Re:Eat Real Food
by ctoa on Thursday January 08, 2026 @06:00PM
(#46547743)
Well, that's exactly the problem with focusing too hard on one macro nutrient recommendation out of context of other balanced diet recommendations.
Adding lean meat, dairy, eggs to protein poor diets is good, I love all of those things. Trying to hit a high protein target and understanding this to mean having to eat all or mostly meat is simply over correcting in a different direction.
And meat isn't a perfect PDCAAS! Beef is 0.92 close to soy at 0.91. Milk, eggs, soy protein (isolate), whey are 1. Beans are 0.75.
There's even more nuance, beans are partly lower because they are low in methionine, the essential amino acid that adults needs far less of than any other amino acid and that you don't need more of. In the context of a whole diet, it's not 92% of every gram for beef and 75% of every gram for beans, it doesn't work that way.
Relatively small servings of animal foods add up to a lot of protein, like some other comment was freaking out about needing to eat 4 hamburgers or a 16 oz steak to hit the (very modest) goal of 90g in a day. But something like, 1 egg + 1 can tuna + 1 serving Greek yogurt == 42g, is already at half the goal, much of the rest of it will fill out just fine from a balanced set of other non-empty calorie sources.
Adding lean meat, dairy, eggs to protein poor diets is good, I love all of those things. Trying to hit a high protein target and understanding this to mean having to eat all or mostly meat is simply over correcting in a different direction.
And meat isn't a perfect PDCAAS! Beef is 0.92 close to soy at 0.91. Milk, eggs, soy protein (isolate), whey are 1. Beans are 0.75.
There's even more nuance, beans are partly lower because they are low in methionine, the essential amino acid that adults needs far less of than any other amino acid and that you don't need more of. In the context of a whole diet, it's not 92% of every gram for beef and 75% of every gram for beans, it doesn't work that way.
Relatively small servings of animal foods add up to a lot of protein, like some other comment was freaking out about needing to eat 4 hamburgers or a 16 oz steak to hit the (very modest) goal of 90g in a day. But something like, 1 egg + 1 can tuna + 1 serving Greek yogurt == 42g, is already at half the goal, much of the rest of it will fill out just fine from a balanced set of other non-empty calorie sources.