and they are lower than the internet thinks. They are also the wrong target for anyone who trains. Here is what the guidelines actually say, what the research says for active people, and how to work out your own number in about thirty seconds.
The official Australian number
The Australian and New Zealand Nutrient Reference Values set the Recommended Dietary Intake for protein at roughly 0.84g per kilogram of body weight per day for adult men and 0.75g per kilogram for adult women. For adults over 70 those figures rise to about 1.07g and 0.94g.
For an 80kg man that is about 67g a day. For a 65kg woman, about 49g.
Here is the part almost everyone misses. The RDI is the amount that prevents deficiency in a sedentary population. It is a floor, not a target. It was never designed to describe what supports training, recovery, or holding onto muscle while losing fat.
What active people actually need
Once you train regularly, the research consistently lands higher than the RDI. Sports Dietitians Australia and the international sports nutrition consensus put the useful range at 1.2 to 2.0g per kilogram per day, with the position inside that range depending on what you are training for.
- General fitness, two or three sessions a week: 1.2 to 1.4g/kg. Enough to recover properly without overthinking it.
- Endurance training, running or cycling most days: 1.4 to 1.6g/kg. Long sessions burn a small but real amount of protein for fuel, and there is more tissue repair to fund than people assume.
- Resistance training to build muscle: 1.6 to 2.2g/kg. The evidence gets thin above about 1.6, and above 2.2 there is essentially no added benefit for most people.
- Losing fat while keeping muscle: 1.6 to 2.4g/kg. This is the one case where higher genuinely helps. In a calorie deficit, protein is what stops the weight you lose from being muscle.
Work out your number
Multiply your body weight in kilograms by the figure that matches your training. That is the whole calculation.
- 70kg, runs three times a week. 70 x 1.4 = roughly 98g a day.
- 85kg, lifts four times a week. 85 x 1.8 = roughly 153g a day.
- 60kg, training and trying to lean out. 60 x 1.8 = roughly 108g a day.
If you carry a lot of body fat, use your target weight rather than your current weight, otherwise the number gets unnecessarily large.
Spreading it across the day matters more than the total
This is the finding that changes the most for the most people. Your body cannot bank protein. Muscle protein synthesis responds to a dose in a given meal, and once that response is triggered, more protein in the same sitting adds little.
The practical version: aim for 25 to 40g of protein per meal, three or four times a day, rather than 30g at breakfast, 20g at lunch and 100g at dinner. The person eating 120g spread evenly will out-recover the person eating 150g stacked into one meal.
Breakfast and the afternoon. Toast, cereal, fruit and coffee typically deliver under 10g, and the 3pm gap usually gets filled with something carbohydrate-heavy. Fixing those two slots alone often adds 40 to 50g a day without touching dinner.
What 30g of protein actually looks like
Numbers on a page are hard to act on, so here is the same dose in real food.
- One 100g pack of shelf-stable chicken breast: 24 to 25g, no cooking, no fridge
- Roughly 120g of cooked chicken breast: about 35g
- Two large eggs plus a slice of cheese: about 20g
- A 200g tub of Greek yoghurt: about 20g
- One protein shake: typically 20 to 25g
- A 95g tin of tuna: about 22g
- A cup of cooked lentils: about 18g
Notice that hitting 150g a day from whole food alone means eating a serious volume of it. That is the real reason people use convenience protein, and it is a better reason than any marketing claim.
Do you need supplements?
Honestly, no. If you can hit your number with food, food is better. It comes with micronutrients, fibre and satiety that a powder does not.
Supplements and ready-to-eat protein solve a logistics problem, not a nutrition one. They are worth using when the alternative is missing the target entirely: no fridge at work, a 3pm gap with nothing sensible nearby, training straight after work, or travel. Getting 25g into the afternoon from a pack in your bag beats getting zero from a perfect meal you did not have time to make.
A useful rule: build the total out of real meals, and use convenience protein to plug the two or three specific gaps in your week that keep repeating. If you find yourself relying on it for most of your intake, the problem is the meals, not the supplement.
Can you eat too much?
For healthy adults with normal kidney function, high protein intakes in the ranges above are well tolerated, and the long-standing worry about protein damaging healthy kidneys has not held up in the research. If you have existing kidney disease, that is genuinely different and worth a conversation with your GP or an Accredited Practising Dietitian before making changes.
The more realistic downside is opportunity cost. Protein is filling, so pushing it very high tends to crowd out carbohydrates, and if you are training hard, low carbohydrate intake will cost you more performance than the extra protein gains you.
The short version
- The Australian RDI, around 0.75 to 0.84g/kg, is a deficiency floor and not a training target
- If you train, 1.2 to 2.0g/kg is the useful range, and 1.6g/kg suits most people who lift
- Spread it across three or four meals of 25 to 40g rather than stacking it into dinner
- Breakfast and mid-afternoon are where most Australians lose 40g a day
- Use food first and let convenience protein cover the gaps that keep recurring
25g of protein, no fridge, no cooking.
Tuk-Dak shelf-stable chicken breast keeps in a desk drawer or a gym bag for months. Dispatched same day from our Sydney warehouse.
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