How to defeat your mom's outdated notions about exercise and nutrition with facts and logic

The Question

Hi Casey,

My mom (59) has started getting interested in lifting and of course I have told her to check out Liftoff! She became a vegetarian in 1989 and went vegan over a decade ago. Her first fear about LIFTOFF was it would be anti plant-based muscle building (I assured her you are so chill and cool), so this gives you an idea of what she may have encountered before when reading about exercise and health. She’s still not sure about trying the LIFTOFF program, but is working on machines at her gym.

Recently she said she was frustrated because she wasn’t going up in weights. We went back and forth about her program and finally I said, are you eating enough food? Are you getting enough protein? She said yeah she snacks all the time, and she gets 65-70 grams a day, so protein isn’t the problem. For reference, I’d say she probably weighs 165 lbs.

I told her a protein increase would be a great idea, but she was extremely (and surprisingly) defensive! She said all those studies about building muscle aren’t done on women, or older people. They are done on young men and don’t factor in post-menopausal women. And eating too much protein leeches calcium from your bones! (At this point I become the Nick Young ??? meme.)

Now, honestly, I can’t say I know who all the subjects are in the research I end up consuming from sources I trust like you. BUT as far as I’ve been able to see, the calcium thing is for people who don’t eat a varied diet and eat high animal protein diets? I assume she got this info from some pro-plant-based diet books misrepresenting research, but is there even a “too much protein” point?

I am hoping our swole science friend Casey can assist. Thanks so much for everything you do and thank you for helping me on my journey to get strong as hell.

-Audrey in Oregon

The Answer

Hi! I'm so glad you asked this. This is gonna be a good one, I am so excited; time for me to toot both my science journalism and science degree horns.

Let’s start here: The media is very good at stirring irrational fear about this or that compound or vitamin or “toxin” or fruit or whatever causing certain irreversible body disaster. The average science article or science-person appearance on radio or TV[^1] is telling you to be scared of a new thing, or that your life will be wholly turned around by something. But these panics are often based on a single study that ends up getting contravened by more studies that come out in the following months or years. And you never hear about those later studies because, of course, the headline “Thing Probably Doesn’t Work As Well As Everyone Thought It Might; Ambiguity and Nuance Abound” doesn’t traffic as well as “New Discovery About To Change Everything.” (Especially in the “clicky-headline-uber-alles” times we’ve been living in.)

I wish things didn’t work this way, not least because it becomes a library of paralyzing little rules, the provenance of which we can’t remember and therefore feel like we’re endangering ourselves to forget. And probably the older someone is, the more paralyzing little rules they have probably internalized (that, unbeknownst to them, have probably been disproven since the time they learned them). More to the point, despite the “do your own research” times we’ve been living in, very few people are properly equipped to find and correctly interpret raw academic publications and studies, and popular media is mostly not helping.

If I’m dieting for my health (I think?) should I give it up for strength training?

Time for a Tombstone of science journalism on the random little diet rules we follow “for our health.”

She's A BeastCasey Johnston

So, this all sucks very much. But this is why my advice is to let such headlines and TV/radio drift in one ear and out the other. Individual academic studies are not lifestyle advice, and just because wide-eyed news reporters or talk show hosts or Joe Rogan or Andrew Huberman treats them that way, doesn’t mean you have to. Look around even more, and you’ll notice that the actual health concerns get sustained, ongoing coverage from many angles—the contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, for instance, or the increased risk of cancer for 9/11 rescuers. I think at this point we can take the popular media’s science-reporting track record for what it is, and ignore its one-off stories (at least for the purposes of making your individual choices about what to eat or do).

With all that in mind, let’s talk about the calcium/protein issue. I’ll be honest, when I got this reader’s letter, I metaphorically leapt out of my seat to go find the answer. A small part of me was worried, admittedly. But a larger part of me suspected that this was a perfect illustration of the kind of science/media miscommunication that can arise.