I'm gonna make this easy for all of us: how much protein to eat, period

There is a lot of panic out there among the newspaper opinion columnists, and maybe no one else, that everyone is eating too much (“obscene amounts” of!) protein. I’m gonna say this once, and I’m gonna say it very loudly for the New York Times/Washington Post/The Atlantic/Chicago Tribune/Marfa Picayune-Journal/Bowling Green Ledger-Inquirer-Advocate/Springfield Shopper/Daily Planet columnists in the back so that I hopefully never, ever, ever, ever have to say it again.
Most of these articles cite the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) as the amount of protein everyone should eat, which is of 0.38g/lb bodyweight (For a 150lb person, this would be 57g of protein, or one chicken breast, with zero other sources such as cheese, tofu, beans, whole grain bread, etc). The concern-trolling Atlantic gravely calls this “what the government recommends." Then these publications do backwards math from how much meat is produced for Americans to eat, or self-reported amounts a small group says they consume, find the amount is higher than 0.38g/lb of bodyweight, and start waving their arms about how everyone's about to die from too much protein.
But the RDA is not adequate for anyone except a comatose or very sedentary person; it's actually a nutritional floor for malnourishment. It’s the line between starvation (of adequate protein, insufficient amounts of which could lead to muscle loss) and just-barely-not-starvation. And it's especially not adequate for a person who wants to maintain the muscle they have, and performs the actual government-recommended amount of physical activity. To wit: The great crime of protein intake concern-trolling, wailing that anyone who says you should eat more than the RDA because they are trying to rob you blind using nothing but various meat cuts, is the following: our illustrious government also makes recommendations for a minimum weekly amount of physical activity. It includes two sessions of strength-building activities.
Apparently these two departments have never spoken to one another, because you can't with the one hand tell us to lift weights, and then with the other hand tell us we don't need more that a couple glasses of milk's worth of protein every day. This is like telling us to build a house in the path of a daily tornado.
Anyway: If you are a normal, somewhat active person, recommended protein intake for that basically-physically-active person by the American College of Sports Medicine, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the Dietitians of Canada, and the International Society of Sports Nutrition[^1] is 1.2-2.0g/kg of bodyweight, or 0.54-0.9g/lb bodyweight.
That's a pretty big range, but it can be broken down a little further based on your own body and goals. If you have more body fat, good news: The real basis for protein intake is lean body mass, not overall body weight, so your intake doesn't need to be quite as high. Here's what I suggest: If you don't work out at all, whether that's your political stance or you're taking a break from it all, 0.5g/lb suffices to maintain your lean body mass. If you are active, whether that's lifting, running, scaling Half Dome, recreational athletic bird watching, pro-am tag-playing, or anything else, 0.7g/lb will adequately feed your active muscles.
If you are trying to build muscle or strength (more on that in a moment), you should shoot for 1g/lb. Those are the "easy Mode" numbers. Based on your body and activity level, you can tweak them a little up and down, per the lower charts. But if you don't want to do more math, or remember more incremental numbers, the Easy Mode numbers will do you fine.

Occasionally, what the concern-trolling publications are wailing about is when someone like me dares to suggest a person might benefit from eating as much as 1 gram per pound of bodyweight (1g/lb) in protein, per day, as if I'm trying to kill everyone. But I wrote previously, eating 1g/lb bodyweight is only necessary to achieve goals in the following scenarios:
- You are deliberately building strength or muscle (bulking or recomping)
- You’re at a higher body fat level (>30% is a decent rule of thumb) and you are lifting weights, aiming to lose body fat, and are aiming for a higher protein intake because it has been shown to optimize the fat loss process
- You’re cutting, or maybe even are a bodybuilder nearing the end of a stage shred and are trying to hold on to all the muscle you can, and maybe find slightly higher protein helps with feeling fuller longer
If you're not trying to do any of those things? Great: You don't need to eat 1g/lb of protein.
Depending whether you're active or not, 0.7 or 0.5g/lb will suit you fine, without risking your muscle or, as The Bowling Green Ledger-Inquirer-Advocate frets, depleting the world of its protein reserves.

It's worth noting that some people get confused even further with these numbers when trying to convert from pounds to kilograms, as my OG Megsquats wrote in a clever newsletter recently. The actual RDA in our government's scientific terms is 0.8g/kg, which is equal to 0.38g/lb. But all it takes is one person in one “how much protein do I need?” thread in one subreddit to misstate the RDA as “0.38g/kg” before you have a veritable “how many days are in the week” bodybuilding.com debate raging without end.
Kilograms and pounds, you may have noted, are not the same thing. But if someone is reading fast, and don’t understand math or units (a frightening, and likely increasing, number of people in this country thanks to our impoverished public education system), they might see 0.38g/lb, think it’s the same as 0.38g/kg, later divide it by 2.2 because you got confused and think, oh no, I'm only supposed to be eating 0.17g/lb of protein--that's like 30 grams a day! We have been way, way overeating on protein. So just to clarify: These numbers are not the same. 0.38g/kg is not the same as 0.38g/lb, because one kilogram does not equal one pound–not even close. One kilogram equals 2.2 pounds. Do you see why I'm trying to make this a little easier?
Which brings me to my last point: There is also some fearmongering about what happens to our heath if we eat "too much" protein. But if you have ever tried to eat a lot of protein, you know that it is difficult to eat a lot of protein, period, unless you are doing something cartoonish like drinking eight scoops of protein powder every single day. Protein is the most expensive macro.
Problems are technically possible with acute increases to protein, or extreme protein overdose for an extended period of time. But in active men with intakes as high as 1.27g/lb bodyweight, there were no negative health effects. That number may not sound sooo different from 0.54g/lb, but it’s more than twice as much (191 grams vs. 81 grams). I submit that even our most dedicated eaters are not eating, like, 200 grams of protein per day incidentally. That is literally a whole chicken, plus another half a chicken breast, every single day. Get out of here.
If you know this, you know that when The Atlantic waves its arms about “kidney or liver damage,” it’s panicking over nothing. In fact, I defy you, Concern Trolling Newspaper/Magazine Columnist, to find a single otherwise healthy person who was harmed by their accidental eating of too much protein.
So here it is again in text, the easy-mode version of optimal protein intake:
- Building muscle/attempting body composition manipulation, eat ~1g/lb
- Maintaining and active, 0.7g/lb
- Sedentary, 0.5g/lb
There. Simple numbers no one will die from and no columnist needs to claw their face off over. Eat protein, not too little, some (but definitely not all) of it from plants. But (sigh) that’s a topic for another day.

Eat
~Discord Pick of the Week: Japan keeps its older folks active (and socially connected!) by getting them into rugby. ~
Lindsay Gibbs at the Power Plays newsletter has a phenomenally good play-by-play of the fallout from sadsack/president of the Spanish football federation Luis Rubiales assaulting a player for all creation to see. There were a lot of punch-pulling headlines about this, but Lindsay lays it out straight, and for that we thank her.
A whole Self package on letting trans kids play sports.
By the feminist killjoy you were always destined to be.
A new tampon design (spiral) has been approved by the FDA. I’ll be honest; I don’t think I’ve ever, uh, seen a tampon meaningfully “expand” while in use, if you get what I’m saying. So I really wonder what a different expanding design is gonna do. But hey!
If you believe you can get away without doing RDLs, look at Steph Curry. My man takes his lifting seriously, and it cured his bad ankles! Let that be a lesson to us all.
i've been saying it and saying it but hip thrusts are overrated. if you want to be double cheeked up on a Thursday like Steph, you will do your RDLs and you will like it https://t.co/wJGO5XPd8c
— Casey Johnston (@caseyjohnston) August 25, 2023
Drink
The WSJ wrote about these “rate me” subreddits that flip me all the way out. It kills me that (I’m sorry, I believe that you cannot dish what you cannot take) God’s most forsaken souls, inside and out, are telling people who are almost exclusively drop-dead gorgeous women that they are, like, 5’s. 4’s, even.
I’ve spent longer than was advisable poring over the ranking criteria of one of these subreddits, and I have to say everything that happens between 5 and 10 is completely subjective, beauty-wise. None of these people have any idea of what they are talking about or how attractiveness works; it’s that old “2/10 would not bang” meme risen from its grave.
I feel very put out at the idea of anyone submitting their self-esteem to the chopping block of our worst losers. The algorithm loves these posts because they have faces in them, which makes people stop and look at them. And the more of us who stop and look, the more people it gets shown to, the more of us start to feel like a normal thing to do is to submit yourself to judgment from weird strangers with too much time on their hands; and on and on and on. Modern virality!
This piece is more interesting than the headline suggests; it’s more so about the battle between the behemoth of Walmart in its B2B transactions and small grocers that try to compete (and the legislation that could help them).
Americans gained 145,860-some lifestyle options in about 50 years. That’s too many options.

Rest
Loved this Blackbird Spyplane on the end of small cool cars. Someday I would like to realize my goal of driving a Geo Tracker. No—do not try to intervene.
What is time for? (a good complement to Jenny Odell’s Saving Time).
The article I want to read is “climate impacts that the assholes of BP, Exxon, et al.” did not anticipate. Vanishing groundwater in the U.S. had to be one. Feels ironic, especially since the Midwest is now routinely flooding; it’s giving “water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” I did not imagine the apocalypse would be so uncannily ripped straight from classic literature, she said, fully dissociated. I also hear reports that New York City smells extremely bad right now, and my armchair guess is all the sea creatures that are dying in the boiling Florida ocean are drifting up there in the current.
I watched Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which was recently nominated as the greatest film of all time. You can fight me, but it led me to conclude that YouTube lifestyle vloggers are onto way more than anyone is giving them credit for.
That’s all for this week! I love you for reading, thank you, let’s go—
[F1] The ISSN actually recommends 1.4g/kg as a floor, which is 0.63g/lb.
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