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For the average person living in a high income country, protein needs are easily met to begin with. People end up conflating advice from fitness culture with g

For the average person living in a high income country, protein needs are easily met to begin with. People end up conflating advice from fitness culture with general health, which while overlapping isn’t the same. If you want to be super jacked then sure, eat a lot of protein, but if you just want to enjoy your life without major health issues there are bigger fish to fry so to speak.

kjkjadksj 4y ago
Late in life you are gonna wish you built up a little more muscle mass by then.
- comte7092 4y ago
  I do actively build muscle, the thing is that you don’t have to be “optimal” to do so. You can build plenty of muscle if you eat significantly below the recommended 1g/lb that fitness influencers talk about, it just won’t be as much as you could have otherwise. That’s a fine trade for me, I’m not planning to compete in any bodybuilding shows and I have other things I’d rather focus on in life.
  - tasoga 4y ago
    While I am certain that influencers are saying 1g/lb, I just want to clarify that it is around 1.4-1.6g/kg. It takes significantly less protein to build muscle and have an atheltic physique than some are trying to prescribe, which is a shame because it is overconsumption like anything else we do and as a vegetarian I previously struggled with the idea knowing full well I couldn't hit 190 g of protein unless I was chugging shakes all day
    - comte7092 4y ago
      The irony is that even non vegetarians will chug shakes all day to get “enough” protein.
iopq 4y ago
You should be exercising, which raises your protein requirements. Sure, for sedentary people the requirements are low. But being sedentary is not ideal for health
- comte7092 4y ago
  I do exercise, and that doesn’t raise your protein requirements as much as one would think. It’s only relevant if you’re looking to be a competitive athlete, which I am not.
  - iopq 4y ago
    That's not true, since you want muscle mass even for health reasons. The requirement for increasing muscle mass when doing weight training is at least 1.6 g/kg of bodyweight or thereabouts, which is a huge amount of protein for example, I'm 93kg, which sets my dietary protein to 150g or thereabouts I need 2700 calories a day for maintenance that means even if I do nothing but drink full fat milk, I will have gained only 135g of protein from my calories, which isn't enough to optimize for muscle recovery after training this is why I slip a few grams of protein powder into my morning coffee, avoid eating foods high in carbs and fats, just to approach that number (I may not hit it exactly every day)
  - brailsafe 4y ago
    Those are two wildly different things to compare. Among all degrees of doing something usefully physical, exercising at all would be at the bottom of the ladder, and competitive athlete would be at the top. But you don't need to want to compete to want to get stronger, improve your form, improve your mobility, looks, lose weight etc.. and a greater protein intake would likely be helpful with all of it. It's still good to exercise anyway, obviously, but diet is considered a massive component in getting results of any kind for a reason.
    - comte7092 4y ago
      My point consistently been that protein needs are overestimated, not that there isn’t any benefit to greater protein consumption. Will eating more protein help you build more muscle? The answer to that for the average person is almost certainly yes. Do you need to eat the “optimal” amount to build muscle? Certainly not. Like everything else, protein consumption has to be weighed against the trade offs.
nradov 4y ago
That is really terrible, ignorant advice. There are significant health benefits from maintaining a fairly high protein intake, even for regular people that aren't elite athletes. That especially applies to older people because protein digestion becomes less effective with age and they are at high risk of sarcopenia. https://peterattiamd.com/donlayman/ https://peterattiamd.com/donlayman/
- comte7092 4y ago
  Let’s be clear then: Absolute minimum requirement for a sedentary person: .8 g/kg of body weight (not recommended). Optimum for muscle building: 2.2 g/kg What I’m talking about: 1.1g/kg and up is probably fine. What about this do you take issue with? “High” and “low” are extremely vague. Edit: erroneously wrote .36 g/kg, when it should have been .8. .36 is g/lb
  - nradov 4y ago
    Listen to the interview that I linked above. It's long but seriously worth the time. I can't boil down Don Layman's research to a short comment without losing essential information. 90%+ of people ought to be building lean muscle even if they don't care about sports or aesthetics. This is essential for having a healthy endocrine system and stabilizing joints in order to prevent injuries. https://www.gabriellereece.com/muscle-as-the-cornerstone-of-longevity-optimizing-strength-for-disease-prevention-with-dr-gabrielle-lyon/ https://www.gabriellereece.com/muscle-as-the-cornerstone-of-...
  - incrudible 4y ago
    The takeaway from the article is that one must not just look at the numbers on the package but also consider bioavailability.
    - boston_clone 4y ago
      The actual conclusions from the article are primarily about zinc and iron, not protein.
  - 4y ago
dilap 4y ago
How long do you want to live and how robust do you want to be as you age? Something like 50% of people have sarcopenia by the time they're 80. Seems likely eating more high-quality protein and doing resistence training could be a good way to increase life-and-health-span, avoiding that fate.
- comte7092 4y ago
  How many of those people are just plain sedantary? “High-quality” is an extremely vague notion, and there is a huge gap between the average persons habits and the health/fitness world’s “ideal”. People will point to an extremely low average and then use that as evidence of an extremely narrow ideal, when there is a fairly large amount of range in between that may or may not be just fine. Resistance training is good. Eating below the minimum standard of protein is good. Does the average person need to be eating 1g/lb of body weight? No.
  - dilap 4y ago
    I understand the term to mean - dense protein vs calories - adequate quantities of all consituient amino acids - easily digestable So e.g. beef is a higher quality protein than beans, by that metric. It's hard to know the ideal amount of protein for sure w/o e.g. life-long RCTs (and even then, that answer will only be for whatever context those studies are done in), and to be sure there are people to advocate for low-protein diets as well as for high-protein. Personally, I'm placing my bets on high-protein. I've tried everything from vegan to vegetarian to (now) meat-based diets, and I feel by far the healthiest and strongest on a meat based diet. (And it's my most recent diet, so I have the disadvantage of aging going along w/ it.) Given the lack of consensus around dietary topics, I'd advise all people to keep an open mind and do some indivdual experimentation. (I take it as an axiom that feeling good, strong, healthy in the moment is a good predictor of health over the long term, thus making personal experimentation a valid approach. Of course that could in theory be not true, but it seems very unlikely to me.)
    - Buttons840 4y ago
      > I take it as an axiom that feeling good, strong, healthy in the moment is a good predictor of health over the long term, thus making personal experimentation a valid approach. Of course that could in theory be not true, but it seems very unlikely to me. There are many example of things that make you feel good in the short term, but not in the long term. It's not a wild "theory", it's a pattern we see all over the place. I'm not sure why that would seem unlikely to you. I feel better in the moment while eating a dozen cookies. I feel worse later. I feel better for a few hours when I take an opioid or other drugs, but long term it's not going to be for the better. I'll feel better for a few days if I skip my workout today, I wont feel sore and beat up. After a week or two, old aches and pains will return, and over the long run not exercising will cause me more and more problems. Billions of people overeat and have an unhealthy body weight which causes them problems. They do it because overeating feels good in the moment. Is it really that unthinkable that eating a lot of red meat can make a person feel good but increase their risk of cardiovascular disease long term? We may not agree whether or not this is true, but can we at least agree that if it is true, it follows the exact same pattern as many other things in life?
crazygringo 4y ago
I have no idea what your point is. The article is about insufficient iron and zinc from plant-based meat substitutes, not insufficient protein.
- comte7092 4y ago
  Felt like making the point.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
> protein needs are easily met to begin with that's not the topic of the article you're commenting on

kjkjadksj 4y ago

Late in life you are gonna wish you built up a little more muscle mass by then.

comte7092 4y ago
I do actively build muscle, the thing is that you don’t have to be “optimal” to do so. You can build plenty of muscle if you eat significantly below the recommended 1g/lb that fitness influencers talk about, it just won’t be as much as you could have otherwise. That’s a fine trade for me, I’m not planning to compete in any bodybuilding shows and I have other things I’d rather focus on in life.
- tasoga 4y ago
  While I am certain that influencers are saying 1g/lb, I just want to clarify that it is around 1.4-1.6g/kg. It takes significantly less protein to build muscle and have an atheltic physique than some are trying to prescribe, which is a shame because it is overconsumption like anything else we do and as a vegetarian I previously struggled with the idea knowing full well I couldn't hit 190 g of protein unless I was chugging shakes all day
  - comte7092 4y ago
    The irony is that even non vegetarians will chug shakes all day to get “enough” protein.

iopq 4y ago

You should be exercising, which raises your protein requirements. Sure, for sedentary people the requirements are low. But being sedentary is not ideal for health

comte7092 4y ago
I do exercise, and that doesn’t raise your protein requirements as much as one would think. It’s only relevant if you’re looking to be a competitive athlete, which I am not.
- iopq 4y ago
  That's not true, since you want muscle mass even for health reasons. The requirement for increasing muscle mass when doing weight training is at least 1.6 g/kg of bodyweight or thereabouts, which is a huge amount of protein for example, I'm 93kg, which sets my dietary protein to 150g or thereabouts I need 2700 calories a day for maintenance that means even if I do nothing but drink full fat milk, I will have gained only 135g of protein from my calories, which isn't enough to optimize for muscle recovery after training this is why I slip a few grams of protein powder into my morning coffee, avoid eating foods high in carbs and fats, just to approach that number (I may not hit it exactly every day)
- brailsafe 4y ago
  Those are two wildly different things to compare. Among all degrees of doing something usefully physical, exercising at all would be at the bottom of the ladder, and competitive athlete would be at the top. But you don't need to want to compete to want to get stronger, improve your form, improve your mobility, looks, lose weight etc.. and a greater protein intake would likely be helpful with all of it. It's still good to exercise anyway, obviously, but diet is considered a massive component in getting results of any kind for a reason.
  - comte7092 4y ago
    My point consistently been that protein needs are overestimated, not that there isn’t any benefit to greater protein consumption. Will eating more protein help you build more muscle? The answer to that for the average person is almost certainly yes. Do you need to eat the “optimal” amount to build muscle? Certainly not. Like everything else, protein consumption has to be weighed against the trade offs.

nradov 4y ago

That is really terrible, ignorant advice. There are significant health benefits from maintaining a fairly high protein intake, even for regular people that aren't elite athletes. That especially applies to older people because protein digestion becomes less effective with age and they are at high risk of sarcopenia. https://peterattiamd.com/donlayman/ https://peterattiamd.com/donlayman/

comte7092 4y ago
Let’s be clear then: Absolute minimum requirement for a sedentary person: .8 g/kg of body weight (not recommended). Optimum for muscle building: 2.2 g/kg What I’m talking about: 1.1g/kg and up is probably fine. What about this do you take issue with? “High” and “low” are extremely vague. Edit: erroneously wrote .36 g/kg, when it should have been .8. .36 is g/lb
- nradov 4y ago
  Listen to the interview that I linked above. It's long but seriously worth the time. I can't boil down Don Layman's research to a short comment without losing essential information. 90%+ of people ought to be building lean muscle even if they don't care about sports or aesthetics. This is essential for having a healthy endocrine system and stabilizing joints in order to prevent injuries. https://www.gabriellereece.com/muscle-as-the-cornerstone-of-longevity-optimizing-strength-for-disease-prevention-with-dr-gabrielle-lyon/ https://www.gabriellereece.com/muscle-as-the-cornerstone-of-...
- incrudible 4y ago
  The takeaway from the article is that one must not just look at the numbers on the package but also consider bioavailability.
  - boston_clone 4y ago
    The actual conclusions from the article are primarily about zinc and iron, not protein.
- 4y ago

dilap 4y ago

How long do you want to live and how robust do you want to be as you age? Something like 50% of people have sarcopenia by the time they're 80. Seems likely eating more high-quality protein and doing resistence training could be a good way to increase life-and-health-span, avoiding that fate.

comte7092 4y ago
How many of those people are just plain sedantary? “High-quality” is an extremely vague notion, and there is a huge gap between the average persons habits and the health/fitness world’s “ideal”. People will point to an extremely low average and then use that as evidence of an extremely narrow ideal, when there is a fairly large amount of range in between that may or may not be just fine. Resistance training is good. Eating below the minimum standard of protein is good. Does the average person need to be eating 1g/lb of body weight? No.
- dilap 4y ago
  I understand the term to mean - dense protein vs calories - adequate quantities of all consituient amino acids - easily digestable So e.g. beef is a higher quality protein than beans, by that metric. It's hard to know the ideal amount of protein for sure w/o e.g. life-long RCTs (and even then, that answer will only be for whatever context those studies are done in), and to be sure there are people to advocate for low-protein diets as well as for high-protein. Personally, I'm placing my bets on high-protein. I've tried everything from vegan to vegetarian to (now) meat-based diets, and I feel by far the healthiest and strongest on a meat based diet. (And it's my most recent diet, so I have the disadvantage of aging going along w/ it.) Given the lack of consensus around dietary topics, I'd advise all people to keep an open mind and do some indivdual experimentation. (I take it as an axiom that feeling good, strong, healthy in the moment is a good predictor of health over the long term, thus making personal experimentation a valid approach. Of course that could in theory be not true, but it seems very unlikely to me.)
  - Buttons840 4y ago
    > I take it as an axiom that feeling good, strong, healthy in the moment is a good predictor of health over the long term, thus making personal experimentation a valid approach. Of course that could in theory be not true, but it seems very unlikely to me. There are many example of things that make you feel good in the short term, but not in the long term. It's not a wild "theory", it's a pattern we see all over the place. I'm not sure why that would seem unlikely to you. I feel better in the moment while eating a dozen cookies. I feel worse later. I feel better for a few hours when I take an opioid or other drugs, but long term it's not going to be for the better. I'll feel better for a few days if I skip my workout today, I wont feel sore and beat up. After a week or two, old aches and pains will return, and over the long run not exercising will cause me more and more problems. Billions of people overeat and have an unhealthy body weight which causes them problems. They do it because overeating feels good in the moment. Is it really that unthinkable that eating a lot of red meat can make a person feel good but increase their risk of cardiovascular disease long term? We may not agree whether or not this is true, but can we at least agree that if it is true, it follows the exact same pattern as many other things in life?

crazygringo 4y ago

I have no idea what your point is. The article is about insufficient iron and zinc from plant-based meat substitutes, not insufficient protein.

comte7092 4y ago
Felt like making the point.

jjtheblunt 4y ago

> protein needs are easily met to begin with that's not the topic of the article you're commenting on