Pushing Protein

Niloufar Haidari on protein psychosis

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, Niloufar Haidari explores the bewildering rise of protein and its relationship to the contemporary masculinity crisis.

This piece is an online-only article linked to our forthcoming third print issue, ‘The Influencers’, which is all about how the internet has reshaped food culture, as well as about the broader sociocultural systems and structures that inform how we eat today. You have just one more week to pre-order the issue for the special discounted price of £18, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see here for details). Order your copy now!

‘I can’t hit my protein!’ squeals Kai Shepherd mockingly, before demolishing 100 quail eggs. The twenty-four-year-old content creator has made a name – and bought a house – for himself off the back of protein-based content. His videos may be tongue-in-cheek, but his commitment to protein is extremely serious, as evidenced by his huge arms and the protein powder affiliate codes in his bio. Shepherd’s long-suffering-but-game parents also feature heavily in his almost absurdist output, as does his dog and, most recently, his girlfriend – unlike much of the dour (American) proteinaceous content online, Shepherd is able to poke fun at his obsession, and has spawned a genre of even more ludicrous spin-offs.

We are living in the age of protein psychosis. Every supermarket is hawking ‘high-protein’ products, from Lidl’s high-protein tiramisu to M&S’s high-protein sweet chilli lentil tortilla chips. Protein brand Grenade has collaborated with Cadbury to create the ‘Creme Egg Flavour Soft Core Protein Bar’; Babybel has launched Mini Babybel Protein, each of which features a whopping 0.8g more protein than the regular version. And if you’re thinking about getting on it but don’t want to jeopardise your macros, protein-fortified IPAs are available.

normal products

For the modern man, the current ideal body type is large and muscular. Social media is overflowing with jacked gymbros in tight t-shirts showing off their muscles while guiding followers through what they eat in a day to get ripped: steak and eggs washed down with a protein coffee for breakfast, protein shake, 200g of chicken breast with rice and broccoli for lunch, protein shake, protein bar, twelve hard-boiled eggs as a snack, a bowl of minced beef for dinner and another protein shake – or perhaps some protein ice cream – for dessert. It’s the straight-man version of Lady Gaga’s ‘bus, club, ’nother club’.

Much of this content is explicitly geared towards fat loss: protein is exalted partly for its high-satiety properties, and the suffix which most commonly follows ‘high protein’ is ‘low calorie’. Protein influencers such as @tastyshreds (2.7 million followers) share macho recipes for staying in a calorie deficit without sacrificing flavour or testosterone, with captions like ‘This ain’t meal prep. This is fridge domination 😤🔥’. Unlike Shepherd, there are no traces of humour here, just invitations to comment ‘COOKBOOK’ and be sent ‘233+ macro-friendly recipes that actually taste like cheat meals’, alongside sporadic motivational quotes about Jesus.

The brief mainstream cultural flirtation with ‘body positivity’ – which ultimately proved to be an exercise in market expansion under the guise of progressive inclusivity – is over. While in the Y2K era of extreme thinness, content promoting dieting and weight loss was traditionally aimed mostly at women, this time around – as we bravely move towards greater gender equality – men’s body-image anxieties are also being targeted by influencers and snake-oil salesman promoting a broader culture of disordered eating, with men encouraged to obsess over their macros and body-fat percentage and put cottage cheese in places it has no business being. The motivation for these bad-faith actors is obvious: money. But what is the draw for men?

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Whereas previously companies created products and sold them to us via celebrities and marketing campaigns, the protein craze seems to have reversed the usual flow, with businesses desperately pumping out products to meet the demand created by social media influencers. A 2024 poll found that young men aged between sixteen and twenty-four were three times more likely than the general population to have increased their meat consumption in the preceding year, citing the influence of manosphere content that is increasingly shaping how this demographic thinks about image and selfhood.

‘As the right-wing forces that increasingly forge our algorithms and our political systems lash out against “woke” and the cultural progressiveness of the preceding decade … old connections between vegetarianism, effeteness and liberalism have once again been brought to the fore’

With traditional markers of masculinity – such as stable employment or home ownership – increasingly out of reach, building muscle has become more and more linked with personal identity and self-worth. Wrapped up in the guise of self-improvement, the manosphere (it’s worth noting that a substantial proportion of muscle-building content is at least manosphere-adjacent) proffers advice rooted in essentialist, historically dubious notions, with men as the naturally dominant hunter-gatherers and women as docile, frail creatures who have caused a fertility crisis by sending work emails – a transgression against their feminine natures. In this world of pseudoscientific marketing, high protein consumption – specifically in the form of meat – is presented as an easy form of gender-affirming care for men, cosigned by beefy healthcare providers (podcasters) such as Joe Rogan, Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman.

It’s difficult (although not impossible) to sell meat via affiliate link, so many of these ‘longevity’ influencers have turned instead to shilling protein powders and bars while also commending the benefits of a ‘whole foods diet’. Rogan is the co-founder of Onnit, a health and supplements brand that has become synonymous with his podcast (and which was the subject of a 2024 lawsuit for deceptive advertising). He sold the company to Unilever for a rumoured $100 million in 2021, but still heavily promotes its products. Attia was co-developer and chief science officer of David – ‘the optimal protein for your optimal form’ – until he was forced to step down after being named in the Epstein files. Huberman, seemingly unscathed by his own string of scandals, remains one of its main sponsors and investors. Pushing protein is a serious business.

The protein trend comes alongside a sharp cultural turn away from plant-based eating and its liberal ‘soy boy’ associations. As the right-wing forces that increasingly forge our algorithms and our political systems lash out against ‘woke’ and the cultural progressiveness of the preceding decade – which also saw a short-lived reduction in meat-eating – old connections between vegetarianism, effeteness and liberalism have once again been brought to the fore. The ethnological link between masculinity and meat remains strong. A 2025 study found that ‘men who strongly identify as meat-eaters … tend to perceive themselves as more masculine’ and that ‘masculinity beliefs hinder reducing meat consumption and adopting plant-based diets’. Another, from 2024, 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 in turn translated into foods higher in protein and calories.

Online reactionaries, junk-science bros and conservative talk-show hosts feed these anxieties by producing a steady stream of content in which they insist that modern life – and eating tofu – is causing a crisis of masculinity. But these fears are not new. Masculinity has been in crisis throughout history – mostly because it’s incredibly fragile, definable primarily through what it is not. And in our current cultural moment, it is not vegan, it is not liberal, it is not weak, it is not feminine and it is most certainly not ordering oat milk in its coffee. As masculinity enters its latest and most online flop era, protein-maxxing is being offered to men as a shortcut to regain lost metaphorical testosterone.

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The mythologisation of protein as a symbol of strength and health goes back to at least the mid-nineteenth century, when the German scientist Justus von Liebig hypothesised that high meat consumption was necessary for strength. Von Liebig, who argued that protein was ‘the only true nutrient’, also created the first protein shake, a meaty paste made from boiled-down cow carcasses. (Although his ideas were quickly proved wrong, his thinking proved hugely influential and still informs many of our societal ideas about meat consumption.)

Commercial protein powders would follow a few years later. Although initially developed to help the poor and working classes to consume sufficient amounts of the nutrient, they were ‘largely purchased by members of the middle classes’, who had more disposable income and ‘were strongly attracted to the physical culture movement of the period, which was centered around eating well and keeping fit to combat the pressures of daily life in the modern world’.

The parallels to today’s ‘wellness’ world are strikingly obvious: although purportedly accessible to everyone, wellness is a nakedly aspirational lifestyle that relies heavily on fearmongering around modernity and is financially out of reach for the average person. The recent MAHA-approved update to the food pyramid – which places greater emphasis on protein from animal-based sources like meat and butter rather than lower-cost options such as beans and grains – is projected to increase grocery bills by nearly a third, according to one estimate, making it even harder for already struggling families to feed themselves. And, much like in the nineteenth century, the people worrying the most about their protein intake are the same people who are most likely to already be getting enough of it.

As we live through the death throes of (the myth of) Western liberal values, manliness has been repackaged as animal-based muscle gain, with protein sold as a magical, disembodied nutrient that you can and should purchase at every available opportunity – providing an easy alternative to self-introspection or class-based insurrection. What is marketed to men as ‘peak masculinity’ is a joyless, sterile life in which everything that makes life actually worth living – community, companionship, carbohydrates – is replaced with grams of protein, meal prepping and dunking yourself in ice-cold water upon waking. This way of looking at food (broken down into macros, obsessively tracked to the gram) is symptomatic of a wider shift in the way we eat now. Whether or not food actually tastes good, or whether the experience of eating it is enjoyable, has become secondary to whether the protein-to-calorie ratio is optimal for our goals. It’s the perfect dietary companion to our hyper-capitalist culture and its obsession with self-optimisation in the pursuit of increased productivity and hitting KPIs.

In a time of polycrisis – when everything feels unachievable, unobtainable or pointless – increasing protein intake has, for men, become a tangible way to solve everything that is wrong with their lives. More protein (plus gym) equals more muscle, which equals more manliness, which will make you more desirable, which will in turn make you more successful (according to the looks-maxxing prosperity index). At the end of this protein-based hamster wheel is every modern man’s dream: running a pyramid scheme barely disguised as a life-coaching business while accruing passive income from the people you exploit.

At some point – once every man in the world has given up gainful or useful employment to start a podcast sponsored by their very own protein-powder brand – we might finally hit peak protein. Either that, or the world will implode even earlier than expected from the sheer amount of livestock we will need to rear to meet the astronomical protein demands of men in sedentary desk jobs. Or maybe the snake-oil merchants in our phones will soon move on to something else instead – Kai’s girlfriend is a plant-based fibre-maxxer.

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Credits

Niloufar Haidari is a tiny woman from Neasden with the soul of an itinerant drifter and the eating habits of a racoon

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.