> the US's per capita consumption of meat

That number seemed unreal to me, so I looked it up. I think it represents the total pre-processing weight, not the actual meat meat consumption. From Wikipedia:

> As an example of the difference, for 2002, when the FAO figure for US per capita meat consumption was 124.48 kg (274 lb 7 oz), the USDA estimate of US per capita loss-adjusted meat consumption was 62.6 kg (138 lb)

Processing, cutting into sellable pieces, drying, and spoilage/loss mean the amount of meat consumed is about half of that number.

I'm a weightlifter and as part of my training, I eat pretty close to about a pound of meat a day during bulk, usually about 12-14oz. This is because I need to eat about 200g of protein a day. I supplement it with protein shakes.

I find that to be a challenging amount of meat. It's a lot! And to find out that's average???

Americans eat way too much meat. Cheese, too.

The starting point for that data is 1909, when average life expectancy was under 50 years and child malnourishment was a major problem. The change since 1970 has been much quite modest: http://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detai...

Also, you need to adjust for demographics. In 1900, 35% of the population was under 15: https://demographicchartbook.com/index.php/chapter-5-age-and.... Today it’s only 19%. Children and babies obviously eat a lot less meat than adults, and they make up a much smaller share of the population today than back then.

There’s a restaurant in Las Vegas, the Heart Attack Grill, which sarcastically plays on this trope.

> It has become internationally famous for embracing and promoting an unhealthy diet of incredibly large hamburgers. Customers are referred to as "patients," orders as "prescriptions," and the waitresses as "nurses." All those who weigh over 350 pounds are invited to unlimited free food provided they weigh themselves on an electronic cattle scale affront a cheering restaurant crowd.

> The menu includes the Single Bypass Burger®, Double Bypass Burger®, Triple Bypass Burger®, Quadruple Bypass Burger®, Quintuple Bypass Burger™, Sextuple Bypass Burger™, Septuple Bypass Burger™, and the Octuple Bypass Burger™. These dishes range in weight from half a pound to four pounds of beef. Also on the menu are Flatliner Fries® (cooked in pure lard) and the Coronary Dog™, Lucky Strike no filter cigarettes, alcohol, Butterfat Milkshakes™, full sugar Coca-Cola, and candy cigarettes for the kids!

https://heartattackgrill.com/press

Worth noting there seems to be no upper limit for the anabolic response to protein ingestion, according to this study:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38118410/

What happens is that the excess of protein stays in your system, but, if you don't use the nutrient by exercising, the caloric excess will obviously make you fat.

"These findings demonstrate that the magnitude and duration of the anabolic response to protein ingestion is not restricted and has previously been underestimated in vivo in humans."

It says 1.2-1.6 grams of protein and healthy fats per kilogram of body weight, from animal and plant sources (including milk). Is that really advocating for more meat?

Too many calories is the basic explanation for why American's health sucks. Calories available per person has gone up ~32% since the 1960s (we obviously can't measure calories consumed per person, but supply and demand would dictate these excess calories are going somewhere). It is not clear to me that meat specifically is a problem so much as excess consumption leading to obesity, which then causes chronic health problems downstream.

Though of course "meat" is too vague a category to be helpful. Obviously there's a link between beef and heart disease and colorectal cancer. There seems to be no health problems associated with consuming chicken or seafood.

I bet the number of vegans and vegetarians in the US are also at their highest (and growing).

I'd strongly prefer the government just not try to tell people what to eat, the incentives will always be perverse and nutrition science is anything but science in most cases.

EDIT down-thread to prove my point you'll see people citing studies in favor of and against the new recommendations. The studies are almost always in animals or use self reported data with tiny sample sizes.

"a chicken in every pot" is a political slogan that has been in active use from 17th century France to at least Herbert Hoover.

Processed food and sugar consumption has also gone up.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8805510/

> Conclusions: As observed from the food availability data, processed and ultra-processed foods dramatically increased over the past two centuries, especially sugar, white flour, white rice, vegetable oils, and ready-to-eat meals. These changes paralleled the rising incidence of NCDs, while animal fat consumption was inversely correlated.

Small nit - this is probably assumed, but I would like the unit to be explicit: Yearly per capita pounds of meat.

That is, how many pounds of meat the average American eats in a year. An increase of 100 pounds means about an extra quarter-pound a day.

The biggest food related problem in the US is obesity. Lean meat is very high satiety and really helps with keeping weight in check. Of course a McDonalds meal is the opposite and you eat more than half your day's calories in a few minutes.

You should see the local Golden Corral.

I think the key point is the relative ratios of meat versus processed carbs. Right now we have government guidance telling people to eat more processed carbs than meat, and that’s backward.

Americans also just need to eat less period, but that’s a separable issue.

The moment I saw whole milk and a huge steak in the intro, I knew this website was not to be trusted.

At least the page mentions alternatives - plenty of other sources of protein, like dairy, eggs, legumes, etc.

Fun...

This is something I have been thinking about and researching for awhile, because there is so very much confusing language out there.

Your quote says over the last century, so I'm going to use roughly 1920 as the baseline. It also refers to a per capita increase of meat consumption by 100 pounds, or about 45.4 kilograms (to make the math easier). This is roughly an increase of 124g of meat per person per day (or about 3oz if that makes more sense to you).

This equates to a daily increase in per-capita protein intake by 25-30g (depending on which meat and how lean it is).

In 1920, the average American adult male was about 140 pounds, and ate about 100g of protein per day, which works out to roughly 0.71 grams per pound of body weight (or about 1.6 grams per kilogram).

In 2025, one century later, the average American adult male is 200 pounds, and if he eats the same ratio of weight to protein, you would expect that he would eat around 140g of protein per day, which is slightly higher than the increase in per-capita meat consumption over the same time.

However, if you look at actual statistics of what people are eating in protein, you'll see that the average American adult male is actually eating about 97g of protein per day, or about 0.49 grams per pound (1.1 grams per kg), which is much less than we ate a century ago, which means that that the increase in meat consumption doesn't match change in protein, so is offset by either less non-meat protein, meat with lower protein content (e.g. more fat), or both.

There was some discussion lower in the thread about bodybuilders vs normal people, and about basing your calculations on lean body weight vs full bodyweight. Lean body weight calculations are often used for bodybuilders, but those numbers are elevated (typically 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body weight). For someone who is sedentary to lightly active (e.g. daily walks), the calculation is based on full body weight, not lean body weight, and is about 0.7 gram per pound (or 1.5 grams per kilogram), which matches this recommendation exactly.

Hitting these targets has been shown to greatly increase satiation, reduce appetite, but it does not make you lose weight, and it is not permanent (reducing your protein intake removes the effect, which makes sense). However, long term studies show that people who increase their protein intake to these levels and lose weight (through calorie reduction or fasting) keep that weight off.

Finally, from what I've been able to cobble together, high protein intakes combined with high fat and high sugar intakes does not have the same effect as a diet that matches the recommendations here (ie. it's not just about higher protein intake, it's about percentage of calories from protein, which should be around 20-25%... 200 pound sedentary to lightly active adult male, 140g of protein, or 560 calories, in a total diet of 2250-2800 calories, depending on activity level)

My wife is vegetarian, mostly vegan because she's allergic to dairy.

I really enjoyed "keeping up" with her when we were dating, because I was really tired of eating the same things all the time. There's really a lot of delicious plant proteins if you take the time to look.

(That being said, our kids like meat. We just don't eat it all the time.)

It’s the corn subsidies.

USA is actually healthier then in 1909. Life expectancy was going up the whole time. A whole bunch of malnutritiom related issues and diseases just disappeared.

You need to go to much more recent times to get worsening results/predictions.

"Last century" is a big piece of that, surely. As recently as 50 years ago, obesity rates were quite low (and risk of hunger among the poor was, you know, more real than it is today).

Wouldn't it be more likely that it's calories, not meat per se, that is the main proxy for measuring our health decline?

I think its dangerous to engage with this website as an earnest attempt to make people healthier as individuals or as a population and not a metastasis of woo-fueld ignorance of data and trends like you're talking about whos goal is ultimately just to sell shit to desperate people.