I suffered protein shortage after I retired 5 years ago by relying on frozen dinners for the first 3 months. When I worked, I used to do that on weekends and it was fine because during the weak I pigged out at a steak bar (with 12oz steak, cheese covered brocolli, and a full dish of ice cream) or equivalent dinners, where generally the rule was eat until you could eat no more.
But relying on that frozen dinner diet for months at a time caused drastic muscle loss, which I've never fully recovered, but have now stabilized muscle (still higher than average for age) at a lower weight.
People I know report similar experiences, even with somewhat higher protein "prepared meals." Even though it may make a good meal, you need at least 2 more good meals with protein a day.
I might even add that my current short stature may have been reinforced by a diet, largely, of TV dinners after my father died at my age of 11.
Anyway, here I'd like to reprise and extend my commentary about Protein to my discussion group.
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The recommended daily allowance to prevent protein deficiency is 0.8g protein per 1kg weight.
For example,
165 pounds (75kg) 60 grams protein
But, people over 40 begin to experience muscle loss without additional protein, so they need 1-1.2g per kg.
That's 75-90 grams protein for 165 pound person.
People who exercise regularly (shouldn't that be everyone) need 1.1-1.5g per kg
People who regularly lift weights (shouldn't that be everone?) need 1.2-1.7g per kg.
Excessive intake begins somewhere over 2g/kg (indicated by ammonia in urine, which is an indicator for several things including too much protein). One number I've seen is 2.4g/kg.
For determining protein need, obese people need to deduct excess weight due to bodyfat from obesity (probably best determined with bodyfat measurement because fat people may have more muscle too).
I'm linking Mayo on these numbers below (and they link their FDA reference) as a kind of "opposition" witness, however I discount their claim that "Americans get enough protein" (which comes straight from the FDA and a few other sources) because:
If Americans ate only the calories they needed, with the same diet as now, they would not be getting enough protein.
AND
If particular Americans avoid eating any of the following, it makes getting enough protein much more difficult:
Dairy, eggs, meat, seafood, beans, nuts, lentils. Because standard American diets include those things.
But many people restrict or limit some of those foods. I know many people who restrict dairy. I myself avoid eggs, seafood, and beans and try to minimize meat to small portions. So you can't generalize the assumed American Diet to everyone.
Finally, it's much more complicated than all the above suggests. There are two additional issues:
Protein cannot be absorbed very quickly. No more than 30g at one time. So for someone elderly like me who needs at least 1.2g/kg* or over 90g protein, I need to eat in in no less than 3 meals per day. (So, it doesn't look to me like single meal per day works...).
And I lift weights and exercise regularly, putting need closer to 1.5 kg...and why don't they multiply the elderly and exercise factors??? Show me the easy peasy diet without too many calories that adds up to 120g. It's easy go google everything you eat for grams of protein. I have, and without 2 protein shakes I end up nowhere near 120g or even 100g.
Second, these numbers are essentially assuming all your protein is properly complemented. So you are cleverly combining things lacking the essential amino acid lysine (like wheat) with things that have excess lysine (like beans). Whatever protein you consume isn't so cleverly combined, you are getting less effective protein.
If you have a wheat heavy diet like me (I eat whole wheat bread daily and pasta regularly, and restrict or minimize other proteins) I am most likely short on lysine, which is the "limiting" amino acid of wheat protein. Unless complemented, the 10g of raw protein I get from my serving of pasta is really only like 6g of fully complemented protein. I don't eat beans to complement the wheat (and I'm thinking now I should find a way to do so). Adding cheese doesn't complement the wheat so much as add to it, so if I added 5g of cheese protein I'd get 6+5 and not 10+5 grams of fully complemented protein.
A better way to look at this would be to look at the recommended need for each essential amino acid. I haven't found any online calculators that do that sort of thing.
If you know which one(s) you are lacking, it is also possible to add limiting amino acids to your diet directly as most are available in bulk or capsule forms. There are also pills with fully complemented set of amino acids but they are a very expensive way to eat.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be meeting my targets without 1-2 servings of the whey isolate protein I use. (Whey protein, and dairy in general, has a near optimal profile of amino acids, but for that reason it also doesn't "complement" anything else.) People having issues with dairy can get protein from bean or pea sources (which is not as good by itself but can be complemented and naturally complements grains).
2) The cause of Heart Disease which is THE BIGGEST THING is saturated fats and cholesterol which mostly come from meat and dairy.
Over time, message #2 has been slightly modified, but message #1 remains the same.
For awhile, this led to all sorts of mischef regarding things like trans fats which turned out to be even more harmful than saturated fats.
Who was pushing for this message and why???Why exactly did meat and dairy, and hence protein, became evil in the 1970's and ever since (except among the "we must keep our guns and meat" crowd).
I have heard this cast a slightly different way. Rather than pushing us all onto trans-fats, we were also being pushed into "Low Fat" dairy and meat products which employed elevated levels of sugar, typically in the form of corn syrup.
So some people blame the "Low Fat" craze not (only) on the makers of hydrogenated vegetable oils (big ag and especially big corn processors) but also on the producers of corn syrup (which happens to also be big ag and especially big corn).
One way or another it's big corn pushing to sell more corn oil and/or syrup.
I also have a 3rd conspiracy theory.
1970's was the rise of eco-consciousness, Earth Day, and all that. One part of this was "Limits to Growth," something I hold very true and dear.
To me, this meant that not only human population stabilization, but human population reduction was (and even more now) needed.
A vast array of groups in society don't like this message. Especially the longstanding promoters of birthing, always to their own advantage, conservative religious groups. Best example is the Catholic Church, but don't forget Mormons, Evangelicals, Muslims, and even Orthodox Jews.
Their whole operation relies on getting people to have as many children as they can. That's also part of the "benefit" to the people involved, or at least they perceive it that way. This makes up for the fact that otherwise too many people "get wise" and leave the movement otherwise.
So such people (along with plain vanilla capitalists, finance bankers, and so on who rely on and endlessly "growing" world) sought to erase the population explosion message, and divert concerned people to other concerns.
And the way that did that was by diversion. No, there's not too many people, in fact we could have far more people, if we only all stopped eating meat, since meat requires a lot more resources to produce.
So we had (and still have) Diet for a Small Planet, and so on.
Now there are several problems with this diversion. First is that producing meat may not in itself be the largest driver of environmental destruction. When you have more people, that also means more houses, cars, power plants, etc, etc, and ultimately even more wars.
Second is that even if these people involved with the production of meat suddenly became unemployed and had to find other work to do, what would it be? It would possibly be something equally environmentally destructive.Ending with
Finally, it could also be cynically said that as a diversion, the idea that getting away from animal protein would permit ever greater population growth, was of no danger to the powers that be, precisely because "it's never gonna happen."
It will attract a certain segment of the left wing (labeled by others as bleeding hearts) who will voluntarily give up animal protein (leaving more and lower prices for everyone else). They and many others will live in a perpetual state of insufficient protein. From the standpoint of the powers that be, if this segment has a nil population growth rate, that's perfectly fine, it can be made up among more useful far right christians.
And therefore, one could perhaps say the same thing about people who push my message, we need to reduce population drastically by choice or it will be forced upon us in a terrible way later.
Ain't gonna happen. I concede that. I'm pushing for something that won't work, not because it couldn't but because enough people will never believe it it enough to overcome other influences. (That could always change, with a global revolution in thought. All we're talking about is thought, but behind that thought currently lies a vast power.)
But I'm thinking in terms of the people a thousand years from now, looking back at the disaster that transpired.
Are they saying, why couldn't those people just switch to a vegetarian diet? Only kooks, because virtually everyone says that the failure of the human population to get it's numbers under control was the #1 reason for the collapse of civilization. Everything else was secondary or largely driven by that overpopulation. And we must never forget, but it's won't be easy for a long time, because we now live in a much smaller and ravaged world because of the human population bubble.
That's the optimistic version anyway.
Now why is it that a pretty sizable segment of society believes that "overpopulation" is a meme invented by Gates or Soros for purposes of fostering or opposing some kind of racial readjustment?
This is a pretty widely held view on the US right.
You have to understand how the range of acceptable opinion works in a meme-controlled society like ours. There are two sides to the US oligarchy, the "conservative" side which included the likes of Koch, and the "liberal" side which includes Gates and Soros.
BOTH SIDES promote something akin to business as usual including maximum growth, but in different ways. Neither side actually supports the kind of radical change we need to get to a sustainable society. (This is much as it is in the realm of global warming. No major actor actually supports the kind of radical changes we need. Instead, there is much talk, conferences, and programs, and yet the greenhouse gasses keep ratcheting up decade after decade, much as the population itself has done).
It has to be understand that GROWTH IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OF ALL to the powers that be in our society. The oligarchs, religions, governments, businesses, pretty much everyone who has any power in society depends and relies on it. Bonds, stocks, religions, government projects, and wars all need population growth.
The Koch side wants to see (and may soon get) the ascendency of supposedly conservative values, including strong religion, sexism, and no abortion or birth control to let people get away. Simple enough, they say that overpopulation is a myth.
On the Gates / Soros they recognize the (intuitively obvious) fact that there is overpopulation (as somebody in the range of acceptable opinion has to, or at least did before the myth that loss of fertility was the greater danger was erected) but proclaim it can be managed with small incremental reforms, such as promoting birth control or the education of women (which are fine ideas, but will do even less to tackle the population bubble than fertility loss).
One of the exact problem with the Gates / Soros kinds of fake solutions is that they aren't going to happen. It would take a revolution to get birth control and abortion available everywhere. And while that revolution is supposedly obviated by incremental reforms, the other side is growing like gangbusters, largely through greater birthing. The most conservative religions are growing fastest, and that includes Islam and Mormonism which promote birthing the most strongly. These are the religions that also oppose abortion the most strongly and demand traditional sex roles which either suppress or negate the effects of the greater education of women on reducing population growth.
Stronger medicine is needed, and I've already proposed it. It's the "half child" policy. There should be two sets of adults for each child born. Only with this kind of drastic population decrease can be population bubble be deflated fast enough to avoid the collapse of civilization. There is no racial selectivity in my proposal whatever. The same rule should apply to all.
It could happen if enough people believed in it. That is the only hope, and I wouldn't bet on it.
But whenever sustainable-population-size advocates appear, even in environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, they are promptly discharged into oblivion, or throttled back into no views by social media, whose oligarch owners are committed in every way (with some tilt on it away from their disfavored groups) to growth.
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