Ya but the general hysteria is that any AI use is bad and that we can only trust this AI use because its from Linus. I’ve used AI successfully for debugging and learning new code bases and patches and I’ve been told I’m wrong for doing so.

People eat more than they need because modern society makes it incredibly easy to, and we’re removed from the survival conditions that made high-energy foods so attractive to us in the first place. The American lifestyle is particularly bad in this regard, with our car-dependent cities, sedentary lifestyles, abundance of cheap, calorie-dense food, and food companies that spend heavily on advertising and lobby politicians to keep regulations and labeling requirements favorable to them.

Agreed, although I’ll add a few things. Protein has a much higher thermic effect of food (TEF), meaning your body expends more energy processing it. Protein and carbs both contain around 4 calories/gram and fat around 9, but TEF is roughly 20–30% for protein, 5–10% for carbs and 0–3% for fat. In other words, your body burns roughly that percentage of the calories from each just processing them.

More importantly, protein supplies the amino acids your body needs to maintain and rebuild muscle; carbs can’t substitute for the essential amino acids you have to get from your diet. That’s particularly useful during a caloric deficit, when you’re trying to lose fat while preserving muscle, and as you get older and age-related muscle loss becomes a concern.

Protein also tends to be more satiating than carbs or fat and affects appetite hormones like ghrelin, GLP-1 and CCK. So while there’s no magic number of calories that adding protein will make you eat less, the evidence supports protein making it easier to feel satisfied on fewer calories.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32768415/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8878356/

So protein helps you maintain muscle, makes you feel fuller per calorie, and costs your body more energy to process. There are pretty good reasons people trying to lose fat, build/maintain muscle, or stay healthy as they age to seek out higher-protein foods. The marketing obsession didn’t come out of nowhere, even if companies take advantage of it by plastering the protein content across the front of the package while leaving things like carbs, saturated fat, and total calories much less prominent.