source: https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...
In 2026, you can't get a straight answer to this question, because anything protein related is SEO-optimized blogspam (thanks Google).
Whether that’s the right approach or not is debatable. It’s certainly easier to target 1g/lb of total body mass than .82g/lb of lean body mass. (But certainly it’s easier to eat enough protein to hit .82g/lb lean body mass.)
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 yeah people who say that protein is easy to get assume that you're eating meat with every meal
on a vegetarian diet you get it from random sources, bread has a little, cheese has a little, it all adds up to the point where you're basically fine especially if you try to include a main protein/meat replacement in every meal (tofu, seitan, chickpeas) but I'm just not a big person and the amount of food I'd need to eat to reach the optimal grams/lb would be too much without supplementation
The recommended minimum is 1.2 g/kg (0.55g/lb)
I'm curious how, historically, people have fared, as meat has not been as available as it is now (though this has probably varied considerably over time)
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.
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.
I would not want to do that but there’s no practical upper limit on how much protein a healthy person can digest.
Getting your rubber from whole food products is definitely the way to go.
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.
When people talk about eating more beans, or when people talk about using it as an ingredient, it usually only mean dry beans.
Some humans have methanogens in their gut and these people exhale methane (gut->bloodstream->lungs) and they can emit quite a lot, at least enough to completely fuck up our lab work. Our lead scientist is such a person, and the effect is so bad that he exhales into a bin liner when setting up an experiment.
Or he did: this was so inconvenient that we automated all our instruments, valves, etc so we could run experiments from the kitchen or even at home (lots of RPis which I wouldn’t normally use for anything important). Fortunately this also automated all the data collection.
But now I have to run a trial to see if my diet modulates anal CH4 emissions. Thanks HN!
Cow “farts” (actually rumen belches) are something else entirely.
Just something I randomly found in a search.
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.
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!
FWIW, the evidence demonstrating that fibre is protective against colon cancer is limited, and when studies try to adjust for behavioural differences, the colon cancer reduction disappears.
Actual RCTs that randomly assigned subjects found no difference in polyp rates between high and low fibre diets.
For decades it was indeed widely observed that the people who ate a lot of fibre tended to have a lower incident rate. But the sort of person who has a high fibre diet almost always has a lot of other protective habits and norms: They're less likely to smoke, less likely to drink to excess, they tend to eat less red meat, they eat less sugar and UPFs, and so on.
As is often the case, these habits don't tend to happen in isolation, and this is where observational studies fail. So if you take someone with a lot of bad habits and supplement fibre, they'll have better cholesterol control, glycemic benefits, and of course regularity benefits, but it won't measurably move the needle on colon cancer rates.
This is all just conversational, but the current consensus is that fibre, or lack thereof, is not a contributor behind the rise in colon cancer among younger subjects. There are many suspected causes, all moving the needle enough that incidence rates jump.
As far as I know the only RCT that fits that description is one looking at people who had already developed adenomas and then tested for reoccurrence.
An RCT actually designed to answer the question would need to last decades and just isn’t feasible.
There are a large multitude of studies that show a negative correlation between CRC and fiber intake even when adjusting for diet, exercise, BMI, income, alcohol consumption etc…
> but the current consensus is that fibre, or lack thereof, is not a contributor behind the rise in colon cancer among younger subjects.
There’s not good evidence to say it’s the sole or primary factor, but saying there’s consensus that is not a contributor is way too strong.
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?
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)
So basically toss a shovel of potato starch into your protein shake and be done with it. It's flavored so strongly to make whey protein palatable that you won't even notice.
Stop substituting and finding short cuts. Just eat a balanced meal with vegetables.
I wouldn't sweat it - just focus on eating unprocessed food fiber or not
A single bowl of oatmeal with chia seeds gets you about halfway there. 2-3 tbsp of chia seeds has ~10-15g of fiber, mostly soluble fiber. Soluble is what you want for lowering cholesterol because it binds to bile acid, which means your liver has to use cholesterol from your body to make more bile. The oatmeal adds another ~4-5g and is largely soluble too.
After that you don't have far to go. Besides lentils and many beans, whole grains are really fiber dense, e.g., having wheat bread on a sandwich can get you another +6 just from the bread. Brown rice instead of white gets you 3-4 more. Weird grains like barley and bulgur have a bunch and go well in things like casseroles, chilis, etc. You'll also get at least some from whatever fruits/veggies you were going to eat anyway.
It is a lot compared to what most people take, but it’s not hard. Banana, orange, some broccoli, and you are close. Lentils, beans (lupini is great because it also has protein) here and there, oats, an extra fruit (pear is nice), berries, avocado, so many options.
But you need to be conscious. Most people need less starch and sugar and fat.
I poop 2-4 times a day. I know some people have a real problem going to the bathroom once a day… just eat more fiber folks.
presumably is what you allude to?
Not true? It becomes fat if you are above your caloric intake.
Fiber on the other is just undigestible, so you always expel it, though I agree that too much fiber will cause issues.
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.
If you're feeling good, looking healthy and your body does what you need it to then I'd have to agree that whatever you're doing is working for you, numbers or theory be damned.
I know people are big on the whole fiber fad, but the bulk of benefits which come from eating more fiber are from eating fewer calories. If you're eating high fiber you physically cannot shovel as many calories into your belly. It is a viable strategy since most americans eat way too much every day, but fiber simply isn't essential to health or weight loss. If you like, explain to me a theory on why fiber is somehow essential.
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.
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.
Whey got to be the most expensive, especially isolate.
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.
It mixes better, tastes more neutral, and generally has more leucine than those other options, which is important for signalling muscle synthesis
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.
https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/document/download/413a6600-...
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)
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.
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/209-front-burner/epis...
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.
Did you mean 2.2g/kg?
In a study of 236 edible species, protein content of dry matter ranged from 6% to 77%. [1]
And a study of a particular grasshopper found it had higher protein content than lamb, beef, pork, chicken, turkey and fish [2].
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Nutritional+....
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00217-019-03383-0
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.
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
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.