For a few weeks last fall, I was eating a deflated rectangle made of cottage cheese, eggs and shredded Cheddar every day for lunch. When this unholy concoction first came out of the oven, it would seem so fluffy and filled with promise; warm and buttery yellow. By the time this egg bake made it to my plate, it fell into a sad lump. It always tasted fine; I’ve had much worse. But it’s certainly not what I would have chosen to eat regularly if I had not listened to the siren song of #proteinfluencers.
Protein has been the hot macronutrient for a while now. Longtime readers may recall that I gently mocked my husband for his protein obsession back in 2023. He had been listening to health podcasts and social media posts, and various protein powders made their way into our pantry. In the two years since I wrote that piece, protein has become even more ubiquitous. This month, The Wall Street Journal noted that “In the year to Feb. 22, the fastest-growing grocery items were those with the most protein per serving — 25 grams or more, according to NielsenIQ data.” The extended Kardashian clan, who never met a trend they couldn’t capitalize on, is in the mix. Khloe Kardashian just announced a new line of protein popcorn called Khloud.
Protein-forward diets are easy to market because they appeal to both men and women. Dieting in general is female coded, but men can focus on protein without feeling emasculated because body builders do it, and it comes in the form of literal red meat (hello beef tallow, my old friend) and gym-rat powders.
In general, I try to eat in a way that makes me feel physically and mentally good. I thought that I had grown beyond fads and that I could not be swayed. I try to resist outside influences because I was raised on a steady diet of teen magazines and “America’s Next Top Model” and the fiction that celery is a negative calorie food. I don’t need to flood my brain with any more self-loathing nonsense.
Still, I don’t want to be ignorant of ways to keep myself fully functional. I turned 43 this year. I’m competitive about my athletic prowess. I’m trying to get my fastest mile run under 7 minutes. I have been reading about how muscle mass starts to decline in your 30s — especially for women — and consuming enough protein is essential for building new muscle.
I’m also not immune to social media, in part because it’s my job to analyze what is popular and how trends are sold to a captive audience. But I am also part of the audience.
Experts do not agree about what is the optimal amount of protein — is it 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, or 1.6 or 2.2 or 3.3? Nutrition studies more broadly are difficult to conduct, and the results are often messy and conflicting. I am bad at doing math in my head, so for the packaged foods I was buying when I was protein focused, I looked for items that had a 10x ratio of calories to grams of protein (if something had 120 calories, I wanted it to have 12 grams of protein or more). If this sounds arbitrary, it’s because it is.
I would like to tell you that I moved away from my protein obsession because I saw that it was silly and that, as a person who is healthy and fit, it was an unnecessary tweak. But the truth is, I stopped because most of those protein-packed products tasted like chemicals and sawdust, and they caused the kind of gastrointestinal woe I do not need to go into. “Proteinified food is just slightly better junk. Whether you notice the ‘better’ or the ‘junk’ first is a Rorschach test: You see whichever you care about more in the moment,” concluded Chris Gayomali in Grub Street, after he did a deep dive on how protein took over American grocery stores.
I also did not want to spend my waning days in this mortal coil deciding which brand of overpriced protein brownie bars to buy. As Katherine J. Wu explained in The Atlantic in 2023 when she unpacked the protein craze, “many of the people who worry most about getting enough of it — the wealthy, the ultra-athletic, the educated — are among those who need to supplement the least.” Additionally, with egg, beef and bacon prices still astronomically high, the cost of an ultra-protein diet does not seem worthwhile, not to mention the environmental impact.
And anyway, if my “For You” page on TikTok is any indication, the health influencers are moving away from protein to a new, hot macronutrient: fiber. I can’t wait for all the prune-laced recipes I’m going to be making in six months.
End Notes
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Context is everything: One of my favorite newsletters, Your Local Epidemiologist, tackles another health fad this week, responding to the question: “What’s the deal with seed oils?” Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist who I have interviewed before, and Megan Maisano, a registered dietitian nutritionist, look at the evidence and conclude: “From a public health perspective, we do have room for improvement in our diets, but removing seed oils is far from the top of the priority list. Seed oils are not miracle cures, and they’re not poison. Like most things in nutrition, context is everything.”
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Everything old is new again: In 2004, in The New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan wrote about the anti-carb craze of that era. “What is striking is just how little it takes to set off one of these applecart-toppling nutritional swings in America; a scientific study, a new government guideline, a lone crackpot with a medical degree can alter this nation’s diet overnight,” he wrote. “Maybe what we should be talking about is an American paradox: that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily,” he said.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
The post Why We Let Fads Dictate What We Eat appeared first on New York Times.
