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.
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.
From what I've read, both are good sources of usable protein but animal protein is considered higher quality because it includes more essential micronutrients that are delivered more effectively through the digestion process. Basically it's what your body has evolved to process best. Protein drinks do give quick protein for recovery, etc.
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.
That’s because a lot of guidance and studies focus on total body mass and not lean.
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.)
You don't need to eat "high protein food" to get adequate protein.
Let's say an 80 kg moderately active man needs to eat 2600 kcal/day to maintain body weight. According to current guidelines, that man needs about 0.8g/kg of protein per day, or 64 grams per day.
White bread has about 2.6 grams of protein per 77 kcal.
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.).
Age is a factor and goals are a factor, the 1g/lb number is for optimal gains from bodybuilding not the minimum you need to just be alive or healthy
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
As I understand it you need more protein as you get older.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of the fiber they are putting in foods so they can call them high fiber don’t have the positive health benefits generally associated with fiber. e.g. I researched Benefiber years ago and the studies I found at the time indicated it had none of the benefits to heart health or colon health. But it dissolves basically into nothing while still technically being fiber.
Lots of people = almost all people in the USA, according to research I’ve seen. I’m not sure of exact numbers, but I recall it being somewhere close to 95% of people being deficient to some degree, with the majority of that group being quite deficient.
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.
Now I have to go to the lab and check (we have a ringdown sensor tuned to CH4/CO2/H2O precise into single digit ppb).
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!
The sensor she likely uses is only good in the hundreds of ppm. Fortunately the LFL for methane is roughly 50,000 ppm so there’s no need to give up smoking when a bout of methane-heavy flatulence occurs.
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 don't doubt it's healthy, perhaps via reducing insulin spikes. But the question is if it is the cause of the mysterious increase in colorectal cancer.
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!
> There’s an enormous amount of data on this topic.
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.
> Actual RCTs that randomly assigned subjects found no difference in polyp rates between high and low fibre diets.
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.
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)
> that "fiber" is chemically modified resistant starch
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.
That is a lot of food. Even if I’d eat just that, I’d have to very consciously force myself to eat one kilo of that, unless it’s something like watermelon.
I don't think it needs to be nearly that much food.
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.
I’ve mostly seen the 14g of fiber per 1000 calories recommendation.
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.
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.
Please expand on this. Cholesterol is a useful biomarker, but lower cholesterol could be worse. Cholesterol is used to repair the body. If your cholesterol is lower because you've inhibited your ability to produce it (malnutrition or by taking statins), that's bad. If your cholesterol is lower because your inflammation is lower and fewer repairs are needed, that's good. There are also two forms of LDL, one is harmless and the other is oxidized.
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 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.
But we do have endless studies showing not eating enough fiber increases your chance of having colon cancer, and we also know a lot of people today don't have nearly as much fiber as people did in the past.
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.
There are massive efforts to sell more dairy/beef in general. The governments in the USA and other countries subsidize it at massive scales. Other proteins are just fine, but there’s no pea protein lobby. Well, certainly not at the same scale.
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.
I'm OK with this. There have been a lot dumber "health" fads (low fat, low sodium, etc.) than focusing on more protein. Protein is also more satiating than carbohydrates so it can reduce calorie intake overall.
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.
That's because the raw material is only ~10% of the retail price. According to EU data, commodity prices for sweet whey powder in the EU are about 1.6 € per kg.
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.
Farming is not an open and free market. You cannot draw any conclusions about actual costs and impact from retail pricing. Subsidies distort cost massively.
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.
There's massive variation across insect species, relatively little research and no industrialisation on the scale of current farming. It's not useful to generalise all insects and all production techniques simply to "bugs are less efficient".
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].
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.
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
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.
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.
Is 30g of protein from a shake truly equivalent to 30g of protein from 100g of chicken breast?
In 2026, you can't get a straight answer to this question, because anything protein related is SEO-optimized blogspam (thanks Google).
From what I've read, both are good sources of usable protein but animal protein is considered higher quality because it includes more essential micronutrients that are delivered more effectively through the digestion process. Basically it's what your body has evolved to process best. Protein drinks do give quick protein for recovery, etc.
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.
That’s because a lot of guidance and studies focus on total body mass and not lean.
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.)
In the imperial vs metric conversation, the protein debate has my favorite use of units: 1 gram per pound.
It's very mnemonic though and typical of the units for the respective components in the US.
I laugh every time, but also, Americans know their weight in lbs but nutritional panels are in metric. It’s sensible nonsense.
>regular old high protein food
You don't need to eat "high protein food" to get adequate protein.
Let's say an 80 kg moderately active man needs to eat 2600 kcal/day to maintain body weight. According to current guidelines, that man needs about 0.8g/kg of protein per day, or 64 grams per day.
White bread has about 2.6 grams of protein per 77 kcal.
https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/174924/wt1
You have: 2600 kcal / (77 kcal / 2.6 grams)
You want: grams
* 87.792208
/ 0.011390533
That works out to about 88 grams of protein per day eating nothing except white bread.
It's difficult to not get enough protein unless you're eating too few calories overall.
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.).
Age is a factor and goals are a factor, the 1g/lb number is for optimal gains from bodybuilding not the minimum you need to just be alive or healthy
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)
As I understand it you need more protein as you get older.
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)
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.
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/
600g of lean beef is how much protein ?
about 150g
At 0.82g/lb and assuming 20% body-fat doesn’t that mean average joe is weighing almost 230lbs? That seems high
Henselmans‘ number is for total body mass, not lean.
Your priors on what normal amount of protein amounts to is way off of the general public, at least as of 5 years ago.
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.
This is definitely not true. You can live off almost entirely protein and digest it just fine.
I would not want to do that but there’s no practical upper limit on how much protein a healthy person can digest.
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.
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.
A lot of the fiber they are putting in foods so they can call them high fiber don’t have the positive health benefits generally associated with fiber. e.g. I researched Benefiber years ago and the studies I found at the time indicated it had none of the benefits to heart health or colon health. But it dissolves basically into nothing while still technically being fiber.
Lots of people = almost all people in the USA, according to research I’ve seen. I’m not sure of exact numbers, but I recall it being somewhere close to 95% of people being deficient to some degree, with the majority of that group being quite deficient.
Wild that people can't just cook and eat more vegetables.
Not the worst trend, but especially comical since so much of food processing is about removing fiber to make foods faster to eat and less satiating.
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.
Beans look gross?
Not dry but they don't exactly look appetizing when cooked and covered in bean juice if you don't already like them.
Most of the world disagrees and eats/enjoys tons of beans.
I think the problem with beans is not looking gross, it's that they cause you to contribute a lot of methane to climate warming (you fart a lot).
Now I have to go to the lab and check (we have a ringdown sensor tuned to CH4/CO2/H2O precise into single digit ppb).
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!
Let me know how it goes, I have a home sensor I'm married to for that (and she is very loud with alerts)
The sensor she likely uses is only good in the hundreds of ppm. Fortunately the LFL for methane is roughly 50,000 ppm so there’s no need to give up smoking when a bout of methane-heavy flatulence occurs.
The methane quantity from human legume consumption is negligible, and beans are just about the most greenhouse-efficient source of protein there is.
Cow “farts” (actually rumen belches) are something else entirely.
Wooosh
That's only if your not acclimated to a high fiber diet.
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.
They take the good fiber out with extreme processing and replace it with more palatable fiber like wheat dextrin that doesn’t have the same benefits.
Getting your rubber from whole food products is definitely the way to go.
Related, the healthiest sources of protein are very affordable and typically come with a ton of fibre. You can have both very easily
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?
I can't find it specifically, but I do remember studies of the Hadza tribe and their lower incidents of cancer.
Just something I randomly found in a search.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4654
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.
I don't doubt it's healthy, perhaps via reducing insulin spikes. But the question is if it is the cause of the mysterious increase in colorectal cancer.
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!
> There’s an enormous amount of data on this topic.
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.
> Actual RCTs that randomly assigned subjects found no difference in polyp rates between high and low fibre diets.
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.
Thanks!
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)
Metamucil (and it's unbranded brethren) are decidely un-cheap
Really? I think my no-name psyllium husk is ~$0.40/day.
> that "fiber" is chemically modified resistant starch
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.
Just eat real food.
Stop substituting and finding short cuts. Just eat a balanced meal with vegetables.
You’re grossly underestimating how much fiber a person needs to eat.
How much fiber does a person need to eat, as measured in weight or volume of common vegetables?
Millions of people have gone years without fiber intentionally or not
I wouldn't sweat it - just focus on eating unprocessed food fiber or not
Men around 40g per day, it's like 2 pounds of a balanced mix of legumes, beans, vegetables, whole grains and fruits.
That is a lot of food. Even if I’d eat just that, I’d have to very consciously force myself to eat one kilo of that, unless it’s something like watermelon.
I don't think it needs to be nearly that much food.
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.
I’ve mostly seen the 14g of fiber per 1000 calories recommendation.
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.
And OliPops have 6 to 9g per can.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezoar
presumably is what you allude to?
That doesn't happen magically, and "spamming" protein can definitely damage your kidneys.
This is really only a concern for people that already have damaged kidneys.
> spam the amount of protein you take in and the excess just gets expelled.
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.
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.
My LDL numbers beg to differ.
Please expand on this. Cholesterol is a useful biomarker, but lower cholesterol could be worse. Cholesterol is used to repair the body. If your cholesterol is lower because you've inhibited your ability to produce it (malnutrition or by taking statins), that's bad. If your cholesterol is lower because your inflammation is lower and fewer repairs are needed, that's good. There are also two forms of LDL, one is harmless and the other is oxidized.
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 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.
No studies show protein has anything to do with colon cancer and in fact it could even have protective effects.
But we do have endless studies showing not eating enough fiber increases your chance of having colon cancer, and we also know a lot of people today don't have nearly as much fiber as people did in the past.
mainstream science literally links heavy meat consumption to colon cancer all the time.
There are other sources of protein.
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.
Why they all using whey when you got soy, pea and other much cheaper protein ?
Whey got to be the most expensive, especially isolate.
There are massive efforts to sell more dairy/beef in general. The governments in the USA and other countries subsidize it at massive scales. Other proteins are just fine, but there’s no pea protein lobby. Well, certainly not at the same scale.
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.
Why do government cheese when you can do government gainz
Whey is the best if you don't have any dairy allergies and your body handles it well.
It mixes better, tastes more neutral, and generally has more leucine than those other options, which is important for signalling muscle synthesis
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.
I can’t read the article because of the paywall and thought that’s what it would be about.
I'm OK with this. There have been a lot dumber "health" fads (low fat, low sodium, etc.) than focusing on more protein. Protein is also more satiating than carbohydrates so it can reduce calorie intake overall.
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.
That's because the raw material is only ~10% of the retail price. According to EU data, commodity prices for sweet whey powder in the EU are about 1.6 € per kg.
https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/document/download/413a6600-...
> 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.
Farming is not an open and free market. You cannot draw any conclusions about actual costs and impact from retail pricing. Subsidies distort cost massively.
I was hoping this would be an article about molecular evolution
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
https://archive.is/CbkfI
Added above. Thanks!
CBC's Front Burner podcast also covered this recently in a great episode. Recommended!
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/209-front-burner/epis...
> 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.
> 2.2g/lb (1g per lb)
Did you mean 2.2g/kg?
Hope you like cricket flour!
Actually, I believe bugs have been tried and turn out less efficient than whatever we have now. I believe soy is cheapest.
There's massive variation across insect species, relatively little research and no industrialisation on the scale of current farming. It's not useful to generalise all insects and all production techniques simply to "bugs are less efficient".
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 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.
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
What's "real" vs. "fake" sugar? Should we be adding sugar at all?
There are lots of healthy sweeteners
And fair the petulant need we have for sweetness is probably a result of the bad programming we had as kids consuming this junk.
This is the majority of people, and it’s getting worse, society is noticeably getting fatter
Except in China where it's very hard to find protien supplements or lean meat. I visited two years ago and really struggled.
Now, why would eggs be so expensive?
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.
I mean this is not a bad thing, I personally feel more sated eating protein-enriched food and am less likely to snack excessively.