America Has Entered Late-Stage Protein
On a recent Tuesday morning, I was blessed with a miracle in a mini-mart. I had set out to find the protein bar I kept hearing about, only to find a row of empty boxes. But then I spotted the shimmer. Pushed to the back of one carton, gleaming in its gold wrapper, was a single Salted Peanut Butter David Protein Bar. It was mine.
David bars are putty-like rectangles of pure nutritional efficiency: 28 grams of protein stuffed into 150 calories, or roughly the equivalent of eight egg whites cooked without oil. They are booming right now. After all, in this era of protein mania, one must always be optimizing. A Quest bar might get you 20 grams of protein for just under 200 calories, but David—named after Michelangelo’s masterpiece—does more for less. “Humans aren’t perfect,” promises one David tagline, “but David is.” Why, given the possibility of perfection, would you accept eight grams less?
If a food with more protein is better, then it follows that a food with less is worse. After eating my David bar, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit bad about my dinner of brown rice and spicy chickpeas. A cup of Eden Foods organic chickpeas (240 calories) gets you a measly 12 grams. Now that I was living in the world of David, I was newly ambivalent about eating anything that wasn’t chunks of unadulterated protein. I am fueling, I thought, shoving cubes of baked tofu into my mouth. Did you know that green peas have an unusual amount of protein for a vegetable? With unsettling frequency, I began to add frozen peas to my dinners. (They’re not great on cacio e pepe, it turns out.)
I have become quietly obsessed with this one single macronutrient. How could I not be? Everything is protein now: There are protein chips and protein ice creams and cinnamon protein Cheerios. Lemonade is protein, and so is water. Last month, Chipotle introduced a “high protein cup” consisting of four ounces of cubed chicken. Melanie Masarin, the founder and CEO of Ghia, a nonalcoholic-drink brand, recently told me that an investor asked her whether Ghia has plans for a high-protein aperitif. No, but the investor’s logic was obvious: Healthy people, the kind who tend to watch their drinking, only want one thing. This week, the federal government released its latest set of dietary guidelines—including a newly inverted food pyramid. At the top is protein.
[Read: Protein madness has gone too far]
In some ways, protein is just the latest all-consuming nutritional fixation. For decades, the goal was to avoid fat, which meant that pretzels were good and peanut butter was bad and fat-free Snackwell’s devil’s-food cookie cakes were a cultural phenomenon. Then Americans rediscovered fat and villainized carbs. But protein is different. Whatever your dreams are, protein seems to be the answer. It supports muscle gain, for those trying to bulk up, but it’s also satiating, which means people trying to lose weight are also advised to eat more protein. It has the power to make you bigger and more jacked, but also smaller and more delicate. People on GLP-1s are supposed to be especially mindful of their protein intake, to prevent muscle loss on extremely low-calorie diets, but so are weight lifters.
It is a nutritional philosophy that encourages not restriction but abundance: as much protein as possible, all the time. You can have your cake and eat it too (as long as it is made with “protein flour”). In a world where the very act of eating feels fraught, layered with a lifetime of rules and fads and judgments about what food is and is not “good,” protein offers absolution: You don’t have to feel bad about this. It has so many grams! What a beautifully straightforward recommendation: Eat more of this one thing that happens to be everywhere, and that frequently tastes good.
The low rattle of protein mania—the protein matchas and protein Pop-Tarts and protein seasonings to sprinkle on your protein chicken cubes—can be as maddening as it is inescapable. Everybody knows that you are supposed to eat a varied diet with many different types of foods that provide many different nutrients. But only protein is endowed with a special kind of redemptive power. Nobody is pretending that tortilla chips are a cornerstone of a balanced diet, but if they’re protein tortilla chips (7 grams), well, then maybe they’re at least fine. This is fantastic news if your goal is to enjoy tortilla chips, but it does have a tendency to recast all food that has not been protein-ified—either by nature or by the addition of whey-protein isolate—as a minor failure. It is depressing to look at a pile of roasted vegetables, arranged elegantly over couscous, and think: I will try harder tomorrow. I know, because I do it.
Protein is supposed to allow people to realize their untapped potential—to make us stronger and sharper. I suspect, though, that I would be stronger and sharper if I could stop ambiently thinking about my protein intake. That the world is now covered in a protein-infused haze provides constant reminders that I am falling short. Lots of protein evangelists will tell you that this is how cavemen ate, and therefore it is good. I think the best part of being a caveman would be not worrying about protein.
As nutritional trends go, there are worse obsessions than protein. Even if there is still significant debate about how much protein one needs, you are unlikely to send yourself into kidney failure because you protein-maxxed too hard. But the fanatical focus on protein as the true answer, the universal key to transforming the body you have into the one you want—7 grams, 28 grams, 11 grams, a chicken smoothie—feels eerily familiar. We counted calories, grams of fat, carbohydrates, trying to distill the messy science of nutrition into one single quantitative metric. Protein, for all its many virtues, is just another thing to count.