It's funny that protein everything is taking off just as more data seems to come out that you really don't need as much protein as previously thought, even for vigorous weightlifting (~0.82g/lb of lean body mass seems to be a sufficient number), which isn't really all that hard to get from regular old high protein food. There's no good reason to infuse it in everything. I've been lifting for many years now, and have not noticed a difference from when I used to follow the old 1g/lb of body weight rule.
And somehow all the people I've met mentioning figures from papers (be it 1g, 1.4g or whatever) always seem to skip the "lean" part of "lean body mass" part, which is again a decent difference.
That’s because a lot of guidance and studies focus on total body mass and not lean.
Whether that’s the right approach or not is debatable. It’s certainly easier to target 1g/lb of total body mass than .82g/lb of lean body mass. (But certainly it’s easier to eat enough protein to hit .82g/lb lean body mass.)
What's "regular old high protein food"? Do you mean something like meat every meal? When I recorded my meals I found my protein intake to be quite low (I don't eat meat. I eat fish but not every day.).
As I understand it you need more protein as you get older.
I'm curious how, historically, people have fared, as meat has not been as available as it is now (though this has probably varied considerably over time)
Historically older people lose a lot of muscle mass, which also means they gain weight and lose mobility, some even needing assistance doing basic things like walking or getting out of their chair.
Getting enough protein and exercising is crucial as you age, and it's something a lot of people have historically not understood, since as your metabolism slows, you get less hungry right when your protein needs are increasing.
Age is a factor and goals are a factor, the 1g/lb number is for optimal gains from bodybuilding not the minimum you need to just be alive or healthy
and yeah people who say that protein is easy to get assume that you're eating meat with every meal
on a vegetarian diet you get it from random sources, bread has a little, cheese has a little, it all adds up to the point where you're basically fine especially if you try to include a main protein/meat replacement in every meal (tofu, seitan, chickpeas) but I'm just not a big person and the amount of food I'd need to eat to reach the optimal grams/lb would be too much without supplementation
All the people on GLP-1 drugs are told to make sure they get enough protein. My dad, who is on one of them, was saying his friend (also on one) was saying he felt it was like a cheat code for being able to eat pasta... so I think a lot of people are eating the same old stuff, but just feeling less guilty about it.
They still want to eat Doritos, and now they can buy the protein Doritos and act like they are following the doctor's orders, even though that's not in the spirit of what the doctor was saying. There are also a lot of products that change little to nothing, but still slap a "Protein" label on the front of the box.
We saw similar things with "low carb" versions of everything during the Atkin's craze. Before that we saw everything made into "low fat" in the 80s, which we're still suffering from. It's likely a big reason why we as a society have a need for weight loss drugs in the first place.
Are the protein doritos good? Has he told you? Doritos are my achiles heel for junk food. When I was weightlifting a lot my coach said to have Doritos with cottage cheese as a post-lifting snack which actually was pretty good!
I'm on GLP-1 so I no longer obsessively crave Doritos and can resist their siren song. But maybe the protein ones are worth trying.
You don't need to eat "high protein food" to get adequate protein.
Let's say an 80 kg moderately active man needs to eat 2600 kcal/day to maintain body weight. According to current guidelines, that man needs about 0.8g/kg of protein per day, or 64 grams per day.
White bread has about 2.6 grams of protein per 77 kcal.
> According to current guidelines, that man needs about 0.8g/kg of protein per day
O.8g/kg was set as the target to avoid protein deficiency, not as any measure of optimal. Current guidelines are 50-100% higher. Optimal for muscle growth is higher still according to many studies.
If you are trying to hit the bro-science 1g/lb of body weight, that’s a lot of protein and most will likely have trouble hitting it without supplements (or eating mass amounts of meat).
Of course most people proteinmaxxing are not actually growing any muscle but eating protein fortified Doritos makes them feel like they are doing something healthy.
A diet put together by Lancet and friends comes out to 82g/10MG, which works out to 1.11 g/kg for an 80 kg man who eats 2600 kcal/day. So their recommendation is obviously below that, and therefore not 50% higher than 0.8g/kg/day.
Some of those guidelines are old (if that matters), but some of them aren't. The EAT-Lancet diet was designed quite recently.
Even if the American numbers are right, just swap the white bread for whole wheat bread and you'll hit the target. It remains dead easy to get adequate protein no matter what guidelines you use.
If your goal is only to avoid malnutrition, then 0.8g/kg is sufficient. If your goal is to grow muscle or pursue athletic ventures, etc, no one seems to recommend anything that low.
But you’re also arguing against a point no one is making. No one says “it’s hard for me to eat maintenance calories and get enough protein to prevent signs of malnutrition”. The typical statement is that is hard to reach a higher target (0.8 or 1g per pound) intended to help grow muscle. And this is typically in the context of a balanced diet and often in the context of a calorie deficit as someone is trying to lose weight. Also this is usually in the context of the diet being based in a typical western diet, so some of the calories are lost to “junk”.
“It’s hard for me to hit 0.8g/lb when I’m running an 800 calorie deficit and eating a lot of fruit and vegetables” is not an unreasonable claim.
This review shows mostly one thing: the science on this sucks. Look at the data they collected. Studies over 7 days, 2 weeks, 4 weeks... the longest one was three months and didn't even really differentiate these 2g/kg bodybuilding levels of protein intake from the average ones. An experienced natural lifter will probably need a year to see truly measurable benefits from training. And unexperienced lifters will probably see good results even with a shit diet because of basic adaptions.
Welcome to the world of exercise and dietary science. It’s not great, largely because there’s no money in it and blinding is frequently impossible. This is why meta analysis is so popular.
Protein supplements alone is like a $30B dollar market and protein foods in general is >$100B. You'd think they would find some money in there. By comparison, the hair loss market is less than $10B and they have been putting out a few really high quality studies over the years. But I guess people affected by hair loss have higher agency than others.
The thing is that investing in large scale nutrition studies has no payoff. If Optimum Nutrition hypothetically proved conclusively that 1g protein/lb body weight grew more muscle than .8g, any growth to the industry would be general and not specific to their company. Basically there’s no return on investment.
A new baldness fighting drug gets patent protection and exclusive market rights.
You’re broadly right (most diets provide adequate protein), but white bread is a crappy example. Most white breads are fortified, and even if not are surprisingly nutritious compared to a lot of pure junk food (e.g. outer corn or rice carbs and sugars).
That means there are some (very poor) calorie-sufficient diets that don’t provide enough protein. But I agree that it’s still rarer than people think.
For someone who eats 2600 kcal/day, eating enough protein is very easy, even if the required protein intake for avoiding the loss of muscular mass in old age is significantly greater than 0.8 g/kg.
However, I would not call 2600 kcal/day a value typical for "moderately active" but for an "active" profession.
I work mostly sitting by the computer, but I still walk about a couple of hours per day and I spend about a half of hour daily with more intense exercises with weights, so I would call myself moderately active.
Even so, in most days if I eat above 1800 to 1900 kcal (being a male of average height and about 76 kg), I gain weight immediately. Therefore, for me eating enough proteins without eating too many calories is a problem about which I must think permanently.
Eating only bread is not realistic, but a real diet could include bread made from 250 g of wheat flour + 250 g lentils. This adds to 90 g of protein, but the digestibility of proteins from both cereals and legumes is only about 90%, unlike for animal proteins, so the true protein intake would be 81 g. This would be at the lower limit of an acceptable protein intake for a male of average height, but it would provide almost 1800 kcal.
For myself, that would mean that I could eat absolutely nothing else. Adding the minimum amount of oil to provide essential fatty acids and fat-soluble vitamins would already exceed the amount of calories that I may eat.
If you cook your own food, it is not difficult to have acceptable ratios of protein per calories. However, the food that I see in a supermarket, as ready-to-eat food, almost always has bad or extremely bad protein per calories ratios. If you add a few sweet things to your menu it is very easy to exceed your calories threshold without eating enough protein.
Most folks (at least in North America) get no where near the recommended level. It's silly to have protein infused junk food, but a shake or protein powder make it a lot easier to get to the right level than remembering to have 3 hard boiled eggs.
From what I've read, both are good sources of usable protein but animal protein is considered higher quality because it includes more essential micronutrients that are delivered more effectively through the digestion process. Basically it's what your body has evolved to process best. Protein drinks do give quick protein for recovery, etc.
I would hardly draw that conclusion from this paper. It's a meta analysis of a handful of studies with fairly low sample sizes, and it wasn't immediately clear that there was any controlling factor wrt amount consumed. There are also a lot of statements pointing out there was no statistically significant difference for various metrics...
I won't call it common sense, but humans with highly limited technology lived and reproduced to build sophisticated civilizations in almost every biome on the planet.
Our biology is immensely adaptable, so anyone declaring you absolutely need some finely decided very specific thing in order to be "be healthy" should be treated skeptically.
With regards to protein specifically: your body doesn't trade in proteins as inputs, it trades in amino acids which cracked off the protein chains you eat. Everything else is just trying to keep the crowd of gut bacteria from making you feel uncomfortable.
This was a good video I watched the other day, where they tested protein content and go in to what protein actually is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsOCD1gci60 (I 3rd-Party Tested The UK’s Top Protein Products).
Protein is made up of amino acids, different sources of protein have different amino acid profiles.
Animal protein matches the amino acids profile we need the best. Whey protein is close, soy isn't bad. You can vary your food groups to balance the amino acids, so if one source is low in one amino acid, you can compliment it with another source higher in another. I found the video intersting and been using protein supplements for near 20 years.
0.82g/lb is a lot of protein. That's basically what what bro science was saying for years (2g per kg) and it's not easy to hit if you count quality protein that's bioavailable so I don't know what the point is here.
For averge Joe to hit 0.82g/lb he would need to eat 600g of lean beef every day. Or 33 eggs.
... also Menno Henselmans while he does a lot of great work that outweights everything he posts tons pseudo-scientific where's often clear he just did a basic Google Scholar search. Plus he seems too eaeger to "debunk" but often barely even understands deficiencies of many of the studies he references. A lot of people take his website for some holy grail of "scientific bodybuilding" because he's trying too hard to market it that way and he's been wrong many times and built arguments on foundations he barely understands.
Examine.com for example has different figures and it's a website where studies are reviewed by actual PHDs and graded by their strength not just simple Google Scholar search.
Wasn't that always bro science ? From what I remember when I looked into it most people couldn't digest more than approximately 1.7g of protein for every kg of body weight. At the very upper end. And that's just digestion - not even actual use - and it had to be spread out across the day.
Humans have a limited capacity to turn protein into calories, which is why you will starve to death if your diet is purely lean protein (see: "rabbit starvation").
The human capacity to turn old protein into new protein is separate. IIRC, total protein turnover in humans is on the order of 300g per day. Only a fraction of that protein comes from diet. Something like 250g comes from recycling existing tissue at the cellular level.
That's 1.8g/kg of lean body mass which is pretty close to the 2g/kg total body mass I've always used for weight training.
That's still a LOT of protein. 130g a day for me. To reach that is 500g of chicken breast, for example. And it's not like you can eat that in one meal. That's another controversial topic but it's likely about 50g per meal (for me, 90kg man) is the max. So if I eat chicken for dinner, 50g protein the I still need two other spaced meals to get the remaining 80g.
I'm not doing elite training so I'm not going to follow this rigidly, it's just a rough daily goal. I'll usually have a protein shake per day, then a high protein meal and try to make up the rest elsewhere.
I’m going to be honest, I feel that these ideas do not come from a place of science but from a political bent that meat is bad and therefore we should eat less of it. This is inconvenient because it does not fit actual facts of reality (humans work best with an a meat based diet but can in a pinch eat just about anything) and therefore reality must be denied. Those who point out that what they say is wrong will get the usual treatment for that.
That is a lot of food. Even if I’d eat just that, I’d have to very consciously force myself to eat one kilo of that, unless it’s something like watermelon.
I don't think it needs to be nearly that much food.
A single bowl of oatmeal with chia seeds gets you about halfway there. 2-3 tbsp of chia seeds has ~10-15g of fiber, mostly soluble fiber. Soluble is what you want for lowering cholesterol because it binds to bile acid, which means your liver has to use cholesterol from your body to make more bile. The oatmeal adds another ~4-5g and is largely soluble too.
After that you don't have far to go. Besides lentils and many beans, whole grains are really fiber dense, e.g., having wheat bread on a sandwich can get you another +6 just from the bread. Brown rice instead of white gets you 3-4 more. Weird grains like barley and bulgur have a bunch and go well in things like casseroles, chilis, etc. You'll also get at least some from whatever fruits/veggies you were going to eat anyway.
I’ve mostly seen the 14g of fiber per 1000 calories recommendation.
It is a lot compared to what most people take, but it’s not hard. Banana, orange, some broccoli, and you are close. Lentils, beans (lupini is great because it also has protein) here and there, oats, an extra fruit (pear is nice), berries, avocado, so many options.
But you need to be conscious. Most people need less starch and sugar and fat.
I poop 2-4 times a day. I know some people have a real problem going to the bathroom once a day… just eat more fiber folks.
that "fiber" is chemically modified resistant starch
the FDA allows it to be called fiber, but it acts differently in the body to the soluble and insoluble fiber that most people are familiar with
IMO, it's a mistake to treat fiber as a single, fungible food component, rather than as a family of different substances with different health effects
if you're looking for "easy fiber intake", there is much more and stronger evidence for psyllium-based soluble fiber, widely available in cheap and convenient drinks like metamucil (I prefer formulations without the dye and maltodextrin, but that's getting into the weeds)
> that "fiber" is chemically modified resistant starch
So basically toss a shovel of potato starch into your protein shake and be done with it. It's flavored so strongly to make whey protein palatable that you won't even notice.
I think there are two main philosophies at play. Either you give the gut bulk through eating fiber, or you eat foods to maintain a fast transit time. I lean toward the transit time approach by eating plenty of easy to digest simple carbs. Personally I've never felt better.
I think eating hard-to-digest, crappy proteins(like all the protein added to shakes, bars, etc)... paired with fermentable bulk fiber... is actually the recipe for inflammation, irritation and colon cancer.
But we do have endless studies showing not eating enough fiber increases your chance of having colon cancer, and we also know a lot of people today don't have nearly as much fiber as people did in the past.
Have you ever looked at those studies? The leading one involves them intentionally giving mice cancer. Completely irrelevant for human biology.
There's a christian cult with a strong bias for vegetarianism that does a lot of medical science publishing. Some of their studies provide useful information, but some of them exist just to create a headline and push a message. Don't be duped.
Fiber is indigestible and not required for human health. It's also a cause of bloating, constipation and gas... because it's indigestible. Fiber does have the benefit of slowing sugar digestion, but you can and should just eat less sugar. Some forms of fiber can be converted to fatty acids by bacteria in your colon, while also producing other byproducts. You can get those fatty acids by eating more meat without the added stress on your digestive system.
Compare the human digestive system of a human being to a wolf (carnivore), a pig (omnivore) and a gorilla (herbivorous hindgut fermenter). The human gut by proportions sits somewhere between wolf and pig.
Look up the actual studies on fiber rather than pop science articles, and examine them critically. They'll do things like assume that pooping more often and having a greater volume of poop is healthier, with no basis. Things like how easy it is to poop or feelings of being bloated are harder to quantify, so they're typically ignored.
Or you get the extrapolating cancer risk based on some vaguely understood biomarker, which is one step below "in mice" as far as science goes.
Please expand on this. Cholesterol is a useful biomarker, but lower cholesterol could be worse. Cholesterol is used to repair the body. If your cholesterol is lower because you've inhibited your ability to produce it (malnutrition or by taking statins), that's bad. If your cholesterol is lower because your inflammation is lower and fewer repairs are needed, that's good. There are also two forms of LDL, one is harmless and the other is oxidized.
If you're feeling good, looking healthy and your body does what you need it to then I'd have to agree that whatever you're doing is working for you, numbers or theory be damned.
I know people are big on the whole fiber fad, but the bulk of benefits which come from eating more fiber are from eating fewer calories. If you're eating high fiber you physically cannot shovel as many calories into your belly. It is a viable strategy since most americans eat way too much every day, but fiber simply isn't essential to health or weight loss. If you like, explain to me a theory on why fiber is somehow essential.
My theory is that the only reason we need indigestible carbohydrate is to push out the indigestible carbohydrate that is already stuck in the colon. Therefore we need it either all the time or not at all. Does this make sense?
I see the logic there, and it's my understanding that the ancient Egyptian physicians believed something similar. Eating high bulk foods helped to prevent other food from rotting inside your gut.
Indigestible carbohydrate is a much broader category than fiber:
-Soluble fiber
-Insoluble fiber
-Sugar alcohols like sorbitol
-Resistant starch (though I'm unsure what the practical difference is between this and soluble fiber)
Insoluble fiber adds bulk to your stool, which I don't think there's a lot of evidence this is healthy. It's probably the main culprit in fiber-induced constipation.
Soluble fiber and resistant starches are probably fine if you're not overdoing it, and if you're on a low-meat diet it's probably how you get short chain fatty acids. It's worth noting that if you're not used to eating these molecules you won't have the bacteria so it'll take some weeks of gas before your system adapts.
Sugar alcohols of the right sort will certainly help your body clear out your gut. Xylitol is interesting for its dental health properties.
To your point: in much of the plant food we grow, there's a matrix of these carbs and digestible carbs. Eating a plum is probably fine. Eating purified sugar, even from plums, is generally bad for you. Eating purified sorbitol from plums won't make you feel good. Why should it be any different eating a bunch of fiber in the form of supplements? The human body is adapted/tuned to digest these molecules in the context of others.
Thankfully I think demand will have to grow a lot for legumes to rise in price much since legumes are basically a byproduct required for growing other more valuable crops.
It's great that beans look kind of gross because otherwise people would learn they taste really good and are healthy at the same time.
I'm just talking about how they look, I'm the chief bean lover. It's kind of annoying how pointing out a negative about something immediately gets people defensive.
Now I have to go to the lab and check (we have a ringdown sensor tuned to CH4/CO2/H2O precise into single digit ppb).
Some humans have methanogens in their gut and these people exhale methane (gut->bloodstream->lungs) and they can emit quite a lot, at least enough to completely fuck up our lab work. Our lead scientist is such a person, and the effect is so bad that he exhales into a bin liner when setting up an experiment.
Or he did: this was so inconvenient that we automated all our instruments, valves, etc so we could run experiments from the kitchen or even at home (lots of RPis which I wouldn’t normally use for anything important). Fortunately this also automated all the data collection.
But now I have to run a trial to see if my diet modulates anal CH4 emissions. Thanks HN!
The sensor she likely uses is only good in the hundreds of ppm. Fortunately the LFL for methane is roughly 50,000 ppm so there’s no need to give up smoking when a bout of methane-heavy flatulence occurs.
Taste is very individual. I personally can't stand the taste of dry beans, to the point where I have a strong aversion just to the texture itself. Fresh green beans can be fine (usually has a sweet or acidic taste), and beans used in Asian food like glass noodles or soy source don't taste like beans at all to me.
When people talk about eating more beans, or when people talk about using it as an ingredient, it usually only mean dry beans.
The main reason protein is highly sought after is that it's an ego/prestige thing associated with excessive self care.
Our diets are very heavily connected to our social status. Being able to consume that level of protein is all about excessive self care.
Fiber is cheap and viewed as a poor person thing. Nobody is holding up their expensive grass fed fiber to brag about the environmental toll it takes, like folks do with their meat and whatnot.
A lot of the protein fad can be traced back to dairy farmers pushing whey into every product they can.
Not the farmers; the producers, distributors, and everything on the way to the consumer. Research labs and marketing agencies construct fads and push it through their magazines and media IP.
That’s the difference between protein and fiber though. You can essentially spam the amount of protein you take in and the excess just gets expelled. The same is not true of fiber too much fiber has downsides.
If your diet is exclusively protein and fiber then your maximum possible caloric intake is very low and how protein intake behaves when you are above maintenance levels is obviously not relevant to you.
There’s an enormous amount of data on this topic. So much I’ll just tell you to do a web search rather than pointing to some papers in is response: it’s just so pervasive and going back for decades.
Use a conventional search not an ai-generated summary as that will have influencer slop mixed in. Though oddly, I’ve never seen an anti-fibre influencer, but have seen lots of pro-fibre influencer posts!
> There’s an enormous amount of data on this topic.
FWIW, the evidence demonstrating that fibre is protective against colon cancer is limited, and when studies try to adjust for behavioural differences, the colon cancer reduction disappears.
Actual RCTs that randomly assigned subjects found no difference in polyp rates between high and low fibre diets.
For decades it was indeed widely observed that the people who ate a lot of fibre tended to have a lower incident rate. But the sort of person who has a high fibre diet almost always has a lot of other protective habits and norms: They're less likely to smoke, less likely to drink to excess, they tend to eat less red meat, they eat less sugar and UPFs, and so on.
As is often the case, these habits don't tend to happen in isolation, and this is where observational studies fail. So if you take someone with a lot of bad habits and supplement fibre, they'll have better cholesterol control, glycemic benefits, and of course regularity benefits, but it won't measurably move the needle on colon cancer rates.
This is all just conversational, but the current consensus is that fibre, or lack thereof, is not a contributor behind the rise in colon cancer among younger subjects. There are many suspected causes, all moving the needle enough that incidence rates jump.
> Actual RCTs that randomly assigned subjects found no difference in polyp rates between high and low fibre diets.
As far as I know the only RCT that fits that description is one looking at people who had already developed adenomas and then tested for reoccurrence.
An RCT actually designed to answer the question would need to last decades and just isn’t feasible.
There are a large multitude of studies that show a negative correlation between CRC and fiber intake even when adjusting for diet, exercise, BMI, income, alcohol consumption etc…
> but the current consensus is that fibre, or lack thereof, is not a contributor behind the rise in colon cancer among younger subjects.
There’s not good evidence to say it’s the sole or primary factor, but saying there’s consensus that is not a contributor is way too strong.
> but saying there’s consensus that is not a contributor is way too strong
In most cause hypotheses, fibre just doesn't rank at all. I mean, of course everyone should eat more fibre so that's good, but it isn't a credible cause for the rise of colon cancer rates among the young.
Most destructive to the fibre hypothesis is that fibre intake has actually increased over the past few decades, at the same time that youth colon cancer rates crept up[1]. I don't know what notion people have about common Western food practices decades ago, but in the 1980s, for instance, fibre was basically non-existent in the common diet: No one ate multigrain anything. Everything was loaded with sugar, trans fats and simple carbs (we literally considered that healthy, with hilarious products like Snackwells).
[1] Twice as many young people, per capita, are facing colon cancer now than in the 80s. Overall colon cancer rates are down significantly now, however this is most certainly due to the massive reduction in smoking and other behavioural issues that catch up to you after many decades, but kids today are in no way eating less fibre than kids in the 1980s.
> There are a large multitude of studies that show a negative correlation between CRC and fiber intake even when adjusting for diet, exercise, BMI, income, alcohol consumption etc…
Not really. Take any behaviour or practice that is common among the healthier cohort and it's easy meat for bullshit study results. It's why the nutrition field in particular is full of contradictory studies because "adjusting for" is carrying a lot of unmerited credibility.
> Not really. Take any behaviour or practice that is common among the healthier cohort and it's easy meat for bullshit study results. It's why the nutrition field in particular is full of contradictory studies because "adjusting for" is carrying a lot of unmerited credibility.
You’re the one that said that when studies adjust for these differences they no longer show a correlation.
That is just flat wrong. You used that exact phrase “adjust for”. You can move the goalpost if you want to “I don’t think they are correctly adjusting for all differences” but that’s a very different argument than the one you presented.
The preponderance of the evidence is that fiber has a protective effect against colon cancer and there are multiple plausible explanatory mechanisms.
“I don't know what notion people have about common Western food practices decades ago, but in the 1980s, for instance, fibre was basically non-existent in the common diet”
This is misleading.
1. There is a single gram per thousand calorie difference in aggregate between 1980 and today, so if it was non existent then, it’s non-existent now.
2. Percentage of ultra processed food and food away from home has gone up drastically since 1980, so the types of fiber consumed on average have changed drastically as well.
3. “Fiber” is now a much broader category than it used to be. Resistant starches can now be labeled fiber. If a tiny fraction of the population eats the equivalent a single low carb tortilla with 30g of resistant starch per day that’s enough to completely throw off the aggregate fiber stats. There is much less evidence that resistant starch is protective against colon cancer.
4. Stability in the aggregate doesn’t preclude changes in sub populations. Changes in the way we eat leading to a larger sub population with very little fiber intake.
We know that there have been changes in sub populations. For instance one study that found fiber consumption was stable overall between 1999-2017 found that it dropped among White adults, but the aggregate was stable because it rose among Black and Hispanic adults.
> You’re the one that said that when studies adjust for these differences they no longer show a correlation.
A large number of studies that fully adjust for lifestyle differences have found no meaningful difference in colon cancer rates. It is basically debunked.
This cynical piece covers quite a few of them. The evidence that fibre prevents colon cancer is akin to the evidence that red wine keeps you healthy. It disappears when properly analyzed.
> This is misleading.
The mean fibre intake in the 1980s was ~11 grams per day. Today the fibre intake is ~15g. A 36% increase in fibre, and youth colon cancer rates have more than doubled. The math isn't mathing.
I grew up in the 1980s, friend. I suspect you didn't, because anyone heralding those good old days of food quality is clearly simply clueless. A good diet was captain crunch (actually an entire aisle was just whatever cartoons or characters were big having their own cereal that was all coloured flour + sugar), miracle bread, bagged chips and an endless series of full-sugar products.
On the eating out thing: Food made by McDonalds or any other org is in no way empirically worse for you than similar foods eaten at home. Like I get far more veggies and fibre from a Wendy's burger than when I make the burger at home. This is one of those lazy correlation hand-wavy things people use to invent data where there is none. The one real change with eating out is higher sodium is more prevalent, but otherwise it isn't really illustrative of much at all.
I don't doubt it's healthy, perhaps via reducing insulin spikes. But the question is if it is the cause of the mysterious increase in colorectal cancer.
I work in the grocery industry and can say fiber era is already here. It maybe hasn’t reached most consumers yet but food companies are making the products and trend forecasters called it years ago. It’s going to be a tsunami. And not necessarily a bad one bc it’s an easy sell. Lots of ppl really do need more fiber.
Is it? They’re pricier, they’re not available in food deserts, they go bad much more quickly, and they require more skill to cook into a delicious meal.
Disgree except with the food desert thing. Theyreactually way cheaper than some chemically-generated-fiber cookies n cream bar bullshit. Its just that they take some effort and time to make and everyone wants convenience
You can get beans anywhere. If they are not available fresh, they are equally nutritous when dried or in a can. They are tasty, easy to cook, and an excellent source of fiber and protein.
If you don't like beans, how about a peanut butter sandwich. If you lack the requisite kitchen skills, ask a six year old to make you one.
The fact is that most people just prefer to eat other stuff. We prioritize convenience over health, enabled by food industries that profit from selling us junk.
If you buy fresh vegetables, I don't necessarily think they're pricier but they do require more planning. You need to buy what is in season, which means planning meals around what is in season and cheap to buy, which changes on the season.
For certain staples, buying frozen is extremely cheap, can be cheaper than fresh, can be better than buying fresh as frozen as soon as picked, and extremely easy to cook. I've always got frozen broccoli, carrots, peas, green beans, spinach in the freezer. Three minutes in a microwave steamer and it's an easy side, or add in to meals near the end of cooking.
I also always have a bag of potatoes in the house, cheap, keep well, easy to steam in microwave, can mash, can bake, pop in the airfryer etc.
I'll grant you the food dessert and going back arguments, but unless I'm buying particularly out of season or less common, foreign vegetables, produce is often one of the cheapest sections of the store.
Lots of people = almost all people in the USA, according to research I’ve seen. I’m not sure of exact numbers, but I recall it being somewhere close to 95% of people being deficient to some degree, with the majority of that group being quite deficient.
A lot of the fiber they are putting in foods so they can call them high fiber don’t have the positive health benefits generally associated with fiber. e.g. I researched Benefiber years ago and the studies I found at the time indicated it had none of the benefits to heart health or colon health. But it dissolves basically into nothing while still technically being fiber.
Digestion Resistant Maltodextrin is what at least some of them are adding now and from what I've read it does have similar or the same colon benefits. Haven't seen anything indicating the opposite.
Maybe better than some options. But fiber can be soluble or insoluble. DRM is fully soluble, which means it helps slow digestion and absorption but doesn’t have colon health benefits (usually associated with the less palatable insoluble fiber).
Psyllium husk is a great blend of both, but it’s not very palatable because the insoluble fiber makes it gritty. It also tastes like dirt which is why Metamucil smothers it in orange flavoring.
That was last wave. Personally, I’m wary of products with added fiber, but always choose whole wheat or whole grain. If needed, you can supplement with psyllium.
That might be a byproduct, but I don't think it's the point. The point as I understand it is to make them hyper palatable which means adding the right mix of sugar, fat and salt.
The actual content of the article is about the great increase in the price of whey protein concentrate since last summer, until now, apparently due to greatly increased demand for it.
Where I live, in the European Union, the price of whey protein concentrate had doubled around the beginning of 2026 and now it has reached even a triple price in comparison with a year earlier.
For a few years in the past, before the price increase, whey protein concentrate had been cheaper than the cheapest meat, per its content of protein. Now it has become about 50% more expensive than chicken breast, per protein content.
This is annoying for me, because where I live there were only 2 ways for achieving a diet satisfying simultaneously 3 criteria without including meat: sufficient daily protein intake, not exceeding the calories threshold that would cause rapid gain of weight and price not greater than an equivalent diet with meat (there are a lot of plant protein concentrates, but all are many times more expensive than cheap meat, at least here).
One way is to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, which is an activity that wastes too much time and too much water, the other way was to use whey protein concentrate as an ingredient for various dishes made from vegetables, to increase their protein content.
At the current price, the use of whey protein concentrate is no longer attractive, despite the fact that whey protein is the ideal source of protein, with optimum amino-acid composition and perfect digestibility.
The FT article believes that this sudden increase in the demand for whey protein concentrate was caused by the widespread use of drugs like Ozempic for weight loss, which also causes loss of muscular mass, leading to the use of protein supplements to prevent it, and also to the new US dietary guidelines, which recommend an increased consumption of protein (the old US recommendations for daily protein intake were notorious as much too low, i.e. they were at a level that prevents death, without ensuring good health, but the new recommendations might have jumped on the other side of an optimum intake).
The only possible positive consequence of this huge price increase is that it might convince some people to invest in the production of whey protein concentrate from cultures of genetically-modified fungi, instead of from cow milk. There already exists a strain of the fungus Trichoderma, whose genome was modified to secrete cow whey protein, instead of an enzyme secreted by the wild fungi.
Unlike with "lab-grown meat", there is no doubt that it will be possible to produce protein powders of whey protein or of egg-white protein in a cheaper way from fungal cultures than from milk or eggs.
It is likely that in the near future I will return to eating a moderate amount of chicken meat, after I will finish my reserves of whey protein concentrate, which were bought a long time ago, when it was cheap.
Most plant protein concentrates are not an acceptable substitute for meat, because their very high prices make obvious that their production is less efficient than that of meat, i.e. it requires a lot of extra energy and chemical reagents.
More than half of my protein intake comes from plant sources like lentils and wheat, but I cannot raise that percentage to 100%, because I gain weight immediately.
Fortunately, I do not have any problem with gluten, so I can enjoy bread that I bake at home, which is tasty and which has a negligible cost per protein content.
Farming is not an open and free market. You cannot draw any conclusions about actual costs and impact from retail pricing. Subsidies distort cost massively.
I'm also from the EU, and the plant protein mix in the shop I buy from is less than half the price of the whey protein, about 13 EUR per kg. Interestingly, casein doesn't seem to have increased in price nearly as much as whey protein did.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but 1kg of whey protein on Amazon seems to cost around £20, which is roughly what I remember it costing back when I used to use it 7 or 8 years ago.
That's because the raw material is only ~10% of the retail price. According to EU data, commodity prices for sweet whey powder in the EU are about 1.6 € per kg.
That doesn't add up with what OP said, though. Firstly, they mentioned a 2-3x increase, whereas your link has a 60% increase. Secondly, what're they buying if not retail? Thirdly, 2 euros per kilo is surely much better value per gram of protein than you're ever going to get with chicken?
2 EUR/kg was the price for buying in bulk, which is not accessible for individuals.
At retail I had been buying for a few years, before the start of the current price increase, pure non-adulterated whey protein concentrate at around 15 EUR/kg, i.e. at somewhat less than 19 EUR per kilogram of pure protein, which was less than the price of any kind of meat per its protein content.
Today I can buy chicken breast at a price around 25 EUR per kilogram of pure protein, which is much less than the current price of whey protein.
The price of whey protein concentrate must be evaluated carefully, because most whey protein on the market is diluted with various kinds of garbage. Pure non-adulterated whey protein concentrate is harder to find.
Until last year I was buying pure whey protein concentrate with 80% protein at a price of around 15 EUR/kg. At the beginning of 2026 it was around 25 EUR/kg. Now it is over 35 EUR/kg in the best case, with other vendors demanding much higher prices.
I'm OK with this. There have been a lot dumber "health" fads (low fat, low sodium, etc.) than focusing on more protein. Protein is also more satiating than carbohydrates so it can reduce calorie intake overall.
I’ve definitely noticed this in my diet. I am a gym rat so I eat a lot of protein, but I’ve seen an uptick in other protein focused snacks and foods around. At my office the protein shakes in the fridge disappear pretty quick compared to the soda, perhaps due to folks who want to get more protein easily more than other gym rats
There are massive efforts to sell more dairy/beef in general. The governments in the USA and other countries subsidize it at massive scales. Other proteins are just fine, but there’s no pea protein lobby. Well, certainly not at the same scale.
The economics for cheaper proteins are actually incredible, too. The incentives simply don’t exist in the right places to facilitate the right legislation and public awareness, though. Many of us grew up with “Got Milk?” and “Beef is What’s for Dinner”, not “Got Lentils?”. It really made a difference.
> setting a daily target of 1.2–1.6 grammes per kilogramme of body weight, 50-100 per cent above the longstanding recommended dietary allowance of 0.8g
This is a good range for improving for maintaining your body composition; preserving or building muscle. Fitness coaches are recommending 2.2g/lb (1g per lb) or even more which doesn't have much scientific backing. 1.6g/kg seems to be the max that will benefit muscle gain.
On the other hand, there are some (Valter Longo, biologist at UCLA) who say that such high protein will reduce your overall longevity. He recommends 0.36g protein per lb body weight.
I don't know what to do with this info. Personally, I stay around 1.2g protein/lb (and exercise) as a middle ground.
I had been seeing the protein marketing push and largely ignored it, until I went to go buy some protein powder and it was triple the price of what I expected/remembered. I went to look at that time and found this as the answer.
I'm annoyed by it, but like every other food fad, I assume it will be temporary... unless GLP-1s make it a mainstay. I also wonder if we'll see prices return to normal if demand goes down, or if this is the new normal and companies will just pocket the margin.
There's massive variation across insect species, relatively little research and no industrialisation on the scale of current farming. It's not useful to generalise all insects and all production techniques simply to "bugs are less efficient".
In a study of 236 edible species, protein content of dry matter ranged from 6% to 77%. [1]
And a study of a particular grasshopper found it had higher protein content than lamb, beef, pork, chicken, turkey and fish [2].
AFAIK it's very hard to keep them sterile, and a large volume of crickets may look like a lot but not produce much protein. If packed too densely, maybe they crush each other or otherwise die?
It depends. They figured out that more than about 15% soy in pig feed gives the pigs cancer and other diseases. Soy isn't just nutrients, there are pesticides the plant produces which can cause issues. I think fermenting soy into tofu deals with a lot of that, but I don't know.
Bugs have the chitin, which some animals (like us) don't digest super well. You also need more than just the protein, so why not let your chickens eat the bugs? They're real happy to do it and it makes the chicken taste better.
Bugs as a protein source in agriculture is probably underutilized in the west. It may be less economical today, because growing corn and soy is subsidized while breeding insects isn't. In some areas of Adrica, entrepreneurs collect waste food and even run public dry toilets to feed insects like black soldier fly. BSF is easier to keep clean than many other insects because the adults don't eat.
Look at our fucking food! We have smooth brained governance in food, why do we still have real sugar in candy when we can (AND DO) use fake sugar.
We of course fucked up protein intake, this is a CORRECTION towards healthier food as it always should have fucking been
We literally have 1/8 of the US population, and possibly hundreds of millions of people globally, on fucking peptides to protect themselves from the insane food we don’t want to regulate
100% due to marketing, influencers, and people wanting to make money.
I remember reading an article from a couple that were professional body builders. It was pretty insightful. I also will not forget that they said they never once drank protein shakes. All of their protein came from their diets, such as eating turkey and other foods.
Also, most people don’t work out hard enough to need a protein shake. It’s usually just extra calories and ultimately turning into fat.
Whey powder was about turning a waste stream into profit, but it is a highly digestible protein with clear benefits. Human breastmilk is mostly whey with a bit of casein. Cow's milk is mostly casein with a bit of whey. While it's true that most americans are too sedentary to need the protein, they also don't eat whey powder, nor do they really understand why people do. Probably because of all those marketers and shysters confusing the issue trying to hock a product.
If you're concerned with health, ignore any advice from competition bodybuilders. They all take steroids and will often make things up to avoid admitting they take illegal drugs. Some also mislead others to give themselves a leg up. Arnold Schwarzenegger was known for pulling that one a few times.
A steak is better than whey powder because it contains a multitude of other aminos and nutrients. But who's gonna stick a steak in a blender?
It's funny that protein everything is taking off just as more data seems to come out that you really don't need as much protein as previously thought, even for vigorous weightlifting (~0.82g/lb of lean body mass seems to be a sufficient number), which isn't really all that hard to get from regular old high protein food. There's no good reason to infuse it in everything. I've been lifting for many years now, and have not noticed a difference from when I used to follow the old 1g/lb of body weight rule.
source: https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...
Your priors on what normal amount of protein amounts to is way off of the general public, at least as of 5 years ago.
And somehow all the people I've met mentioning figures from papers (be it 1g, 1.4g or whatever) always seem to skip the "lean" part of "lean body mass" part, which is again a decent difference.
In the imperial vs metric conversation, the protein debate has my favorite use of units: 1 gram per pound.
I laugh every time, but also, Americans know their weight in lbs but nutritional panels are in metric. It’s sensible nonsense.
It's very mnemonic though and typical of the units for the respective components in the US.
That’s because a lot of guidance and studies focus on total body mass and not lean.
Whether that’s the right approach or not is debatable. It’s certainly easier to target 1g/lb of total body mass than .82g/lb of lean body mass. (But certainly it’s easier to eat enough protein to hit .82g/lb lean body mass.)
Isn't age also a factor?
What's "regular old high protein food"? Do you mean something like meat every meal? When I recorded my meals I found my protein intake to be quite low (I don't eat meat. I eat fish but not every day.).
As I understand it you need more protein as you get older.
I'm curious how, historically, people have fared, as meat has not been as available as it is now (though this has probably varied considerably over time)
Historically older people lose a lot of muscle mass, which also means they gain weight and lose mobility, some even needing assistance doing basic things like walking or getting out of their chair.
Getting enough protein and exercising is crucial as you age, and it's something a lot of people have historically not understood, since as your metabolism slows, you get less hungry right when your protein needs are increasing.
Age is a factor and goals are a factor, the 1g/lb number is for optimal gains from bodybuilding not the minimum you need to just be alive or healthy
and yeah people who say that protein is easy to get assume that you're eating meat with every meal
on a vegetarian diet you get it from random sources, bread has a little, cheese has a little, it all adds up to the point where you're basically fine especially if you try to include a main protein/meat replacement in every meal (tofu, seitan, chickpeas) but I'm just not a big person and the amount of food I'd need to eat to reach the optimal grams/lb would be too much without supplementation
The recommended minimum is 1.2 g/kg (0.55g/lb)
All the people on GLP-1 drugs are told to make sure they get enough protein. My dad, who is on one of them, was saying his friend (also on one) was saying he felt it was like a cheat code for being able to eat pasta... so I think a lot of people are eating the same old stuff, but just feeling less guilty about it.
They still want to eat Doritos, and now they can buy the protein Doritos and act like they are following the doctor's orders, even though that's not in the spirit of what the doctor was saying. There are also a lot of products that change little to nothing, but still slap a "Protein" label on the front of the box.
We saw similar things with "low carb" versions of everything during the Atkin's craze. Before that we saw everything made into "low fat" in the 80s, which we're still suffering from. It's likely a big reason why we as a society have a need for weight loss drugs in the first place.
Are the protein doritos good? Has he told you? Doritos are my achiles heel for junk food. When I was weightlifting a lot my coach said to have Doritos with cottage cheese as a post-lifting snack which actually was pretty good!
I'm on GLP-1 so I no longer obsessively crave Doritos and can resist their siren song. But maybe the protein ones are worth trying.
>regular old high protein food
You don't need to eat "high protein food" to get adequate protein.
Let's say an 80 kg moderately active man needs to eat 2600 kcal/day to maintain body weight. According to current guidelines, that man needs about 0.8g/kg of protein per day, or 64 grams per day.
White bread has about 2.6 grams of protein per 77 kcal.
https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/174924/wt1
You have: 2600 kcal / (77 kcal / 2.6 grams)
You want: grams
* 87.792208
/ 0.011390533
That works out to about 88 grams of protein per day eating nothing except white bread.
It's difficult to not get enough protein unless you're eating too few calories overall.
> According to current guidelines, that man needs about 0.8g/kg of protein per day
O.8g/kg was set as the target to avoid protein deficiency, not as any measure of optimal. Current guidelines are 50-100% higher. Optimal for muscle growth is higher still according to many studies.
If you are trying to hit the bro-science 1g/lb of body weight, that’s a lot of protein and most will likely have trouble hitting it without supplements (or eating mass amounts of meat).
Of course most people proteinmaxxing are not actually growing any muscle but eating protein fortified Doritos makes them feel like they are doing something healthy.
>Current guidelines are 50-100% higher.
Eh. If you're an American, maybe. They're a real outlier and it seems like bro science to me.
Canada recommends 0.8g/kg/day.
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/food-nutriti...
A diet put together by Lancet and friends comes out to 82g/10MG, which works out to 1.11 g/kg for an 80 kg man who eats 2600 kcal/day. So their recommendation is obviously below that, and therefore not 50% higher than 0.8g/kg/day.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Content-of-macronutrient...
The UK recommends about 55g/day for men and 45g/day for women, which is under 0.8 g/kg.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Australia recommends about 0.8 g/kg/day.
https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/nutrient-reference-values/nu...
France recommends 0.83 g/kg/day (section 2.2.1)
https://www.anses.fr/fr/system/files/NUT2012SA0103Ra-2.pdf
Some of those guidelines are old (if that matters), but some of them aren't. The EAT-Lancet diet was designed quite recently.
Even if the American numbers are right, just swap the white bread for whole wheat bread and you'll hit the target. It remains dead easy to get adequate protein no matter what guidelines you use.
If your goal is only to avoid malnutrition, then 0.8g/kg is sufficient. If your goal is to grow muscle or pursue athletic ventures, etc, no one seems to recommend anything that low.
But you’re also arguing against a point no one is making. No one says “it’s hard for me to eat maintenance calories and get enough protein to prevent signs of malnutrition”. The typical statement is that is hard to reach a higher target (0.8 or 1g per pound) intended to help grow muscle. And this is typically in the context of a balanced diet and often in the context of a calorie deficit as someone is trying to lose weight. Also this is usually in the context of the diet being based in a typical western diet, so some of the calories are lost to “junk”.
“It’s hard for me to hit 0.8g/lb when I’m running an 800 calorie deficit and eating a lot of fruit and vegetables” is not an unreasonable claim.
Could you link to the guidelines you're talking about?
Which guidelines? FDA guidelines? (Covered in the article.) Other countries? (some GP linked) Guidelines for muscle growth?
Henselmen’s review is a good start for muscle growth:
https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...
This review shows mostly one thing: the science on this sucks. Look at the data they collected. Studies over 7 days, 2 weeks, 4 weeks... the longest one was three months and didn't even really differentiate these 2g/kg bodybuilding levels of protein intake from the average ones. An experienced natural lifter will probably need a year to see truly measurable benefits from training. And unexperienced lifters will probably see good results even with a shit diet because of basic adaptions.
Welcome to the world of exercise and dietary science. It’s not great, largely because there’s no money in it and blinding is frequently impossible. This is why meta analysis is so popular.
Protein supplements alone is like a $30B dollar market and protein foods in general is >$100B. You'd think they would find some money in there. By comparison, the hair loss market is less than $10B and they have been putting out a few really high quality studies over the years. But I guess people affected by hair loss have higher agency than others.
The thing is that investing in large scale nutrition studies has no payoff. If Optimum Nutrition hypothetically proved conclusively that 1g protein/lb body weight grew more muscle than .8g, any growth to the industry would be general and not specific to their company. Basically there’s no return on investment.
A new baldness fighting drug gets patent protection and exclusive market rights.
Now look up the amino acid profile of protein in white bread, though.
You’re broadly right (most diets provide adequate protein), but white bread is a crappy example. Most white breads are fortified, and even if not are surprisingly nutritious compared to a lot of pure junk food (e.g. outer corn or rice carbs and sugars).
That means there are some (very poor) calorie-sufficient diets that don’t provide enough protein. But I agree that it’s still rarer than people think.
For someone who eats 2600 kcal/day, eating enough protein is very easy, even if the required protein intake for avoiding the loss of muscular mass in old age is significantly greater than 0.8 g/kg.
However, I would not call 2600 kcal/day a value typical for "moderately active" but for an "active" profession.
I work mostly sitting by the computer, but I still walk about a couple of hours per day and I spend about a half of hour daily with more intense exercises with weights, so I would call myself moderately active.
Even so, in most days if I eat above 1800 to 1900 kcal (being a male of average height and about 76 kg), I gain weight immediately. Therefore, for me eating enough proteins without eating too many calories is a problem about which I must think permanently.
Eating only bread is not realistic, but a real diet could include bread made from 250 g of wheat flour + 250 g lentils. This adds to 90 g of protein, but the digestibility of proteins from both cereals and legumes is only about 90%, unlike for animal proteins, so the true protein intake would be 81 g. This would be at the lower limit of an acceptable protein intake for a male of average height, but it would provide almost 1800 kcal.
For myself, that would mean that I could eat absolutely nothing else. Adding the minimum amount of oil to provide essential fatty acids and fat-soluble vitamins would already exceed the amount of calories that I may eat.
If you cook your own food, it is not difficult to have acceptable ratios of protein per calories. However, the food that I see in a supermarket, as ready-to-eat food, almost always has bad or extremely bad protein per calories ratios. If you add a few sweet things to your menu it is very easy to exceed your calories threshold without eating enough protein.
Most folks (at least in North America) get no where near the recommended level. It's silly to have protein infused junk food, but a shake or protein powder make it a lot easier to get to the right level than remembering to have 3 hard boiled eggs.
Is 30g of protein from a shake truly equivalent to 30g of protein from 100g of chicken breast?
In 2026, you can't get a straight answer to this question, because anything protein related is SEO-optimized blogspam (thanks Google).
From what I've read, both are good sources of usable protein but animal protein is considered higher quality because it includes more essential micronutrients that are delivered more effectively through the digestion process. Basically it's what your body has evolved to process best. Protein drinks do give quick protein for recovery, etc.
Animal protein is considered to be better than plant protein for lean muscle mass. So it depends if the shake is say whey or soy.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7926405/#sec5-nutri...
I would hardly draw that conclusion from this paper. It's a meta analysis of a handful of studies with fairly low sample sizes, and it wasn't immediately clear that there was any controlling factor wrt amount consumed. There are also a lot of statements pointing out there was no statistically significant difference for various metrics...
I won't call it common sense, but humans with highly limited technology lived and reproduced to build sophisticated civilizations in almost every biome on the planet.
Our biology is immensely adaptable, so anyone declaring you absolutely need some finely decided very specific thing in order to be "be healthy" should be treated skeptically.
With regards to protein specifically: your body doesn't trade in proteins as inputs, it trades in amino acids which cracked off the protein chains you eat. Everything else is just trying to keep the crowd of gut bacteria from making you feel uncomfortable.
I will say this is true for the average person. Now, there is a .01% of humanity that's doing things like extreme sports it starts to matter a lot.
This was a good video I watched the other day, where they tested protein content and go in to what protein actually is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsOCD1gci60 (I 3rd-Party Tested The UK’s Top Protein Products).
Protein is made up of amino acids, different sources of protein have different amino acid profiles.
Animal protein matches the amino acids profile we need the best. Whey protein is close, soy isn't bad. You can vary your food groups to balance the amino acids, so if one source is low in one amino acid, you can compliment it with another source higher in another. I found the video intersting and been using protein supplements for near 20 years.
So true, and as a person ages it becomes even more important to keep getting good protein but most don't.
0.82g/lb is a lot of protein. That's basically what what bro science was saying for years (2g per kg) and it's not easy to hit if you count quality protein that's bioavailable so I don't know what the point is here.
For averge Joe to hit 0.82g/lb he would need to eat 600g of lean beef every day. Or 33 eggs.
... also Menno Henselmans while he does a lot of great work that outweights everything he posts tons pseudo-scientific where's often clear he just did a basic Google Scholar search. Plus he seems too eaeger to "debunk" but often barely even understands deficiencies of many of the studies he references. A lot of people take his website for some holy grail of "scientific bodybuilding" because he's trying too hard to market it that way and he's been wrong many times and built arguments on foundations he barely understands.
Examine.com for example has different figures and it's a website where studies are reviewed by actual PHDs and graded by their strength not just simple Google Scholar search.
https://examine.com/guides/protein-intake/
600g of lean beef is how much protein ?
about 150g
At 0.82g/lb and assuming 20% body-fat doesn’t that mean average joe is weighing almost 230lbs? That seems high
Henselmans‘ number is for total body mass, not lean.
Oops, you're right. Messed that up in my OP.
Wasn't that always bro science ? From what I remember when I looked into it most people couldn't digest more than approximately 1.7g of protein for every kg of body weight. At the very upper end. And that's just digestion - not even actual use - and it had to be spread out across the day.
This is definitely not true. You can live off almost entirely protein and digest it just fine.
I would not want to do that but there’s no practical upper limit on how much protein a healthy person can digest.
Humans have a limited capacity to turn protein into calories, which is why you will starve to death if your diet is purely lean protein (see: "rabbit starvation").
The human capacity to turn old protein into new protein is separate. IIRC, total protein turnover in humans is on the order of 300g per day. Only a fraction of that protein comes from diet. Something like 250g comes from recycling existing tissue at the cellular level.
That article doesn't say 0.82g/lb of *lean body mass*:
> There is normally no advantage to consuming more protein than 0.82g/lb (1.8g/kg) of *total bodyweight* per day
And there are other analyses out there recommending closer to 1g/lb of total bodyweight, and this analysis is much more convincing: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/protein-science/
> ~0.82g/lb of lean body mass
That's 1.8g/kg of lean body mass which is pretty close to the 2g/kg total body mass I've always used for weight training.
That's still a LOT of protein. 130g a day for me. To reach that is 500g of chicken breast, for example. And it's not like you can eat that in one meal. That's another controversial topic but it's likely about 50g per meal (for me, 90kg man) is the max. So if I eat chicken for dinner, 50g protein the I still need two other spaced meals to get the remaining 80g.
I'm not doing elite training so I'm not going to follow this rigidly, it's just a rough daily goal. I'll usually have a protein shake per day, then a high protein meal and try to make up the rest elsewhere.
> To reach that is 500g of chicken breast, for example
Why not? I eat more than this every day and I eat once a day (OMAD).
0.82g/lb of lean body mass is a ton of protein compared to any normal diet. That's like 5 scoops of whey protein powder for a 180lb person.
I’m going to be honest, I feel that these ideas do not come from a place of science but from a political bent that meat is bad and therefore we should eat less of it. This is inconvenient because it does not fit actual facts of reality (humans work best with an a meat based diet but can in a pinch eat just about anything) and therefore reality must be denied. Those who point out that what they say is wrong will get the usual treatment for that.
I admit this is conspiratorical.
The next wave will be "fiber-maxxing", with the increased rate of colon cancer in millenials and gen z. Seriously guys, get your fiber intake.
I know no one asked but if you're a gym bro and looking for easy fiber intake, get the carb balance tortillas from mission. 17g of fiber per tortilla.
And OliPops have 6 to 9g per can.
Just eat real food.
Stop substituting and finding short cuts. Just eat a balanced meal with vegetables.
You’re grossly underestimating how much fiber a person needs to eat.
How much fiber does a person need to eat, as measured in weight or volume of common vegetables?
Men around 40g per day, it's like 2 pounds of a balanced mix of legumes, beans, vegetables, whole grains and fruits.
That is a lot of food. Even if I’d eat just that, I’d have to very consciously force myself to eat one kilo of that, unless it’s something like watermelon.
I don't think it needs to be nearly that much food.
A single bowl of oatmeal with chia seeds gets you about halfway there. 2-3 tbsp of chia seeds has ~10-15g of fiber, mostly soluble fiber. Soluble is what you want for lowering cholesterol because it binds to bile acid, which means your liver has to use cholesterol from your body to make more bile. The oatmeal adds another ~4-5g and is largely soluble too.
After that you don't have far to go. Besides lentils and many beans, whole grains are really fiber dense, e.g., having wheat bread on a sandwich can get you another +6 just from the bread. Brown rice instead of white gets you 3-4 more. Weird grains like barley and bulgur have a bunch and go well in things like casseroles, chilis, etc. You'll also get at least some from whatever fruits/veggies you were going to eat anyway.
I’ve mostly seen the 14g of fiber per 1000 calories recommendation.
It is a lot compared to what most people take, but it’s not hard. Banana, orange, some broccoli, and you are close. Lentils, beans (lupini is great because it also has protein) here and there, oats, an extra fruit (pear is nice), berries, avocado, so many options.
But you need to be conscious. Most people need less starch and sugar and fat.
I poop 2-4 times a day. I know some people have a real problem going to the bathroom once a day… just eat more fiber folks.
Millions of people have gone years without fiber intentionally or not
I wouldn't sweat it - just focus on eating unprocessed food fiber or not
Unprocessed food like raw liver?
that "fiber" is chemically modified resistant starch
the FDA allows it to be called fiber, but it acts differently in the body to the soluble and insoluble fiber that most people are familiar with
IMO, it's a mistake to treat fiber as a single, fungible food component, rather than as a family of different substances with different health effects
if you're looking for "easy fiber intake", there is much more and stronger evidence for psyllium-based soluble fiber, widely available in cheap and convenient drinks like metamucil (I prefer formulations without the dye and maltodextrin, but that's getting into the weeds)
> that "fiber" is chemically modified resistant starch
So basically toss a shovel of potato starch into your protein shake and be done with it. It's flavored so strongly to make whey protein palatable that you won't even notice.
Metamucil (and it's unbranded brethren) are decidely un-cheap
Really? I think my no-name psyllium husk is ~$0.40/day.
I think there are two main philosophies at play. Either you give the gut bulk through eating fiber, or you eat foods to maintain a fast transit time. I lean toward the transit time approach by eating plenty of easy to digest simple carbs. Personally I've never felt better.
I think eating hard-to-digest, crappy proteins(like all the protein added to shakes, bars, etc)... paired with fermentable bulk fiber... is actually the recipe for inflammation, irritation and colon cancer.
No studies show protein has anything to do with colon cancer and in fact it could even have protective effects.
But we do have endless studies showing not eating enough fiber increases your chance of having colon cancer, and we also know a lot of people today don't have nearly as much fiber as people did in the past.
mainstream science literally links heavy meat consumption to colon cancer all the time.
There are other sources of protein.
Have you ever looked at those studies? The leading one involves them intentionally giving mice cancer. Completely irrelevant for human biology.
There's a christian cult with a strong bias for vegetarianism that does a lot of medical science publishing. Some of their studies provide useful information, but some of them exist just to create a headline and push a message. Don't be duped.
Fiber is indigestible and not required for human health. It's also a cause of bloating, constipation and gas... because it's indigestible. Fiber does have the benefit of slowing sugar digestion, but you can and should just eat less sugar. Some forms of fiber can be converted to fatty acids by bacteria in your colon, while also producing other byproducts. You can get those fatty acids by eating more meat without the added stress on your digestive system.
Compare the human digestive system of a human being to a wolf (carnivore), a pig (omnivore) and a gorilla (herbivorous hindgut fermenter). The human gut by proportions sits somewhere between wolf and pig.
Look up the actual studies on fiber rather than pop science articles, and examine them critically. They'll do things like assume that pooping more often and having a greater volume of poop is healthier, with no basis. Things like how easy it is to poop or feelings of being bloated are harder to quantify, so they're typically ignored.
Or you get the extrapolating cancer risk based on some vaguely understood biomarker, which is one step below "in mice" as far as science goes.
My LDL numbers beg to differ.
Please expand on this. Cholesterol is a useful biomarker, but lower cholesterol could be worse. Cholesterol is used to repair the body. If your cholesterol is lower because you've inhibited your ability to produce it (malnutrition or by taking statins), that's bad. If your cholesterol is lower because your inflammation is lower and fewer repairs are needed, that's good. There are also two forms of LDL, one is harmless and the other is oxidized.
If you're feeling good, looking healthy and your body does what you need it to then I'd have to agree that whatever you're doing is working for you, numbers or theory be damned.
I know people are big on the whole fiber fad, but the bulk of benefits which come from eating more fiber are from eating fewer calories. If you're eating high fiber you physically cannot shovel as many calories into your belly. It is a viable strategy since most americans eat way too much every day, but fiber simply isn't essential to health or weight loss. If you like, explain to me a theory on why fiber is somehow essential.
My theory is that the only reason we need indigestible carbohydrate is to push out the indigestible carbohydrate that is already stuck in the colon. Therefore we need it either all the time or not at all. Does this make sense?
I see the logic there, and it's my understanding that the ancient Egyptian physicians believed something similar. Eating high bulk foods helped to prevent other food from rotting inside your gut.
Indigestible carbohydrate is a much broader category than fiber: -Soluble fiber -Insoluble fiber -Sugar alcohols like sorbitol -Resistant starch (though I'm unsure what the practical difference is between this and soluble fiber)
Insoluble fiber adds bulk to your stool, which I don't think there's a lot of evidence this is healthy. It's probably the main culprit in fiber-induced constipation.
Soluble fiber and resistant starches are probably fine if you're not overdoing it, and if you're on a low-meat diet it's probably how you get short chain fatty acids. It's worth noting that if you're not used to eating these molecules you won't have the bacteria so it'll take some weeks of gas before your system adapts.
Sugar alcohols of the right sort will certainly help your body clear out your gut. Xylitol is interesting for its dental health properties.
To your point: in much of the plant food we grow, there's a matrix of these carbs and digestible carbs. Eating a plum is probably fine. Eating purified sugar, even from plums, is generally bad for you. Eating purified sorbitol from plums won't make you feel good. Why should it be any different eating a bunch of fiber in the form of supplements? The human body is adapted/tuned to digest these molecules in the context of others.
Thankfully I think demand will have to grow a lot for legumes to rise in price much since legumes are basically a byproduct required for growing other more valuable crops.
It's great that beans look kind of gross because otherwise people would learn they taste really good and are healthy at the same time.
Beans look gross?
Not dry but they don't exactly look appetizing when cooked and covered in bean juice if you don't already like them.
Most of the world disagrees and eats/enjoys tons of beans.
I'm just talking about how they look, I'm the chief bean lover. It's kind of annoying how pointing out a negative about something immediately gets people defensive.
I think the problem with beans is not looking gross, it's that they cause you to contribute a lot of methane to climate warming (you fart a lot).
That's only if your not acclimated to a high fiber diet.
The methane quantity from human legume consumption is negligible, and beans are just about the most greenhouse-efficient source of protein there is.
Cow “farts” (actually rumen belches) are something else entirely.
Wooosh
Now I have to go to the lab and check (we have a ringdown sensor tuned to CH4/CO2/H2O precise into single digit ppb).
Some humans have methanogens in their gut and these people exhale methane (gut->bloodstream->lungs) and they can emit quite a lot, at least enough to completely fuck up our lab work. Our lead scientist is such a person, and the effect is so bad that he exhales into a bin liner when setting up an experiment.
Or he did: this was so inconvenient that we automated all our instruments, valves, etc so we could run experiments from the kitchen or even at home (lots of RPis which I wouldn’t normally use for anything important). Fortunately this also automated all the data collection.
But now I have to run a trial to see if my diet modulates anal CH4 emissions. Thanks HN!
Let me know how it goes, I have a home sensor I'm married to for that (and she is very loud with alerts)
The sensor she likely uses is only good in the hundreds of ppm. Fortunately the LFL for methane is roughly 50,000 ppm so there’s no need to give up smoking when a bout of methane-heavy flatulence occurs.
Please post this on Show HN with a clickbait title about farts, I look forward to it.
Taste is very individual. I personally can't stand the taste of dry beans, to the point where I have a strong aversion just to the texture itself. Fresh green beans can be fine (usually has a sweet or acidic taste), and beans used in Asian food like glass noodles or soy source don't taste like beans at all to me.
When people talk about eating more beans, or when people talk about using it as an ingredient, it usually only mean dry beans.
In Germany they already started. There's protein XYZ everywhere, but I've recently seen ads for high fiber drinks.
Won't happen.
The main reason protein is highly sought after is that it's an ego/prestige thing associated with excessive self care.
Our diets are very heavily connected to our social status. Being able to consume that level of protein is all about excessive self care.
Fiber is cheap and viewed as a poor person thing. Nobody is holding up their expensive grass fed fiber to brag about the environmental toll it takes, like folks do with their meat and whatnot.
A lot of the protein fad can be traced back to dairy farmers pushing whey into every product they can.
Not the farmers; the producers, distributors, and everything on the way to the consumer. Research labs and marketing agencies construct fads and push it through their magazines and media IP.
Of course. These things are cyclical. Some might remember the f plan diet or similar.
That’s the difference between protein and fiber though. You can essentially spam the amount of protein you take in and the excess just gets expelled. The same is not true of fiber too much fiber has downsides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezoar
presumably is what you allude to?
> spam the amount of protein you take in and the excess just gets expelled.
Not true? It becomes fat if you are above your caloric intake.
Fiber on the other is just undigestible, so you always expel it, though I agree that too much fiber will cause issues.
> It becomes fat if you are above your caloric intake.
Uh what? No. LOL.
I eat crazy amounts of protein, it's almost all of my diet outside of fibre and I've lost 120 pounds and now sit in the bottom of my BMI bracket.
If your diet is exclusively protein and fiber then your maximum possible caloric intake is very low and how protein intake behaves when you are above maintenance levels is obviously not relevant to you.
That doesn't happen magically, and "spamming" protein can definitely damage your kidneys.
This is really only a concern for people that already have damaged kidneys.
Are there studies showing the increased cancer rate is caused (or at least correlated with) reduced fiber intake? Or is this just a guess of yours?
There’s an enormous amount of data on this topic. So much I’ll just tell you to do a web search rather than pointing to some papers in is response: it’s just so pervasive and going back for decades.
Use a conventional search not an ai-generated summary as that will have influencer slop mixed in. Though oddly, I’ve never seen an anti-fibre influencer, but have seen lots of pro-fibre influencer posts!
> There’s an enormous amount of data on this topic.
FWIW, the evidence demonstrating that fibre is protective against colon cancer is limited, and when studies try to adjust for behavioural differences, the colon cancer reduction disappears.
Actual RCTs that randomly assigned subjects found no difference in polyp rates between high and low fibre diets.
For decades it was indeed widely observed that the people who ate a lot of fibre tended to have a lower incident rate. But the sort of person who has a high fibre diet almost always has a lot of other protective habits and norms: They're less likely to smoke, less likely to drink to excess, they tend to eat less red meat, they eat less sugar and UPFs, and so on.
As is often the case, these habits don't tend to happen in isolation, and this is where observational studies fail. So if you take someone with a lot of bad habits and supplement fibre, they'll have better cholesterol control, glycemic benefits, and of course regularity benefits, but it won't measurably move the needle on colon cancer rates.
This is all just conversational, but the current consensus is that fibre, or lack thereof, is not a contributor behind the rise in colon cancer among younger subjects. There are many suspected causes, all moving the needle enough that incidence rates jump.
Thanks!
> Actual RCTs that randomly assigned subjects found no difference in polyp rates between high and low fibre diets.
As far as I know the only RCT that fits that description is one looking at people who had already developed adenomas and then tested for reoccurrence.
An RCT actually designed to answer the question would need to last decades and just isn’t feasible.
There are a large multitude of studies that show a negative correlation between CRC and fiber intake even when adjusting for diet, exercise, BMI, income, alcohol consumption etc…
> but the current consensus is that fibre, or lack thereof, is not a contributor behind the rise in colon cancer among younger subjects.
There’s not good evidence to say it’s the sole or primary factor, but saying there’s consensus that is not a contributor is way too strong.
> but saying there’s consensus that is not a contributor is way too strong
In most cause hypotheses, fibre just doesn't rank at all. I mean, of course everyone should eat more fibre so that's good, but it isn't a credible cause for the rise of colon cancer rates among the young.
Most destructive to the fibre hypothesis is that fibre intake has actually increased over the past few decades, at the same time that youth colon cancer rates crept up[1]. I don't know what notion people have about common Western food practices decades ago, but in the 1980s, for instance, fibre was basically non-existent in the common diet: No one ate multigrain anything. Everything was loaded with sugar, trans fats and simple carbs (we literally considered that healthy, with hilarious products like Snackwells).
[1] Twice as many young people, per capita, are facing colon cancer now than in the 80s. Overall colon cancer rates are down significantly now, however this is most certainly due to the massive reduction in smoking and other behavioural issues that catch up to you after many decades, but kids today are in no way eating less fibre than kids in the 1980s.
> There are a large multitude of studies that show a negative correlation between CRC and fiber intake even when adjusting for diet, exercise, BMI, income, alcohol consumption etc…
Not really. Take any behaviour or practice that is common among the healthier cohort and it's easy meat for bullshit study results. It's why the nutrition field in particular is full of contradictory studies because "adjusting for" is carrying a lot of unmerited credibility.
> Not really. Take any behaviour or practice that is common among the healthier cohort and it's easy meat for bullshit study results. It's why the nutrition field in particular is full of contradictory studies because "adjusting for" is carrying a lot of unmerited credibility.
You’re the one that said that when studies adjust for these differences they no longer show a correlation.
That is just flat wrong. You used that exact phrase “adjust for”. You can move the goalpost if you want to “I don’t think they are correctly adjusting for all differences” but that’s a very different argument than the one you presented.
The preponderance of the evidence is that fiber has a protective effect against colon cancer and there are multiple plausible explanatory mechanisms.
“I don't know what notion people have about common Western food practices decades ago, but in the 1980s, for instance, fibre was basically non-existent in the common diet”
This is misleading.
1. There is a single gram per thousand calorie difference in aggregate between 1980 and today, so if it was non existent then, it’s non-existent now.
2. Percentage of ultra processed food and food away from home has gone up drastically since 1980, so the types of fiber consumed on average have changed drastically as well.
3. “Fiber” is now a much broader category than it used to be. Resistant starches can now be labeled fiber. If a tiny fraction of the population eats the equivalent a single low carb tortilla with 30g of resistant starch per day that’s enough to completely throw off the aggregate fiber stats. There is much less evidence that resistant starch is protective against colon cancer.
4. Stability in the aggregate doesn’t preclude changes in sub populations. Changes in the way we eat leading to a larger sub population with very little fiber intake.
We know that there have been changes in sub populations. For instance one study that found fiber consumption was stable overall between 1999-2017 found that it dropped among White adults, but the aggregate was stable because it rose among Black and Hispanic adults.
> You’re the one that said that when studies adjust for these differences they no longer show a correlation.
A large number of studies that fully adjust for lifestyle differences have found no meaningful difference in colon cancer rates. It is basically debunked.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4250613/
This cynical piece covers quite a few of them. The evidence that fibre prevents colon cancer is akin to the evidence that red wine keeps you healthy. It disappears when properly analyzed.
> This is misleading.
The mean fibre intake in the 1980s was ~11 grams per day. Today the fibre intake is ~15g. A 36% increase in fibre, and youth colon cancer rates have more than doubled. The math isn't mathing.
I grew up in the 1980s, friend. I suspect you didn't, because anyone heralding those good old days of food quality is clearly simply clueless. A good diet was captain crunch (actually an entire aisle was just whatever cartoons or characters were big having their own cereal that was all coloured flour + sugar), miracle bread, bagged chips and an endless series of full-sugar products.
On the eating out thing: Food made by McDonalds or any other org is in no way empirically worse for you than similar foods eaten at home. Like I get far more veggies and fibre from a Wendy's burger than when I make the burger at home. This is one of those lazy correlation hand-wavy things people use to invent data where there is none. The one real change with eating out is higher sodium is more prevalent, but otherwise it isn't really illustrative of much at all.
> Though oddly, I’ve never seen an anti-fibre influencer
Ah-ha! At last, a niche I can squirm myself into in our brave new world.
Low fiber intake is very heavily correlated with an increase in all cause mortality.
Every 10g per day is correlated with a 10% reduction in all cause mortality (up to 30g). Mostly from a reduction in cardiac and cancer deaths.
I don't doubt it's healthy, perhaps via reducing insulin spikes. But the question is if it is the cause of the mysterious increase in colorectal cancer.
I can't find it specifically, but I do remember studies of the Hadza tribe and their lower incidents of cancer.
Just something I randomly found in a search.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4654
I’m pretty puzzled honestly at how many people are fiber deficient.
I once did the calculation for my daily fiber intake and it was well beyond the daily recommended minimum.
What are people eating (or not eating) that leads to a fiber deficiency?
If you don't eat legumes or whole grain bread it's not hard to be fiber deficient.
I work in the grocery industry and can say fiber era is already here. It maybe hasn’t reached most consumers yet but food companies are making the products and trend forecasters called it years ago. It’s going to be a tsunami. And not necessarily a bad one bc it’s an easy sell. Lots of ppl really do need more fiber.
Wild that people can't just cook and eat more vegetables.
Is it? They’re pricier, they’re not available in food deserts, they go bad much more quickly, and they require more skill to cook into a delicious meal.
Disgree except with the food desert thing. Theyreactually way cheaper than some chemically-generated-fiber cookies n cream bar bullshit. Its just that they take some effort and time to make and everyone wants convenience
I'm not buying these excuses.
You can get beans anywhere. If they are not available fresh, they are equally nutritous when dried or in a can. They are tasty, easy to cook, and an excellent source of fiber and protein.
If you don't like beans, how about a peanut butter sandwich. If you lack the requisite kitchen skills, ask a six year old to make you one.
The fact is that most people just prefer to eat other stuff. We prioritize convenience over health, enabled by food industries that profit from selling us junk.
> they’re not available in food deserts
This highly depends on location
If you buy fresh vegetables, I don't necessarily think they're pricier but they do require more planning. You need to buy what is in season, which means planning meals around what is in season and cheap to buy, which changes on the season.
For certain staples, buying frozen is extremely cheap, can be cheaper than fresh, can be better than buying fresh as frozen as soon as picked, and extremely easy to cook. I've always got frozen broccoli, carrots, peas, green beans, spinach in the freezer. Three minutes in a microwave steamer and it's an easy side, or add in to meals near the end of cooking.
I also always have a bag of potatoes in the house, cheap, keep well, easy to steam in microwave, can mash, can bake, pop in the airfryer etc.
I'll grant you the food dessert and going back arguments, but unless I'm buying particularly out of season or less common, foreign vegetables, produce is often one of the cheapest sections of the store.
Legumes are dirt cheap and packed to the gills with fiber.
Lots of people = almost all people in the USA, according to research I’ve seen. I’m not sure of exact numbers, but I recall it being somewhere close to 95% of people being deficient to some degree, with the majority of that group being quite deficient.
A lot of the fiber they are putting in foods so they can call them high fiber don’t have the positive health benefits generally associated with fiber. e.g. I researched Benefiber years ago and the studies I found at the time indicated it had none of the benefits to heart health or colon health. But it dissolves basically into nothing while still technically being fiber.
Digestion Resistant Maltodextrin is what at least some of them are adding now and from what I've read it does have similar or the same colon benefits. Haven't seen anything indicating the opposite.
Maybe better than some options. But fiber can be soluble or insoluble. DRM is fully soluble, which means it helps slow digestion and absorption but doesn’t have colon health benefits (usually associated with the less palatable insoluble fiber).
Psyllium husk is a great blend of both, but it’s not very palatable because the insoluble fiber makes it gritty. It also tastes like dirt which is why Metamucil smothers it in orange flavoring.
I had aging parents in the 90's, Metamucil was the only thing going. and only one flavour was available. It's great to see more choices.
That was last wave. Personally, I’m wary of products with added fiber, but always choose whole wheat or whole grain. If needed, you can supplement with psyllium.
They take the good fiber out with extreme processing and replace it with more palatable fiber like wheat dextrin that doesn’t have the same benefits.
Getting your fiber from whole food products is definitely the way to go.
Not the worst trend, but especially comical since so much of food processing is about removing fiber to make foods faster to eat and less satiating.
That might be a byproduct, but I don't think it's the point. The point as I understand it is to make them hyper palatable which means adding the right mix of sugar, fat and salt.
Related, the healthiest sources of protein are very affordable and typically come with a ton of fibre. You can have both very easily
The actual content of the article is about the great increase in the price of whey protein concentrate since last summer, until now, apparently due to greatly increased demand for it.
Where I live, in the European Union, the price of whey protein concentrate had doubled around the beginning of 2026 and now it has reached even a triple price in comparison with a year earlier.
For a few years in the past, before the price increase, whey protein concentrate had been cheaper than the cheapest meat, per its content of protein. Now it has become about 50% more expensive than chicken breast, per protein content.
This is annoying for me, because where I live there were only 2 ways for achieving a diet satisfying simultaneously 3 criteria without including meat: sufficient daily protein intake, not exceeding the calories threshold that would cause rapid gain of weight and price not greater than an equivalent diet with meat (there are a lot of plant protein concentrates, but all are many times more expensive than cheap meat, at least here).
One way is to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, which is an activity that wastes too much time and too much water, the other way was to use whey protein concentrate as an ingredient for various dishes made from vegetables, to increase their protein content.
At the current price, the use of whey protein concentrate is no longer attractive, despite the fact that whey protein is the ideal source of protein, with optimum amino-acid composition and perfect digestibility.
The FT article believes that this sudden increase in the demand for whey protein concentrate was caused by the widespread use of drugs like Ozempic for weight loss, which also causes loss of muscular mass, leading to the use of protein supplements to prevent it, and also to the new US dietary guidelines, which recommend an increased consumption of protein (the old US recommendations for daily protein intake were notorious as much too low, i.e. they were at a level that prevents death, without ensuring good health, but the new recommendations might have jumped on the other side of an optimum intake).
The only possible positive consequence of this huge price increase is that it might convince some people to invest in the production of whey protein concentrate from cultures of genetically-modified fungi, instead of from cow milk. There already exists a strain of the fungus Trichoderma, whose genome was modified to secrete cow whey protein, instead of an enzyme secreted by the wild fungi.
Unlike with "lab-grown meat", there is no doubt that it will be possible to produce protein powders of whey protein or of egg-white protein in a cheaper way from fungal cultures than from milk or eggs.
> where I live there were only 2 ways for achieving a diet satisfying simultaneously 3 criteria without including meat
If you want the same price or cheaper than meat, why not eat meat then?
I'm celiac, I cannot eat gluten and a GF diet can be up to 600% the price of a gluten diet - too bad for me (but not just because of the price)
It is likely that in the near future I will return to eating a moderate amount of chicken meat, after I will finish my reserves of whey protein concentrate, which were bought a long time ago, when it was cheap.
Most plant protein concentrates are not an acceptable substitute for meat, because their very high prices make obvious that their production is less efficient than that of meat, i.e. it requires a lot of extra energy and chemical reagents.
More than half of my protein intake comes from plant sources like lentils and wheat, but I cannot raise that percentage to 100%, because I gain weight immediately.
Fortunately, I do not have any problem with gluten, so I can enjoy bread that I bake at home, which is tasty and which has a negligible cost per protein content.
Farming is not an open and free market. You cannot draw any conclusions about actual costs and impact from retail pricing. Subsidies distort cost massively.
I'm also from the EU, and the plant protein mix in the shop I buy from is less than half the price of the whey protein, about 13 EUR per kg. Interestingly, casein doesn't seem to have increased in price nearly as much as whey protein did.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but 1kg of whey protein on Amazon seems to cost around £20, which is roughly what I remember it costing back when I used to use it 7 or 8 years ago.
That's because the raw material is only ~10% of the retail price. According to EU data, commodity prices for sweet whey powder in the EU are about 1.6 € per kg.
https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/document/download/413a6600-...
That doesn't add up with what OP said, though. Firstly, they mentioned a 2-3x increase, whereas your link has a 60% increase. Secondly, what're they buying if not retail? Thirdly, 2 euros per kilo is surely much better value per gram of protein than you're ever going to get with chicken?
2 EUR/kg was the price for buying in bulk, which is not accessible for individuals.
At retail I had been buying for a few years, before the start of the current price increase, pure non-adulterated whey protein concentrate at around 15 EUR/kg, i.e. at somewhat less than 19 EUR per kilogram of pure protein, which was less than the price of any kind of meat per its protein content.
Today I can buy chicken breast at a price around 25 EUR per kilogram of pure protein, which is much less than the current price of whey protein.
The price of whey protein concentrate must be evaluated carefully, because most whey protein on the market is diluted with various kinds of garbage. Pure non-adulterated whey protein concentrate is harder to find.
Until last year I was buying pure whey protein concentrate with 80% protein at a price of around 15 EUR/kg. At the beginning of 2026 it was around 25 EUR/kg. Now it is over 35 EUR/kg in the best case, with other vendors demanding much higher prices.
I was hoping this would be an article about molecular evolution
I'm OK with this. There have been a lot dumber "health" fads (low fat, low sodium, etc.) than focusing on more protein. Protein is also more satiating than carbohydrates so it can reduce calorie intake overall.
I’ve definitely noticed this in my diet. I am a gym rat so I eat a lot of protein, but I’ve seen an uptick in other protein focused snacks and foods around. At my office the protein shakes in the fridge disappear pretty quick compared to the soda, perhaps due to folks who want to get more protein easily more than other gym rats
I'd argue it was when biochemical reactions started building self replicating micro-organisms out of it, but a health craze is fine too I guess.
I can’t read the article because of the paywall and thought that’s what it would be about.
https://archive.is/CbkfI
Added above. Thanks!
Why they all using whey when you got soy, pea and other much cheaper protein ?
Whey got to be the most expensive, especially isolate.
There are massive efforts to sell more dairy/beef in general. The governments in the USA and other countries subsidize it at massive scales. Other proteins are just fine, but there’s no pea protein lobby. Well, certainly not at the same scale.
The economics for cheaper proteins are actually incredible, too. The incentives simply don’t exist in the right places to facilitate the right legislation and public awareness, though. Many of us grew up with “Got Milk?” and “Beef is What’s for Dinner”, not “Got Lentils?”. It really made a difference.
Whey is the best if you don't have any dairy allergies and your body handles it well.
It mixes better, tastes more neutral, and generally has more leucine than those other options, which is important for signalling muscle synthesis
Why do government cheese when you can do government gainz
There are higher heavy metal levels in non dairy based protein supplements.
I've never encountered a soy or pea protein that didn't make flavor noticeably worse. Whey protein isolate can be made essentially flavor neutral.
I drink soy isolate protein, no flavor, every day and it tastes ok. Not incredible, just as completely as whey isolate.
CBC's Front Burner podcast also covered this recently in a great episode. Recommended!
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/209-front-burner/epis...
> setting a daily target of 1.2–1.6 grammes per kilogramme of body weight, 50-100 per cent above the longstanding recommended dietary allowance of 0.8g
This is a good range for improving for maintaining your body composition; preserving or building muscle. Fitness coaches are recommending 2.2g/lb (1g per lb) or even more which doesn't have much scientific backing. 1.6g/kg seems to be the max that will benefit muscle gain.
On the other hand, there are some (Valter Longo, biologist at UCLA) who say that such high protein will reduce your overall longevity. He recommends 0.36g protein per lb body weight.
I don't know what to do with this info. Personally, I stay around 1.2g protein/lb (and exercise) as a middle ground.
> 2.2g/lb (1g per lb)
Did you mean 2.2g/kg?
oops yes!
0% Greek yogurt or Skyr all the way! 10-12g unprocessed protein / 100g
Yes, on my last trip to the US I noticed protein-boosted drinks are the latest fad. Also noticed this in Germany.
Remember folks, carbs feed your brain.
Don't make it difficult for your brain to get food to look less fluffy.
Especially if you want to do things in your life that require using your brain.
If I go to the store, I can buy extra protein milk, it is the most absurd product. Its like taking vitamin pill supplement tier marketing
I had been seeing the protein marketing push and largely ignored it, until I went to go buy some protein powder and it was triple the price of what I expected/remembered. I went to look at that time and found this as the answer.
I'm annoyed by it, but like every other food fad, I assume it will be temporary... unless GLP-1s make it a mainstay. I also wonder if we'll see prices return to normal if demand goes down, or if this is the new normal and companies will just pocket the margin.
Hope you like cricket flour!
Actually, I believe bugs have been tried and turn out less efficient than whatever we have now. I believe soy is cheapest.
There's massive variation across insect species, relatively little research and no industrialisation on the scale of current farming. It's not useful to generalise all insects and all production techniques simply to "bugs are less efficient".
In a study of 236 edible species, protein content of dry matter ranged from 6% to 77%. [1]
And a study of a particular grasshopper found it had higher protein content than lamb, beef, pork, chicken, turkey and fish [2].
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Nutritional+....
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00217-019-03383-0
less efficient in what way? you could probably raise crickets in a smaller space and with less resources.
AFAIK it's very hard to keep them sterile, and a large volume of crickets may look like a lot but not produce much protein. If packed too densely, maybe they crush each other or otherwise die?
It depends. They figured out that more than about 15% soy in pig feed gives the pigs cancer and other diseases. Soy isn't just nutrients, there are pesticides the plant produces which can cause issues. I think fermenting soy into tofu deals with a lot of that, but I don't know.
Bugs have the chitin, which some animals (like us) don't digest super well. You also need more than just the protein, so why not let your chickens eat the bugs? They're real happy to do it and it makes the chicken taste better.
Bugs as a protein source in agriculture is probably underutilized in the west. It may be less economical today, because growing corn and soy is subsidized while breeding insects isn't. In some areas of Adrica, entrepreneurs collect waste food and even run public dry toilets to feed insects like black soldier fly. BSF is easier to keep clean than many other insects because the adults don't eat.
Tofu isn't fermented. (Stinky tofu, natto and soy sauce are, though.)
Genuinely, we were all deficient for so long
Look at our fucking food! We have smooth brained governance in food, why do we still have real sugar in candy when we can (AND DO) use fake sugar.
We of course fucked up protein intake, this is a CORRECTION towards healthier food as it always should have fucking been
We literally have 1/8 of the US population, and possibly hundreds of millions of people globally, on fucking peptides to protect themselves from the insane food we don’t want to regulate
What's "real" vs. "fake" sugar? Should we be adding sugar at all?
There are lots of healthy sweeteners
And fair the petulant need we have for sweetness is probably a result of the bad programming we had as kids consuming this junk.
This is the majority of people, and it’s getting worse, society is noticeably getting fatter
Except in China where it's very hard to find protien supplements or lean meat. I visited two years ago and really struggled.
I mean this is not a bad thing, I personally feel more sated eating protein-enriched food and am less likely to snack excessively.
100% due to marketing, influencers, and people wanting to make money.
I remember reading an article from a couple that were professional body builders. It was pretty insightful. I also will not forget that they said they never once drank protein shakes. All of their protein came from their diets, such as eating turkey and other foods.
Also, most people don’t work out hard enough to need a protein shake. It’s usually just extra calories and ultimately turning into fat.
Whey powder was about turning a waste stream into profit, but it is a highly digestible protein with clear benefits. Human breastmilk is mostly whey with a bit of casein. Cow's milk is mostly casein with a bit of whey. While it's true that most americans are too sedentary to need the protein, they also don't eat whey powder, nor do they really understand why people do. Probably because of all those marketers and shysters confusing the issue trying to hock a product.
If you're concerned with health, ignore any advice from competition bodybuilders. They all take steroids and will often make things up to avoid admitting they take illegal drugs. Some also mislead others to give themselves a leg up. Arnold Schwarzenegger was known for pulling that one a few times.
A steak is better than whey powder because it contains a multitude of other aminos and nutrients. But who's gonna stick a steak in a blender?
Now, why would eggs be so expensive?