• As soon as you wake up;

• 40 minutes prior to working out;

• Immediately after working out.

Step into any health-food store and you're likely to see stacks of protein-packed powders and bars, often accompanied by pictures of people with athletic bodies. The message is clear: if you want to trade in your relatively normal body for the Mr. (or Ms.) Universe model, you can't live without products like protein powders and bars. After all, it takes protein to build muscles, so megadoses of protein must result in megamuscles, right? Before buying into that premise, take a close look at the facts. In the end, you may not lose your normal body, but you won't lose your money either.

How much protein does an athlete really need?

It's true that weight lifters and other high-powered athletes need more protein than the rest of us. Recent studies suggest that a 200-pound athlete should eat between 120 and 180 grams of protein every day, while a 200-pound office worker can get by quite nicely on only 70 to 90 grams. To put it in perspective, a shot-putter could reach his maximum daily requirement by filling his plate with these items: 250 grams or eight ounces of firm tofu, one broiled pork chop, and one cup each of roasted peanuts, cottage cheese, chickpeas, oat bran, and ricotta cheese. The office worker could skip the tofu, pork chop, and cottage cheese.

Of course, athletes also need more calories than the rest of us. A weight lifter or football player can easily go through 4,000 calories per day, compared with the roughly 2,000 calories a moderately active person burns. And it would take a real effort to consume 4,000 calories without getting 180 grams of protein. Whether you want to lose weight, gain weight, or hold steady, current Irish and European dietary recommendations advise that you stick to the same formula: at least 50 percent of your calories should come from complex carbohydrates, less than 35 percent should come from fat, and only 12 to 15 percent from protein.

The average adult needs 0.6 - 0.8 grams of protein for every kilogram (2.2 lbs.) of body weight. Infants may need as much as 2.0 grams per kilogram, adolescents need up to 1.2 grams per kilogram and pregnant women need an additional 10 grams per day.

You now know how much protein you need on a daily basis. So where do you get it. Here is some sample representations of protein contribution for certain foods or groups of foods. Click on a few foods that you eat in a day to find the total amount of protein contribution from those foods.