source: https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...
source: https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...
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.
O.8g/kg was set as the target to avoid protein deficiency, not as any measure of optimal. Current guidelines are 50-100% higher. Optimal for muscle growth is higher still according to many studies.
If you are trying to hit the bro-science 1g/lb of body weight, that’s a lot of protein and most will likely have trouble hitting it without supplements (or eating mass amounts of meat).
Of course most people proteinmaxxing are not actually growing any muscle but eating protein fortified Doritos makes them feel like they are doing something healthy.
Eh. If you're an American, maybe. They're a real outlier and it seems like bro science to me.
Canada recommends 0.8g/kg/day.
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/food-nutriti...
A diet put together by Lancet and friends comes out to 82g/10MG, which works out to 1.11 g/kg for an 80 kg man who eats 2600 kcal/day. So their recommendation is obviously below that, and therefore not 50% higher than 0.8g/kg/day.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Content-of-macronutrient...
The UK recommends about 55g/day for men and 45g/day for women, which is under 0.8 g/kg.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Australia recommends about 0.8 g/kg/day.
https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/nutrient-reference-values/nu...
France recommends 0.83 g/kg/day (section 2.2.1)
https://www.anses.fr/fr/system/files/NUT2012SA0103Ra-2.pdf
Some of those guidelines are old (if that matters), but some of them aren't. The EAT-Lancet diet was designed quite recently.
Even if the American numbers are right, just swap the white bread for whole wheat bread and you'll hit the target. It remains dead easy to get adequate protein no matter what guidelines you use.
But you’re also arguing against a point no one is making. No one says “it’s hard for me to eat maintenance calories and get enough protein to prevent signs of malnutrition”. The typical statement is that is hard to reach a higher target (0.8 or 1g per pound) intended to help grow muscle. And this is typically in the context of a balanced diet and often in the context of a calorie deficit as someone is trying to lose weight. Also this is usually in the context of the diet being based in a typical western diet, so some of the calories are lost to “junk”.
“It’s hard for me to hit 0.8g/lb when I’m running an 800 calorie deficit and eating a lot of fruit and vegetables” is not an unreasonable claim.
Henselmen’s review is a good start for muscle growth:
https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...
A new baldness fighting drug gets patent protection and exclusive market rights.
If I had to guess, in addition to there being basically no money in it, it’s probably hard to get people to sign up for strictly compliant diets for long periods of time. Letting someone roll your head with a Dermaroller a couple times per week is comparatively a small investment in time and effort.
> So people suffering from hair loss absolutely have higher agency here.
That’s valid. Guys suffering hair loss are likely a lot more motivated than guys who opted into a protein study for $100 or whatever.
That means there are some (very poor) calorie-sufficient diets that don’t provide enough protein. But I agree that it’s still rarer than people think.
However, I would not call 2600 kcal/day a value typical for "moderately active" but for an "active" profession.
I work mostly sitting by the computer, but I still walk about a couple of hours per day and I spend about a half of hour daily with more intense exercises with weights, so I would call myself moderately active.
Even so, in most days if I eat above 1800 to 1900 kcal (being a male of average height and about 76 kg), I gain weight immediately. Therefore, for me eating enough proteins without eating too many calories is a problem about which I must think permanently.
Eating only bread is not realistic, but a real diet could include bread made from 250 g of wheat flour + 250 g lentils. This adds to 90 g of protein, but the digestibility of proteins from both cereals and legumes is only about 90%, unlike for animal proteins, so the true protein intake would be 81 g. This would be at the lower limit of an acceptable protein intake for a male of average height, but it would provide almost 1800 kcal.
For myself, that would mean that I could eat absolutely nothing else. Adding the minimum amount of oil to provide essential fatty acids and fat-soluble vitamins would already exceed the amount of calories that I may eat.
If you cook your own food, it is not difficult to have acceptable ratios of protein per calories. However, the food that I see in a supermarket, as ready-to-eat food, almost always has bad or extremely bad protein per calories ratios. If you add a few sweet things to your menu it is very easy to exceed your calories threshold without eating enough protein.
In 2026, you can't get a straight answer to this question, because anything protein related is SEO-optimized blogspam (thanks Google).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7926405/#sec5-nutri...
Our biology is immensely adaptable, so anyone declaring you absolutely need some finely decided very specific thing in order to be "be healthy" should be treated skeptically.
With regards to protein specifically: your body doesn't trade in proteins as inputs, it trades in amino acids which cracked off the protein chains you eat. Everything else is just trying to keep the crowd of gut bacteria from making you feel uncomfortable.
Protein is made up of amino acids, different sources of protein have different amino acid profiles.
Animal protein matches the amino acids profile we need the best. Whey protein is close, soy isn't bad. You can vary your food groups to balance the amino acids, so if one source is low in one amino acid, you can compliment it with another source higher in another. I found the video intersting and been using protein supplements for near 20 years.
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.)
That's 1.8g/kg of lean body mass which is pretty close to the 2g/kg total body mass I've always used for weight training.
That's still a LOT of protein. 130g a day for me. To reach that is 500g of chicken breast, for example. And it's not like you can eat that in one meal. That's another controversial topic but it's likely about 50g per meal (for me, 90kg man) is the max. So if I eat chicken for dinner, 50g protein the I still need two other spaced meals to get the remaining 80g.
I'm not doing elite training so I'm not going to follow this rigidly, it's just a rough daily goal. I'll usually have a protein shake per day, then a high protein meal and try to make up the rest elsewhere.
Why not? I eat more than this every day and I eat once a day (OMAD).
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.).
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)
Getting enough protein and exercising is crucial as you age, and it's something a lot of people have historically not understood, since as your metabolism slows, you get less hungry right when your protein needs are increasing.
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)
> There is normally no advantage to consuming more protein than 0.82g/lb (1.8g/kg) of *total bodyweight* per day
And there are other analyses out there recommending closer to 1g/lb of total bodyweight, and this analysis is much more convincing: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/protein-science/
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.
I'm on GLP-1 so I no longer obsessively crave Doritos and can resist their siren song. But maybe the protein ones are worth trying.
I admit this is conspiratorical.
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.
The human capacity to turn old protein into new protein is separate. IIRC, total protein turnover in humans is on the order of 300g per day. Only a fraction of that protein comes from diet. Something like 250g comes from recycling existing tissue at the cellular level.