Protein has always been my safe space in the diet wars. As the pendulum swings back and forth between “carbohydrates are going to kill you” and “fat is going to kill you,” everyone agrees that protein is good for your muscles, satiating, and non-lethal. Everyone except nephrologists, that is.
Back in 1982, a nephrologist—that is, a kidney doctor—named Barry Brenner, co-author of one of the definitive textbooks on nephrology, published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that eating too much protein over a long period of time might overwork the kidneys and eventually lead to chronic kidney disease and even kidney failure. This idea has been hotly debated ever since, with opinions loosely settling into two distinct camps: nephrologists think too much protein is a problem, and sports nutrition researchers think it isn’t.
As someone who pays a lot of attention to the sports nutrition literature and very little attention to the latest nephrology news, I haven’t worried much about Brenner’s hypothesis. But a recent review paper by three nephrologists in Sports Medicine—in my world,…
