A demand for the average American to eat more meat would have to explain, as a baseline, why our already positive trend in meat consumption isn't yielding positive outcomes. There are potential explanations (you could argue increased processing offsets the purported benefits, for example), but those are left unstated by the website.
[1]: https://www.agweb.com/opinion/drivers-u-s-capita-meat-consum...
[2]: https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detai...
I find that to be a challenging amount of meat. It's a lot! And to find out that's average???
Americans eat way too much meat. Cheese, too.
In reality, I don't think anybody in the US follows the food pyramid religiously. But I do think people (try to) follow the main strokes of what the government tells them is a healthy dietary balance, and so any recommendation to increase their fat/protein intake will result in more meat consumption even if the guidelines doesn't itself proscribe that as the only source.
EDIT down-thread to prove my point you'll see people citing studies in favor of and against the new recommendations. The studies are almost always in animals or use self reported data with tiny sample sizes.
All of the protein recommendations I've seen were for lean mass. You don't feed fat.
yeah both of those people are extreme cases that would break this very crude formula
And even then this rule is not perfect because of individual genetics, metabolism rates, activity level, percentage of lean mass, etc.
Americans (US citizens) really do eat a lot. What the hell
(Note that I am neither a vegetarian nor a vegan.)
food industry has to be policed -- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a high school level story featuring the meat packing industry. All around, additives and substitutes are more profitable than raw ingredients.
You need to go to much more recent times to get worsening results/predictions.
I don’t believe that the average American eats nearly a pound of meat per day. I do believe if the average American ate meat before carbs, we could get there, and all be a lot healthier, though.
For me, processed carbs make me much hungrier, but the kale salad I’m eating right now makes me less hungry.
I think you’re conflating 200g of protein with 200g of meat that has protein.
That number seemed unreal to me, so I looked it up. I think it represents the total pre-processing weight, not the actual meat meat consumption. From Wikipedia:
> As an example of the difference, for 2002, when the FAO figure for US per capita meat consumption was 124.48 kg (274 lb 7 oz), the USDA estimate of US per capita loss-adjusted meat consumption was 62.6 kg (138 lb)
Processing, cutting into sellable pieces, drying, and spoilage/loss mean the amount of meat consumed is about half of that number.
The real number for meat consumption at the end consumer is about half that amount.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38118410/
What happens is that the excess of protein stays in your system, but, if you don't use the nutrient by exercising, the caloric excess will obviously make you fat.
"These findings demonstrate that the magnitude and duration of the anabolic response to protein ingestion is not restricted and has previously been underestimated in vivo in humans."
Even a cup of cooked rice or a slice of bread has several grams of protein.
Because of old age. Being vegan increased your odds threefold to die of old age instead of prematurely from disease.
Apologies for not having a link to the source
I can eat 200g of lentil noodles in a sitting.
back of the hand math suggests id have to eat a kg of dry lentils a day to reach my protein requirements. that's gotta be what, 2800 cal? edit: 800g of lentils for 200g of protein, 2500 cal.
im just thinking out loud here, but lentils alone wouldn't be adequate for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EU76q3Vf3Q
My favorite is pan frying them in a hot sauce + aromatics for a quick chickpea rice bowl, I even gotten into the habit of using chickpeas as a chicken replacement for many of my Mexican dishes.
If you're use to the typical American diet, please try cooking more lentils! Very tasty, filling dishes, low on costs and high on nutrients.
chicken 100g/27g of protein
chickpeas 100g/19g of protein
That's a good ratio for something that costs less than a dollar a can compared to chicken.
im probably more conscious about what i eat than the average person, just on virtue of watching macros lol
Just as an example of an opposite experience.
(american, vegetarian for 13 years, athletic, former meat eater, long carb centric diet that i'm trying to change)
Obviously there are exceptions - particularly right now - but those are solved by rooting out corruption.
people don't realize how challenging it is to eat 200g of protein a day, every day, for months, without eating like 3000cal lol
that said, i do eat a lot of plant based protein. i love chickpeas and i also fuck w tofu a lot.
If you go to Western Europe, they're not drinking lots of skim milk, and if you eat things from the bakeries, there's more butter and not as much low quality vegetable oil or sugar. When my French cousins come here, they find lots of the stuff sold here revoltingly sweet.
Case in point: the Mayo Clinic article titled "Are you getting enough protein?"[0]
It claims that protein is only a concern for people who are undereating or on weight loss drugs, yet it cites protein recommendations that many people find challenging to meet (1.1g/kg for active people, more if you're over 40 or doing strength or endurance workouts.) To top it off, it's illustrated with a handful of nuts, which are pretty marginal sources of protein. It's bizarrely mixed messaging.
[0] https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speak...
That is, how many pounds of meat the average American eats in a year. An increase of 100 pounds means about an extra quarter-pound a day.
Americans also just need to eat less period, but that’s a separable issue.
I used to drink protein shakes, but now I am actively against these. Artificial sweeteners provoke insulin release [1] [2] that leads to type-II diabetes.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2887503/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10568...
I really like this study of a population of highly trained athletes and their diets/protein intake: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27710150/
In that study they eat > 1.2g protein/kg body weight, but 43% of that is "plant sources", meaning grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables. Like one serving of oatmeal is 6g, things you don't think of as "protein" add up and you have to count them. The athletes in that study are Dutch and 19% of their protein intake came from bread.
But what always happens with protein recommendations is that they say "x grams protein/kg bodyweight" but people hear "protein is meat, you are telling me to eat x grams/kg bodyweight of meat." Very few people ever look closely enough at their diet to develop an intuitive sense for counting macros.
Lentils contain trypsin inhibitors, which contain inordinate amount of nitrogen that is counted as protein.
While you do not eat these directly after cooking your lentils, you do not eat as much protein as you would think you do.
What is the problem of consuming say 80-100% of whey protein? Not all of it has sweeteners.
> The US is the biggest consumer of beef in the world, but, according to new research, it’s actually a small percentage of people who are doing most of the eating. A recent study shows that on any given day, just 12% of people in the US account for half of all beef consumed in the US.
> Men and people between the ages of 50 and 65 were more likely to be in what the researchers dubbed as “disproportionate beef eaters”, defined as those who, based on a recommended daily 2,200 calorie-diet, eat more than four ounces – the rough equivalent of more than one hamburger – daily. The study analyzed one-day dietary snapshots from over 10,000 US adults over a four-year period. White people were among those more likely to eat more beef, compared with other racial and ethnic groups like Black and Asian Americans. Older adults, college graduates, and those who looked up MyPlate, the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) online nutritional educational campaign, were far less likely to consume a disproportionate amount of beef.
High steaks society: who are the 12% of people consuming half of all beef in the US? - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/beef-usd... - October 20th, 2023
Demographic and Socioeconomic Correlates of Disproportionate Beef Consumption among US Adults in an Age of Global Warming - https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3795 | https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15173795 - August 2023
(my observation of this is that we can sunset quite a bit of US beef production and still be fine from a food supply and security perspective, as consumption greatly exceeds healthy consumption limits in the aggregate)
Well, for starters, that'd be completely fucking joyless. And on top of that, meat contains other nutrients that I'd have to account for (which is not hard tbh, but requires a little bit of studying and planning).
> tasty milk product called tvoroh
My gallbladder has never been at 100% and as a result, I have to eat a relatively low fat diet. This is not something a normal person faces. I eat a fair amount of low fat greek yogurt, though. Similar concept.
In any event, looking at the whole history of food guidance paints a clearer picture of my point. Happy to hear of alternatives though!
When you compare the macros of that to sausages or ribs or even steak it’s quite drastically different.
Also I’d guess you aren’t covering your meat in thick sugary sauce every time…
Your diet contains many sources of protein lower quality than beans (as in the linked study with high level Dutch athletes getting 19% of their protein from bread), you do need to count those. They do add up and if you don't, you end up assuming you need way more protein than you do.
Lions can't eat ducks or chickens. We can and do.
Why should I, as a top predator, drink a protein powder instead eating a meat of a big mammal?
There are satiety indexes for different foods but they are not universal. I can eat almost unlimited carbs and never feel full. I'll eat multiple plates full of bread or a thousand calories in french fries and then move on to the main course.
6oz of lean meat and some salad and I'm good with 500 or so calories on my plate.
I honestly don't get how potatoes supposedly fill people up. I have made twice baked potatoes before and eaten an easy 2000 calories of them along side thanksgiving dinner.
In contrast right now I'm eating clean and doing a body recomp. Eating clean is super satiating, for me at least!
The average western diet may over consume meat, but I have to work my butt off to hit my protein goals for strength training.
A slice of bacon has 3g of protein. 150 calories though. Eating enough protein through bacon isn't the best of ideas, even if someone is doing a ketogenic diet!
60-80g of protein is about right for a man who has a moderately physical job or who exercises some small amount. 100g is the minimum for putting on muscle and getting stronger.
The average western diet over consumes everything, it could do with less sugar, less processed foods (which are hyper palatable and don't satiate hunger), and more pure protein.
Do you really observe that in your circles? I've lived in 6 different states, from Maryland to Idaho, and I've never got an impression that many people take any real though or consideration for their health at all. If anything, I'd armchair guestimate something like 10% of adults seem to put any real attention of effort into their health. I feel like late teens to late college year people put more effort in general, but only because they themselves are on the meat market and don't usually have complex lives (kids, careers)
What evidence do you have that the loss adjusted numbers have gone down while the preprocessed numbers have gone up so dramatically?
Why did you drink them before, if you appear to fundamentally object to the idea?
This is something I have been thinking about and researching for awhile, because there is so very much confusing language out there.
Your quote says over the last century, so I'm going to use roughly 1920 as the baseline. It also refers to a per capita increase of meat consumption by 100 pounds, or about 45.4 kilograms (to make the math easier). This is roughly an increase of 124g of meat per person per day (or about 3oz if that makes more sense to you).
This equates to a daily increase in per-capita protein intake by 25-30g (depending on which meat and how lean it is).
In 1920, the average American adult male was about 140 pounds, and ate about 100g of protein per day, which works out to roughly 0.71 grams per pound of body weight (or about 1.6 grams per kilogram).
In 2025, one century later, the average American adult male is 200 pounds, and if he eats the same ratio of weight to protein, you would expect that he would eat around 140g of protein per day, which is slightly higher than the increase in per-capita meat consumption over the same time.
However, if you look at actual statistics of what people are eating in protein, you'll see that the average American adult male is actually eating about 97g of protein per day, or about 0.49 grams per pound (1.1 grams per kg), which is much less than we ate a century ago, which means that that the increase in meat consumption doesn't match change in protein, so is offset by either less non-meat protein, meat with lower protein content (e.g. more fat), or both.
There was some discussion lower in the thread about bodybuilders vs normal people, and about basing your calculations on lean body weight vs full bodyweight. Lean body weight calculations are often used for bodybuilders, but those numbers are elevated (typically 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body weight). For someone who is sedentary to lightly active (e.g. daily walks), the calculation is based on full body weight, not lean body weight, and is about 0.7 gram per pound (or 1.5 grams per kilogram), which matches this recommendation exactly.
Hitting these targets has been shown to greatly increase satiation, reduce appetite, but it does not make you lose weight, and it is not permanent (reducing your protein intake removes the effect, which makes sense). However, long term studies show that people who increase their protein intake to these levels and lose weight (through calorie reduction or fasting) keep that weight off.
Finally, from what I've been able to cobble together, high protein intakes combined with high fat and high sugar intakes does not have the same effect as a diet that matches the recommendations here (ie. it's not just about higher protein intake, it's about percentage of calories from protein, which should be around 20-25%... 200 pound sedentary to lightly active adult male, 140g of protein, or 560 calories, in a total diet of 2250-2800 calories, depending on activity level)
No we don't. Please show me where.
Are you claiming the old food pyramid is where?
Because Bush jr deprecated that in 2006, and his new, balanced pyramid was again replaced in 2011 by MyPlate, which did not tell you to eat more processed carbs, and was not even a pyramid.
Why do so many of you people think that something that was very clearly replaced twice is still somehow in effect? How much of the recent history of the US are you guys missing? Did you lose your memory or something?
Bears are a terrible example to pick, as they aren't real “predators” in the first place. They are omnivorous, eating more fruits, roots and insects than meat, by far. Depending on their species and where they live they may eat fishes as well, but not that much meat at all.
And of course as omnivorous ourselves, we eat far less meat than actual predators like wolves and felines.
Like if someone is a 6 foot 10 body builder, they know their needs.
Also the suggested range of g/kg ranges from .8g/kg to 1.2g/kg, which is also a huge range, but that is primarily for building strength, not maintaining.
Given the goals here are "rough guidelines on eating healthy", I'm fine saying most men should aim for 60-90g of lean protein a day. That isn't exactly a hot take.
> attempt to improve heart disease rates
The diet basedheart disease science of the early 1990s was totally junk.[2]
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8375951/
[2] https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2016/09/404081/sugar-papers-reveal...
Point being someone eating a couple bags of jerky over a workday would probably count as having eaten literal pounds of beef, despite consumed weight being much lower. Water is noncompressible and makes your stomach full very quickly.
As in they can't catch them? Or they can't survive on a diet of them? I'd be surprised if it was the latter.
I learned the 1992 food pyramid in school. I was in college by the time they changed it, and I have no idea what the current one says. When the government undertakes a mass campaign to socialize children into a particular idea that’s what happens.
The problem with the number is that people see it and imagine pounds of meat like they see at the grocery store, but it's measuring pounds of meat that go into the meat processing plant.
> What evidence do you have that the loss adjusted numbers have gone down while the preprocessed numbers have gone up so dramatically?
No, the two numbers show the ratio.
The "pounds of meat consumed per person" from the FAO is a pre-processed weight.
The pounds of meat consumed per person from the USDA is the end-user weight. It's about half of the FAO number.
As someone who lifted for a good handful of years, there are a few reasons i used protein powder, it was a very affordable way to add 25-50g of protein and some random fruits or peanut butter or whatever(i'd usually blend up a shake).
It was also a good way as someone who struggles to eat a surplus, to hit my goals as it just went down way easier than an additional full meal.
It is ALSO easier to cut weight and maintain protein goals by utilizing simply water and protein powder.
when it came time for me to cut, im simply swapping milk for water, and removing the peanut butter, and suddenly that "meal" is ~400 calories less.
So the very simple answer? convenience/affordability.
This sounds like.. not very much. I eat 6-7oz of ground beef with breakfast alone, pretty much daily! Are people really eating less than ~1/2 cup of meat over all their meals combined?
You must have always known humans were apex predators, and that was the only non-sweetener reason you listed.
[1]: https://globalactiontoendsmoking.org/research/tobacco-around...
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/about/cigarettes-and-cardiovascu...
I can't imagine anyone actually saying this with a straight face (also I am totally using this line for everything now). What a way to view oneself!
Your mind is going to be blown when you learn about vegetarians!
I'm in the US and was raised on a pretty standard diet. As a young adult, I stopped eating beef for environmental reasons. As an older adult (50s) I mostly stopped eating most meat for environmental and ethical reasons. I don't call myself a vegetarian and don't make a fuss when vegetarian options aren't available (eg, eating at a friend's house).
That is all to say: I haven't noticed any difference in my health either way, but that isn't why I (95%) stopped eating meat.
Fat's thermal food effect is 3% of fat's energy, while sugar and amino acids have 8 to 10 times more of their energy converted to heat (25% and 30%). That thermal effect raises the body temperature and makes body to sweat.
Ketogenic diet also allow for fat burn through the year, not at the cut stage only. I once managed to burn fat and bulk at the same time, burning 2 kg of fat and adding 4.5 kg of lean mass in three months, just by switching to intermittent fasting and hypertrophy-specific training. Without PEDs - they interfere with thinking.
Our cat does not eat lamb as he is not adapted to lamb, but he does eat a lot of duck purring to the skies.
And it's not like the 90s pyramid had sugar at the base.
By itself, this figure doesn't really mean much. On any given day, less than 1% of people have birthdays, but that doesn't mean there's a small percentage of people who are having most of the birthdays
The following paragraph is more valid, but the 12% figure still seems dubious.
This phrasing strongly suggests it’s not the same 12% every day. In which case… it’s probably not that noteworthy.
People in India smoked just as much when they weren't living such sedentary lifestyles.
(But I doubt the cheese I find so delicious is that same as the cheese that's so prevalent in American diets...)
every breakfast joint near me in California has some sort of variation on hamburg steak & eggs. Judging by the fact that it's on every menu, it must be popular to some degree.
that's parents' point ( I think ? )
(Beef is about 25-30% protein by weight. Whey protein isolates are about 80% protein by weight.)
Yeah, it just means that half the beef eaten per day goes to the 12% having a BBQ, etc, not that only 12% of the population have access to half the beef available each day
So I think you can consider your regular breakfast to be an outlier with regard to beef consumption.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/people-are-bad-repor...
1.2g/kg * 90kg (~200lbs-lean) = 108g of protein.
each person, on average, in the US would be eating one 16oz steak or 3-5 hamburgers every day.
Also, you need to adjust for demographics. In 1900, 35% of the population was under 15: https://demographicchartbook.com/index.php/chapter-5-age-and.... Today it’s only 19%. Children and babies obviously eat a lot less meat than adults, and they make up a much smaller share of the population today than back then.
A study of people who eat almost exclusively whole foods that do not include red meat vs people who eat almost exclusively whole foods that do include meaningful amounts of red meat would be really interesting.
When so much red meat is consumed as greasy burgers coupled with white bread buns and deep fried potatoes, I don’t know how to decouple the impact of the red meat from the rest of it. I fear the “red meat bad” stuff might be the inverse of the “oh, it’s clearly the wine” silliness for why French people are healthier.
> It has become internationally famous for embracing and promoting an unhealthy diet of incredibly large hamburgers. Customers are referred to as "patients," orders as "prescriptions," and the waitresses as "nurses." All those who weigh over 350 pounds are invited to unlimited free food provided they weigh themselves on an electronic cattle scale affront a cheering restaurant crowd.
> The menu includes the Single Bypass Burger®, Double Bypass Burger®, Triple Bypass Burger®, Quadruple Bypass Burger®, Quintuple Bypass Burger™, Sextuple Bypass Burger™, Septuple Bypass Burger™, and the Octuple Bypass Burger™. These dishes range in weight from half a pound to four pounds of beef. Also on the menu are Flatliner Fries® (cooked in pure lard) and the Coronary Dog™, Lucky Strike no filter cigarettes, alcohol, Butterfat Milkshakes™, full sugar Coca-Cola, and candy cigarettes for the kids!
A healthy, whole-food plant-based diet is linked to a lower risk of ischemic stroke, with studies showing reduced risk compared to meat-eaters. The conclusion of this paper[1] for example reads that "Lower risk of total stroke was observed by those who adhered to a healthful plant-based diet."
Additionally, researchers at Harvard found that a plant-based diet may lower overall stroke risk by up to 10%. [2]
1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8166423/
2: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/healthy-plant-based-diet-assoc...
1. It’s proteins and fats, not just protein. The site specifically calls out avocado as an example.
2. It’s from meat and vegetable sources. Other commenters have mentioned that you get more protein from non-meat sources than you expect.
> im just thinking out loud here, but lentils alone wouldn't be adequate for me.
This seems in line with maintenance calories for a moderately active man, am I missing something?
Try plain boiled potatoes. I bet you feel like stopping long before 2000 Calories. Tasty things are tasty and often easy to eat an unhealthy amount of.
For the purposes of this conversation, about the nutritional effect of your diet, that seems like a fair way to put it.
Can’t help eating junk carbs when I see them, though.
I eat meat too, but I don't eat it every day so if you average it over time it will likely be around those numbers.
> People in India smoked just as much when they weren't living such sedentary lifestyles.
I suspect they also lived shorter lives for the aforementioned all-round mortality reasons.
https://idlewords.com/2006/04/argentina_on_two_steaks_a_day....
Makes me think of the song:
I like that term. I assume that means you cut out beef, pork, mutton, goat, cheese, and milk but eat seafood and birds/eggs.
I may start that diet!
I’m a large guy (190cm/100kg); I lose weight eating a pound of bacon for breakfast and a pound of chicken for dinner, if I’m even moderately exercising (3x cardio, 3x strength each week). Thirty minutes a day, split between strength and cardio is hardly “top athlete” and more “recommended amount”.
That’s not to say anybody is wrong, merely our experiences may be as varied as humans are — ie, we may legitimately have different needs.
I was thinking more as a unit of measurement, but yeah, sorry that was poorly written on my part, sorry.
> every breakfast joint near me in California has some sort of variation on hamburg steak & eggs. Judging by the fact that it's on every menu, it must be popular to some degree.
Sure. The diners near me have that kind of stuff too, just, if I went to a diner every morning my heart would probably revolt after about a month.
Eggs work too.
Though of course "meat" is too vague a category to be helpful. Obviously there's a link between beef and heart disease and colorectal cancer. There seems to be no health problems associated with consuming chicken or seafood.
Go on...
> One limitation of this work is that it was based on 1-day diet recalls, so our results do not represent usual intake[0].
Ah.
[0]: Demographic and Socioeconomic Correlates of Disproportionate Beef Consumption among US Adults in an Age of Global Warming https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3795
But the source you were quoting was about beef alone. So these are people who eat more beef daily than I eat of any meat.
If you expand from that, it could easily be daily.
The person I responded to seemed to seems to believe lions eating only poultry would develop nutritional deficiencies of some kind. Maybe that's true but I'm interested to learn if there are sources. Not just gut feel "they don't eat them in the wild so they can't do it".
They also found a demographic correlation, which isn't easily explained by random sampling.
But here we have the problems with the numbers and why they should only be guidelines. Consumption of protein needs to increase as you get old (into the range we consider for athletes). And basing consumption on body weight is stupid, because telling an obese person they need to eat twice as much protein as a non-obese person is probably wrong.
The more you know.
what???? there is entire family that eat entire Cow that can feed the whole village, that is crazy
But hey, here we go.
1. Intense physical exercise is the only known way to increase IQ. (Admittedly pure strength training is not the best for this, HIIT workouts are better)
2. Muscle mass is a huge factor in the early death in seniors. Basically people who lack muscle mass are more likely to fall over and fracture something, at which point they are much more likely to die.
3. Lean muscle mass, up to a certain point (e.g. extreme body builders have worse mortality numbers), decreases mortality across the board.
4. I like living w/o pain, and you can choose to either have your joints take the load or your muscles take the load.
5. I enjoy being able to move my body and be active in the world.
6. I'm vain and I like to look good.
> most people don't.
Most people in America die of a heart attack. Most people in America are obese and have troubles moving around. Most people in America don't read books. Most people in America don't enjoy mathematics. Most people in America don't go to art museums.
People should have aspirations to do more than average.
Except the people hallucinating that we need to eat more meats. A couple of people requiring more caloric/protein intake doesn't make it reasonable for everyone to take in more
The advice to cut processed foods is solid and is something we have been saying for decades.
Meat contains essential fats to various degrees while protein powder does not at all. Usually, protein powder ([1] as an example) is not exactly matched to the human profile of amino acids [2], that means extraneous amino acids will be converted to glucose and stored as fat.
[1] https://explosivewhey.com/blogs/fitness-nutrition/what-is-wh...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11291443/
Notice that ratio between leucine and methionine is 3/1 in consumption profile and is much higher in the whey protein profile. This leucine most probably will be wasted.
If the only food in your pantry were seitan, you’d have to eat 260g (960cal) of it to hit 200g protein. It’s not that much food.
Most people haven’t tried it but asian stores may sell it next to tofu as “vegan chicken/beef”. It has a nice texture that you can cube and treat like chicken in a stir fry.
I eat it weekly.
Kinda makes zero cal sweeteners look good.
If we assume that lions' best diet is beef [1], then chicken [2] would be less optimal for them.
[1] https://tools.myfooddata.com/protein-calculator/171797/100g/...
[2] https://tools.myfooddata.com/protein-calculator/171140/wt9/1
Look at the amino acid ratios. Leucine to valine ratio is about 0.66 for chicken and 0.8 for beef. This means that protein synthesis will be bound by valine in case of chicken and what is not used in the protein synthesis will be converted to glucose and then stored as fat. Chicken will be about 80% (0.66/0.8) as nutritious as beef, judging just by two essential amino acids ratio.
I started at 70kg (181cm), so pretty skinny, and without prior resistance training. I ate between 120and 140g of protein per day, without any shakes.
I am aware that these gains would not have continued, but my body obviously had more than enough with 130g to build muscle. I did eat a calorie surplus, but
200g seems like A LOT.
At least aspartame increases insulin secretion in them.
Whey protein most probably would bound muscle protein synthesis by methionine available, and make substantial (I think 40%) amount of calories from leucine in it to be converted to glucose. Two 33g servings of whey protein can be converted to 1g of fat, just from leucine alone.
It's their breakfast. Chances are rather small they don't get any protein intake for the rest of the day.
When you couple this with the motivations of industrial food companies (some of whom are now owned by tobacco companies), and the research they do into the neuroscience effects of flavour, texture, even packaging of food, you'll start to spot that a push to "Real Food", and for that food to be less processed and more inclined towards protein, is more likely to result in overall calorie reduction.
One of the things that isn't cutting through on this program is saying "eat protein" is assumed to mean "eat meat", which some assume means you can eat burgers. Nope. Healthy protein is not red meat that has been fried - that's going to take a bit more education, I expect.
in the US most days include a meat in at least 1 meal. Now, i'm framing this as "fish, eggs, fowl". Cereal with milk, bagel with cream cheese, not meat, but meat adjacent. Waffles have eggs. we love "deli meats" in the US, every store has a deli counter where you can get meat sliced right before your own eyes; or you can go to the 4-8 door cold case where the pre-sliced meats are. And dinner, well i can think of a couple of vegetarian dishes that are "staples" like red beans and rice (can be vegan/vegetarian), or pasta with marinara (vegetarian).
When presented with something like the Mediterranean diet, most americans would balk at the bird and rabbit food they were now expected to eat.
I can expand, but yes, meat is like, a huge deal in the US. Especially beef. part of it is our chicken and pork is kinda bland and merely "just food" but our beef ranges from "ok if i'm real hungry" to "really very good, actually". Fish is hit and miss, depends where you live in the US as to how popular it is. also most of the cow is used for food in the US, very little is wasted, to my understanding. brain, eyes, tongue, glands, lungs, etc are all sold, bones sold as fertilizer, hide is obviously leather, and so on.
for the record i wish animals were treated better, in fact, i have been searching for a local beef farmer for a decade and all the ones i run in to sell their beef to texas!
Many foods in the United States are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (which is very cheap compared to cane sugar because growing corn is very cheap in the United States because of climate, infrastructure, and extensive government subsidies). In soft drinks, the syrup is roughly 55% fructose, 45% glucose.
Table sugar is usually sucrose, which is a compound sugar (disaccharide) comprised of one fructose and one glucose molecule. In many bottled soft drinks, the low pH of the beverage hydrolyzes the sucrose into its component sugars, resulting in a solution of 50% fructose and 50% glucose.
Chemically, we're comparing a 55/45 mixture of fructose and glucose to a 50/50 mixture of fructose and glucose. HFCS has become a bogeyman in American society, but evidence since the 1980s seems to show that, when it comes to soda, the excess fructose isn't nearly as bad as the whole "recreationally drinking 40g of instantly available sugar" part.
Mexican coke does taste different, but it may have more to do with the other flavorants and the bottling process than the source of the sugar.
Here's a fantastic video about this all: https://www.pbs.org/video/everyone-is-wrong-about-mexican-co...
Edit: I found a cool 2014 study that actually assayed the sugar content in various soda pop brands: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089990071...
Looks like some HFCS-sweetened soda pop has up to a 70/30 fructose/glucose ratio. It's also worth noting that corn syrup contains maltose and various polysaccharides not present in table sugar, but I think most of that is refined out in colas, since there only seems to be 1% maltose present in the colas analyzed by this paper.
Lions challenge the dominant male, and if they win, they kill all of their offspring and take all of their females.
Hopefully you are not doing that with every male you encounter that happens to be physically weaker than you.
You're badly misusing that amino acid data.
> When presented with something like the Mediterranean diet, most americans would balk at the bird and rabbit food they were now expected to eat.
> I ate between 120and 140g of protein per day, without any shakes.
I'm afraid you're going to unlearn it, as humans are below big felines in the food chain.
If you were following the old food guide in use for the last 20 years -- the one that replaces the food pyramid -- you'd see that 100 g is about a quarter of your plate. The old food guide could be summed up as "a quarter of your plate should be protein, a quarter carbs, and half fruits and vegetables". Real simple, so simple anyone could understand it. Although I have been presented with evidence recently that there are some who can not.
I struggled a lot with my nutrition and eating "regular food" always mad me fat. I tried various keto and low carb variants but never made it work and always hit a wall after 2-3 weeks. UNTIL I discovered intermittent fasting. After having done the intermittent fasting for about 5 years I started another low carb/keto journey but this time I went all in on fat and protein. No holding back. And I also cut excessive vegetables (especially the raw stuff). So now I'm eating all the eggs, meat, butter, bacon as much as I want. About a year in. The results so far.. dropped 4kg body fat and put on 2kg of muscle.
It's not just saying it pops out of the data as a statistical curiosity, it's saying that there is a real subset of the population who are disproportionately eating more beef.
If you mean grilling, at least every 8 days! Hopefully more often than that! And what's the issue? I can cook indoors or outside the same meal but avoid the smoke and heating the house.
(If you have resources that show otherwise, that would be interesting. But smoking really does seem like the obvious historical outlying factor for heart disease in India, with calorie-dense diets playing catch up as the country has become wealthier.)
Well the point of nutrition research is to account for that kind of thing. And it's true enough that men and women have specifically different protein needs. But person-to-person variation doesn't scale up into pure randomness. The reason it's possible to make meaningful population level nutrition recommendations is precisely because of broadly shared commonalities, about what is both good and bad for us.
Meat is as well. Maybe organic in small quantities, not too often can help.
Fish is problematic as much is contaminated with mercury and other heavy metals (we poisoned the ocean).
I was asking for a source for this assumption. Lions in the wild eat gazelles, giraffes, zebras, and buffalo, not cattle. I guess there isn't a great source so I'll leave it.
"high scores: braised eye-of-round steak 40.62; broiled t-bone steak (porterhouse) 32.11; grilled lean steak 31.0 " numbers are grams per hundred grams or wiki also reports 25% as the average, thus your factor of 2 error in weight (400 instead of 200).
Sincerely,
You-cannot-read-or-convert-units-or-gather-info-correctly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foods_by_protein_conte...
Regarding the study this is a both can be true situation. There can be (1) a population who is disproportionate in their beef eating, and (2) a study about 12% doing the most on any given day can count in favor of that group being real and (3) not everyone from the daily 12% is part of the DBE group. It's more likely a venn diagram overlap, and where it doesn't overlap, people who aren't part of the DBE are incidentally in that 12% while being closer to average in the aggregate over the longer term. Those facts can all sit together comfortably without amounting to a contradiction.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8805510/
> Conclusions: As observed from the food availability data, processed and ultra-processed foods dramatically increased over the past two centuries, especially sugar, white flour, white rice, vegetable oils, and ready-to-eat meals. These changes paralleled the rising incidence of NCDs, while animal fat consumption was inversely correlated.
Heart disease is a real risk. Don't ignore it. It's not something that only happens to other people.
You know how people like cold pressed extra virgin olive oil? Or avocado oil? Those are "high quality". Industrially refined/deodorized/hexane-extracted soybean, corn, non-high-oleic sunflower/safflower oil, canola tend to be considered to be on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Deodorizing causes the oil to oxidize, as does deep frying, and that makes a variety of nasty byproducts that seem likely to cause systemic inflammation. And from here on HN the other day, "Inflammation now predicts heart disease better than cholesterol" https://www.empirical.health/blog/inflammation-and-heart-hea...
People in this thread are scoffing at RFK saying that beef tallow fries are "healthy", and while I wouldn't go that far, there seems to be good evidence that it's much healthier to deep fry in beef tallow than the soybean oil most switched to in the 90s. Beef tallow is high in saturated fat, which tends to be relatively stable under heat, and very low in polyunsaturated fats, which tend to be the fats that oxidize the worst. Soybean oil, on the other hand, is extremely high in polyunsaturated fat (60% vs 2-4% for beef tallow). And the big problem with commercial deep frying is that the oil is frequently just topped off rather than replaced, so those oxidization byproducts build up over time. More stable fat is really important there.
I also don't know how relevant this is, but soybean frying oil tends to have silicone-based anti-foaming agents mixed in (polydimethylsiloxane is the one I've seen most commonly) - you can find this in the big jugs at Costco if you want to check it out. Silicone generally doesn't seem great to be swallowing - I think it's pretty inert, but it seems likely to me to have mechanical properties that your body's not quite used to dealing with effectively. This is just me being biased about eating something that's pretty obviously not food, though, I haven't seen much on the subject.
Hydrogenated oils are now well known to be bad (trans fats). So Crisco/creamed vegetable shortening, very low quality.
So yeah, there are higher and lower quality oils, especially once they've been degraded via high heat over a long period and oxygen exposure in commercial or industrial frying processes.
I was an adult before I ever ate chickpeas (in any form), really any beans outside of Taco Bell refried beans, eggplant (in any form), tzatziki, any sort of flatbread, lentils, avocado, zucchini, cauliflower. Etc.
It's not "fructose" vs "sucrose", it's a difference between something that's 50% fructose and 50% glucose (table sugar) and something that is 42% fructose and 53% glucose (corn syrup).
I really enjoyed "keeping up" with her when we were dating, because I was really tired of eating the same things all the time. There's really a lot of delicious plant proteins if you take the time to look.
(That being said, our kids like meat. We just don't eat it all the time.)
Most dietary studies are observational, which means there is no control group and no blinding. It’s a deep dive into data (largely self-reported) with an attempt to control the endless variables by slicing and dicing the data to hopefully end up with groups that can be meaningfully compared.
Dairy (in certain forms) offers the same benefits.
There was no such observation, just claim going contra observed data. The period you picked does correlate meat consumption going up with health getting better.
You said that meat consumption went up for last century. Then you claimed that "our already positive trend in meat consumption isn't yielding positive outcomes" - except that majority of that period did yielded positive outcomes.
It doesn't mean the diets of humans are biologically supposed to consist of huge amounts of meat.
Most apex predators are of course obligate carnivores. But humans are probably near the top because the use of weapons and tools makes us highly dangerous, so most land animals are wary of humans. Even many predators don't prey on humans for food.
(Although some large land predators do, mostly when they're desperate for food.)
A reasonably close rule of thumb can actually be 1g of protein per cm of height.
Also not accurately represented is that your body absorbs less protein per gram consumed the older you get. (I couldnt find a source with an actual ratio, just recommendations for _more_ as you get older).
When listening to folks like Layne Norton, they have said that surprisingly many people who simply increase their protein inadvertently begin to lose weight due to greater satiety per net calorie. (remember, roughly 20% of protein calories are lost in digesting/absorbing/converting the protein)
[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1741-7015-11-63?ut...
Not sure about availability in the US, in EU cottage cheese often is sold as much more creamy spread, like Philadelphia cheese.
Which is hilarious since current bro-science is that protein is the most filling macronutrient.
> After correction for measurement error, higher all-cause mortality remained significant only for processed meat
This is in the abstract. You don’t even have to open the actual report to see this. Without even getting into whether or not this study controlled correctly for all possible variables, even they themselves had to acknowledge that the link between red meat and mortality is at best weak.
There is so much of this sort of misinterpretation when it comes to dietary science that it’s really hard to know what information is accurate and what information is being misrepresented or misunderstood.
Cranberry's & nut mix - 34g (total) have 8g of protein
1 cup of milk - roughly 8g of protein
This is a pretty light breakfast of 16g of protein. How about a 'big, bold breakfast':
2 eggs - 12 g of protein
4 bacon strips - 12 g of protein
1 cup of hash browns - 3 g of protein
(other carbs pancakes etc going to have < 1g of protein)
So in the 'big, bold breakfast' => 27 g of proteins, I would be 3g behind my daily, average protein intake for the morning.
2 hamburgers for lunch, that's 30g of protein, keeping me close to my daily, average protein intake for lunch.
8 oz steak for dinner, thats 56g of protein.
In total: 27+30+56 = 112g of protein, just 4 g over needed daily, average intake of protein.
Resisting the sarcasm, this is not reasonable.
[1] Perkins https://perkinsmenus.com/hearty-mans-combo/#:~:text=Two%20eg...
"The two most common translations of tvorog are cottage cheese (common in the US) and quark (common in Germany). The process of making these different cheeses is quite similar: you take fermented, acidized or sour milk, and separate the curds from the whey. For cottage cheese, cream is added to the curds before they’re packaged, and for quark, the curds are not overly dried so the curds come out quite soft and creamy. Tvorog, on the other hand, is most often packaged as dry grainy pieces of curd."
Thats not the implication of 12% of Americans eating 50% of beef by consumed by all Americans that day.
If I had to make up some numbers it’s probably that, on any random day, 12% of Americans ate 50% of the beef (a large burger), 28% of American ate the rest of the beef (bit of lunch meat), and 60% of Americans did not eat any beef.
By saying “on any given day” you are suggesting it’s a different 12%. The article does confuse this by identifying cohorts that eat more beef. But it’s a tautological label based on the survey data. They identify some correlates, like being a 50 something male. But there are males who are 50 something that don’t eat any beef. They’re not included in the 12%.
The 12% is just the outcome of the sample. It doesn’t mean they’re a consistent cohort.
Example:
* on any given day x million women give birth
* there are x million women who give birth every day
My diet is light on carbs and has plenty of protein. I don’t think I’m deficient.
Four chicken breasts would be something like a pound and a half of meat. That seems excessive.
In OP, they say "Protein target: ~0.54–0.73 grams per pound of body weight per day". Given that an average male weighs 200lbs in the US[1], we're looking for 108-146g protein/day. If your protein only comes from chicken breasts, and given that an average (52g) chicken breast has 16g of protein[2], you'd have to eat 8 chicken breasts per day to fulfill those requirements. Factoring in your other meat (something with lunch, and a bit from other sources like cheese), if you skip meat in your breakfast, yeah, you'd need like four with dinner to hit targets.
Your diet is your business of course, but I'd consider tracking your diet for a few days to see how the numbers add up.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm
[2] values for "1 unit", whatever that is: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/171477/nutrients
Fried foods are bad for you regardless. The idea that one could swap out a seed oil for some other fat and keep all of their bad habits otherwise in place and magically become healthy is a fantasy.
I hope your numbers were more accurate when you determined you were struggling with hitting targets....
No, I bought a kitchen scale and did everything by weight, it seemed like the only sensical solution. This is probably a good time to plug Cronometer! I'm not affiliated, just been a happy paying customer for a few years now. https://cronometer.com/
I wasn't that serious about the whole thing, but I read somewhere that the benefits decline rapidly after 1.6g/kg bodyweight. That was the reason I didn't do any shakes.
> How did you do that in a plant based diet
Beans and whole grains. I realized that fat intake was limiting my protein access so I cut fat down do between 10 and 20% of energy intake. That means you have to chew down a whole lot of bulgur and beans. I ate about 3000 calories (I do a lot of swimming) and then you only need about 18% of energy from protein to reach 140g. Easy peasy.
I also made my own firm tofu (i was cheap). I could easily eat 200g of tofu a day.
Why are fried foods bad for you? It’s commonly held wisdom, but I’m curious what the mechanics are, to see if there’s a way to mitigate it. Is it something other than the oxidation products that I mentioned? And if it is those, would a more stable fat not fare better? I guess there’s the changes to the food from the high temps in both cases.
By "variety" you mean B12 & omega 3? Or is there something else you think vegans need to supplement that omnivores don't? My kids have varying dietary preferences and personally I haven't found it any more difficult to get high-quality supplements than it is to get high-quality animal proteins.
But what "variety of unregulated supplements" most reminds me of is my chore prepping the cow mineral-vitamin mixes on the farm I worked on as a kid. Most farm animals are given a variety of supplements (by my recollection the cows got A, D, E, iodine, selenium, zinc, various minerals...) that have even less regulation than human supplements. And roughly two thirds of beef cattle in the US receive growth-promoting hormones, though we didn't use those on our farm. And much of the dairy consumed in the US is directly supplemented with vitamin A and D. If you consume animal products in the US you're probably already taking poorly-regulated supplements, they've just been laundered through the body of an animal.
(To be clear I don't agree with the grandparent comment that animal products like dairy, meat, and fish are inherently unhealthy, at least for most people. But neither do I agree that they're inherently superior.)
For fried food, I'd worry way more about the raw caloric density and the overeating that can be induced by hyperpalatable foods[1] than oxidation.
if I'm eating bread, pasta and other cereals, I may exceed the 1.2g/kg recommendations but the PDCAAS (Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score) of these would make it in truth closer to 0.6g/kg.
Someone else eating mostly meat would get in total 1.2g/kg protein but also 1.2g/kg when PDCAAS is accounted for.
Maybe it's to simplify the calculation to the average user but it feels misleading, you can't know for sure the proportion of cereals in somebody diet.
Something to note is the acknowledgements, though: “This work was supported by the Soy Nutrition Institute Global, United Soybean Board, Corn Refiners of America, National Corn Growers Association, Canola Council of Canada and USA Canola Association. These funders had no role in the design, analysis or writing of this article.”
Doesn’t mean it’s junk, but also probably not totally disinterested science, since continued funding is probably contingent on them being happy with the results.
EDIT: from what I read, it was mostly a high level summary of literature wihh th some conclusions like high polyunsaturated fat is good for reducing ldl levels, it mentioned at the end that you shouldn’t reuse deep frying oil, try to keep oil under smoke point, some other things like that. Didn’t see much about inflammation, but I didn’t read too carefully, just skimmed.
Adding lean meat, dairy, eggs to protein poor diets is good, I love all of those things. Trying to hit a high protein target and understanding this to mean having to eat all or mostly meat is simply over correcting in a different direction.
And meat isn't a perfect PDCAAS! Beef is 0.92 close to soy at 0.91. Milk, eggs, soy protein (isolate), whey are 1. Beans are 0.75.
There's even more nuance, beans are partly lower because they are low in methionine, the essential amino acid that adults needs far less of than any other amino acid and that you don't need more of. In the context of a whole diet, it's not 92% of every gram for beef and 75% of every gram for beans, it doesn't work that way.
Relatively small servings of animal foods add up to a lot of protein, like some other comment was freaking out about needing to eat 4 hamburgers or a 16 oz steak to hit the (very modest) goal of 90g in a day. But something like, 1 egg + 1 can tuna + 1 serving Greek yogurt == 42g, is already at half the goal, much of the rest of it will fill out just fine from a balanced set of other non-empty calorie sources.
i can hike elevation all day which is great for backpacking, i look great with a shirt off, and i can stand up from the couch without using my hands.
yes, im taking it a bit far at this point, but really that just means eating the average american's protein intake and then a protein shake or two on top
Like, it’s probably something closer to 40% than 12%.
> Anything where P*10 > KCAL is a very good protein source, imo.
for the average person's protein intake, yes.
try doing 200g of protein a day with tofu. for firm tofu, that's over 5 pounds of tofu a day! and that's over 2000 calories.
it's doable but i also challenge you to eat 5 pounds of tofu every day of a week and tell me if that's any fun, lol.
Yes, at more than twice the price for me.
> for the average person's protein intake, yes.
The average person doesn't need that ratio, reaching 60-90g of protein is trivial. That ratio is good for bodybuilding purposes. Now, eating that much tofu, that sucks. Generally, getting 200g of protein sucks, even when you eat protein powder.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/PDCAAS-values-for-variou...
> Was that too much
I challenge you to eat 5 pounds of animal products in a day, for three days.
> And the big problem with commercial deep frying is that the oil is frequently just topped off rather than replaced, so those oxidization byproducts build up over time.
> polydimethylsiloxane
> Safety and environmental considerations: According to Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry, no "marked harmful effects on organisms in the environment" have been noted for siloxanes. PDMS is nonbiodegradable, but is absorbed in waste water treatment facilities. Its degradation is catalyzed by various clays.[49] The 2020 re-evaluation of food additive purposed PDMS (E 900) by the European Food Safety Authority found no safety concerns with PDMS in food for its reported use cases, although they did recommend the setting of a maximum limit for potentially toxic cyclopolysiloxanes in E 900 leftover from the manufacturing process.
B12 is produced by bacteria in dark soil.
Dairy is unhealthy because it contains a lot of hormones that are unhealthy to take, except from your own species and during weaning stage of growing up.
An other reason it is unhealthy is the amount of puss allowed in by the industry. Those animals are sick and have huge udders, too big -> often infected.
That's fine for the average person.
> Generally, getting 200g of protein sucks, even when you eat protein powder.
I have a some days where I hit 120g and it's not a recovery or workout day and I just give up lol.