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Comment by comte7092 | Hacker News Reader

For the average person living in a high income country, protein needs are easily met to begin with.

People end up conflating advice from fitness culture with general health, which while overlapping isn’t the same. If you want to be super jacked then sure, eat a lot of protein, but if you just want to enjoy your life without major health issues there are bigger fish to fry so to speak.

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I have no idea what your point is. The article is about insufficient iron and zinc from plant-based meat substitutes, not insufficient protein.

Felt like making the point.

How long do you want to live and how robust do you want to be as you age? Something like 50% of people have sarcopenia by the time they're 80. Seems likely eating more high-quality protein and doing resistence training could be a good way to increase life-and-health-span, avoiding that fate.

How many of those people are just plain sedantary?

“High-quality” is an extremely vague notion, and there is a huge gap between the average persons habits and the health/fitness world’s “ideal”.

People will point to an extremely low average and then use that as evidence of an extremely narrow ideal, when there is a fairly large amount of range in between that may or may not be just fine.

Resistance training is good. Eating below the minimum standard of protein is good. Does the average person need to be eating 1g/lb of body weight? No.

I understand the term to mean

- dense protein vs calories

- adequate quantities of all consituient amino acids

- easily digestable

So e.g. beef is a higher quality protein than beans, by that metric.

It's hard to know the ideal amount of protein for sure w/o e.g. life-long RCTs (and even then, that answer will only be for whatever context those studies are done in), and to be sure there are people to advocate for low-protein diets as well as for high-protein.

Personally, I'm placing my bets on high-protein.

I've tried everything from vegan to vegetarian to (now) meat-based diets, and I feel by far the healthiest and strongest on a meat based diet. (And it's my most recent diet, so I have the disadvantage of aging going along w/ it.)

Given the lack of consensus around dietary topics, I'd advise all people to keep an open mind and do some indivdual experimentation.

(I take it as an axiom that feeling good, strong, healthy in the moment is a good predictor of health over the long term, thus making personal experimentation a valid approach. Of course that could in theory be not true, but it seems very unlikely to me.)

> I take it as an axiom that feeling good, strong, healthy in the moment is a good predictor of health over the long term, thus making personal experimentation a valid approach. Of course that could in theory be not true, but it seems very unlikely to me.

There are many example of things that make you feel good in the short term, but not in the long term. It's not a wild "theory", it's a pattern we see all over the place. I'm not sure why that would seem unlikely to you.

I feel better in the moment while eating a dozen cookies. I feel worse later.

I feel better for a few hours when I take an opioid or other drugs, but long term it's not going to be for the better.

I'll feel better for a few days if I skip my workout today, I wont feel sore and beat up. After a week or two, old aches and pains will return, and over the long run not exercising will cause me more and more problems.

Billions of people overeat and have an unhealthy body weight which causes them problems. They do it because overeating feels good in the moment.

Is it really that unthinkable that eating a lot of red meat can make a person feel good but increase their risk of cardiovascular disease long term? We may not agree whether or not this is true, but can we at least agree that if it is true, it follows the exact same pattern as many other things in life?

Those are all short-term phenomenons, though, providing rapid feedback in both feeling worse and having worse performance.

I mean, sure, it's possible that eating food which makes you feel good (over weeks and months, not just for 1 hour and then w/ a hangover) is actually unhealthy, but it seems unlikely, especially if you're eating traditional foods which your body should have incorporated knowledge of through evolution.

“High-quality” is an extremely vague notion

I'm glad you said that. This notion of "high quality" just refers to the essential amino acids it contains. There is no intrinsic quality to a particular protein source, they are broken down into single amino acids or very small (tripeptide or less) in digestion, anyway. Anyone can get all essential amino acids necessary for their body's protein synthesis from a mix of plant sources, too, it just requires a little planning.

Most people should look more at metabolic disorders as a factor in middle age or later sedentary lifestyles, and maybe even secondary vascular disorders' role in health and muscle density in later life. Being active when you are young is great, but their are many other factors in later life health. There is good evidence that veganism is associated with improved average longevity (among other good outcomes). I don't care who eats meat - I do - but it's better to do it with eyes open, and not for faulty reasons.

Bringing it back to the article though, some of the plant based products being brought to market give me pause because of how processed they are. The salt, sugar, and fat levels are getting high and you lose the benefits of less processed vegetables.

Protein (specially the aminoacid methionine) is actually known to shorten lifespan in mammals. It does this by decreasing the level of FGF-21 in the body. Advices to maximize lifespan should mention restricting dietary protein.

Interesting, I have never heard that one before. Would you mind sharing a source?

You know all those studies on caloric restriction that show life extension benefits? Looks like their benefits are mediated by FGF21 increase resulted by protein reduction [1].

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29499-8

More than 50% of people are dead before 80. Seems like a strange age to choose for this measure.

About half of americans are already overweight and falling apart by the time their 40 -- I'm aiming higher!

You should be exercising, which raises your protein requirements. Sure, for sedentary people the requirements are low. But being sedentary is not ideal for health

I do exercise, and that doesn’t raise your protein requirements as much as one would think. It’s only relevant if you’re looking to be a competitive athlete, which I am not.

Those are two wildly different things to compare. Among all degrees of doing something usefully physical, exercising at all would be at the bottom of the ladder, and competitive athlete would be at the top. But you don't need to want to compete to want to get stronger, improve your form, improve your mobility, looks, lose weight etc.. and a greater protein intake would likely be helpful with all of it. It's still good to exercise anyway, obviously, but diet is considered a massive component in getting results of any kind for a reason.

My point consistently been that protein needs are overestimated, not that there isn’t any benefit to greater protein consumption.

Will eating more protein help you build more muscle? The answer to that for the average person is almost certainly yes. Do you need to eat the “optimal” amount to build muscle? Certainly not.

Like everything else, protein consumption has to be weighed against the trade offs.

My point consistently been that protein needs are overestimated

Peter Attia disagrees:

"The more I research this topic, the more I find that the RDA (recommended daily allowance) of 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight is simply not sufficient"

https://peterattiamd.com/category/nutritional-biochemistry/p...

The RDA is very rarely discussed anywhere online that I’ve seen, if at all.

While it is an official statistic, it isn’t representative of the average person’s idea of protein needs.

I find that with relatively low protein intake, simply because the tradeoff for me is money and desire, I'm definitely able to build muscle, but I also feel like it just goes away in other areas, and likely would be easier to work on multiple major muscle groups with a greater intake.

It really feels like you’re talking past GP. GP does not appear to be saying that most people need to eat enormous amounts of protein in the pursuit of peak physique and performance. Simply that, for most people who aren’t already focused on high protein intake, increasing the share of protein relative to other macronutrients will likely correlate strongly with increased strength, athleticism, longevity, and looks. There’s no call to take this to extremes that I’ve seen.

Which seems to be mostly true from my research.

Not giving your muscle the proper amount of protein is just wasting your exercise effort. Why spend hours exercising, but cut your benefits?

That's not true, since you want muscle mass even for health reasons. The requirement for increasing muscle mass when doing weight training is at least 1.6 g/kg of bodyweight or thereabouts, which is a huge amount of protein

for example, I'm 93kg, which sets my dietary protein to 150g or thereabouts I need 2700 calories a day for maintenance

that means even if I do nothing but drink full fat milk, I will have gained only 135g of protein from my calories, which isn't enough to optimize for muscle recovery after training

this is why I slip a few grams of protein powder into my morning coffee, avoid eating foods high in carbs and fats, just to approach that number (I may not hit it exactly every day)

> protein needs are easily met to begin with

that's not the topic of the article you're commenting on

Late in life you are gonna wish you built up a little more muscle mass by then.

I do actively build muscle, the thing is that you don’t have to be “optimal” to do so.

You can build plenty of muscle if you eat significantly below the recommended 1g/lb that fitness influencers talk about, it just won’t be as much as you could have otherwise.

That’s a fine trade for me, I’m not planning to compete in any bodybuilding shows and I have other things I’d rather focus on in life.

While I am certain that influencers are saying 1g/lb, I just want to clarify that it is around 1.4-1.6g/kg. It takes significantly less protein to build muscle and have an atheltic physique than some are trying to prescribe, which is a shame because it is overconsumption like anything else we do and as a vegetarian I previously struggled with the idea knowing full well I couldn't hit 190 g of protein unless I was chugging shakes all day

The irony is that even non vegetarians will chug shakes all day to get “enough” protein.

That is really terrible, ignorant advice. There are significant health benefits from maintaining a fairly high protein intake, even for regular people that aren't elite athletes. That especially applies to older people because protein digestion becomes less effective with age and they are at high risk of sarcopenia.

https://peterattiamd.com/donlayman/

Let’s be clear then:

Absolute minimum requirement for a sedentary person: .8 g/kg of body weight (not recommended).

Optimum for muscle building: 2.2 g/kg

What I’m talking about: 1.1g/kg and up is probably fine.

What about this do you take issue with? “High” and “low” are extremely vague.

Edit: erroneously wrote .36 g/kg, when it should have been .8. .36 is g/lb

Listen to the interview that I linked above. It's long but seriously worth the time. I can't boil down Don Layman's research to a short comment without losing essential information.

90%+ of people ought to be building lean muscle even if they don't care about sports or aesthetics. This is essential for having a healthy endocrine system and stabilizing joints in order to prevent injuries.

https://www.gabriellereece.com/muscle-as-the-cornerstone-of-...

The takeaway from the article is that one must not just look at the numbers on the package but also consider bioavailability.

The actual conclusions from the article are primarily about zinc and iron, not protein.

I aim for 1.5g/kg and don’t eat meat most days. I need to actively plan to meet that protein intake. I don’t use meat substitutes if I can help it, but they do make it significantly easier to get protein.

Getting enough protein to meet the needs to sustain exercise is pretty awkward without substitutes in our sedentary lives.

It'd have probably been easier to manage when we didn't have to put hours of intense exercise in bursts to compensate for working in offices and stores, and instead did physical labor.

Eating lots of legumes and groats to fulfill protein needs is more viable if the calories are needed for your daily labor, then the starches are an upside.

Tofu fortunately makes things easier, but it's not always readily available in many places where its consumption wasn't a cultural practice already.

Still, you've got to pay attention to eating some protein in every meal, and if you're in the West and similar (Latin America will have many of the same patterns, but I'll always find it weird it's not considered "Western" culturally despite being an offshoot of Spain), you may have to deviate plenty from the diet of your culture.

I eat 3,000-4,000 calories/day (I’m reasonably lean at 105kg body weight). Eating that many legumes just leads to bloating in my experience, which makes getting enough protein entirely from that source tricky. I’ve done it, but I found it impacted sleep quality.

I’ve found a liter of chocolate milk after training to be the best low-cost solution to topping off protein. My gym-bro understanding of metabolism justifies this as a way to replenish glycogen post-workout.

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