10/08/2026
“Just Eat More Meat and Eggs” Is Not a Metabolic Health Strategy! I keep hearing the same oversimplified advice being given to people with completely different nutritional and metabolic needs:
“You need to lose weight? Eat more meat and eggs.”
“You’re underweight? Eat more meat and eggs.”
“Hormonal problems? More meat and eggs.”
As a Clinical Holistic Nutritionist working extensively with women’s hormone health, weight management and metabolic health, I find this advice deeply reductive. Protein matters. Adequate protein matters enormously. Meat and eggs can absolutely form part of a healthy diet for people who choose to eat them.
But “eat more meat and eggs” is not a clinical nutrition strategy. Whether someone needs to gain weight, lose adipose tissue, preserve muscle, improve insulin sensitivity or navigate perimenopause, the objective is not simply to push animal protein higher. We need to assess total energy intake, protein requirements, protein distribution, fibre, carbohydrate quality, fat quality, micronutrient adequacy, muscle stimulus, sleep, stress, metabolic markers, gastrointestinal health and the individual's medical context.
For fat loss, eating more meat does not somehow override energy balance. For healthy weight gain, simply increasing meat and eggs does not guarantee adequate energy, carbohydrate, fibre, calcium, essential fats or overall nutritional adequacy. And for body recomposition, protein works alongside appropriate resistance training and sufficient total nutrition.
From a cardiometabolic perspective, telling everyone to indiscriminately increase meat can also be particularly poor advice. The 2026 ACC/AHA dyslipidaemia guideline specifically identifies reducing saturated fat as an important dietary component of LDL-C management and notes that saturated fat is commonly found in foods including red meat. It also cites evidence that replacing meat with plant protein can reduce LDL-C.
This becomes especially relevant when working with women approaching and moving through midlife. We should not become so obsessed with protein that we stop looking at the rest of the plate, or the woman's actual biomarkers.
And fibre is not an optional decorative extra. Legumes, vegetables, fruit, seeds, nuts and whole grains where tolerated contribute fibres and phytochemicals that animal foods simply do not provide. Current dietary guidance continues to emphasise dietary patterns containing a variety of nutrient-dense foods rather than reducing human nutrition to one food group.
The same applies to eggs. Eggs are nutritious foods and can be appropriate for many people. The American Heart Association's scientific advisory on dietary cholesterol specifically emphasises the importance of the overall dietary pattern.
So when somebody presents with weight resistance, insulin resistance, dyslipidaemia, PCOS, perimenopausal body-composition changes or difficulty gaining weight, my response will never be:
“Just eat more meat and eggs.”
My question is: Why is this happening in this particular person?
Then we build the nutritional strategy around the answer.
Clinical nutrition requires assessment, context, individualisation and critical thinking. And if the same nutritional advice is being prescribed to an underweight person, an insulin-resistant woman, a woman with elevated LDL-C and someone trying to lose body fat, that is not personalised nutrition.
Disclaimer: The man depicted in this image is entirely fictional and AI-generated. He does not represent or depict any real person.
