4 ms·

> defined as those who, based on a recommended daily 2,200 calorie-diet, eat more than four ounces... daily. This sounds like.. not very much. I eat 6-7oz of g

> defined as those who, based on a recommended daily 2,200 calorie-diet, eat more than four ounces... daily. 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?

ronjakoi 10mo ago
I haven't had any meat in about 20 years. But I also don't live in the US.
SecondHandTofu 10mo ago
Beef, not meat. Surely you jest and you know that that's a huge amount and you're on some high-calorie gym diet?
- zmgsabst 10mo ago
  6oz of beef is only 44g of protein; a moderate gym load would require more for many adult men. Typical might be more like 75-100g. (Recommendations I’ve heard is 2g per 1 kg of muscle mass; roughly 40% of your weight at moderate fitness.) 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.
  - stinos 10mo ago
    6oz of beef is only 44g of protein It's their breakfast. Chances are rather small they don't get any protein intake for the rest of the day.
  - smaudet 10mo ago
    > That’s not to say anybody is wrong 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.
  - XorNot 10mo ago
    Due to digestion protein is also much lighter on calories then the baseline would suggest (15% less then the measured value can be typical) - dependent highly on preparation of course (I.e. the typical American steak prep of "first I'm adding half a stick of butter..." kind of ruins the benefit).
  - glenstein 10mo ago
    >ie, we may legitimately have different needs. 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.
ianferrel 10mo ago
That's 4 ounces of beef, not meat. I eat plenty of meat, but eat beef less than once a week.
patja 10mo ago
Habits vary (vegans exist!) And I agree 4 oz is a pretty small portion. But I don't think I personally know very many people who eat beef daily. For me and my family it is once or twice a week.
- bombcar 10mo ago
  I know or knew (and at a time was one) who would eat a hamburger for lunch every day, day-in, day-out. If you expand from that, it could easily be daily.
- bregma 10mo ago
  4 oz (a quarter pound) is 100 g or an amount about the size of the palm of your hand -- a single serving. It's not a small portion, it's recommended standard portion. 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.
tasty_freeze 10mo ago
> Are people really eating less than ~1/2 cup of meat over all their meals combined? 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.
bee_rider 10mo ago
Your diet is your own business of course, but a burger for breakfast is… unusual, right?
- parliament32 10mo ago
  Not a burger: ground beef and eggs scrambled, with potatoes and whatever fruit-of-the-week on the side. Yes it's a post-gym meal :)
  - bruce511 10mo ago
    I'm not sure "gym goer" defines the "average American " :). So I think you can consider your regular breakfast to be an outlier with regard to beef consumption.
    - HPsquared 10mo ago
      Outliers are more likely to post their experiences, and those unusual experiences are then also more likely to be shared. It can make for a skewed perception of the world if someone consumes a lot of media (or other secondhand information) and allows it to shape their worldview.
      - glenstein 10mo ago
        And to your point, I think the psychology of someone in the comment section is to react to broad statements like they are Sudoku puzzle where you can "solve" by finding an exception to a broad statement, however rare the exception.
    - davidmurdoch 10mo ago
      The administration putting out the "eat more meat" guidance is simultaneously telling everyone they need to work out. The recommendation seems consistent when their started goal is to change current "American" habits.
- serf 10mo ago
idiotsecant 10mo ago
There is a substantial body of evidence that much red meat is wildly not good for you, especially when you consume it as consistently as you're saying you do.
- dpark 10mo ago
  There’s a substantial body of evidence that consuming the average American diet while also being mostly sedentary is terrible for you. I’m unclear how much of the data gathered about red meat specifically can be meaningfully decoupled from all the confounding factors, though. 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.
  - diddid 10mo ago
    Don’t drink water, if you drink too much, it’ll kill you!
  - idiotsecant 10mo ago
    You don't think studies control for this?
    - dpark 10mo ago
      I believe that they try to, but I have serious doubts about how effective it is. Dietary science is littered with examples of incorrect guidance driven by data we misinterpreted. Remember when a generation of people were told to eat low fat and they all got fatter? Remember trans fats replacing saturated? Remember when we told everyone that drinking alcohol in moderation was healthier than not drinking at all? 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.
epolanski 10mo ago
Sometimes I wonder how is it possible that cattle alone severely outweighs all livestock on the planet, and by a very huge margin (like 10 to 1), then I read about such dietary habits. 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.
edoceo 10mo ago
Wow! That's feels like a lot to me. I take 7 days to consume 450g (~1 US lb) of pork. I eat maybe 120g of beef in a month.
lambda 10mo ago
I eat meat (beef, pork, poultry, and fish) maybe three or four meals a week, and probably about 6 to 8 oz per meal when I eat it. So on a per day basis, yeah, I probably eat about 3-4 ounces of meat per day. 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.
wat10000 10mo ago
Are you really eating nearly half a pound of beef for breakfast every morning? I have, like, some toast and cheese.
- parliament32 10mo ago
  So you have effectively zero protein with breakfast, are you eating four chicken breasts for dinner or something? Or are you protein-deficient.. if so, it seems the guidance in OP is meant to correct people like you.
  - wat10000 10mo ago
    Doesn’t cheese have protein? 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.
    - parliament32 10mo ago
      I only mentioned it because I really struggled with hitting protein targets unless I made sure I had a good portion of meat with every meal. 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 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 https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/171477/nutrients
      - wat10000 10mo ago

ronjakoi 10mo ago

I haven't had any meat in about 20 years. But I also don't live in the US.

SecondHandTofu 10mo ago

Beef, not meat. Surely you jest and you know that that's a huge amount and you're on some high-calorie gym diet?

zmgsabst 10mo ago
6oz of beef is only 44g of protein; a moderate gym load would require more for many adult men. Typical might be more like 75-100g. (Recommendations I’ve heard is 2g per 1 kg of muscle mass; roughly 40% of your weight at moderate fitness.) 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.
- stinos 10mo ago
  6oz of beef is only 44g of protein It's their breakfast. Chances are rather small they don't get any protein intake for the rest of the day.
- smaudet 10mo ago
  > That’s not to say anybody is wrong 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.
- XorNot 10mo ago
  Due to digestion protein is also much lighter on calories then the baseline would suggest (15% less then the measured value can be typical) - dependent highly on preparation of course (I.e. the typical American steak prep of "first I'm adding half a stick of butter..." kind of ruins the benefit).
- glenstein 10mo ago
  >ie, we may legitimately have different needs. 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.

ianferrel 10mo ago

That's 4 ounces of beef, not meat. I eat plenty of meat, but eat beef less than once a week.

patja 10mo ago

Habits vary (vegans exist!) And I agree 4 oz is a pretty small portion. But I don't think I personally know very many people who eat beef daily. For me and my family it is once or twice a week.

bombcar 10mo ago
I know or knew (and at a time was one) who would eat a hamburger for lunch every day, day-in, day-out. If you expand from that, it could easily be daily.
bregma 10mo ago
4 oz (a quarter pound) is 100 g or an amount about the size of the palm of your hand -- a single serving. It's not a small portion, it's recommended standard portion. 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.

tasty_freeze 10mo ago

> Are people really eating less than ~1/2 cup of meat over all their meals combined? 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.

bee_rider 10mo ago

Your diet is your own business of course, but a burger for breakfast is… unusual, right?

parliament32 10mo ago
Not a burger: ground beef and eggs scrambled, with potatoes and whatever fruit-of-the-week on the side. Yes it's a post-gym meal :)
- bruce511 10mo ago
  I'm not sure "gym goer" defines the "average American " :). So I think you can consider your regular breakfast to be an outlier with regard to beef consumption.
  - HPsquared 10mo ago
    Outliers are more likely to post their experiences, and those unusual experiences are then also more likely to be shared. It can make for a skewed perception of the world if someone consumes a lot of media (or other secondhand information) and allows it to shape their worldview.
    - glenstein 10mo ago
      And to your point, I think the psychology of someone in the comment section is to react to broad statements like they are Sudoku puzzle where you can "solve" by finding an exception to a broad statement, however rare the exception.
  - davidmurdoch 10mo ago
    The administration putting out the "eat more meat" guidance is simultaneously telling everyone they need to work out. The recommendation seems consistent when their started goal is to change current "American" habits.
serf 10mo ago

idiotsecant 10mo ago

There is a substantial body of evidence that much red meat is wildly not good for you, especially when you consume it as consistently as you're saying you do.

dpark 10mo ago
There’s a substantial body of evidence that consuming the average American diet while also being mostly sedentary is terrible for you. I’m unclear how much of the data gathered about red meat specifically can be meaningfully decoupled from all the confounding factors, though. 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.
- diddid 10mo ago
  Don’t drink water, if you drink too much, it’ll kill you!
- idiotsecant 10mo ago
  You don't think studies control for this?
  - dpark 10mo ago
    I believe that they try to, but I have serious doubts about how effective it is. Dietary science is littered with examples of incorrect guidance driven by data we misinterpreted. Remember when a generation of people were told to eat low fat and they all got fatter? Remember trans fats replacing saturated? Remember when we told everyone that drinking alcohol in moderation was healthier than not drinking at all? 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.

epolanski 10mo ago

Sometimes I wonder how is it possible that cattle alone severely outweighs all livestock on the planet, and by a very huge margin (like 10 to 1), then I read about such dietary habits. 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.

edoceo 10mo ago

Wow! That's feels like a lot to me. I take 7 days to consume 450g (~1 US lb) of pork. I eat maybe 120g of beef in a month.

lambda 10mo ago

I eat meat (beef, pork, poultry, and fish) maybe three or four meals a week, and probably about 6 to 8 oz per meal when I eat it. So on a per day basis, yeah, I probably eat about 3-4 ounces of meat per day. 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.

wat10000 10mo ago

Are you really eating nearly half a pound of beef for breakfast every morning? I have, like, some toast and cheese.

parliament32 10mo ago
So you have effectively zero protein with breakfast, are you eating four chicken breasts for dinner or something? Or are you protein-deficient.. if so, it seems the guidance in OP is meant to correct people like you.
- wat10000 10mo ago
  Doesn’t cheese have protein? 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.
  - parliament32 10mo ago
    I only mentioned it because I really struggled with hitting protein targets unless I made sure I had a good portion of meat with every meal. 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 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 https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/171477/nutrients
    - wat10000 10mo ago