Why Are Americans So Obsessed With Protein? Blame MAGA.

TikTok content creators are hocking powders from Just Move and Ryse. Netflix is teasing its documentary Untold: The Liver King, which tracks the rise and fall of the raw-meat enthusiast, out later this month. Influential podcast bros, from the physician Peter Attia to the very well-paid Joe Rogan, swap protein-heavy diet anecdotes and share their “current state of protein supplementation.” One of this year’s most talked about shows, season three of The White Lotus, derived a whole thread of narrative tension from what can only be described as Chekhov’s protein shake.

For decades, an American protein mania has been building. This year, it may be hitting its peak. News and takes have abounded, from Vogue’s “4 Signs You’re Not Getting Enough Protein” and Grub Street’s deep dive on added-protein foods to The New Yorker’s profile of a protein bar company and the The New York Times’ fact-check of “big protein claims.”

“I don’t have a good sense on what’s driving that right now, other than if it’s just the usual manosphere—or manomania, here in the United States,” says Pieter Cohen, an internist at Cambridge Health Alliance and associate professor at Harvard Medical School who leads the center’s Supplement Research Program. “Everyone’s letting their testosterone out these days.” One thing he’s noticed: More men than women arrive at his office “interested in protein.”

It’s not only men who care about protein, but a mosey through recent history suggests a strong correlation between the rise of the likes of the men’s rights movement and our national lust for protein—which is how we got to the quagmire of contradiction wherein a “manosphere” helmed by Donald Trump (he of the diet dubbed by his own health secretary, the admittedly often incorrect Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to be “really, like, bad”) has such a vocal contingent of intense protein-maxing “health” obsessives.

The intertwinement of masculinity and red meat (and its attendant health properties, namely protein) is strong and deep-seated. A 2023 study found that men were “more likely to eat foods to the extent that those foods were perceived as higher in masculinity and lower in femininity,” which correlated with foods that were seen as higher in protein. Another, from this year, found that men who have what they describe as a strong “meat-eating identity” also “tend to perceive themselves as more masculine.” An obsession with protein affords a masculine-coded cover on the feminine-coded world of body image and dieting—and a subject over which men can bond as bros.

While discussing the carnivore diet, Joe Rogan and Theo Von—both members of the podcast contingent widely seen to have played a major part in turning the election for Trump—laud the powers of red meat (while acknowledging that some people do well on a vegetarian diet, “Not for me, dude,” Rogan says with grim resolve) before sliding into a tangent about Rogan’s avoidance of pizza that becomes, somehow, aggressively erotic.

“If I had a couple of cocktails,” Rogan murmurs, “I probably would have grabbed a slice.”

Von begins shifting in his chair. “Oh fuck yeah, boy.”

“A couple of tequilas?” Rogan smiles coyly at his interlocutor. “Next thing you know, I want some pizza.”

“Oh dude, I’ll”—Von grits his teeth—“I’ll do whatever after that, boy.”

The so-called Liver King, who rips into raw animal hearts, testicles, and livers with his teeth, hawks protein supplements purportedly “high in organs including blood, colostrum, and tallow” (none of which, it should be noted, is an organ). His ensuing online popularity afforded him entry into a world populated by his right-wing idols. Last year, he posted a video compilation of himself fanboying over Trump, Logan Paul, and others.

According to the food historian Hannah Cutting-Jones, we can trace today’s relationship to protein back to the 19th-century chemist and early macronutrient expert Justus von Liebig, who called it “the only true nutrient”—and, in the 1860s, promptly started making and selling his own protein supplement of sorts: Liebig’s Extract of Meat. In the 1950s and ’60s, doctors and scientists homed in on protein supplementation as an important tool in treating malnutrition in places like North Africa, India, and postwar Korea.

For almost as long as there’s been enthusiasm for protein, there’s been controversy: over how it’s made, how much to get, and from where. In the mid-1970s, the FTC was reporting that “marketing of [protein supplement] products is almost universally dependent upon consumer misinformation and misconceptions about the nutritional characteristics of protein.” A series of New York Times articles from the same era read like the plot of a body-horror film: In 1974, an animal science professor came up with a process to “recycle” cows by turning slaughterhouse waste products into a protein supplement that could be fed to “feedlot steers”; by 1977, the FDA was linking “liquid protein supplements” for humans—also made from cattle-slaughtering by-products—with the deaths of 16 women, leading to a substantial decrease in sales.

There may not be, at present, deadly concerns about contaminated products. (Though it’s true that protein powders, like all supplements, aren’t under the purview of the FDA—which hasn’t stopped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from promising to liberate them from government oversight.) But Cohen does worry about the risk to patients (“in particular, teenage guys”) who forgo a balanced diet in favor of protein shakes, as well as the psychological effects of feeding student-athletes the idea that protein supplements are the only way to a healthy body—“a brilliant advertising campaign for the supplement industry,” he said, despite that “when we’re talking about anyone who’s not an elite athlete,” meaning the likes of NBA players or professional runners, “is there any evidence I know of that getting your protein from whole foods is inadequate, or somehow it’s better to get through protein powder? I don’t know of any evidence to suggest that.”

Cohen also pointed me to the work of his Harvard colleague S. Bryn Austin, in the Social and Behavioral Sciences department at the School of Public Health, who is the founding director of a research and training program dedicated to eating-disorder prevention. In 2022, she coauthored a paper examining young men’s use of protein supplements. Its findings warn clinicians to “be aware of their male patients’ use of protein powders and muscle-building supplements,” which pose “acute and long-term physical and psychological consequences.” Last year, one of her coauthored studies found a pipeline from the use of muscle-building supplements to anabolic steroids in young men.

The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for protein is 0.36 grams per pound of bodyweight, but some popular online health experts, like Attia, who advises David Protein and has invested in the protein-forward deer meat company Maui Nui Venison, recommend far greater levels. He says that his practice aims for one gram per pound of bodyweight. (Andrew Huberman has called this a good starting point—though one of his own supplements of choice and a financial incentive is AG1, which contains a measly two grams of protein per serving.)

Big Protein may have come for all of us. Mary Claire Haver and Gabrielle Lyon are prominent pro-protein online personalities who target their content toward women, and an informal poll floated to an active group chat found that the respondent protein-supplement enthusiasts had women slightly outnumbering the men (sample size: five). TikTok is rife with people of all genders ranking (and selling) Ryse Protein and eating (and selling) David Protein bars. But on TikTok, at least, the videos tend to conform to aesthetic gender norms. The men often show up in tank tops that reveal bulging biceps, hefting tubs of the powder, while the women cook through “what I eat in a day” videos in sports bras and tight pants showcasing abs and what one user describes as “a flat stomach and fat butt.”

The bodybuilding craze of the 1970s, birthed from the founding of Venice’s Gold’s Gym, fueled by new protein supplements and steroids, and popularized by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s oiled muscles in 1977’s Pumping Iron, coincided with an era of economic flux, widening political polarization, and rising momentum around women’s rights and gay rights—the latter of which sparked a backlash men’s rights, or “men’s liberation,” movement.

Some 40 years later, in 2014, Food Business News called protein the year’s “leading food-industry buzzword,” and a report from NPD Group not only found widespread enthusiasm for the macronutrient, but that, according to an NPD analyst, “many are willing to pay, or have already paid a premium, for these products.” By 2015, psychologists were finding that the overconsumption of protein among men could constitute an eating disorder. Was it correlation, coincidence, or some lean-meat canary in the proverbial coal mine that it was into this proteinous landscape that Donald Trump—burger loving, locker room talking, and all—announced his bid for the presidency?

And now, amid a shrinking economy, following strides and setbacks for women’s rights via #MeToo and its backlash (including the overturning of Roe v. Wade), as well as marriage equality, visibility, and media representation for queer and trans people with a similar subsequent “anti-woke” recoil—we have a second Trump term, MAHA, and what menswear commentator Derek Guy calls the “slim-fit revolution” of the manfluencer sphere.

Perhaps Saxon Ratliff, played by the son of the ur-celebrity bodybuilder himself, Patrick Schwarzenegger, said it best. “Lochy, we don’t do it for the taste,” he told his beleaguered and un-swole little brother in an early episode of The White Lotus, watching him choke down a frothy white, freshly blended protein shake. “We do it for the high T and the BDE.” Whether our current protein path leads to an accidental brush with transcendence, or face down on the pavement as gunshots ricochet nearby, remains to be seen.