The chase for the golden 200 grams of protein per day, and the pop-up notification confirming such maxxing, has many of us thinking differently about what, and how, we eat. But is this actually healthy?
We’re now officially a quarter of the way through the 21st century, 25 years on. (Let that sink in a moment.) Looking back, it’s undeniable that this century’s most transformative technology—at least so far—is the modern smartphone. Like the automobile, the television, and electricity itself, smartphones represent a profound change in the rhythms of modern life. Of course, this extends to food.
The “Instagram-ization” of how we eat has been widely discussed and analyzed. But there is another function of our phones that’s just now approaching something like ubiquitous critical mass: the calorie counting apps, the MyFitnessPals, and the macro trackers, which allow users to calculate in real time a best-guess estimate of carbohydrate and sodium intake, of fiber and mineral consumption, and, most important here at the dawn of the great quarter turn, one’s daily ingestion of protein.
Yes, protein, that building block of organic life, is enjoying an utter it-girl moment with no signs of slowing or stopping. The social media hellmouth apps in my phone are full of edicts—100 grams a day! One gram per pound of body weight every 24 hours! Fifty grams first thing in the morning!—with numbers functioning as the illusion of control. It’s not just me. This stuff is everywhere—despite the fact that “most people in the US meet or exceed their [protein] needs,” according to the Mayo Clinic.
This trend, which echoes and rhymes with various food and dietary fads over the last 25 years, is reaching something like an observable popular crescendo now, impacting our grocery shelves, our refrigerators, and our conception of the self as informed by the symbiotic relationship we’ve formed with our phones. Dubbed by Modern Retail as “the proteinization of food,” we’re living through a moment in which no comestible is left unfortified, unmixed with whey isolate, or un-boosted with pea protein. Thirty grams in a bag of processed chicken chips, 16 grams in a can of protein-spiked seltzer, 40 grams or more in the allulose-sweetened health sludge I paid $8 for at Whole Foods.
Since you care about food—you’re a TASTE reader, after all—I invite you to join me in a thought exercise: Search your email inbox for “protein,” and see how many returns it yields. Mine had 400-plus from marketers and media in the last year alone. It’s staggering. The food noise is deafening, and the result is agita. I’m suffering from protein anxiety, from branched-chain amino angst. The whole world smells like protein spirit.
You can see it walking the aisles of Erewhon, where America’s wellness-coded food trends arrive first, and at Pop Up Grocer, Emily Schildt’s deeply on-trend curated snack shop on Bleecker Street in the West Village. A protein-focused collection in the brand’s directory features labneh and spice mixes, doughnuts and pasta, toaster pastries and ice cream, chips and bars and drinks and gummies, all fortified with additional protein and proudly labeled as such to the gram.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in the number of protein-forward brands applying to be in Pop Up Grocer,” Schildt tells me, “and we’ve been seeing it for some time.” Schildt mentions products by Drumroll (vanilla and chocolate doughnuts, plant-based, 10 grams of pea and pumpkin protein per serving) and PRIMA (an “ancestral protein” bar with beef tallow and collagen, 16 grams per serving) as being among her shop’s top-selling items by unit volume. Something called a “Pruffle”—a chocolate bonbon with 6 grams of almond protein—is also particularly popular at Pop Up, per Schildt. (“People are texting and DMing us constantly about stock replenishment.”)
“‘Protein’ is becoming the new ‘organic,’” says Andrea Hernández, founder of the popular and influential publication Snaxshot. “It’s increasingly devoid of meaning.” Hernández views the proteinification of the American diet as the latest in an ongoing series of diet arcs, with roots in past trends like Atkins, prebiotics and probiotics, and keto, and added resonance in the wider moment of GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic and Wegovy. “We’re seeing a convergence of multiple generations,” she tells me, from fitness bros to thinfluencers to intrepid marketeers desperate for more brand share. “It’s the new marketing play, the new ad-lib,” Hernandez says. “It’s the buzzword of the moment.”
The trend itself is multigenerational. Millennials of a certain age are pairing those GLP-1 agonists with a high-protein diet for weight loss and satiety, but younger generations—as young as Generation Alpha—are looksmaxxing and chadbulking with protein in a serious way, eating entire chickens out front of Whole Foods and indulging in children’s protein powder. “Gen Alpha, in their own brain rot way, are so interested in protein,” Hernández tells me, referencing a scene in the recent Ben Stiller Christmas film Nutcrackers (it was just okay) in which a teenage boy brags to his crush about eating protein and lifting weights. “That’s proof of just how much the narrative around protein is permeating across generations.”
Food writers are not immune to this stuff. (Several of your favorite food writers are also power lifters or otherwise healthmaxxers, despite eating and drinking for a living.) On my most recent Erewhon visit, I saw two teenage boys outside the store, chugging OWYN (a beverage with 32 grams of protein), which costs around $7. In a few years, they’ll grow up to afford a $19 Dr. Paul’s Raw Animal-Based Smoothie, which contains “organ meat supplements” and is endorsed by Paul Saladino, MD, a carnivore diet proselytizer with more than 2.5 million Instagram followers. I tried the OWYN and found it more chalky than chocolaty, with the same vaguely filling post-food sensation one gets from consuming technologically derived meat alternatives.
This raises a major question I’ve been noodling on for some time—what with the powdered protein doughnut of it all—as to whether or not this stuff should even taste good in the first place. Are we gorging ourselves to hit the golden 200 grams of protein pop-up notification for the flavor? Or is it to satisfy something else, to chase a numbers matrix in our own private gamified version of modern life, half-cyborgically obsessed with the glowing readout on our soon-to-be surgically attached devices? Having harnessed technology, and in particular the front-facing camera, in a fulsome blitz to distort our sense of self, the all-encompassing dysmorphia is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a closed loop of loathing and recrimination: I track my micros in my phone to look better in the photos I take with my phone, which I will then compare to everyone else I see on social media on my phone.
I tried the OWYN and found it more chalky than chocolaty, with the same vaguely filling post-food sensation one gets from consuming technologically derived meat alternatives.
I personally cannot stand the taste of allulose, monk fruit, or other so-called safe sugars—and I can pick them out of a flavor lineup every time—which means that many of the #ProteinPackedProducts currently in vogue hit somewhere between ambivalence and mid-gross for me. The same goes for protein powders, despite the all-abiding millennial urge to get swole. And yet I cannot be a protein hater outright; humans require protein to live, which renders hating protein a fundamentally intractable position. Having an opinion about protein is kind of like having an opinion about oxygen. (Imagine an article titled “Ten Signs You Aren’t Getting Enough O.”) There’s flavor, and then there are macros, but then there’s also the feeling of it all. Particularly when consumed post-workout, a protein-maxx meal can offer a sense of completion for runners, lifters, and walkers. Instead of working out and restricting calories to shed weight fast, today’s exercise enthusiasts are reaching for a protein-rich meal or drink to extend the endorphin rush—at least in theory.
Our all-protein-everywhere moment needn’t be a series of uncanny valleys. Hernández shouts out the company Im’peccable Chicken as an interesting node of the protein amino CPGification of America (it’s a whole chicken breast, seasoned with flavors like teriyaki or orange habanero and vacuum-packed). “This is something that’s really popular in Asia,” she tells me, “but that pretty much doesn’t exist in America. But I could snack on a chicken breast if it’s really well-seasoned, you know?”
I agree wholeheartedly—please give me chicken over GoMacro—but then again, I am an easy mark for retired dairy cow beef and that sort of thing, a regenerative holistic protein approach that has, bafflingly and disappointingly, become politicized as of late. In the course of researching this story, I was influenced by a recommendation from the journalist Serena Dai, who recommended the apocryphal “protein bar that actually tastes good” as part of a 2024 holiday gift guide for the Atlantic.
The bars are made by an artisan chocolatier called HÅKAN, based in the Hudson Valley; they offer 20 grams of protein per bar (thanks to the use of whey protein), and they legit taste really great. They’re also bloody expensive (like $8 a bar once shipped) and have 330 calories each—which, I can’t remember, is that amount of caloric consumption per protein intake supposed to make me feel bad or good? Sometimes in my gamified numerical tracking interlay I discover a coding conflict betwixt the data. Please reboot me, perhaps with the assistance of a professional.
Having an opinion about protein is kind of like having an opinion about oxygen.
And what do the professionals say about it? The bottomless morass of conflicting dietician information no doubt contributes to the wider agita, and it’s hard to know who to listen to. But one voice I’ve come to trust is that of Maya Feller, MS, RD, CDN, of Brooklyn-based Maya Feller Nutrition. She’s a nutritionist, author of the excellent Eating From Our Roots cookbook, and cohost of the Well, Now podcast on Slate, which is a solid listen.
“The returning fascination with protein speaks to a larger nutrition and wellness shift happening in the country,” Feller tells me. “Dieting and thinness are dominating wellness conversations in the name of health. We have normalized medical weight loss and diet extremes.” Feller points to the widespread use of GLP-1 agonists as directly driving the protein vogue, but she sees this as a cautionary tale. “Our society is divorced from the act of purchasing and preparing foods in their whole and minimally processed forms,” she says. “We are living at super speeds, with a plethora of demands that pull us further away from ourselves. Quick fixes have become the gold standard for modern nutrition problems…and I worry that the lines will become blurred when it comes to what macro- and micronutrients are needed to maintain health and well-being.”
That’s the hardest part of this whole thing, the protein and the smartphone and the modern condition: we’re taking this incredible gift—the sum totality of human history, a living digital god in our pockets—and using it to make ourselves feel worse about ourselves and to judge one another. Did you look up a photo of me while reading this essay, to see if it seemed like I might know what I’m talking about when it comes to protein? Did anything in these words make you pause—make you feel funny—or cause you to check in on your own daily macro performance?
Feller, for the record, recommends an individualized approach to how much protein you ingest each day, based on factors like exercise habits and body type. It may vary from as little as 0.8 grams to 1.5 grams per kilogram of body weight. For me, this is a huge part of what makes the Instagram and TikTok fitfluencer one-size-fits-all content version of this feel so disingenuous—and potentially dangerous. Feller cites negative calcium balance, increased bone resorption, and the increased chance of uric acid stones as some of the risks of a very high-protein diet. “High protein intake should be done under the care of a qualified health care professional,” she says.
The odds are good that someone, somewhere—in all likelihood, a very fit-looking person with approximately zero qualifications, gyrating in miniature across your phone screen—is going to try to make you feel bad about the amount of protein you’re consuming in 2025. There’s one weird trick that food influencers and protein peddlers hate, and it may be the only logical response. It requires that I suggest you do the level opposite of what I, as a member of the content industry, am supposed to want you to do, but it’s the last line of defense we have in this world, and we may not have it for much longer. In this new year, I invite you—and me, and all of us—to occasionally touch grass, lose track of our macros, and indulge in the last great indulgence of our anxious, data-drunk, extremely online modern era: to log the fuck off.