My Patient Did Everything The Protein Headlines Told Her To Do, But Missed 1 Crucial Detail

“Sitting across from Diane, watching her go through that food diary meal by meal, I realised that nobody had asked her a simple but impactful question.”

Diane sat across from me looking like someone who’d done everything right and gotten nothing for it.

She was 58, and she’d spent three months following the advice that’s everywhere right now. The headlines, the wellness accounts, this year’s new federal dietary guidelines, which single out women over 40 by name: eat more protein.

She’d taken it seriously, on her own initiative, before we’d ever discussed it – Greek yoghurt at breakfast, a chicken breast at lunch, a protein shake most afternoons, salmon or steak most nights.

She’d started lifting twice a week. She brought a food diary to the visit, unprompted, because she wanted me to see she wasn’t lying to either of us.

Her weight hadn’t moved. Not up, not down. It was just stuck, in a way that made her start to wonder, quietly, whether something was actually wrong with her.

I’m a physician-researcher. I run randomised clinical trials on diet and metabolic health, and I’d watched this same protein message spread through my patient population for months without ever pushing back on it.

It’s advice I don’t think is wrong, exactly, in the broad strokes. But sitting across from Diane, watching her go through that food diary meal by meal, waiting for me to find the thing she’d done wrong, I realised that nobody had asked her a simple but impactful question: not how much protein are you eating, but where is it coming from?

We went through the diary together. Her protein intake wasn’t just........

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