Protein matters. But the conversation around how much you actually need is more complicated than the industry would have you believe — and there’s a nutrient most of us are genuinely short on that barely gets a mention.
I’ve been weight training on and off since I was 17 — which is, at this point, basically half my life. And like most people who spend time in gyms, I got drawn into the protein obsession early. Hit your grams. Track everything. Buy the shake. It made sense: more protein equals more muscle equals better health.
Then in 2017 my dad passed away, and a year later my first daughter was born. Two things that arrived close together and changed how I thought about almost everything, including food. I started reading properly — and the picture that emerged was more complicated, and more interesting, than the protein narrative I’d been following.
This isn’t an argument against protein. It matters — genuinely — and I still eat plenty of it. Protein and fibre both deserve a place in the conversation. But the way protein dominates that conversation — and the amounts being recommended — don’t hold up as well to scrutiny as the industry would have you believe. And while everyone’s focused on optimising their protein intake, fibre, the nutrient that arguably matters more for long-term health, barely gets a mention.
Also, it’s worth mentioning, I’m not a nutritionist, and I want to be clear about that. People’s goals, bodies, and circumstances are genuinely diverse — and I’m not trying to speak in absolutes. What I am trying to do is share what the evidence actually says, and question whether the loudest voices in nutrition are always pointing in the most useful direction for most people.
Protein and fibre both deserve a place in the conversation. The difference is that one has a £300 million industry behind it. The other barely gets a mention.
Walk into any supermarket and you’ll see it. Protein bars. Protein cereals. Protein water. High-protein yoghurt. Products that never needed the word “protein” on them now wear it like a badge of credibility.
Scroll through fitness content online and the message is consistent: eat more protein, hit your numbers, buy this supplement. The implication is that protein is the master lever — the thing standing between you and the body, energy, and health you’re after.
There’s something to that. But if you look at the evidence rather than the marketing, a more useful question emerges: what is most people’s diet actually missing — and is protein really it?
The 1g per pound rule — who is it actually for?
The idea that you should eat 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day has become one of the most widely repeated rules in fitness. If you weigh 80kg (roughly 176lbs), that’s 176g of protein daily — a significant amount to build a diet around.
For most recreational lifters and everyday people, the evidence suggests that’s considerably more than necessary.
A meta-analysis co-authored by leading fitness researchers found that the benefits of protein for muscle growth plateau significantly at around 1.6g per kilogram of bodyweight per day — beyond which returns diminish considerably, with some studies suggesting modest additional benefit up to around 2.2g per kg in specific contexts. That’s still significantly less than the widely repeated 1g per pound recommendation.
1.6g per kg of body weight is the point at which protein’s benefits for muscle growth begin to plateau significantly, according to a meta-analysis of over 20 studies.
For context:
The US Recommended Dietary Allowance for protein is 0.8g per kg of body weight per day
A more conservative re-analysis of that data suggests 1.0g per kg is more appropriate
The popular 1g per pound figure (2.2g per kg) sits well above both thresholds
This matters because eating significantly more protein than your body uses isn’t neutral. It displaces other things in a diet that has a finite amount of space — carbohydrates, fats, and crucially, fibre. Chasing a protein target that’s higher than necessary often means eating less of the things that genuinely matter for long-term health.
The industry selling you more than you need
It’s worth understanding why the 1g per pound rule became so dominant — because it didn’t emerge from peer-reviewed research. It became popular in bodybuilding communities over decades, spread through forums, coaches, and supplement brands, and arrived in mainstream fitness culture with a commercial tailwind behind it.
To be clear: most people in that culture aren’t acting in bad faith. Coaches, influencers, and athletes genuinely believe what they’re recommending. And for serious athletes, competitive bodybuilders, or people pushing the limits of what their body can do — higher protein intakes can be justified. When you’re training twice a day and your livelihood depends on your physique, optimising every gram makes sense.
But that’s not most of us. Most of us are trying to:
Get in better shape and feel healthier
Keep up with kids and a demanding job
Keep everything else running alongside it
For that person — which is most of the people buying protein bars and tracking their macros — the advice was designed for someone with a very different body, a very different training volume, and in many cases, a very different relationship with performance-enhancing drugs. It was never meant to be universal. It just got treated that way.
The value of the UK protein supplements market in 2024 is worth £304 million, and is projected to nearly double to £539 million by 2032.
This creates an incentive structure where influencers, coaches, and brands benefit financially from recommending higher protein intakes — and from selling the products that make hitting those targets easier. The advice and the product are often inseparable.
Protein bars are a good example of how this plays out. Marketed as a healthy, convenient snack, many are nutritionally closer to a confectionery product — high in processed ingredients, artificial sweeteners, and refined sugars, with protein content added as the justification.
The label says 25g protein. The rest of the ingredients list sometimes tells a different story.
That’s not to say all protein bars are equal — some are genuinely useful in specific contexts, and if you’re training hard and need something convenient, they’re not the worst option. But they’re not health food. They’re a supplement product in a wrapper designed to look like one.
The nutrient most people are actually short on
While the conversation has been dominated by protein, there’s a quieter, less glamorous nutrient that the data consistently points to as one of the most important things most people in the UK aren’t getting enough of.
Fibre.
Only 4% of UK adults meet the recommended daily fibre intake. The average adult gets around 16g per day — more than 10g below the recommended level.
Fibre isn’t exciting. It doesn’t lend itself to a product launch or an influencer partnership. You can’t put “high fibre” on a label and charge a premium for it the same way you can with protein. But the health case for it is robust and consistent across the research in a way that excessive protein simply isn’t.
A major European prospective study tracking over 500,000 people found that every 10g per day increase in dietary fibre was associated with a 13% reduction in colorectal cancer risk — one of the most significant diet-disease relationships in the data.
13% reduction in colorectal cancer risk for every additional 10g of dietary fibre per day, based on a European study tracking over 500,000 people.
And it’s not just cancer. Here’s what the evidence consistently shows fibre does:
Feeds the gut microbiome — which influences everything from immune function to mental health
Slows sugar absorption — reducing blood glucose spikes and improving energy levels
Improves satiety — making it easier to manage weight without calorie counting
Reduces LDL cholesterol — a key marker for cardiovascular risk
Supports bowel regularity — one of the most overlooked markers of digestive health
Reduces colorectal cancer risk — with every additional 10g per day associated with a 13% reduction in risk
The list is long and the evidence is solid. It’s just not as profitable to sell.
Why this matters for how you eat
None of this means protein doesn’t matter. It does — particularly for people who are active, older, or trying to build or maintain muscle. If you’re lifting regularly, eating adequate protein is genuinely important and worth paying attention to.
It’s also worth being clear about something that applies to everyone regardless of age or gender: muscle mass naturally starts to decline from around the age of 30 — a process called sarcopenia — and that decline accelerates as we get older.
Maintaining muscle isn’t just about how you look. It’s directly linked to mobility, metabolic health, bone density, and quality of life in later years.
For that reason, adequate protein genuinely matters for everyone, and becomes increasingly important the older you get.
This post isn’t an argument against the gym, against protein, or against taking your nutrition seriously — all of those things are worth doing. It’s an argument against the idea that you need to be chasing the numbers being sold to you, particularly if you’re an everyday person rather than a competitive athlete.
For most people eating a reasonably varied diet, hitting an adequate protein intake is not actually the hard part. Most of us get enough without consciously trying.
The harder part — is fibre. And fibre comes from exactly the foods that a protein-obsessed food culture tends to crowd out:
Legumes — lentils, chickpeas, black beans
Whole grains — oats, brown rice, quinoa, barley
Vegetables and fruit
Nuts and seeds
The thing worth noting is that these foods are also substantial sources of plant protein. A 100g serving of cooked lentils contains around 9g of protein and 8g of fibre. Chickpeas, black beans, edamame — all deliver both.
And none of this requires giving up meat, fish, or dairy. These foods work alongside whatever else you eat — it’s about adding more of the right things, not stripping out the rest. Eating more of them doesn’t require choosing between protein and fibre. It just means spending less on products engineered to hit one number, and more on food that does several things at once.
The foods highest in fibre also tend to be high in plant protein. Eating more of them doesn’t require choosing between the two.
That’s the approach Stryve is built around. Not chasing protein targets. Not supplement stacks. Whole food, real variety, and plenty of plants — which is, as it turns out, the approach that holds up best across the long-term evidence. Even when the marketing says otherwise.
If you want to put it into practice, here are three recipes worth starting with:
Sources
- Optimal protein intake meta-analysis — Menno Henselmans / University of Cambridge
- Protein intake RDA and optimal ranges — Examine.com
- UK protein supplements market — Credence Research, 2025
- UK fibre intake statistics — Translational Food Sciences / Oxford Academic, 2026
- Dietary fibre and colorectal cancer — EPIC study, PLOS One, 2012
