The Case For Lo Pro

Why America’s latest dietary fetish is bad for just about everybody

- Maddie Oatman

YOU MIGHT NOTICE, the next time you go grocery shopping, that supermarket aisles are turning into one big advertisement for protein. The health claims are everywhere. Wheyhey ice cream—“20 g of protein per pot”—promises to help with “losing weight” and “skin anti aging.” P28 high-protein sliced bread wants to be “part of your journey to a healthy lifestyle.” Kellogg’s Special K Protein cereal “satisfies hunger longer.” Everyone at work seems to be on a high-protein Paleo diet. And American consumers, according to one business analytics firm, spend about $250 million a year on protein powder alone.

Given all the hype, it might come as no surprise that American adults are eating roughly double the average daily protein recommendation of 60 grams for women and 70 grams for men. “If you have enough calories in your diet, not getting enough protein would be very, very hard,” journalist Marta Zaraska told me when I interviewed her for Bite, Mother Jones’ food podcast.

So what’s driving the overconsumption? In her recent book, Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession With Meat, Zaraska traces the origins of America’s love affair with protein back to a shaky research finding from the 1800s: German scientist Carl von Voit set out to determine how much protein soldiers and hard laborers required by observing how much protein they consumed (150 grams a day). “It’s a bit like observing children stuffing themselves with cookies and concluding that young humans require tons of sugar to grow,” Zaraska writes. By 1944, the US Department of Agriculture had halved the von Voit recommendation, but the myth persisted.