alt Hacker NewsYeah, (1) there is no "war on protein," (2) you do not need to eat very much protein unless you are trying to build muscle and you already work out a lot.
The normal recommended daily intake for protein is 0.8 g/kg. 1.2-1.6 is silly; that's a recommendation for athletes.¹
Starches have been a dietary staple in pretty much every society forever. Sugars have not. It's silly that they treat grains as a "sometimes" food.
There's also the weird boogeyman of "processed food." Almost all food is processed to some degree & always has been. We've been cooking, baking, juicing, fermenting, chopping, grinding, mashing, etc. long enough that it influenced the shape of our teeth. Certainly we haven't been making Pizza Pockets that long, but the issue there isn't processing, it's ingredients. And the reason people buy Pizza Pockets isn't that they think they're healthy—it's that Pizza Pockets only need to be microwaved, and cooking a real meal takes time that a lot of people just don't have.
[1]: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/athlete-protein-intake/
Replies
'Processed' generally means 'chemically modified', a la hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Starches are basically glucose. They have a massive insulin response -- often even worse than sugar (because you eat starches in a much higher volume since they don't usually taste sweet).
It's very hard to overeat protein naturally. It's very easy to overeat starches and other carbohydrates naturally.
With regard to "processed" food, it's not a great label. I would use this metric: could you conceivably produce this in an average kitchen with the raw materials? If you can, it's probably safe, if you can't, it's probably something you shouldn't eat. For instance, processing often means "partially hydrogenating" a fat, or milling grains into a fine dust and bleaching them. Sometimes chemically produced oils are deodorized, because they would otherwise smell very unpalatable. You generally should not want your food to be bleached or deodorized..