How do you get enough protein if you don’t eat meat?

This is a question that friends have asked me. I decided to do some research today on this issue. There is some differing information on the web, but I’ll go with the US RDA’s for the sake of argument. These say you should eat .8 grams of protein for ever kilogram of body weight (source link here). Using a pounds to kilo conversion calculator that I found , I determined that I should eat 53 grams of protein a day.

For breakfast, I generally eat a whole wheat English muffin with peanut butter and one egg. That’s 22 grams of protein right there. Then for lunch I might have an Amy’s frozen pizza or some vegetarian frozen entree from Trader Joe’s – 3 of these items currently in my freezer show an average protein amount 18 grams per serving. That 40 grams, not including a mid-morning snack (and I almost always have a mid-morning snack – usually trail mix, which means nuts, which means more protein). To make this easy, let’s say I have 1 cup of black beans, 1 cup of rice, and 1 cup of broccoli – a purely hypothetical example, because it sounds like boring diet food, but my real dinner would be a much tastier version of this. That dinner would give me 23 grams of protein for a grand total of 63 grams of protein for the day, which puts me over the RDA for my weight.

As you can see, I’m getting more than enough protein. I think people under-estimate how much protein there is in foods we don’t think of as being a protein source – like bread or broccoli.