I’ve had it with the current protein obsession.
Eat half your weight in grams of protein a day. Eat protein every 90 minutes. Eat protein to lose weight. Eat protein to build muscle. Eat protein to stay full. Pack it in. Count grams.
Here, have a beef stick.
Here, eat some cottage cheese.
Here, HAVE A COW.
(Vegetarians, y’all are screwed.)
You can tell people have completely lost their everloving minds because protein is now showing up places it doesn’t belong: in brownies, poptarts, iced coffee, pretzels, water — WATER!
(So, vegetarians, maybe you aren’t screwed after all?)
Whatever happened to — I don’t know — just eating food?
Meat is meat.
An apple is an apple.
Cake is cake.
The end.
I’ve run the calculations, and even as a meat-eating human, most days I’m not even close to getting my current recommended amount of protein. To do so, I’d either have to overeat, or forgo other beloved staples like rice and bread, veggies, and ice cream — and y’all know I’m not about to give up my ice cream.
But weirder than putting protein where it doesn’t belong is the messaging. No matter the food fad — low-fat, atkins, keto, paleo, juice, 100-mile, etc — it’s always the same: “Food is salvation.”
But we all know that’s not true, right? I mean, we all know that drinking an ice-cold Coke isn’t going to transform us into scantily-clad, sexy beach babes, and yet somehow protein in our coffee is going to turn us into the best version of ourselves?
Oh, come now.
And there’s another thing that bothers me: the idea that I must have — that I need — more. Millions of people live well with simple diets — beans and rice, ugali and greens, injera and lentils, dal and roti, hummus and pita. To say we need more protein strikes me as presumptuous or entitled. Maybe even elitist.
If anything, what we probably need is less — less Doritos, with or without the extra protein.
Sure, protein is important, and some people absolutely need protein-enhanced foods. Medically speaking, protein smoothies, granola bars and water can be lifesavers.
(Awhile back when I was fussing about yet another raging fad, my younger son pointed out that fads have benefits: a heightened focus on anything — be it a new diet or a social movement — allows for advancements. When the pendulum inevitably swings the other way, it leaves behind the benefits of deeper understanding and expanded world views.)
So once this current craze blows over, people who really do need protein-boosted foods are going to have so many great options.
But for the rest of us? Soon most people will (once again) be like, Yeah, protein is good — in moderation.
our traditional non-protein-enhanced Sunday supper
P.S. When I was almost done writing this post, I happened upon an excellent Fresh Air interview with Daniel Lieberman, author of Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals About Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well. In the interview, he quoted a seventh century B.C. Greek poet: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
When being chased, Lieberman explained, foxes try all sorts of things to escape, but the hedgehog just curls into a ball. Meaning: the fox sees complexity and the hedgehog fits everything into one big (often simple) idea. So when it comes to fad diets, hedgehogs are the ones with the one-plan-fixes-all mentality, while foxes seek the nuance and complexity.
Lieberman’s plea (as I heard it): be foxy.
P.P.S. I almost forgot! I have a great protein bar to recommend! (Because I am nothing if not riddled with inconsistencies.) It’s called The Perfect Bar. My daughter made me try one and they are sooooo good. Like a cross between homemade peanut butter honey balls and the inside of a Reeces cup, but way better than both. Super dense, no weird flavors or textures, with a satisfying chew. Sometimes, we like to cut a bar into tiny cubes to eat with our morning coffee; this way, a single bar lasts several days. They’re on sale at Costco now, I think. In the refrigerator section with all the cheeses. Cost is about a dollar a bar. (Similar on Amazon.)
This same time, years previous: the second first day, jammy oat bars, on eating meat, quark, walk the walk 2020, chocolate cake, full circle, fresh nectarine galette, family extended, on love and leftovers, the quotidian (8.25.14), he got me.
8 Comments
Jennifer
I’m LOVING KC’s energy for this! I also write with that stream of consciousness vibe (so do you, JJ!), in a good way. And if I had 3 cups of coffee, I, too, would use semicolons in parenthetical phrases and dare to write one parenthetical thought IMMEDIATELY after another. I love it. I also love Lindyo’s simple synopsis.
I have many a time, rolled my eyes at the fat diet and must-have-supplements that have wended their way into my home by way of my husband. Creatine! Protein! Vitamin D! Magnesium! Meh.
We had a nice chat over pints just the other day in which I waxed poetic about my fantasy that just eating grass fed lambs and pasture raised chicken, along with homegrown fruits and vegetables and scratch-made breads and grains, would be the cat’s meow to my cardiologist, and that he would get over the issue of cholesterol in eggs and myoglobin in red meat. Alas. And yet I will still raise still raise these things. I might just die on this hill, surrounded by the veggies and animals. Haha
DB Stewart
Well said. Yes, I think we’ve all reached peak protein cognitive load, yet in this current time of doomscrolling at least we’re focused on taking care of ourselves? And yes, ice-cream is indeed taking care of yourself.
Ruby Freed
Amen, Jennifer
Kim
Trying to sort out the incongruity of blasting excessive protein fads and then singing the praises of a protein bar
Jennifer Jo
Haha — I’m eating it for the candy-esque food quality, not the protein. (It’s a really delicious treat!) And sharing about it here to illustrate that nothing is ever purely just one way, including my opinions and rants (wink-wink).
KC
Yeah. I’m torn, because on the one hand:
1. higher protein intake in skinny elderly people as a proportion of what they eat (esp. as how *much* they eat goes down) helps preserve muscle, and it is *hard* keeping muscle as you age past a certain point but it is really beneficial for continued function levels
2. extra protein does clinically help with surgery and injury recovery, up to a certain point, and
3. apparently with the GLP-1 stuff (weight loss shots?), muscle wasting is also a problem (I haven’t had any reason to look into this one as to whether eating more protein helps, but since the main mechanism is Making You Eat SO MUCH Less, there probably does need to be *some* shift in percentage of protein vs. not?)
On the other hand, most of the protein in the US isn’t *fair* at all – if all the Protein Boosting was from soybeans and beans and whatnot, combined with their complete-protein buddy foods, then it’s a way of eating that is not, just, like, obscenely more expensive financially and environmentally than 80% of the rest of the world eats?
But then again I literally can’t digest beans or lentils (I get intestinal inflammation and everything gets dumped out before it gets digested) so I eat animal proteins and… those are the same “obscenely more expensive, financially and environmentally,” sort of thing. (I’d quite literally die if we couldn’t afford the medications and the foods, which is tricky except a lot of people in poorer areas in the world also do just… die… because even a lot of things that are *way* less expensive than what keeps me alive aren’t within their reach; see USAID; vaccines; beans and rice; oral hydration salts; etc.)
And there are economies of scale sometimes, when the *ingredients* are cheap but the processing/transport isn’t, such that poorer people in America at least can access Protein Things if enough other people buy the Protein Things (the opposite holds true for things with scarcity; do not expect larks’ tongues to have economies of scale that help poorer people, in general)(but stuff made from huge field crops sometimes used for animal feed have at least a *chance* of economy of scale advantages). (poorer people in the US often have an enough-calories-not-enough-nutrition diet; so more protein for them: generally good?)
(at least hedgehogs don’t wildly change their strategies every 4-6 years when the diet fads change. The herding instinct is pretty weird.)
Anyway! Yes, with caveats! Thank you for writing about this, and I hope more people can find delicious, satisfying ways of eating that work well for their bodies, their pocketbooks, and also for their neighbors writ large.
Becky R.
What all the fads leave out are the nuances about nutrition, you are correct! Older folks, like me, need a bit more protein to avoid frailty, bodybuilders need more, etc. I don’t generally eat animal protein these days unless it is dairy or seafood, maybe some occasional chicken. It is less about active choice than it appears. It is just not appetizing to me very often. And many scientific studies have verified that people who eat less animal protein most often live longer than people who eat a lot. But this narrative does not fit in with all the marketing campaigns for protein by the industrial food complex. I have almost become a pescatarian in my old age, but I see that as good. I am still getting protein, just not in meat intake. When you look at the limits of nutritional choice in the rest of the world, our obsessions seem silly. Good post, Jennifer.
LindyO
“Be foxy” is my new mantra.☺️