How Protein Took over the World

6 hours ago (ft.com)

https://archive.is/CbkfI

It's funny that protein everything is taking off just as more data seems to come out that you really don't need as much protein as previously thought, even for vigorous weightlifting (~0.82g/lb of lean body mass seems to be a sufficient number), which isn't really all that hard to get from regular old high protein food. There's no good reason to infuse it in everything. I've been lifting for many years now, and have not noticed a difference from when I used to follow the old 1g/lb of body weight rule.

source: https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...

  • 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.

  • 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/

  • 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.).

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

The next wave will be "fiber-maxxing", with the increased rate of colon cancer in millenials and gen z. Seriously guys, get your fiber intake.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • Taste is very individual. I personally can't stand the taste of dry beans, to the point where I have a strong aversion just to the texture itself. Fresh green beans can be fine (usually has a sweet or acidic taste), and beans used in Asian food like glass noodles or soy source don't taste like beans at all to me.

      When people talk about eating more beans, or when people talk about using it as an ingredient, it usually only mean dry beans.

  • 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?

    • Low fiber intake is very heavily correlated with an increase in all cause mortality.

      Every 10g per day is correlated with a 10% reduction in all cause mortality (up to 30g). Mostly from a reduction in cardiac and cancer deaths.

    • There’s an enormous amount of data on this topic. So much I’ll just tell you to do a web search rather than pointing to some papers in is response: it’s just so pervasive and going back for decades.

      Use a conventional search not an ai-generated summary as that will have influencer slop mixed in. Though oddly, I’ve never seen an anti-fibre influencer, but have seen lots of pro-fibre influencer posts!

      2 replies →

  • 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?

    • If you don't eat legumes or whole grain bread it's not hard to be fiber deficient.

  • 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 "fiber" is chemically modified resistant starch

      the FDA allows it to be called fiber, but it acts differently in the body to the soluble and insoluble fiber that most people are familiar with

      IMO, it's a mistake to treat fiber as a single, fungible food component, rather than as a family of different substances with different health effects

      if you're looking for "easy fiber intake", there is much more and stronger evidence for psyllium-based soluble fiber, widely available in cheap and convenient drinks like metamucil (I prefer formulations without the dye and maltodextrin, but that's getting into the weeds)

      2 replies →

  • 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.

    • Not the farmers; the producers, distributors, and everything on the way to the consumer. Research labs and marketing agencies construct fads and push it through their magazines and media IP.

I'd argue it was when biochemical reactions started building self replicating micro-organisms out of it, but a health craze is fine too I guess.

The actual content of the article is about the great increase in the price of whey protein concentrate since last summer, until now, apparently due to greatly increased demand for it.

Where I live, in the European Union, the price of whey protein concentrate had doubled around the beginning of 2026 and now it has reached even a triple price in comparison with a year earlier.

For a few years in the past, before the price increase, whey protein concentrate had been cheaper than the cheapest meat, per its content of protein. Now it has become about 50% more expensive than chicken breast, per protein content.

This is annoying for me, because where I live there were only 2 ways for achieving a diet satisfying simultaneously 3 criteria without including meat: sufficient daily protein intake, not exceeding the calories threshold that would cause rapid gain of weight and price not greater than an equivalent diet with meat (there are a lot of plant protein concentrates, but all are many times more expensive than cheap meat, at least here).

One way is to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, which is an activity that wastes too much time and too much water, the other way was to use whey protein concentrate as an ingredient for various dishes made from vegetables, to increase their protein content.

At the current price, the use of whey protein concentrate is no longer attractive, despite the fact that whey protein is the ideal source of protein, with optimum amino-acid composition and perfect digestibility.

The FT article believes that this sudden increase in the demand for whey protein concentrate was caused by the widespread use of drugs like Ozempic for weight loss, which also causes loss of muscular mass, leading to the use of protein supplements to prevent it, and also to the new US dietary guidelines, which recommend an increased consumption of protein (the old US recommendations for daily protein intake were notorious as much too low, i.e. they were at a level that prevents death, without ensuring good health, but the new recommendations might have jumped on the other side of an optimum intake).

The only possible positive consequence of this huge price increase is that it might convince some people to invest in the production of whey protein concentrate from cultures of genetically-modified fungi, instead of from cow milk. There already exists a strain of the fungus Trichoderma, whose genome was modified to secrete cow whey protein, instead of an enzyme secreted by the wild fungi.

Unlike with "lab-grown meat", there is no doubt that it will be possible to produce protein powders of whey protein or of egg-white protein in a cheaper way from fungal cultures than from milk or eggs.

  • 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)

    • It is likely that in the near future I will return to eating a moderate amount of chicken meat, after I will finish my reserves of whey protein concentrate, which were bought a long time ago, when it was cheap.

      Most plant protein concentrates are not an acceptable substitute for meat, because their very high prices make obvious that their production is less efficient than that of meat, i.e. it requires a lot of extra energy and chemical reagents.

      More than half of my protein intake comes from plant sources like lentils and wheat, but I cannot raise that percentage to 100%, because I gain weight immediately.

      Fortunately, I do not have any problem with gluten, so I can enjoy bread that I bake at home, which is tasty and which has a negligible cost per protein content.

I’ve definitely noticed this in my diet. I am a gym rat so I eat a lot of protein, but I’ve seen an uptick in other protein focused snacks and foods around. At my office the protein shakes in the fridge disappear pretty quick compared to the soda, perhaps due to folks who want to get more protein easily more than other gym rats

> setting a daily target of 1.2–1.6 grammes per kilogramme of body weight, 50-100 per cent above the longstanding recommended dietary allowance of 0.8g

This is a good range for improving for maintaining your body composition; preserving or building muscle. Fitness coaches are recommending 2.2g/lb (1g per lb) or even more which doesn't have much scientific backing. 1.6g/kg seems to be the max that will benefit muscle gain.

On the other hand, there are some (Valter Longo, biologist at UCLA) who say that such high protein will reduce your overall longevity. He recommends 0.36g protein per lb body weight.

I don't know what to do with this info. Personally, I stay around 1.2g protein/lb (and exercise) as a middle ground.

I had been seeing the protein marketing push and largely ignored it, until I went to go buy some protein powder and it was triple the price of what I expected/remembered. I went to look at that time and found this as the answer.

I'm annoyed by it, but like every other food fad, I assume it will be temporary... unless GLP-1s make it a mainstay. I also wonder if we'll see prices return to normal if demand goes down, or if this is the new normal and companies will just pocket the margin.

100% due to marketing, influencers, and people wanting to make money.

I remember reading an article from a couple that were professional body builders. It was pretty insightful. I also will not forget that they said they never once drank protein shakes. All of their protein came from their diets, such as eating turkey and other foods.

Also, most people don’t work out hard enough to need a protein shake. It’s usually just extra calories and ultimately turning into fat.

If I go to the store, I can buy extra protein milk, it is the most absurd product. Its like taking vitamin pill supplement tier marketing

Genuinely, we were all deficient for so long

Look at our fucking food! We have smooth brained governance in food, why do we still have real sugar in candy when we can (AND DO) use fake sugar.

We of course fucked up protein intake, this is a CORRECTION towards healthier food as it always should have fucking been

We literally have 1/8 of the US population, and possibly hundreds of millions of people globally, on fucking peptides to protect themselves from the insane food we don’t want to regulate

Except in China where it's very hard to find protien supplements or lean meat. I visited two years ago and really struggled.

I mean this is not a bad thing, I personally feel more sated eating protein-enriched food and am less likely to snack excessively.