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Why is the US currently obsessed with protein?
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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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Lmfao at this whole thread of nonsense answers.
It's not a weird obsession.
If you want to be muscular, then you need to eat a lot of protein.
If you want to be muscular and have a low body fat percentage, then you need to eat a lot of protein, and eat a lot of protein / calorie you eat.
If you're old and want to slow down how quickly your muscles waste away to maintain your physical health, you need to eat a lot of protein.
And protein is generally one of the more expensive parts of food, so companies constantly try and cut back and replace it with carbs and sugar instead... All leading to people seeking out food with high protein content
Agreed, although I'll add a few things. Protein has a much higher thermic effect of food (TEF), meaning your body expends more energy processing it. Protein and carbs both contain around 4 calories/gram and fat around 9, but TEF is roughly 20–30% for protein, 5–10% for carbs and 0–3% for fat. In other words, your body burns roughly that percentage of the calories from each just processing them.
More importantly, protein supplies the amino acids your body needs to maintain and rebuild muscle; carbs can't substitute for the essential amino acids you have to get from your diet. That's particularly useful during a caloric deficit, when you're trying to lose fat while preserving muscle, and as you get older and age-related muscle loss becomes a concern.
Protein also tends to be more satiating than carbs or fat and affects appetite hormones like ghrelin, GLP-1 and CCK. So while there's no magic number of calories that adding protein will make you eat less, the evidence supports protein making it easier to feel satisfied on fewer calories.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32768415/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8878356/
So protein helps you maintain muscle, makes you feel fuller per calorie, and costs your body more energy to process. There are pretty good reasons people trying to lose fat, build/maintain muscle, or stay healthy as they age to seek out higher-protein foods. The marketing obsession didn't come out of nowhere, even if companies take advantage of it by plastering the protein content across the front of the package while leaving things like carbs, saturated fat, and total calories much less prominent.
It’s a weird obsession because people are trying to eat significantly more than they need.
People misunderstood grams per kilogram and just switched it to grams per pound without actually converting units
Lmfao, no they didn't, you misunderstood the difference in recommended intakes for maintenance (/kg) vs gaining muscle / slowing it's atrophy in old age (/lb).
People eat more than they need because modern society makes it incredibly easy to, and we're removed from the survival conditions that made high-energy foods so attractive to us in the first place. The American lifestyle is particularly bad in this regard, with our car-dependent cities, sedentary lifestyles, abundance of cheap, calorie-dense food, and food companies that spend heavily on advertising and lobby politicians to keep regulations and labeling requirements favorable to them.
The “people are trying to eat significantly more than they need” was referring to protein
As in people are drinking 300 calorie protein shakes when they aren’t hungry so they can hit their “protein target”
What protein shake is 300 calories? All the decent ones are around 110-130
Americans eat too much everything. Protein won't fix that.
Actually one of the biggest problems that Americans and Europeans have when it comes to obesity is high carb diets. Compared to carbohydrates, protein helps keep you feeling fuller, longer. So higher protein diets would absolutely have an impact on fixing that problem.
But dumbasses think protein is only in meat. Internet thinks protein = meat.
https://www.greatveganathletes.com/athletes/sport/bodybuilders/
And let's just ignore colon cancer rates in <30 coincident with the protein fad.
No, the vast majority of bodybuilders and gym bros use whey protein powder which is dairy based.
Also, if we're talking normal food, you have to eat 6 full cans of beans to get the same protein as 1lb of chicken or fish. Meat is not the only way to get protein but the fact of the matter is that for most people (assuming they ignore the morals and ethics) it's gonna be easier and tastier to get a substantial amount of protein from meat.
Lmfao thanks random internet person for your rough feeling of correlation. Glad no actual researcher would have ever possibly thought to check that in their study! /S
White meat certainly seems fine from everything I can find, but beef and red meat are 100% linked to colon cancer. The carnivore diet may not explicitly state to eat only red meat - but every single person I've met that pushes it IRL seems to immediately talk about eating steak or ground beef for every meal. Joe Rogan pushed it by suggesting he was 'experimenting' by eating only eggs, ground beef, and elk. Jordan Peterson literally only consumed beef, salt, and water.
To say this is a right-wing chud fad in recent years is not inaccurate - and to assume causation for the rise in colon cancer is also supported by science.
Yes you can probably do the carnivore diet on nothing but chicken and fish, that simply doesn't match reality as far as most practioners of the carnivore diet are concerned.
Yeah there's a huge difference between the powerlifters living off chicken, rice, and spinach and the modern adherents of the carnivore diet.
This statement is not supported by science. There are no shortcuts, if you want big muscles you have to exercise more.
Exercising is the easy part of body building. Eating and sleeping well enough is the hard part.
Sleep is the endgame boss for me. Diet I've gotten fairly good at. But I've struggled with sleep for a long time and it's so fragile. One thing can be off and it'll screw up the whole night, which messes with the next day etc. It's very easy to fall into a bad sleep cycle.
Obviously. But you have to eat enough protein on top of that.
Btw, high protein intake lets you age quickly.