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Of note: the US's per capita consumption of meat has increased by more than 100 pounds over the last century[1]. We now consume an immense amount of meat per pe

Of note: the US's per capita consumption of meat has increased by more than 100 pounds over the last century[1]. We now consume an immense amount of meat per person in this country. That increase is disproportionately in poultry, but we also consume more beef[2]. 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-consumption-over-last-century https://www.agweb.com/opinion/drivers-u-s-capita-meat-consum... [2]: https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detail?chartId=59426 https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detai...

jdlshore 10mo ago
It says 1.2-1.6 grams of protein and healthy fats per kilogram of body weight, from animal and plant sources (including milk). Is that really advocating for more meat?
- omgJustTest 10mo ago
  90g of protein, what is recommended for me, is like 4 hamburgers or a 16oz steak per day ...
  - tejohnso 10mo ago
    Doesn't make sense to me that a 400lb obese person would need to consume the same amount of protein as a 400lb lean muscle bodybuilder. All of the protein recommendations I've seen were for lean mass. You don't feed fat.
    - deinonychus 10mo ago
      > Doesn't make sense to me that a 400lb obese person would need to consume the same amount of protein as a 400lb lean muscle bodybuilder. yeah both of those people are extreme cases that would break this very crude formula
    - SoftTalker 10mo ago
      Correct, and the guideline on the "realfood.gov" site doesn't say it but all the protein g/kg body weight I've seen (mostly relative to weight training or building muscle) are in terms of kg of lean body mass, not total body weight.
    - omgJustTest 10mo ago
      I am not 400lbs... I don't know if you are implying that... if so check your math: 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.
      - stubish 10mo ago
        A 16oz steak is over 50% protein, or over double your entire daily target. Hamburger count could be right, if you are eating McDonald's burgers or similar. But then you are not following the guidelines, with far too much processed grains and added sugars.
        omgJustTest 10mo ago
        Your beef is with wiki or facts : "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_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foods_by_protein_conte...
        omgJustTest 10mo ago
        For some more perspective: 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%20eggs%2C%20smoked%20sausage%2C%20bacon,of%20America's%20favorite%20breakfast%20places. https://perkinsmenus.com/hearty-mans-combo/#:~:text=Two%20eg...
    - maerF0x0 10mo ago
      All these things are actually rules of thumb that aim to be easy, and less focused on accurate. 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)
  - deinonychus 10mo ago
    do you think that's a lot or a little? does that sound realistic or unrealistic?
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    Nobody should be getting all of their protein from meat, though. Even a cup of cooked rice or a slice of bread has several grams of protein.
  - brainwad 10mo ago
    That's not really a lot of protein on a low carb diet like they are suggesting.
  - blks 10mo ago
    If you don’t forget to count proteins from all the grains and other products, then you may realise you don’t need that much meat (or any meat at all).
  - tomjakubowski 10mo ago
    People, even meat-eaters, tend to get much of their protein intake from the long tail of non-meat foods they consume. Lots of foods (especially grains and legumes) have a little bit of protein, and that adds up.
  - avazhi 10mo ago
    Nobody said you have to get all your protein from meat…
- woodruffw 10mo ago
  The implication is that the current food pyramid disproportionately weights against proteins and fats. Assuming that Americans follow the current pyramid (this is a hell of an assumption), then any change to the pyramid that asks them to change their diets in favor of more protein and fat is likely to result in them eating more meat. 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.
  - jaredwiener 10mo ago
    The food pyramid was phased out in 2011: https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/nov/07/food-pyramid-history-my-plate-healthy-diet/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/nov/07/food-pyramid-...
    - Y_Y 10mo ago
      You can't phase out common "knowledge"!
      - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
        True. But you can stop recommending bad science. The original food pyramid was an industry wish list.
  - ericd 10mo ago
    As I see it, the point of this new pyramid is not to add more emphasis to meat specifically, but to undo some of the past vilification of fat (note the emphasis on whole milk and full fat dairy), and to move emphasis away from carbs as the basis of the diet. And honestly, I think that's pretty much correct - the low fat movement was a disaster for our collective health, because food manufacturers added more sugar to compensate for the bad effects on taste that that has, and because if you eat a good amount of full fat stuff, there's not nearly as much need to snack between meals. 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.
- seawsurf 10mo ago
  This can be an outrageous amount for a normal individual. These proportions are used for bodybuilders and powerlifters. 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
  - HoJojoMojo 10mo ago
    These numbers are actually "disappearance" they include an immense amount of food waste as well so the average American is probably almost half a body builder and leaving food on their plate at a restaurant while more of it is going bad at home and in their grocery.
  - MattRix 10mo ago
    yeah, and it’s also worth noting that the usual guidelines you hear like “eat 1g of protein for each pound you weigh” are actually meant to be 1g of protein per pound of lean mass, which for many people is significantly smaller amount.
  - giantg2 10mo ago
    1.5g/kg for a 90kg person is 135g. You can get almost half that daily need from a chicken breast or a few ounces of fish. Two meals of that and a few non-meat things like rice and beans, lentils, peanut butter, etc and you're set, even towards the higher end of the recommended range. That's doesn't seem outrageous at all.
  - jdlshore 10mo ago
    I think most commenters are missing two things: 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.
    - seawsurf 10mo ago
      People are also forgetting the importance of fiber for satiety and gut health.
- dkarl 10mo ago
  The public health discourse about protein is in a weird place right now. The recommendations are higher than ever, yet people are constantly told not to think about protein, or to worry about excess protein intake instead. 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/speaking-of-health/are-you-getting-too-much-protein https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speak...
- ctoa 10mo ago
  When I did strength sports and would eat ~180g protein a day (which for me was 1.8g/100kg), I ate a lot less meat than you would think, I was carefully tracking all my food for a while and you have to count the whole diet. I really like this study of a population of highly trained athletes and their diets/protein intake: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27710150/ 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.
  - deleted 10mo ago
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  - aucisson_masque 10mo ago
    Protein from grain food isn’t as well absorbed as protein from meat, milk, fish. Roughly, 2g of protein from bean equal 1g meat protein.
    - ctoa 10mo ago
      Yes, but the standards aren't based on "the best protein to absorb", they are based on whole diet consumption. Studies like the one I linked to are where the recommendations come from. It is a misunderstanding to read a recommendation for 1.2g/kg (or whatever) as saying that the 1.2g is supposed to all be meat quality protein. It's supposed to be the protein in your total mixed diet. 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.
      - 10mo ago
parl_match 10mo ago
I'm a weightlifter and as part of my training, I eat pretty close to about a pound of meat a day during bulk, usually about 12-14oz. This is because I need to eat about 200g of protein a day. I supplement it with protein shakes. 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.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- dfee 10mo ago
  I too try for 200g of protein/day, with meat and supplements by shakes. It’s difficult to eat more meat than that, because of how it fills you up, its prep requirements and its cost. 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.
  - itsamario 10mo ago
    I cut out mammal products and replaced with plant protein like lentils and wild rice. I can eat 200g of lentil noodles in a sitting.
    - parl_match 10mo ago
      lentils carb/protein ratio isn't great. you still need to supplement it with protein (whey or pea). i eat a fair amount of lentils, but mostly as a carb source (like white rice). even tofu's ratio isn't good enough. i do eat a lot of tofu though, because i like it 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.
      - 10mo ago
ch4s3 10mo ago
I'd strongly prefer the government just not try to tell people what to eat, the incentives will always be perverse and nutrition science is anything but science in most cases. 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.
- mistrial9 10mo ago
  > not try to tell people what to eat 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.
  - ch4s3 10mo ago
    I'm clearly not advocating against basic safety oversight. It's worth noting that The Jungle was a work of fiction and Sinclair famously fabricated a lot of details wholesale.
- cosmicgadget 10mo ago
  The whole point of government performing the function is that they don't profit from misleading you, rather their goal is the country's welfare. Obviously there are exceptions - particularly right now - but those are solved by rooting out corruption.
  - ch4s3 10mo ago
    You say that but the food pyramid was devised but the agriculture lobby, and was never based on science.
    - cosmicgadget 10mo ago
      Is this true? Specifically, "devised by" vs "influenced by" and "never based on science" meaning there was no, for example, attempt to improve heart disease rates? In any event, looking at the whole history of food guidance paints a clearer picture of my point. Happy to hear of alternatives though!
reactordev 10mo ago
You should see the local Golden Corral.
givemeethekeys 10mo ago
I bet the number of vegans and vegetarians in the US are also at their highest (and growing).
- woodruffw 10mo ago
  That's probably true, but I don't think vegans and vegetarians as a demographic overlap closely with demographics that tend to have heart disease. (Note that I am neither a vegetarian nor a vegan.)
  - givemeethekeys 10mo ago
    Vegans are probably mostly healthy. Vegetarians? Religious vegetarians and healthy vegetarians intersect but mostly don't ;).
    - sebasv_ 10mo ago
      I remember seeing a paper a while back that found veganism increased your death by ischemic stroke probability threefold. 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
      - givemeethekeys 10mo ago
        Hey, do whatever helps you sleep at night. That's what I do. We're all going to the same place - a couple of years here and there won't do much when you're that old anyway.
      - recallingmemory 10mo ago
        This is not accurate. Please link to your source. 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/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8166423/ 2: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/healthy-plant-based-diet-associated-with-lower-stroke-risk/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/healthy-plant-based-diet-assoc...
watwut 10mo ago
USA is actually healthier then in 1909. Life expectancy was going up the whole time. A whole bunch of malnutritiom related issues and diseases just disappeared. You need to go to much more recent times to get worsening results/predictions.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- woodruffw 10mo ago
  I wasn't making a claim about the US being either healthier or unhealthier as a whole; I was only observing that annual per capita meat consumption does not trivially track with the benefits claimed on the site. It might, but the evidence is not presented.
  - watwut 10mo ago
    > I was only observing that annual per capita meat consumption does not trivially track with the benefits claimed on the site 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.
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0xWTF 10mo ago
"a chicken in every pot" is a political slogan that has been in active use from 17th century France to at least Herbert Hoover.
Aurornis 10mo ago
> the US's per capita consumption of meat 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.
- toomuchtodo 10mo ago
  Interestingly, ~12% of humans in the US are responsible for ~50% of beef consumption. > 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-usda-climate-crisis-meat-consumption 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://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3795 | https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15173795 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)
  - 10mo ago
seawsurf 10mo ago
Worth noting there seems to be no upper limit for the anabolic response to protein ingestion, according to this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38118410/ 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."
ixtli 10mo ago
I think its dangerous to engage with this website as an earnest attempt to make people healthier as individuals or as a population and not a metastasis of woo-fueld ignorance of data and trends like you're talking about whos goal is ultimately just to sell shit to desperate people.
underdeserver 10mo ago
Small nit - this is probably assumed, but I would like the unit to be explicit: Yearly per capita pounds of meat. 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.
rayiner 10mo ago
I think the key point is the relative ratios of meat versus processed carbs. Right now we have government guidance telling people to eat more processed carbs than meat, and that’s backward. Americans also just need to eat less period, but that’s a separable issue.
- mrguyorama 10mo ago
  >Right now we have government guidance telling people to eat more processed carbs than meat 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?
  - rayiner 10mo ago
    Okay, I amend my statement to say “we raised an entire generation to think you should eat multiple times as much carbs as protein.” 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.
uoaei 10mo ago
Wouldn't it be more likely that it's calories, not meat per se, that is the main proxy for measuring our health decline?
- PaulRobinson 10mo ago
  There is a lot of research that shows the type of calorie you consume determines to some extent the next calorie you want to consume. You are more likely to be "sated" (i.e. not want to eat more calories), if you eat protein than you are ultra-processed carbohydrates, low calorie soda will leave your body yearning sugar, and so on. 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.
dmayle 10mo ago
Fun... 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)
loeg 10mo ago
"Last century" is a big piece of that, surely. As recently as 50 years ago, obesity rates were quite low (and risk of hunger among the poor was, you know, more real than it is today).
rayiner 10mo ago
The starting point for that data is 1909, when average life expectancy was under 50 years and child malnourishment was a major problem. The change since 1970 has been much quite modest: http://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=95869 http://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detai... 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-sex-structure/figure-5-6-percentage-of-the-population-under-15-years-and-elderly-60-or-65-for-the-united-states-by-region-1830-1860-1900-1940-1970-2000-and-2010 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.
thephyber 10mo ago
There’s a restaurant in Las Vegas, the Heart Attack Grill, which sarcastically plays on this trope. > 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! https://heartattackgrill.com/press https://heartattackgrill.com/press
- adzm 10mo ago
  Real sugar Coca-Cola is delicious though, and while this may just be a personal anecdote, real sugar soda always makes me feel full and satiated, while I've been able to drink several cans of corn syrup soda in a sitting before, I can't imagine doing that with several cans of real sugar soda. The calories are pretty much the same!
  - rcbdev 10mo ago
    Was very confused by this comment, until I looked it up. It seems, sweet beverages and candies in the U.S. are not sweetened with sucrose (table sugar) like in most places on earth. Instead, they use fructose (fruit sugar) syrup. The more you know.
    - Centigonal 10mo ago
      It's more complicated than that. 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-coke-even-johnny-harris-oihm09/ 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/S0899900714001920#fig2 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.
jessecurry 10mo ago
It’s the corn subsidies.
jayers 10mo ago
Too many calories is the basic explanation for why American's health sucks. Calories available per person has gone up ~32% since the 1960s (we obviously can't measure calories consumed per person, but supply and demand would dictate these excess calories are going somewhere). It is not clear to me that meat specifically is a problem so much as excess consumption leading to obesity, which then causes chronic health problems downstream. 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.
- OJFord 10mo ago
  People are more wasteful now (in times of relative plenty generally) too though, at least I'm sure that's true in the UK.
redox99 10mo ago
The biggest food related problem in the US is obesity. Lean meat is very high satiety and really helps with keeping weight in check. Of course a McDonalds meal is the opposite and you eat more than half your day's calories in a few minutes.
Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
At least the page mentions alternatives - plenty of other sources of protein, like dairy, eggs, legumes, etc.
lopis 10mo ago
The moment I saw whole milk and a huge steak in the intro, I knew this website was not to be trusted.
- cies 10mo ago
  Milk is very unhealthy, in any quantity. 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).
  - rjdj377dhabsn 10mo ago
    What is your criteria for "very unhealthy" and do you have any evidence to back up that claim?
  - mythrwy 10mo ago
    If milk if unhealthy in any quantity how did we all survive infancy?
    - cies 10mo ago
      Unhealthy for adults. Good point :)
  - crat3r 10mo ago
    So what then do you believe is a healthy diet? Surely eating animal protein on a regular basis is better than having to take a variety of unregulated supplements to stay within a healthy range of essential vitamins and minerals? Animal protein also has the upside of offering a tremendous amount of, well, protein, alongside the necessary vitamins. Dairy (in certain forms) offers the same benefits.
    - angiolillo 10mo ago
      > Surely eating animal protein on a regular basis is better than having to take a variety of unregulated supplements to stay within a healthy range of essential vitamins and minerals? 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.)
al_borland 10mo ago
Processed food and sugar consumption has also gone up. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8805510/ 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.
gwbas1c 10mo ago
My wife is vegetarian, mostly vegan because she's allergic to dairy. 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.)

jdlshore 10mo ago

It says 1.2-1.6 grams of protein and healthy fats per kilogram of body weight, from animal and plant sources (including milk). Is that really advocating for more meat?

omgJustTest 10mo ago
90g of protein, what is recommended for me, is like 4 hamburgers or a 16oz steak per day ...
- tejohnso 10mo ago
  Doesn't make sense to me that a 400lb obese person would need to consume the same amount of protein as a 400lb lean muscle bodybuilder. All of the protein recommendations I've seen were for lean mass. You don't feed fat.
  - deinonychus 10mo ago
    > Doesn't make sense to me that a 400lb obese person would need to consume the same amount of protein as a 400lb lean muscle bodybuilder. yeah both of those people are extreme cases that would break this very crude formula
  - SoftTalker 10mo ago
    Correct, and the guideline on the "realfood.gov" site doesn't say it but all the protein g/kg body weight I've seen (mostly relative to weight training or building muscle) are in terms of kg of lean body mass, not total body weight.
  - omgJustTest 10mo ago
    I am not 400lbs... I don't know if you are implying that... if so check your math: 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.
    - stubish 10mo ago
      A 16oz steak is over 50% protein, or over double your entire daily target. Hamburger count could be right, if you are eating McDonald's burgers or similar. But then you are not following the guidelines, with far too much processed grains and added sugars.
      - omgJustTest 10mo ago
        Your beef is with wiki or facts : "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_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foods_by_protein_conte...
        omgJustTest 10mo ago
        For some more perspective: 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%20eggs%2C%20smoked%20sausage%2C%20bacon,of%20America's%20favorite%20breakfast%20places. https://perkinsmenus.com/hearty-mans-combo/#:~:text=Two%20eg...
  - maerF0x0 10mo ago
    All these things are actually rules of thumb that aim to be easy, and less focused on accurate. 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)
- deinonychus 10mo ago
  do you think that's a lot or a little? does that sound realistic or unrealistic?
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  Nobody should be getting all of their protein from meat, though. Even a cup of cooked rice or a slice of bread has several grams of protein.
- brainwad 10mo ago
  That's not really a lot of protein on a low carb diet like they are suggesting.
- blks 10mo ago
  If you don’t forget to count proteins from all the grains and other products, then you may realise you don’t need that much meat (or any meat at all).
- tomjakubowski 10mo ago
  People, even meat-eaters, tend to get much of their protein intake from the long tail of non-meat foods they consume. Lots of foods (especially grains and legumes) have a little bit of protein, and that adds up.
- avazhi 10mo ago
  Nobody said you have to get all your protein from meat…
woodruffw 10mo ago
The implication is that the current food pyramid disproportionately weights against proteins and fats. Assuming that Americans follow the current pyramid (this is a hell of an assumption), then any change to the pyramid that asks them to change their diets in favor of more protein and fat is likely to result in them eating more meat. 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.
- jaredwiener 10mo ago
  The food pyramid was phased out in 2011: https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/nov/07/food-pyramid-history-my-plate-healthy-diet/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/nov/07/food-pyramid-...
  - Y_Y 10mo ago
    You can't phase out common "knowledge"!
    - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
      True. But you can stop recommending bad science. The original food pyramid was an industry wish list.
- ericd 10mo ago
  As I see it, the point of this new pyramid is not to add more emphasis to meat specifically, but to undo some of the past vilification of fat (note the emphasis on whole milk and full fat dairy), and to move emphasis away from carbs as the basis of the diet. And honestly, I think that's pretty much correct - the low fat movement was a disaster for our collective health, because food manufacturers added more sugar to compensate for the bad effects on taste that that has, and because if you eat a good amount of full fat stuff, there's not nearly as much need to snack between meals. 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.
seawsurf 10mo ago
This can be an outrageous amount for a normal individual. These proportions are used for bodybuilders and powerlifters. 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
- HoJojoMojo 10mo ago
  These numbers are actually "disappearance" they include an immense amount of food waste as well so the average American is probably almost half a body builder and leaving food on their plate at a restaurant while more of it is going bad at home and in their grocery.
- MattRix 10mo ago
  yeah, and it’s also worth noting that the usual guidelines you hear like “eat 1g of protein for each pound you weigh” are actually meant to be 1g of protein per pound of lean mass, which for many people is significantly smaller amount.
- giantg2 10mo ago
  1.5g/kg for a 90kg person is 135g. You can get almost half that daily need from a chicken breast or a few ounces of fish. Two meals of that and a few non-meat things like rice and beans, lentils, peanut butter, etc and you're set, even towards the higher end of the recommended range. That's doesn't seem outrageous at all.
- jdlshore 10mo ago
  I think most commenters are missing two things: 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.
  - seawsurf 10mo ago
    People are also forgetting the importance of fiber for satiety and gut health.
dkarl 10mo ago
The public health discourse about protein is in a weird place right now. The recommendations are higher than ever, yet people are constantly told not to think about protein, or to worry about excess protein intake instead. 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/speaking-of-health/are-you-getting-too-much-protein https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speak...
ctoa 10mo ago
When I did strength sports and would eat ~180g protein a day (which for me was 1.8g/100kg), I ate a lot less meat than you would think, I was carefully tracking all my food for a while and you have to count the whole diet. I really like this study of a population of highly trained athletes and their diets/protein intake: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27710150/ 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.
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- aucisson_masque 10mo ago
  Protein from grain food isn’t as well absorbed as protein from meat, milk, fish. Roughly, 2g of protein from bean equal 1g meat protein.
  - ctoa 10mo ago
    Yes, but the standards aren't based on "the best protein to absorb", they are based on whole diet consumption. Studies like the one I linked to are where the recommendations come from. It is a misunderstanding to read a recommendation for 1.2g/kg (or whatever) as saying that the 1.2g is supposed to all be meat quality protein. It's supposed to be the protein in your total mixed diet. 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.
    - 10mo ago

parl_match 10mo ago

I'm a weightlifter and as part of my training, I eat pretty close to about a pound of meat a day during bulk, usually about 12-14oz. This is because I need to eat about 200g of protein a day. I supplement it with protein shakes. 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.

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dfee 10mo ago
I too try for 200g of protein/day, with meat and supplements by shakes. It’s difficult to eat more meat than that, because of how it fills you up, its prep requirements and its cost. 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.
- itsamario 10mo ago
  I cut out mammal products and replaced with plant protein like lentils and wild rice. I can eat 200g of lentil noodles in a sitting.
  - parl_match 10mo ago
    lentils carb/protein ratio isn't great. you still need to supplement it with protein (whey or pea). i eat a fair amount of lentils, but mostly as a carb source (like white rice). even tofu's ratio isn't good enough. i do eat a lot of tofu though, because i like it 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.
    - 10mo ago

ch4s3 10mo ago

I'd strongly prefer the government just not try to tell people what to eat, the incentives will always be perverse and nutrition science is anything but science in most cases. 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.

mistrial9 10mo ago
> not try to tell people what to eat 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.
- ch4s3 10mo ago
  I'm clearly not advocating against basic safety oversight. It's worth noting that The Jungle was a work of fiction and Sinclair famously fabricated a lot of details wholesale.
cosmicgadget 10mo ago
The whole point of government performing the function is that they don't profit from misleading you, rather their goal is the country's welfare. Obviously there are exceptions - particularly right now - but those are solved by rooting out corruption.
- ch4s3 10mo ago
  You say that but the food pyramid was devised but the agriculture lobby, and was never based on science.
  - cosmicgadget 10mo ago
    Is this true? Specifically, "devised by" vs "influenced by" and "never based on science" meaning there was no, for example, attempt to improve heart disease rates? In any event, looking at the whole history of food guidance paints a clearer picture of my point. Happy to hear of alternatives though!

reactordev 10mo ago

You should see the local Golden Corral.

givemeethekeys 10mo ago

I bet the number of vegans and vegetarians in the US are also at their highest (and growing).

woodruffw 10mo ago
That's probably true, but I don't think vegans and vegetarians as a demographic overlap closely with demographics that tend to have heart disease. (Note that I am neither a vegetarian nor a vegan.)
- givemeethekeys 10mo ago
  Vegans are probably mostly healthy. Vegetarians? Religious vegetarians and healthy vegetarians intersect but mostly don't ;).
  - sebasv_ 10mo ago
    I remember seeing a paper a while back that found veganism increased your death by ischemic stroke probability threefold. 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
    - givemeethekeys 10mo ago
      Hey, do whatever helps you sleep at night. That's what I do. We're all going to the same place - a couple of years here and there won't do much when you're that old anyway.
    - recallingmemory 10mo ago
      This is not accurate. Please link to your source. 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/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8166423/ 2: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/healthy-plant-based-diet-associated-with-lower-stroke-risk/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/healthy-plant-based-diet-assoc...

watwut 10mo ago

USA is actually healthier then in 1909. Life expectancy was going up the whole time. A whole bunch of malnutritiom related issues and diseases just disappeared. You need to go to much more recent times to get worsening results/predictions.

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woodruffw 10mo ago
I wasn't making a claim about the US being either healthier or unhealthier as a whole; I was only observing that annual per capita meat consumption does not trivially track with the benefits claimed on the site. It might, but the evidence is not presented.
- watwut 10mo ago
  > I was only observing that annual per capita meat consumption does not trivially track with the benefits claimed on the site 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.
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0xWTF 10mo ago

"a chicken in every pot" is a political slogan that has been in active use from 17th century France to at least Herbert Hoover.

Aurornis 10mo ago

> the US's per capita consumption of meat 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.

toomuchtodo 10mo ago
Interestingly, ~12% of humans in the US are responsible for ~50% of beef consumption. > 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-usda-climate-crisis-meat-consumption 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://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3795 | https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15173795 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)
- 10mo ago

seawsurf 10mo ago

Worth noting there seems to be no upper limit for the anabolic response to protein ingestion, according to this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38118410/ 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."

ixtli 10mo ago

I think its dangerous to engage with this website as an earnest attempt to make people healthier as individuals or as a population and not a metastasis of woo-fueld ignorance of data and trends like you're talking about whos goal is ultimately just to sell shit to desperate people.

underdeserver 10mo ago

Small nit - this is probably assumed, but I would like the unit to be explicit: Yearly per capita pounds of meat. 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.

rayiner 10mo ago

I think the key point is the relative ratios of meat versus processed carbs. Right now we have government guidance telling people to eat more processed carbs than meat, and that’s backward. Americans also just need to eat less period, but that’s a separable issue.

mrguyorama 10mo ago
>Right now we have government guidance telling people to eat more processed carbs than meat 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?
- rayiner 10mo ago
  Okay, I amend my statement to say “we raised an entire generation to think you should eat multiple times as much carbs as protein.” 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.

uoaei 10mo ago

Wouldn't it be more likely that it's calories, not meat per se, that is the main proxy for measuring our health decline?

PaulRobinson 10mo ago
There is a lot of research that shows the type of calorie you consume determines to some extent the next calorie you want to consume. You are more likely to be "sated" (i.e. not want to eat more calories), if you eat protein than you are ultra-processed carbohydrates, low calorie soda will leave your body yearning sugar, and so on. 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.

dmayle 10mo ago

Fun... 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)

loeg 10mo ago

"Last century" is a big piece of that, surely. As recently as 50 years ago, obesity rates were quite low (and risk of hunger among the poor was, you know, more real than it is today).

rayiner 10mo ago

The starting point for that data is 1909, when average life expectancy was under 50 years and child malnourishment was a major problem. The change since 1970 has been much quite modest: http://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=95869 http://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detai... 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-sex-structure/figure-5-6-percentage-of-the-population-under-15-years-and-elderly-60-or-65-for-the-united-states-by-region-1830-1860-1900-1940-1970-2000-and-2010 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.

thephyber 10mo ago

There’s a restaurant in Las Vegas, the Heart Attack Grill, which sarcastically plays on this trope. > 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! https://heartattackgrill.com/press https://heartattackgrill.com/press

adzm 10mo ago
Real sugar Coca-Cola is delicious though, and while this may just be a personal anecdote, real sugar soda always makes me feel full and satiated, while I've been able to drink several cans of corn syrup soda in a sitting before, I can't imagine doing that with several cans of real sugar soda. The calories are pretty much the same!
- rcbdev 10mo ago
  Was very confused by this comment, until I looked it up. It seems, sweet beverages and candies in the U.S. are not sweetened with sucrose (table sugar) like in most places on earth. Instead, they use fructose (fruit sugar) syrup. The more you know.
  - Centigonal 10mo ago
    It's more complicated than that. 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-coke-even-johnny-harris-oihm09/ 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/S0899900714001920#fig2 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.

jessecurry 10mo ago

It’s the corn subsidies.

jayers 10mo ago

Too many calories is the basic explanation for why American's health sucks. Calories available per person has gone up ~32% since the 1960s (we obviously can't measure calories consumed per person, but supply and demand would dictate these excess calories are going somewhere). It is not clear to me that meat specifically is a problem so much as excess consumption leading to obesity, which then causes chronic health problems downstream. 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.

OJFord 10mo ago
People are more wasteful now (in times of relative plenty generally) too though, at least I'm sure that's true in the UK.

redox99 10mo ago

The biggest food related problem in the US is obesity. Lean meat is very high satiety and really helps with keeping weight in check. Of course a McDonalds meal is the opposite and you eat more than half your day's calories in a few minutes.

Cthulhu_ 10mo ago

At least the page mentions alternatives - plenty of other sources of protein, like dairy, eggs, legumes, etc.

lopis 10mo ago

The moment I saw whole milk and a huge steak in the intro, I knew this website was not to be trusted.

cies 10mo ago
Milk is very unhealthy, in any quantity. 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).
- rjdj377dhabsn 10mo ago
  What is your criteria for "very unhealthy" and do you have any evidence to back up that claim?
- mythrwy 10mo ago
  If milk if unhealthy in any quantity how did we all survive infancy?
  - cies 10mo ago
    Unhealthy for adults. Good point :)
- crat3r 10mo ago
  So what then do you believe is a healthy diet? Surely eating animal protein on a regular basis is better than having to take a variety of unregulated supplements to stay within a healthy range of essential vitamins and minerals? Animal protein also has the upside of offering a tremendous amount of, well, protein, alongside the necessary vitamins. Dairy (in certain forms) offers the same benefits.
  - angiolillo 10mo ago
    > Surely eating animal protein on a regular basis is better than having to take a variety of unregulated supplements to stay within a healthy range of essential vitamins and minerals? 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.)

al_borland 10mo ago

Processed food and sugar consumption has also gone up. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8805510/ 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.

gwbas1c 10mo ago

My wife is vegetarian, mostly vegan because she's allergic to dairy. 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.)