Walk into a grocery store today.
It feels like a marketing battlefield. You’ve got paleo ketchup. Soda designed for your gut microbes. Chips made from plants but marketed as if they’re secretly Cool Ranch Doritos. It’s noisy.
But the biggest buzzword? Protein.
Everyone wants more of it. Influencers claim we’re starving for it. Food marketers scream their grams per serving. Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently declared we were ending a “war on protein.” A war that nobody knew we were fighting. 🙄
I spoke with Bethany Brookshire, a science journalist who dug into the actual data behind this trend. She doesn’t love the hype. Neither should you.
The Obsession Is Marketing, Not Science
Why is protein everywhere now?
Brookshire isn’t entirely sure. But it started about fifteen years ago in fitness circles. Bodybuilders need protein. They wanted it. Then the wellness industry took the idea and ran with it.
Now it’s in your latte foam. It’s in your toaster pastries.
It’s called “proteinwashing.” Brands slap a high gram count on the front of the bag to sell you stuff you didn’t need. Does it taste good? Brookshire ran a taste test. She asked 12 people to rate a protein-boosted pastry against a regular one.
11 preferred the regular one.
“The one person who did prefer the protein boosted pastry is now in possession of the rest of them.”
Protein, especially the cheap whey kind derived from milk, ruins texture. It makes food weird. But the industry doesn’t care about your mouth. It cares about the number on the label.
How Much Do We Actually Need?
Here is the boring, necessary truth: you need protein to survive.
Your body is basically a sack of amino acids. We can’t make nine of them, the “essential” ones, on our own. So you must eat them. But that doesn’t mean you need extra.
The Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) is roughly 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.
Why that number? It came from studies in the 1970s and 80s. Researchers fed people different amounts of protein until their nitrogen levels stayed balanced. The amount needed to stay alive and maintain current mass? About 0.6 grams. They added a safety buffer and called 0.8 the standard.
Are most people meeting this?
Yes. Most of us get 50 percent more protein than we need. We are fine. We are not malnourished. Relax.
But some groups actually struggle.
- The Elderly. They suffer from sarcopenia, or muscle wasting. They lose appetite, so they eat less total food. They need a higher percentage of protein in those few calories to keep their muscles from shrinking.
- GLP-1 Users. People on drugs like Ozempic lose their appetite drastically. They also lose weight fast, which can include muscle loss. Nutritionists worry they need to prioritize protein intake just to keep what they have.
For the rest of us? The “protein maxxing” crowd is wasting calories.
The Risks of Eating Too Much Meat
If you are healthy and active, extra protein probably isn’t hurting your kidneys. That’s a common fear, but kidney failure is rare for otherwise healthy people. Your body just pees out the excess.
There is a bigger problem.
When people obsess over hitting a macro goal, they often neglect other foods.
Fiber. Vitamin C. Antioxidants. If your diet consists of protein shakes, chicken breasts, and eggs, you’re missing the rest of the biological toolkit. Food isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a matrix of nutrients working together.
“Just eat freaking food, man.”
And then there is the environment. Most supplemental protein comes from animals. Specifically cows. Cows produce methane. Lots of it. Every time someone burps or farts (and they do, often), it contributes to climate change. Prioritizing animal protein to the exclusion of plant foods has a cost. Not just for your wallet. For the planet. 🌍
A More Nuanced Future
The science isn’t settled, but the panic is misplaced.
Experts aren’t angry at each other. They’re just having different ideas over protein-infused beer. Some want to raise the RDA for older adults, maybe to 1.2 or 1.5 grams per kilogram. Others argue for a flexible spectrum based on your lifestyle.
If you spend hours in the gym building mass, yes. You need more protein. The RDA is a baseline for not dying, not for optimization.
But for the average person?
Stop worrying. Eat your vegetables. Have some meat. Have some carbs. You are probably getting plenty of protein.
