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.
Some humans have methanogens in their gut and these people exhale methane (gut->bloodstream->lungs) and they can emit quite a lot, at least enough to completely fuck up our lab work. Our lead scientist is such a person, and the effect is so bad that he exhales into a bin liner when setting up an experiment.
Or he did: this was so inconvenient that we automated all our instruments, valves, etc so we could run experiments from the kitchen or even at home (lots of RPis which I wouldn’t normally use for anything important). Fortunately this also automated all the data collection.
But now I have to run a trial to see if my diet modulates anal CH4 emissions. Thanks HN!
Cow “farts” (actually rumen belches) are something else entirely.
Every 10g per day is correlated with a 10% reduction in all cause mortality (up to 30g). Mostly from a reduction in cardiac and cancer deaths.
Use a conventional search not an ai-generated summary as that will have influencer slop mixed in. Though oddly, I’ve never seen an anti-fibre influencer, but have seen lots of pro-fibre influencer posts!
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.
I once did the calculation for my daily fiber intake and it was well beyond the daily recommended minimum.
What are people eating (or not eating) that leads to a fiber deficiency?
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.
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)
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.
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.
source: https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...
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.
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 millions of people globally, on fucking peptides to protect themselves from the insane food we don’t want to regulate