protein worship

reverence in the time of restriction

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Protein is thought to be named after the Greek word proteus, or primary. That protein is a stand-in for primary speaks to its role in contemporary North American understandings of diet, meals, and “completeness.” A fixation with protein burrows into the study of nutrition, where a balanced diet is understood as the sum of its splintered parts—proteins, carbohydrates, fat, micro-nutrients, vitamins, probiotics, and more.

This atomization of food into its components is necessary for scientific research pursuits, but it tends to extend a fragmented perspective across our diets, health, and bodies. If diet is to be divided into its nutrient-parts, how can health be understood as holistic? Are such dualisms possible?

Despite the splitting of diet and body, protein remains something we can’t seem to get enough of (pop culturally, anyway). Food and health media fixate around “protein obsessions,” a blanket term to cross over many food variations. Articles that explore protein-consumption speak to it as almost mania, decorating their arguments with high-impact phrases like obsessed, huge appetite, or can’t get enough. When you see the word “obsessed” enough times, you begin to think of it as such, even if there may be more to it.

Protein is complicated food space: increasing anxieties about what’s in our food run in both honest and distracting lanes. Questions about where food is sourced, or the climatic impact of its production run alongside a harsh online resurgence of fatphobia and diet culture, tenuous fixation on seed oils and MAHA movements, and sensationalist depictions of ultra-processed foods. Collectively, these contribute to a renewed morality played out on the plate. Amidst these buzzing health urgencies, there seems to be a general reverence towards protein.

Why is protein adored, rather than feared, or seen as something to restrict?

atomization of nutrients

This isn’t the first type of protein-panic to grace North American lifestyles. As Nicola Twilley documents in Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, protein became idolized almost in error in the 1830s:

“Based on an experiment in which dogs fed a diet consisting of just carbohydrates and fat died, one of the field’s leading lights, Justus von Liebig, mistakenly concluded that protein was the only true nutritive element in food. Protein both built muscle and provided the energy to flex it, he asserted, while carbohydrates existed purely to help respiration function smoothly… anyone who wanted to squeeze the most productivity out of their minions began to concern themselves with the adequacy of the workers’ meat and dairy intake.”

The concerns about adequate intake persist, though the idea of “enough” protein feels particularly top of mind. Vox reporter Kenny Torella described the American diet as one that holds “twice the daily amount recommended in the federal dietary guidelines,” citing healthcare experts suggesting that “in general, if you’re eating enough calories, you’re probably eating enough protein.”

While Industrial-era protein panics may have been based on wanting more worker productivity, the concerns now feel relative. Framing of protein intake now insinuates that if you’re thinking about the macro-components of your diet, it’s likely you have enough food at home, instead worrying about their ingredient breakdown. This can cascade further, looking to concerns around macro counts, vitamin supplements, a healthy gut filled with probiotics, and so on.

But it has remained technically challenging to isolate nutritional components like fat, protein, or carbs to the degree in which they are for scientific research. To study nutrition is to understand that the knowledge will change with new studies. It is also a field that sought violent answers to the physical limits of the human body. In 20^th century Canada, nutritional scientists like Lionel Pett conducted horrific experiments on Indigenous children at residential schools to better understand starvation and malnourishment, without consent. To better understand how nutrition worked, people were starved. How do scientific errors around protein and vicious data translate into our home sensibilities of food and eating?

health halo

Framing protein as a primary driver of nutrition has somehow allowed it to remain unscathed by diet-culture restrictions. Protein is seemingly stuffed into every granola bar, oat milk, ice cream, cracker, and pasta noodle that marketers target. The mere word in large, sans-serif font on a boxed food implies a conventionally nutritious choice over those without protein.

But as protein isn’t a meal. Instead, it extends into public food anxieties and moralities about sufficient and good consumption. The director of Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, Dariush Mozaffarian, has described to Inverse Magazine:

“In people’s minds, there’s nothing left.’ But a macronutrient, Mozaffarian says, is not the same thing as food. ‘That’s like saying a fat food or a carb food. Most foods are composed of macronutrients.’”

In Frostbite, Twilley traces the protein mistake to the advent of modern refrigeration. The “mistaken conclusion that protein from flesh foods was the only essential nutrient” drove technological change, rather than grains and beans. Understanding the panics and fixation around protein as more deep-seated in North American culture than is often described makes the idea of protein as its own cultural food category make a little more sense.

Dieticians warn against putting protein on a pedestal, and then spend four TikToks showing how to get more protein in your diet (but only if you really need it, like if you’re menopausal, pregnant or breastfeeding, adding weight-based exercise training into your movement, an aging adult, if…). To be protein-rich is to be afforded a virtuous status, engrained in a culture rooted in healthism.

A 2024 nutritional sciences study found that when protein was added on the front-package labels for foods like breakfast cereal, participants believed it created a health-like halo on the food. The thinking goes that protein-labelled foods would provide better health benefits like building muscle, staying healthy, and living longer. While the health-halo perception was very real, the “overall nutritional compositions of such products are often not significantly better than similar products without protein labels.”

Health halos can act like horse flaps, narrowing the view. In “The Story of the Grape and the Donut,” Graeme Tomlinson (of @thefitnesschef) argues that if you take both foods at face value, the grapes seem like the healthier snack choice. At face value, and steeped in morality, “the most likely outcome is contradiction,” since grapes technically have more sugar than the donut. Tomlinson continues the line of thinking, “Is the donut still bad if everything else you ate that day is nutrient-dense? Are the grapes still good if everything else you eat that week is nutrient-sparse?”

thefitnesschef_

A post shared by @thefitnesschef_

As Tomlinson points to, focusing on a single dietary moment in one’s day is not always an appropriate depiction of overall diet, health, and wellbeing. Rapid-fire food categorization (protein pancakes versus fluffy pancakes) can allow for shame to sneak in and loom over appetite. In rigid healthism, where is the space for nuance, joy, and flavour? Do we really need to make Oreos a protein-forward treat?

Yet the anxieties around making the best food choices are valid. We operate within a food system we’re constantly told is unsafe for workers, animals, and the planet. It’s an impossible bind to be searching for the most ethical food, sourced at the most ethical place, when it’s expensive and not so easily accessed. Of course, in that landscape, choosing foods that feel like the most bang for your buck is going to feel appropriate. You mean to tell me that this $5 carton of oat milk has 8 grams of protein per serving? Sign me up!

types of protein matter

An interesting feature in how protein is depicted as a food trend is the focus on how much rather than what type. Where are the distinctions around protein varieties, like meat-proteins, or plant proteins, or supplements? What, exactly, does protein worship look like culturally? How do these categories change the adoration (if at all)?

There’s a rattling disconnect in this language around protein. In one vein, you have stereotype concerns that vegans and vegetarians don’t get enough proteins. Counter, there’s concern and studies that find Americans are eating too much protein. Which is it?

Situating North American interest in diet and nutrient intake merely as “protein” pushes away these points of interest. This feels particularly important given the role that meat proteins have played in building and maintaining empire, and how they connect with culture, gender, and power.

In the 1830s, Dutch chemist Gerardus Johannes Mulder coined the term “protein,” and described it as the “essential general principle of all animal body constituents.” This description remained in place for protein for decades, even when referring to plant proteins.

While that’s shifted, protein classification still connotes gender and power—a muscle boy built on steak and bone broth, or a Pilates princess who eats small portions of “lean” proteins, like salmon or cottage cheese. Vegetarian proteins have their own variations, too: tofu, tempeh, beans, or soy connote a lightness, as though the protein floats like a butterfly through the body.

Years ago, I wrote about the Canada Food Guide as a cultural and political text, with nearly a century of various lobbyists successfully influencing the outcomes of what to eat, and by how much. Meat and dairy lobbyists pushed for glasses of milk at every meal, eggs and meats as proteins, and anything else as merely “alternatives.” That nuts, legumes, and soy could be consumed was always said with a faint whisper, in the small print.

This reminds me of what

Alicia Kennedy

expertly discusses in No Meat Required, where she argues that “the work of Black and brown vegans and vegetarians has been positioned as novelties.” In contrast, the work of white vegetarians becomes shaped into a “neutral argument, divorced from historical spiritual arguments and dominant ethical concerns about meat consumption.” Kennedy also questions the idea of “complementary proteins,” where plant-proteins are not assumed to be “complete,” thus denoting them as inferior.

While science expands and asks more questions, the social underpinnings around proteins, whiteness, and diets remain cobbled around a type of folk-knowledge, rooted in errors and assumptions that remain pervasive.

a more nourishing protein

When thinking about protein as a catch-all, these nuances are lost to the conversation. A balanced or nourishing meal isn’t always a straightforward (or guaranteed) thing. I spent many years restricting my eating before getting to a point where I thought about appetite fulfillment (and I imagine it will take even longer to breakdown my own conceptions around fuel versus joy).

More people seem aware of the scare tactics from previous decades—the Skinny Bitch fat-free foods, the low-carb low options, egg scares, heart-health scares, sugar scares. Or at least, I’d like to think this is true. But I’m not always sure now, in the age of unadulterated Ozempic, if people care about nourishment so much as suppression.

I’d like to think that people are looking at their plate in full more, with fibers, grains, proteins, vegetables, and hydration as components of a meal. A mental shift towards nourishment and away from restriction is a huge victory, no matter how small it may feel.

Whatever the reasons people seek protein, it sits in a complex middle-space of our nutrition, diet culture, and food systems. There is too much meat being eaten, but there are protein options that are perhaps allowing some people to reduce restrictive eating habits, in some form. There are considerations that are spiritual, cultural, and ethical. These inform reframes of appetite and power through culture.

Protein, in its complexity, is important in these shifting narratives. Plant-based proteins in their own right, rather than complementary or alternative, provide cognitive space to imagine futures where body and exercise are not restricted within conventional gender or cultural roles. There’s space for reframing relationships with food and movement, and I think that gets missed a lot when prioritizing a sensationalized take on people and their diets.

Maybe we’re obsessed, but it’s not like we didn’t have a reason to think so much about it?

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