What you should be eating is a huge lean steak and a small plate of fries.
Look - what your body needs, ultimately, is fuel. You can get fuel from carbs, and you can get fuel from protein; if you eat one or the other exclusively, you won’t starve to death (malnutrition is another story). The difference is what those foods provide in addition to fuel. Protein provides more things that your body needs than carbs do, and therefore, you should try to get more of your fuel from protein than you do from carbs.
Protein is satiating. Lean protein is very difficult to overconsume, calorie-wise.
There are scientific studies wrt muscle-sparing while dieting. People who want to lose weight for aesthetic reasons (especially men, but there is a modern shift to bulkier women’s bodies) care about body composition, not just scale weight. Who wants to be skinny-fat when you can be lean and muscular? Muscle helps with aging. Purposely losing muscle doesn’t seem wise. Most weight lost through caloric restriction alone is going to include a significant amount of lean tissue. Strength training helps avoid muscle-loss. So does protein consumption. Protein recommendations are overblown by those who sell supplements, but it can’t hurt to eat more and it’s almost impossible to consume too much. And, fwiw, you don’t need as much protein when you are trying to gain weight.
As for OP, yes if you are overweight and eating a typical Western diet you probably eat enough protein (and an excess of other things). You mention not wanting to gain muscle, but more protein could help you lose fat. if you based your meals around the protein sources and then cut excess calories from fat/carbs (and no, I’m not saying to do low carb) you would lose fat. If you added basic minimal strength training you would lose fat and spare most of the muscle you have (most Western overweight men have a decent amount of muscle mass), and you would look more muscular without gaining any.
I’d also note that, generally, when you’re asked to eat “more protein”, that is generally going to mean that you reduce consumption of french fries and increase your vegetable sources of protein. A nutritionist is unlikely to recommend additional meat.
Legumes (peas, lentils, chickpeas, beans, soy/edamame, etc.) provide a good source of protein, as well as more unsaturated fats, omega-3s, and fiber. They’re less expensive than meat and they tend to be very satiating, driving you to consume a more appropriate amount of food.
My WAG: For awhile, the foods that had the reputation for being “healthy” all tended to be low in protein, like fresh fruits and vegetables, while many foods that are good sources of protein got a bad reputation because of fat, cholesterol, etc. So it became relatively common for people’s diets to become unbalanced in that direction.
Add to that the increasing popularity of vegetarianism and veganism.
Meat especially red meat: kidney stones, heart disease, colon cancer are elevated risks.
Personally I think the obsession with protein comes from several directions. There is the cultural connection of red meat with masculinity, which is of long standing of course. Then there are the fad weight-loss diets which come and go, but high protein ones have been recently prominent. Probably because lean protein tends to fill you up instead of prime you for craving more, as refined carbs and sugar do, they are effective enough at it that people find some success with them. And then there’s the ‘fitness’ angle, the belief that eating meat (primarily animal muscle) helps you build muscle – akin to the medieval Doctrine of Signatures, like liverwort being a remedy for liver disease because of its liver-shaped lobed leaves.
That’s an interesting article, confusing to read, but interesting. It is supply not intake that they evaluate. They do note in their discussion that their conclusion is in conflict with experimental evidence that demonstrates higher protein ratios intake with aging helps prevent sarcopenia and loss of function among other benefits.
For example, lower protein intake during middle age with increasing dietary protein in later life seems to be protective against Alzheimer’s disease (23). Some epidemiological studies have even detected late age-specific benefits of high protein intakes in terms of reduced all-cause mortality (24, 25).
Biggest problem I see is the broad brush stroke that a macro level paints in.
As you well pointed out:
A dietary pattern high in processed meats on white bread may result in the same macro ratio of one high in fatty fish, legumes, nuts, olive oil, and whole grains, but they ain’t the same thing.
And that’s if the calories intake stayed fixed. Odds are the former, with low satiety, will be associated with calorie excess, and the latter not. The harms of regular excess calorie intake are substantial.
Personally I’d be very disappointed in a nutritionist focusing on macros above the broad quality of the foods with an emphasis on putting plant based foods more forward and increasing the amount that protein comes from legumes, nuts, seeds, and fish while decreasing ultra processed foods in general but especially processed meats. The macros and the calories intake will highly likely just follow.
Protein is the limiting nutrient in your diet. It’s hard to accidentally not get enough fat or carbs. Your body can make glucose from protein in a pinch. But protein is irreplaceable.
A balanced diet will provide enough protein for an average level of activity. But if you’re doing signficant exercise, or some kind of calorie reduction diet, you can absolutely undershoot on protein, leading to fatigue and a tendency to compensate with other things you don’t need.
But to reiterate, yeah, there’s too much emphasis on protein for people on normal diets at normal levels of activity.
When you are in starvation, malnourished and losing vast amounts of weight
(Think holocaust survivors, natural disaster survivors, people stranded for weeks w/o food)
They are gonna hog down on any protein they can get, first and foremost. If they don’t have a way to cook it, they’ll eat it raw.
It’s in our DNA. We evolved from cave peoples. Fruits and berries just went so far til you grabbed you a small animal to eat.
Hope it ain’t your neighbor.
Fat can also be a limiting factor. Look up rabbit starvation . It’s just even less common than a lack of protein in the modern American diet.
That link suggests you can avoid rabbit starvation by eating carbs, and that’s almost certainly true. But just like there are essential amino acids, there are essential fatty acids that we need to eat.
over the last several years, the public health message has shifted away from desired percentages of protein, fats and carbohydrates. For example, the current Dietary Guidelines for Americans emphasize the importance of eating healthier protein rich foods rather than concentrating on specific amounts of daily protein.
I agree with others that much of the push for protein derives from social media pressure on men to be lean and muscular (it’s not just women who receive exaggerated, and oftentimes unrealistic, media messaging about their body shape and size).
The usual advice for a guy looking to build muscle is to consume 1 gram a protein per pound of body weight. This is almost certainly more than is necessary, (for one thing, it doesn’t account for the ratio of lean body mass), but those looking to build muscle are loathe to be undernourished. So it results in a 200 pound man consuming at least 200 grams of protein a day.
Thats a lot of protein. An egg has about 6 grams. A typical chicken breast 25 to 30 grams.
As for why there are ratios? The body is fueled by glucose, which it gets most efficiently from carbohydrates. And it needs certain essential fatty acids, along with certain amino acids. The former comes from certain fats, and the latter comes from protein. So ensuring a ratio of all three macronutrients is meant to ensure that people get enough of each.
As long as your meal is combining a quality carbohydrate (I.e. one that isn’t overly processed; this is the area where food is most processed and adulterated, since simple sugar - which people crave - is a carb) with a complete protein (i.e. not all proteins have all of the essential amino acids you need, so be sure to either get the complete kind or combine incomplete sources, as with beans and rice), and you add fats in small doses (as they are high in calories), you’re good.
To fill in with specifics: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-muscles-protein-idINKBN1W82CL/
The most important bit “for a guy looking to build muscle is to” strength train. The importance of extra protein is small compared to that, and the benefits top off at 0.7g per pound. And yes likely less if more body weight is fat mass. (The study however failed to normalize to fat free mass.)
The gram per pound bit is hard to get out of circulation: it’s just an easy thing to remember! 0.7 per pound doesn’t stick so well.
Except it’s not always; menus that offer a ‘choice of protein’ often include things like halloumi cheese, tofu or eggs, alongside the assortment of meat offerings. ‘Protein’ in this context is pretty much restaurant code for ‘the expensive part’.
Most Americans easily exceed the minimum protein the body requires.
The problem is that you have to eat something to provide your calories. Nutritious food has vitamins, fiber and polyphenols. Healthy fats are a better choice than long believed. Sugar provides little nutritional value. Starches are necessary but differ in how quickly they turn into sugar.
Protein is satiating, requires more work to digest (“the thermal effect of feeding”), and may allow better “muscle maintenance” if dieting and eating fewer calories than the body uses, so that it gets energy from stored sources. If trying to add muscle, to some extent more protein can speed up this process. Strength training has many healthful benefits, even at the cellular level.
Is it overhyped? Almost certainly. The benefits have been much exaggerated. Most people are not bodybuilders. Protein tends to be more expensive than other macronutrients. But there are some benefits, at least compared to most alternatives. Fiber is cheap and healthful, though few people eat recommended amounts. Eating five servings of vegetables a day and getting adequate fiber and exercise would make a bigger difference to health than adding protein, at least at the population level.
I think that these are both incomplete statements.
You’re going to optimize growth by targeting to eat 1g per pound of the lean body mass that you desire to achieve. I.e. you need a surplus that’s attainable in the short term.
But, likewise, that’s not going to just build muscle on its own. You need to lift weights sufficient to trigger the body to put on the extra muscle.
A significant part of the issue, is that many of the loudest voices in the discussion, in particular, online, are people who seem to lack the capacity to hold any kind of nuanced view. Things people eat are therefore either poison, or else absolutely vital; foods either need to be shunned entirely, or eaten to the exclusion of everything else, and the ‘fitness bro’ culture is the worst example of this, galloping from one diet scare story to the next, yelling exaggeration and misinformation at everyone in their radius.
