Comment by parliament32
3 days ago
> 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?
> 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.
Beef, not meat. Surely you jest and you know that that's a huge amount and you're on some high-calorie gym diet?
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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).
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.
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.
You don't think studies control for this?
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Don’t drink water, if you drink too much, it’ll kill you!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your diet is your own business of course, but a burger for breakfast is… unusual, right?
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 :)
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.
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ground beef can be more things than a burger.
every breakfast joint near me in California has some sort of variation on hamburg steak & eggs. Judging by the fact that it's on every menu, it must be popular to some degree.
> ground beef can be more things than a burger.
I was thinking more as a unit of measurement, but yeah, sorry that was poorly written on my part, sorry.
> every breakfast joint near me in California has some sort of variation on hamburg steak & eggs. Judging by the fact that it's on every menu, it must be popular to some degree.
Sure. The diners near me have that kind of stuff too, just, if I went to a diner every morning my heart would probably revolt after about a month.
People go to "breakfast joints" for a weekend treat, not an everyday meal.
A burger is close to a sausage McMuffin which I'm sure some percentage eat for brekky every day.
I haven't had any meat in about 20 years. But I also don't live in the US.
That's 4 ounces of beef, not meat. I eat plenty of meat, but eat beef less than once a week.
Are you really eating nearly half a pound of beef for breakfast every morning? I have, like, some toast and cheese.
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.
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.
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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.