Oh no, men are eating meat and, as usual, liberal women want to monitor men and correct them.
TikTok content creators are hawking 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 New York Times' fact-check of "big protein claims."
Big Protein. Perfect.
"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."
Oh no, men are interested in having high testosterone, not the low testosterone that liberal women prefer.
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.
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Cohen also points 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 that muscle-building supplements formed a pipeline to anabolic steroids in young men.
Oh no, another "pipleine" to right-wing radicalism.
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, recommends 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.)
AG1 is the new name for Athletic Greens, a supplement for getting all of your nutrition from vegetables that you might not get if you're on a mostly-meat diet. So of course it doesn't contain much protein. It's all greens.
This is "journalism" today.
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).
Thank you so much for spotlighting this important study.
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."
How are you doing GAINZZZ-wise? I'm getting back on track after a bad couple of months. In the beginning of the year I was losing a lot of weight while barely doing anything so I kept that strict regime of barely doing anything up. But then, get this, my Program of barely doing anything stopped resulting in lower weight, and actually began putting weight on me.
Unrelated: Grand jury subpoenas have been sent out in the Latitia James federal mortgage fraud case.