America can’t get enough protein. From whey shakes to protein-packed pancakes, pasta, and ice cream, the muscle-building macronutrient has become the go-to solution for all health concerns.
Hannah Cutting-Jones, food historian and director of food studies at the University of Oregon, says that’s the trick. reverse. Do you want to gain muscle? Eat more protein. Lose weight? Focus on protein. Everyone from your dog to your grandparents needs more protein. But really?
In recent decades, on average, we have consistently eaten more of this macronutrient than the recommended daily amounts established by health organizations. This is despite the fact that these groups have continued to decrease the recommended amount of protein we need per day. To complicate matters, we still haven’t settled on the ideal amount of protein needed for a healthy diet. All of this combined has left protein as the only macronutrient that has not yet been demonized by the diet industry in a scientific and cultural gray area. And it begs the question: how much protein do we really need?
The only macronutrient left standing
Part of the protein gold rush comes from decades of narrowing down our diet in search of the best foods. Over the years, popular diets, such as Atkins and keto, have demonized carbohydrates while others, such as the Ornish Diet, vilified fat. With carbohydrates and fats condemned, protein became the only nutrient that was considered correct to eat in any amount desired while maintaining good health.
It’s the only macronutrient left standing, Dariush Mozaffarian, cardiologist and director of the Institute of Food Medicine at Tufts University. In people’s minds, nothing remains. But a macronutrient, says Mozaffarian, is not the same as a food. It’s like saying a fatty food or a carbohydrate food. Most foods are made up of multiple macronutrients.
We can trace our drive to atomize our food to what Mozaffarian calls the birth of modern nutritional science, which is when we first discovered vitamins and began to see food as its components rather than the sum of its parts. Although the discovery of proteins predates this point by a century, once we realized that certain vitamins could cure disease, we became fixated on these discrete compounds. This was also when many deficiency-induced diseases such as scurvy, rickets, beriberi and pellagra were common, Mozaffarian says.
The experts reverse all agree that marketing has also been key to the protein’s success. A 2022 estimate valued the global sports nutrition and supplement market at $27 billion, which often emphasizes the consumption of protein, among other nutrients. By 2030, it is expected to exceed $37 billion.
The idea of good health and protein consumption have merged.
Because protein lives so prominently in our cultural memory as important, I think it’s an easy target for marketing, says David Seres, a professor of medicine at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University Medical Centers.
Most of us, if we get enough calories, [were] probably [getting] enough protein, says Cutting-Jones. We probably shouldn’t stress as much as we do. I think a lot of it is a money maker. A famous protein marketing technique, he says, was to rebrand pork as the other white meat in light of red meats being linked to chronic disease in the mid-20th century.
The idea of good health and protein consumption have become fused, says Cutting-Jones. The words high protein now commonly appear on foods that aren’t even supposed to be high in protein, such as cereals. When a food advertises its protein richness, consumers are more likely to make other positive assumptions about it. For example, a 2024 study in the journal foods describes how more than 1,000 participants perceived a protein-enriched version of a cereal as healthier and more likely to build muscle than its original counterpart. They also seemed to ignore that the protein-fortified cereal had more sugar, sodium and calories than the original.
We are eating more protein than ever before
Protein recommendations first emerged in 1877 when German physiologist Carl von Voit published his book An investigation into diet in public institutions. Von Voit had been studying the nutritional needs of working-class German men and concluded that 118 grams of protein was optimal. This figure became known as the Voit standard. But the American chemist Russell Henry Chittenden of Yale University was used as a test subject to refute this recommendation. In 1904, he published in the magazine Physiological Economics in Nutrition that we only need 50 grams of protein a day.
During World War II, in 1941, then-President Franklin Roosevelt convened the National Defense Nutrition Conference to publish the first recommended daily amounts of protein for Americans. Many men drafted into the war were unhealthy, which led to this focus on nutrition, says Cutting-Jones. The group recommended 1 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight, which equates to about 60 grams for women and 70 grams for men.
Now, the Food and Drug Administration recommends eating 50 grams of protein a day, as originally concluded by Russell Henry Chittenden. But in the decades since those recommendations appeared, Americans are eating more than ever, Cutting-Jones says.
In March 2023, the USDA’s Economic Research Service published a report on diet quality by food source and demographic data that analyzed the years 1977 to 2018. This report analyzed data on the diets of thousands of Americans age 2 and older. He found that men consistently eat more protein than women, and people with high incomes eat more protein than people with middle or low incomes. By age and sex, 2005 and 2006 had the highest protein intake. This peak is in line with the timeline Cutting-Jones describes, saying that by the early 2000s, protein had emerged as a full-fledged panacea.
These data are not a perfect reflection of protein consumption. For one thing, the sample size shrinks over time. The researchers went from analyzing the habits of more than 41,000 people in 1977, to less than 10,000 in 2003, and in 2018 they are looking at just over 7,100 people.
How much protein do we really need?
Experts still don’t agree on how much protein we should eat. Part of this conundrum stems from the flaws in scientific nutrition research. Much of our modern dietary guidance also comes from observational studies, says Columbia’s David Seres. Instead of closely monitoring two identical scenarios to track the effects of one variable, observational studies analyze swaths of data over time and find correlations. While researchers can make associations between factors, Seres says, establishing cause and effect is much more difficult.
Seres says it’s nearly impossible to create a double-blind randomized trial, the gold standard for clinical research for nutrition. It would be difficult and expensive to create a trial involving thousands of people who agree to eat a certain way without any deviation. Think about how many times you’ve tried to go on a diet, he says.
We know that eating more protein than we need means it turns into fat, says Mozaffarian. But instead of going straight to adipose tissue like fat normally does, the extra protein goes through the liver, where it’s turned into fat through a process called de novo lipogenesis. This type of fat tends to engulf organs, he says, and has been linked to an increased risk of metabolic syndrome and heart disease. And while a high-protein, low-carb diet may sound appealing, Mozaffarian says that too much protein still increases the risk of diabetes, even though it doesn’t raise blood sugar, since too much amino acids can affect insulin signaling.
A 2024 study from the University of Pittsburgh concluded that consuming more than 22% of calories from protein can lead to increased activation of immune cells called monocytes that play a role in plaque formation. The authors analyzed blood samples from participants after drinking high- or low-protein shakes. They looked at circulating monocytes between one and four hours after participants drank the shake and found that meals with more than 25 grams of protein induce this process that helps build plaque, which can increase the risk of heart disease .
Because the researchers looked for an increase in plaque-associated cells rather than an increase in the plaque itself, Seres isn’t sure how well we can generalize this data. Still, he calls these results certainly troubling.
What type of protein is best?
Protein is made up of organic compounds called amino acids. Of the 20 amino acids we need, nine are essential to our diet, meaning we cannot synthesize them ourselves. But even if we don’t eat meals perfectly balanced in these 9 amino acids, our bodies are able to extract the nutrients we need, says Cutting-Jones. Seres says research supports this idea: There’s a good consensus that if you don’t get enough amino acids in any food, it will balance out over time.
But just because something has a lot of protein doesn’t always make it the best choice. Some packaged foods, especially ultra-processed ones, have a high protein count, but Seres and Cutting-Jones stress that these products often contain added protein. They say that eating diverse proteins from whole foods is healthier than eating a lot of protein isolate that has been added to packaged foods.
Someone figured out that if you put it in a nice package, you can sell it to every athlete as a great supplement.
Malcolm Watford, professor of nutritional sciences at Rutgers University’s School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, says Americans’ protein consumption can be broken down intoquality protein and highamount protein High-quality proteins have many grams of protein, but high-quality proteins have many different amino acids, even if they have less protein overall. Watford favors high-quality protein over high quantity, as do most nutrition experts.
But the protein has spent the last 50 years or so solidifying in the bulk bucket, and it could take a monumental effort to get out. Watford remembers a time 40 years ago when he first came to the U.S. from the U.K. and saw Wisconsin dairy farmers giving away whey protein to hog farmers for free.
Someone figured out that if you put it in a nice package, you can sell it to every athlete as a great supplement.
#scoop #America #obsessed #protein
Image Source : www.inverse.com