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Comment by comte7092 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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