Nutrition
How to eat for muscle and long-term health, without fads. Start with the two questions that decide most of it: how much protein you need, and what food really does to your testosterone.
Two questions decide most of what a man eats for his health: how much protein he needs, and whether food can change his hormones. This hub answers both with numbers, and treats everything else as detail.
Diet advice for men usually arrives as a system to follow. What the research supports is narrower and duller: enough protein, enough energy to match what you do, and losing excess fat if you carry it.
All guides in this hub
The Mifflin-St Jeor equation: the formula, and how accurate it is
A formula used by many calorie calculators: what it estimates, where accuracy varies, and how to compare the result with a multi-week trend.
Foods and testosterone: what your diet really changes
No single food reliably boosts testosterone. See what evidence says about excess weight, dietary fat, alcohol, soy, zinc and vitamin D.
How much protein do men actually need?
Protein needs for men by weight, training and age, with daily ranges, meal distribution evidence, food sources and kidney cautions.
Where to start
- How much protein do men need? The adult RDA, training ranges and where additional returns become uncertain.
- Belly fat and your waist The measurement that predicts risk better than the scale, and which changes reduce it.
What this hub answers
- How much protein does a man need?
- The adult RDA is 0.8 g/kg/day and is designed to cover nearly all healthy adults. The ISSN considers 1.4 to 2.0 g/kg/day sufficient for most exercising adults; a modeled breakpoint near 1.62 g/kg has wide uncertainty and is not a universal requirement or ceiling. Use the protein guide and calculator for context.
- Can food raise testosterone?
- Only by fixing something that was suppressing it. Losing excess weight raises testosterone measurably; no individual food does much on its own.
- Do I need to cut carbohydrates?
- Not for hormonal reasons. Energy balance and protein intake do the work, and cutting carbohydrate mainly changes how easy that is to sustain.