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.
luke5441 9 minutes ago [-]
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?
vmg12 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
halflife 29 minutes ago [-]
Beans look gross?
Izikiel43 17 minutes ago [-]
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).
chneu 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
hobo123 49 minutes ago [-]
In Germany they already started. There's protein XYZ everywhere, but I've recently seen ads for high fiber drinks.
dyauspitr 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
> 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.
dfxm12 32 minutes ago [-]
Of course. These things are cyclical. Some might remember the f plan diet or similar.
dolorian 1 hours ago [-]
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.
iosjunkie 57 minutes ago [-]
My LDL numbers beg to differ.
sp4cec0wb0y 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ipsento606 24 minutes ago [-]
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)
chneu 38 minutes ago [-]
Just eat real food.
Stop substituting and finding short cuts. Just eat a balanced meal with vegetables.
nojito 32 minutes ago [-]
You’re grossly underestimating how much fiber a person needs to eat.
nradov 29 minutes ago [-]
How much fiber does a person need to eat, as measured in weight or volume of common vegetables?
Izikiel43 12 minutes ago [-]
Men around 40g per day, it's like 2 pounds of a balanced mix of legumes, beans, vegetables, whole grains and fruits.
UncleOxidant 57 minutes ago [-]
And OliPops have 6 to 9g per can.
crisdux 1 hours ago [-]
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.
deadbabe 49 minutes ago [-]
No studies show protein has anything to do with colon cancer and in fact it could even have protective effects.
crisdux 5 minutes ago [-]
mainstream science literally links heavy meat consumption to colon cancer all the time.
Alive-in-2025 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
boothby 1 hours ago [-]
I was hoping this would be an article about molecular evolution
adrian_b 1 hours ago [-]
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.
axelthegerman 44 minutes ago [-]
> 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)
adrian_b 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
clayhacks 1 hours ago [-]
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
surfmike 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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
redanddead 26 minutes ago [-]
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 billions of people globally, on fucking peptides to protect themselves from the insane food we don’t want to regulate
JTbane 44 minutes ago [-]
I mean this is not a bad thing, I personally feel more sated eating protein-enriched food and am less likely to snack excessively.
Rendered at 17:43:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
presumably is what you allude to?
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.
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.
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)
Stop substituting and finding short cuts. Just eat a balanced meal with vegetables.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Did you mean 2.2g/kg?
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/209-front-burner/epis...
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 billions of people globally, on fucking peptides to protect themselves from the insane food we don’t want to regulate