Most people already have enough protein in their diet. If you don’t, you might wonder what enough protein looks like on a plate. How much you need each day will depend on your type of diet and, more specifically, your body weight because the Recommended Dietary Allowance for protein is 0.36 grams per pound. (The USDA has a calculator that can help.) If you’re looking to build muscle or are pregnant or breastfeeding, you will need more, but maybe not as much as you think. If you want to learn more about protein or change your protein goals, you should first consult your doctor.
To help put things in perspective, we created this visual guide to show what 100 grams of protein looks like for vegans, vegetarians, omnivores and carnivores. The grams were calculated by taking the information from the nutrition facts label on packaged items and weighing them when necessary. The gram amounts listed in this guide are specific to the products used for this experiment, so your numbers may vary if you look at a different brand for the following products. Eating 100 grams of protein per day should be pretty easy if you don’t have any dietary restrictions.
Here’s what that would look like: Everything pictured above comes to 103 grams, which puts you slightly over 100 grams. As you can see, getting 100 grams of protein from animal products doesn’t take much: This amounts to a perfect 100 grams of protein. If you ate all of this in a day, plus bread and other nonanimal products, you would surpass 100 grams of protein in a day. For vegetarians, 100 grams of protein might look like this: This actually comes out to 99 grams of protein, which is pretty close. What you see isn’t totally what you get with the amount of protein here: This amounts to 79 grams of protein. If we double up on the mixed nuts, chia seeds and hemp seeds, this brings us to 93 grams of protein. You could add an extra tablespoon of peanut butter or eat a full cup of oats, instead of half a cup, to come closer to 100 grams.
This plate also excludes high-protein vegan meat substitutes, such as tofu, tempeh or plant-based meats like the Impossible Burger. Those food sources can make it easier to get 100 grams of protein for someone who eats a vegan diet.