Yet another Hacker News

26 points thm 2 hours ago 44 comments

dauertewigkeit 1 hour ago | parent

sp4cec0wb0y 1 hour ago | parent

The next wave will be "fiber-maxxing", with the increased rate of colon cancer in millenials and gen z. Seriously guys, get your fiber intake.

sp4cec0wb0y 1 hour ago | parent

I know no one asked but if you're a gym bro and looking for easy fiber intake, get the carb balance tortillas from mission. 17g of fiber per tortilla.

UncleOxidant 1 hour ago | parent

And OliPops have 6 to 9g per can.

chneu 59 minutes ago | parent

Just eat real food.

Stop substituting and finding short cuts. Just eat a balanced meal with vegetables.

nojito 53 minutes ago | parent

You’re grossly underestimating how much fiber a person needs to eat.

nradov 49 minutes ago | parent

How much fiber does a person need to eat, as measured in weight or volume of common vegetables?

Izikiel43 32 minutes ago | parent

Men around 40g per day, it's like 2 pounds of a balanced mix of legumes, beans, vegetables, whole grains and fruits.

ipsento606 44 minutes ago | parent

that "fiber" is chemically modified resistant starch

the FDA allows it to be called fiber, but it acts differently in the body to the soluble and insoluble fiber that most people are familiar with

IMO, it's a mistake to treat fiber as a single, fungible food component, rather than as a family of different substances with different health effects

if you're looking for "easy fiber intake", there is much more and stronger evidence for psyllium-based soluble fiber, widely available in cheap and convenient drinks like metamucil (I prefer formulations without the dye and maltodextrin, but that's getting into the weeds)

crisdux 1 hour ago | parent

I think there are two main philosophies at play. Either you give the gut bulk through eating fiber, or you eat foods to maintain a fast transit time. I lean toward the transit time approach by eating plenty of easy to digest simple carbs. Personally I've never felt better.

I think eating hard-to-digest, crappy proteins(like all the protein added to shakes, bars, etc)... paired with fermentable bulk fiber... is actually the recipe for inflammation, irritation and colon cancer.

deadbabe 1 hour ago | parent

No studies show protein has anything to do with colon cancer and in fact it could even have protective effects.

Alive-in-2025 55 minutes ago | parent

But we do have endless studies showing not eating enough fiber increases your chance of having colon cancer, and we also know a lot of people today don't have nearly as much fiber as people did in the past.

crisdux 25 minutes ago | parent

mainstream science literally links heavy meat consumption to colon cancer all the time.

dolorian 1 hour ago | parent

Fiber is indigestible and not required for human health. It's also a cause of bloating, constipation and gas... because it's indigestible. Fiber does have the benefit of slowing sugar digestion, but you can and should just eat less sugar. Some forms of fiber can be converted to fatty acids by bacteria in your colon, while also producing other byproducts. You can get those fatty acids by eating more meat without the added stress on your digestive system.

Compare the human digestive system of a human being to a wolf (carnivore), a pig (omnivore) and a gorilla (herbivorous hindgut fermenter). The human gut by proportions sits somewhere between wolf and pig.

Look up the actual studies on fiber rather than pop science articles, and examine them critically. They'll do things like assume that pooping more often and having a greater volume of poop is healthier, with no basis. Things like how easy it is to poop or feelings of being bloated are harder to quantify, so they're typically ignored.

Or you get the extrapolating cancer risk based on some vaguely understood biomarker, which is one step below "in mice" as far as science goes.

iosjunkie 1 hour ago | parent

My LDL numbers beg to differ.

vmg12 1 hour ago | parent

Thankfully I think demand will have to grow a lot for legumes to rise in price much since legumes are basically a byproduct required for growing other more valuable crops.

It's great that beans look kind of gross because otherwise people would learn they taste really good and are healthy at the same time.

halflife 50 minutes ago | parent

Beans look gross?

vmg12 12 minutes ago | parent

Not dry but they don't exactly look appetizing when cooked and covered in bean juice if you don't already like them.

Izikiel43 38 minutes ago | parent

I think the problem with beans is not looking gross, it's that they cause you to contribute a lot of methane to climate warming (you fart a lot).

vmg12 12 minutes ago | parent

That's only if your stomach isn't acclimated to a high fiber diet.

adonovan 2 minutes ago | parent

The methane quantity from human legume consumption is negligible, and beans are just about the most greenhouse-efficient source of protein there is.

Cow “farts” (actually rumen belches) are something else entirely.

hobo123 1 hour ago | parent

In Germany they already started. There's protein XYZ everywhere, but I've recently seen ads for high fiber drinks.

chneu 1 hour ago | parent

Won't happen.

The main reason protein is highly sought after is that it's an ego/prestige thing associated with excessive self care.

Our diets are very heavily connected to our social status. Being able to consume that level of protein is all about excessive self care.

Fiber is cheap and viewed as a poor person thing. Nobody is holding up their expensive grass fed fiber to brag about the environmental toll it takes, like folks do with their meat and whatnot.

A lot of the protein fad can be traced back to dairy farmers pushing whey into every product they can.

conorcleary 15 minutes ago | parent

Not the farmers; the producers, distributors, and everything on the way to the consumer. Research labs and marketing agencies construct fads and push it through their magazines and media IP.

dfxm12 52 minutes ago | parent

Of course. These things are cyclical. Some might remember the f plan diet or similar.

dyauspitr 42 minutes ago | parent

That’s the difference between protein and fiber though. You can essentially spam the amount of protein you take in and the excess just gets expelled. The same is not true of fiber too much fiber has downsides.

jjtheblunt 37 minutes ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezoar

presumably is what you allude to?

Izikiel43 36 minutes ago | parent

> spam the amount of protein you take in and the excess just gets expelled.

Not true? It becomes fat if you are above your caloric intake.

Fiber on the other is just undigestible, so you always expel it, though I agree that too much fiber will cause issues.

pull_my_finger 11 minutes ago | parent

That doesn't happen magically, and "spamming" protein can definitely damage your kidneys.

luke5441 29 minutes ago | parent

Are there studies showing the increased cancer rate is caused (or at least correlated with) reduced fiber intake? Or is this just a guess of yours?

joshdavham 20 minutes ago | parent

I’m pretty puzzled honestly at how many people are fiber deficient.

I once did the calculation for my daily fiber intake and it was well beyond the daily recommended minimum.

What are people eating (or not eating) that leads to a fiber deficiency?

vmg12 10 minutes ago | parent

If you don't eat legumes or whole grain bread it's not hard to be fiber deficient.

boothby 1 hour ago | parent

I was hoping this would be an article about molecular evolution

Lyngbakr 1 hour ago | parent

CBC's Front Burner podcast also covered this recently in a great episode. Recommended!

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/209-front-burner/epis...

surfmike 1 hour ago | parent

> setting a daily target of 1.2–1.6 grammes per kilogramme of body weight, 50-100 per cent above the longstanding recommended dietary allowance of 0.8g

This is a good range for improving for maintaining your body composition; preserving or building muscle. Fitness coaches are recommending 2.2g/lb (1g per lb) or even more which doesn't have much scientific backing. 1.6g/kg seems to be the max that will benefit muscle gain.

On the other hand, there are some (Valter Longo, biologist at UCLA) who say that such high protein will reduce your overall longevity. He recommends 0.36g protein per lb body weight.

I don't know what to do with this info. Personally, I stay around 1.2g protein/lb (and exercise) as a middle ground.

happytoexplain 1 hour ago | parent

> 2.2g/lb (1g per lb)

Did you mean 2.2g/kg?

clayhacks 1 hour ago | parent

I’ve definitely noticed this in my diet. I am a gym rat so I eat a lot of protein, but I’ve seen an uptick in other protein focused snacks and foods around. At my office the protein shakes in the fridge disappear pretty quick compared to the soda, perhaps due to folks who want to get more protein easily more than other gym rats

adrian_b 1 hour ago | parent

The actual content of the article is about the great increase in the price of whey protein concentrate since last summer, until now, apparently due to greatly increased demand for it.

Where I live, in the European Union, the price of whey protein concentrate had doubled around the beginning of 2026 and now it has reached even a triple price in comparison with a year earlier.

For a few years in the past, before the price increase, whey protein concentrate had been cheaper than the cheapest meat, per its content of protein. Now it has become about 50% more expensive than chicken breast, per protein content.

This is annoying for me, because where I live there were only 2 ways for achieving a diet satisfying simultaneously 3 criteria without including meat: sufficient daily protein intake, not exceeding the calories threshold that would cause rapid gain of weight and price not greater than an equivalent diet with meat (there are a lot of plant protein concentrates, but all are many times more expensive than cheap meat, at least here).

One way is to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, which is an activity that wastes too much time and too much water, the other way was to use whey protein concentrate as an ingredient for various dishes made from vegetables, to increase their protein content.

At the current price, the use of whey protein concentrate is no longer attractive, despite the fact that whey protein is the ideal source of protein, with optimum amino-acid composition and perfect digestibility.

The FT article believes that this sudden increase in the demand for whey protein concentrate was caused by the widespread use of drugs like Ozempic for weight loss, which also causes loss of muscular mass, leading to the use of protein supplements to prevent it, and also to the new US dietary guidelines, which recommend an increased consumption of protein (the old US recommendations for daily protein intake were notorious as much too low, i.e. they were at a level that prevents death, without ensuring good health, but the new recommendations might have jumped on the other side of an optimum intake).

The only possible positive consequence of this huge price increase is that it might convince some people to invest in the production of whey protein concentrate from cultures of genetically-modified fungi, instead of from cow milk. There already exists a strain of the fungus Trichoderma, whose genome was modified to secrete cow whey protein, instead of an enzyme secreted by the wild fungi.

Unlike with "lab-grown meat", there is no doubt that it will be possible to produce protein powders of whey protein or of egg-white protein in a cheaper way from fungal cultures than from milk or eggs.

axelthegerman 1 hour ago | parent

> where I live there were only 2 ways for achieving a diet satisfying simultaneously 3 criteria without including meat

If you want the same price or cheaper than meat, why not eat meat then?

I'm celiac, I cannot eat gluten and a GF diet can be up to 600% the price of a gluten diet - too bad for me (but not just because of the price)

adrian_b 58 minutes ago | parent

It is likely that in the near future I will return to eating a moderate amount of chicken meat, after I will finish my reserves of whey protein concentrate, which were bought a long time ago, when it was cheap.

Most plant protein concentrates are not an acceptable substitute for meat, because their very high prices make obvious that their production is less efficient than that of meat, i.e. it requires a lot of extra energy and chemical reagents.

More than half of my protein intake comes from plant sources like lentils and wheat, but I cannot raise that percentage to 100%, because I gain weight immediately.

Fortunately, I do not have any problem with gluten, so I can enjoy bread that I bake at home, which is tasty and which has a negligible cost per protein content.

mawadev 1 hour ago | parent

If I go to the store, I can buy extra protein milk, it is the most absurd product. Its like taking vitamin pill supplement tier marketing

JTbane 1 hour ago | parent

I mean this is not a bad thing, I personally feel more sated eating protein-enriched food and am less likely to snack excessively.

redanddead 47 minutes ago | parent

Genuinely, we were all deficient for so long

Look at our fucking food! We have smooth brained governance in food, why do we still have real sugar in candy when we can (AND DO) use fake sugar.

We of course fucked up protein intake, this is a CORRECTION towards healthier food as it always should have fucking been

We literally have 1/8 of the US population, and possibly hundreds of millions of people globally, on fucking peptides to protect themselves from the insane food we don’t want to regulate

cosmotic 3 minutes ago | parent

Except in China where it's very hard to find protien supplements or lean meat. I visited two years ago and really struggled.