We don’t need nearly as much protein as we consume

I learned that any 'health' bars with 12+ grams of carbs are just candy. Yet all except one was over that limit. The exception was 5g yet had sugar alcohol (artifical sweetener?) putting the real number at 20g.

So maybe those bars are intended as whole meal replacement? If so it's not clear on the labels.

Since macronutrients are interchangeable to some degree, they could have written an article called "We don’t need nearly as much fat as we consume" or "We don’t need nearly as much carbs as we consume" as well.

These two paragraphs are very confusing:

> In the early 20th Century, Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson spent a collective five years eating just meat. This meant that his diet consisted of around 80% fat and 20% protein. Twenty years later, he did the same as part of a year-long experiment at the New York City’s Bellevue Hospital in 1928.

> Stefansson wanted to disprove those who argued that humans cannot survive if they only eat meat. But unfortunately for him, in both settings he very quickly became ill when he was eating lean meats without any fat. He developed "protein poisoning”, nicknamed “rabbit starvation”. His symptoms disappeared after he lowered his protein intake and he raised his fat intake. In fact, after returning to New York City and to a typical US diet with more normal levels of protein, he reportedly found his health deteriorating and returned to a low-carb, high fat, and high protein diet until his death aged 83.

This doesn't seem like an anecdote about too much protein, it seems like an anecdote about too little fat. Wikipedia's article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning confirms that this is the right interpretation, and mentions (as this article does, later) that there is no point at which you can get poisoned by too much protein consumption, as long as you are also consuming enough fat.

Wikipedia goes into more detail about the experiment at Bellevue. The two types of diets he was on were a) all meat, with fat and b) all lean meat (analogous to eating solely rabbits, which are naturally lean and have little fat, hence the name). Diet A was fine; diet B was not.

The article's phrasing "a typical US diet with more normal levels of protein" implies that the levels were higher than his previous diet, which caused him problems again. It seems pretty implausible for the standard US diet of the '20s and '30s to be higher-protein than either of these all-meat diets! And the article does mention he returned to a "high protein" diet. It seems like the more reasonable reading is that the important part was that his diet was "low-carb, high fat," which the typical US diet was and is not.

Beginners do not have the muscular coordination for a while, unless they have done some sort of competitive sports before. This takes a while to develop, and if they go to the gym , eat as usual and add one or two protein supplements a day, it's doomed to fail. Summary, their training intensity does not mobilize the body to process more protein and basically every meal would need to be conform. The diet is really 90percent of all, everyone can train, but nobody wants to give up pizza and usual diet schedule. Personal trainers know that, but if they tell this to the customers, they will never see them again. So they tell them white lies. Building muscle takes a lot of time, consistency over long periods, it has to become second nature, else it won't happen. In every gym, you see most people look the same every year, those are the ones. Then you have the ones on performance enhancing drugs and the ones with proper diets, these will have the real results.

If someone gains 2kilos of pure muscle(not fat and water) in a year , it's a lot. That is like 175grams a month, so yeah, these studies are done by people who shouldn't have any business doing such studies.

They leave out too many factors, of course supplements will do nothing for a newcomer.

The only supplements that work you will find on the banned substances lists. The next best thing is a proper diet. I think bodybuilding is a rather dumb sport, but they know how to diet, they have decades of pioneer experience.

If something has more than 10grams of carbs and more than say 7 grams of fat per 100g , it should never be labelled as protein bar. Check the labels, don't trust the packaging brand text. Some of these bars are worse than a Snickers.