The protein number on the back of your cereal box was never designed to make you strong. It was designed to keep you from getting sick. Those are not the same goal, and almost everything confusing about protein advice comes from pretending they are.

The official Recommended Daily Allowance, the famous 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, is a floor. Nutrition scientists calculated it as the amount that keeps a sedentary adult from sliding into outright deficiency, from losing nitrogen faster than they replace it. It is a do-not-fall-below line. Somewhere along the way it got quietly reinterpreted as a target, as if hitting the minimum were the same as optimizing for a long, mobile, sharp-minded life. That reinterpretation, argues a new perspective paper in Frontiers in Nutrition, is a category error we have been making for decades.

I will admit my first reaction to the headline, “scientists say most people need more protein than current guidelines suggest,” was a tired sigh. The internet does not need another voice telling you to eat more protein; the gym-bro industrial complex has that covered. So I went and read the actual paper to find the catch. The catch is interesting, and it is not the one I expected.

An argument, not an experiment

This is a single-author perspective by Dr. Chris Macdonald, a Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Perspective means argument, not experiment: no new trial, no fresh cohort, no data he collected, just one researcher synthesizing the existing literature into a case for changing public guidance. Titled “Beyond the bare minimum,” it argues that the protein guidelines and the physical-activity guidelines share an original sin: both were built around minimum thresholds to prevent deficiency, not around the intakes that actually maximize healthspan.

The numbers he proposes are not shy. Against a UK guideline of roughly 0.75 g/kg, basically the standard RDA, he points toward something closer to 1.5 g/kg for general optimal health, and up to about 2.2 g/kg for older adults and anyone trying to build or hold onto muscle. He also flags the per-meal piece that I find genuinely underappreciated: aging muscle needs a bigger single dose to switch on protein synthesis, on the order of 25 to 30 grams of protein in one sitting rather than the same total dribbled across the day.

The part that survived my skepticism

Here is what made me stop rolling my eyes. The core claim is not fringe, and it does not rest on this paper alone. Back in 2013, an international group of researchers published the PROT-AGE position paper, and they landed in the same place: older adults should be eating at least 1.0 to 1.2 g/kg per day, well above the RDA, specifically to fight off sarcopenia, the slow muscle wasting that turns a stumble into a hip fracture and a hip fracture into a loss of independence. A separate line of work has spent years asking, more or less explicitly, whether we are finally ready to recommend more than the RDA for aging adults.

So the underlying biology isn’t new, and it isn’t only his. As we age our muscle becomes “anabolically resistant,” meaning it responds more sluggishly to the protein we eat, which is exactly why the older body needs more of it and needs it in bigger per-meal hits to clear that higher activation threshold. The official guidance simply never caught up. The floor that protects a 25-year-old from deficiency is a bad target for a 70-year-old trying to keep her legs under her, and that reframe should have been mainstream guidance years ago.

Now the part to keep your eyes open about

And yet. I cannot tell you about this paper honestly without telling you who wrote it. Dr. Macdonald is also the founder and director of something called the Better Protein Institute, an organization whose entire stated mission is to “accelerate the transition to superior sources of dietary protein” and which is built around exactly this question of how much protein we need and how to get people to eat more of it. He is, in other words, a man whose professional identity rests on the proposition that protein is underconsumed, publishing a paper arguing that protein is underconsumed.

The conflict-of-interest statement on the paper reads: “This work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.” The only funding disclosed is publication costs from his own Cambridge college. I am not accusing anyone of cashing a meat-lobby check; the institute’s pitch is actually about sustainable protein, land use and self-sufficiency, not Big Beef, and it publishes open-access. But “no conflict of interest” is doing some heavy lifting when the author runs an institute devoted to the precise conclusion the paper reaches. That is less a financial conflict than an intellectual one, and the cleanest version of this paper would have just said so.

The exercise half of the argument is where the flattening shows. The paper notes, correctly, that even 15 minutes of daily activity cuts all-cause mortality, and that combining aerobic work with resistance training is associated with something like a 40% reduction. Great, achievable, evidence-backed. But the “optimal” Macdonald gestures toward is training that climbs to multiple hours per day, a prescription almost no working adult will ever meet and one the cheerful “do more” headlines quietly drop. An optimum nobody can reach is not much use as public-health advice.

What I’d actually do

Strip away the institute and the single-author caveats, and the load-bearing point holds: the protein RDA is a deficiency floor masquerading as a wellness target, and for older adults especially, eating to the floor is a quietly bad bet against your own future strength. That part I would act on, and the independent PROT-AGE evidence is enough on its own to take it seriously, no perspective paper required.

What I would not do is treat a single-author argument from a protein advocate as new gospel, or read “eat more, train for hours” as a literal instruction. If you are over sixty, the move that is actually supported is concrete and small: aim for the upper end of intake, 1.0 to 1.2 g/kg and more if you lift, get a real 25-to-30-gram hit at each meal instead of saving it all for dinner, and add resistance training your knees will forgive. The guidelines were written to keep you alive. This is the difference between alive and well, and on that narrow point the gym bros and the Cambridge fellow happen to be right.

Sources

  1. Frontiers in Nutrition – Macdonald, “Beyond the bare minimum,” perspective (2026)
  2. ScienceDaily – “Scientists say most people need more protein than current guidelines suggest” (2026)
  3. PROT-AGE Study Group – Bauer et al., protein recommendations for older people, JAMDA (2013)
  4. Advances in Nutrition – “Protein Requirements and Optimal Intakes in Aging: Are We Ready to Recommend More Than the RDA?”
  5. Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge – Dr. Chris Macdonald fellow profile / Better Protein Institute