Hacker News

There are massive efforts to sell more dairy/beef in general. The governments in the USA and other countries subsidize it at massive scales. Other proteins are just fine, but there’s no pea protein lobby. Well, certainly not at the same scale.

The economics for cheaper proteins are actually incredible, too. The incentives simply don’t exist in the right places to facilitate the right legislation and public awareness, though. Many of us grew up with “Got Milk?” and “Beef is What’s for Dinner”, not “Got Lentils?”. It really made a difference.

Most folks (at least in North America) get no where near the recommended level. It's silly to have protein infused junk food, but a shake or protein powder make it a lot easier to get to the right level than remembering to have 3 hard boiled eggs.

And somehow all the people I've met mentioning figures from papers (be it 1g, 1.4g or whatever) always seem to skip the "lean" part of "lean body mass" part, which is again a decent difference.

Isn't age also a factor?

What's "regular old high protein food"? Do you mean something like meat every meal? When I recorded my meals I found my protein intake to be quite low (I don't eat meat. I eat fish but not every day.).

All the people on GLP-1 drugs are told to make sure they get enough protein. My dad, who is on one of them, was saying his friend (also on one) was saying he felt it was like a cheat code for being able to eat pasta... so I think a lot of people are eating the same old stuff, but just feeling less guilty about it.

They still want to eat Doritos, and now they can buy the protein Doritos and act like they are following the doctor's orders, even though that's not in the spirit of what the doctor was saying. There are also a lot of products that change little to nothing, but still slap a "Protein" label on the front of the box.

We saw similar things with "low carb" versions of everything during the Atkin's craze. Before that we saw everything made into "low fat" in the 80s, which we're still suffering from. It's likely a big reason why we as a society have a need for weight loss drugs in the first place.

0.82g/lb is a lot of protein. That's basically what what bro science was saying for years (2g per kg) and it's not easy to hit if you count quality protein that's bioavailable so I don't know what the point is here.

For averge Joe to hit 0.82g/lb he would need to eat 600g of lean beef every day. Or 33 eggs.

... also Menno Henselmans while he does a lot of great work that outweights everything he posts tons pseudo-scientific where's often clear he just did a basic Google Scholar search. Plus he seems too eaeger to "debunk" but often barely even understands deficiencies of many of the studies he references. A lot of people take his website for some holy grail of "scientific bodybuilding" because he's trying too hard to market it that way and he's been wrong many times and built arguments on foundations he barely understands.

Examine.com for example has different figures and it's a website where studies are reviewed by actual PHDs and graded by their strength not just simple Google Scholar search.

https://examine.com/guides/protein-intake/

Your priors on what normal amount of protein amounts to is way off of the general public, at least as of 5 years ago.

Wasn't that always bro science ? From what I remember when I looked into it most people couldn't digest more than approximately 1.7g of protein for every kg of body weight. At the very upper end. And that's just digestion - not even actual use - and it had to be spread out across the day.

I work in the grocery industry and can say fiber era is already here. It maybe hasn’t reached most consumers yet but food companies are making the products and trend forecasters called it years ago. It’s going to be a tsunami. And not necessarily a bad one bc it’s an easy sell. Lots of ppl really do need more fiber.

Not the worst trend, but especially comical since so much of food processing is about removing fiber to make foods faster to eat and less satiating.

That was last wave. Personally, I’m wary of products with added fiber, but always choose whole wheat or whole grain. If needed, you can supplement with psyllium.

Thankfully I think demand will have to grow a lot for legumes to rise in price much since legumes are basically a byproduct required for growing other more valuable crops.

It's great that beans look kind of gross because otherwise people would learn they taste really good and are healthy at the same time.

Are there studies showing the increased cancer rate is caused (or at least correlated with) reduced fiber intake? Or is this just a guess of yours?

In Germany they already started. There's protein XYZ everywhere, but I've recently seen ads for high fiber drinks.

I’m pretty puzzled honestly at how many people are fiber deficient.

I once did the calculation for my daily fiber intake and it was well beyond the daily recommended minimum.

What are people eating (or not eating) that leads to a fiber deficiency?

Of course. These things are cyclical. Some might remember the f plan diet or similar.

I know no one asked but if you're a gym bro and looking for easy fiber intake, get the carb balance tortillas from mission. 17g of fiber per tortilla.

That’s the difference between protein and fiber though. You can essentially spam the amount of protein you take in and the excess just gets expelled. The same is not true of fiber too much fiber has downsides.

Fiber is indigestible and not required for human health. It's also a cause of bloating, constipation and gas... because it's indigestible. Fiber does have the benefit of slowing sugar digestion, but you can and should just eat less sugar. Some forms of fiber can be converted to fatty acids by bacteria in your colon, while also producing other byproducts. You can get those fatty acids by eating more meat without the added stress on your digestive system.

Compare the human digestive system of a human being to a wolf (carnivore), a pig (omnivore) and a gorilla (herbivorous hindgut fermenter). The human gut by proportions sits somewhere between wolf and pig.

Look up the actual studies on fiber rather than pop science articles, and examine them critically. They'll do things like assume that pooping more often and having a greater volume of poop is healthier, with no basis. Things like how easy it is to poop or feelings of being bloated are harder to quantify, so they're typically ignored.

Or you get the extrapolating cancer risk based on some vaguely understood biomarker, which is one step below "in mice" as far as science goes.

I think there are two main philosophies at play. Either you give the gut bulk through eating fiber, or you eat foods to maintain a fast transit time. I lean toward the transit time approach by eating plenty of easy to digest simple carbs. Personally I've never felt better.

I think eating hard-to-digest, crappy proteins(like all the protein added to shakes, bars, etc)... paired with fermentable bulk fiber... is actually the recipe for inflammation, irritation and colon cancer.

Won't happen.

The main reason protein is highly sought after is that it's an ego/prestige thing associated with excessive self care.

Our diets are very heavily connected to our social status. Being able to consume that level of protein is all about excessive self care.

Fiber is cheap and viewed as a poor person thing. Nobody is holding up their expensive grass fed fiber to brag about the environmental toll it takes, like folks do with their meat and whatnot.

A lot of the protein fad can be traced back to dairy farmers pushing whey into every product they can.

I can’t read the article because of the paywall and thought that’s what it would be about.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but 1kg of whey protein on Amazon seems to cost around £20, which is roughly what I remember it costing back when I used to use it 7 or 8 years ago.

> where I live there were only 2 ways for achieving a diet satisfying simultaneously 3 criteria without including meat

If you want the same price or cheaper than meat, why not eat meat then?

I'm celiac, I cannot eat gluten and a GF diet can be up to 600% the price of a gluten diet - too bad for me (but not just because of the price)

Added above. Thanks!

Actually, I believe bugs have been tried and turn out less efficient than whatever we have now. I believe soy is cheapest.

> 2.2g/lb (1g per lb)

Did you mean 2.2g/kg?