Demand for protein powders and shakes has soared in recent years as influencers and health gurus have touted the nutrients’ benefits for weight loss and muscle gain. But the benefits could come at a cost. A recent Consumer Reports investigation found unsafe levels of lead in many popular protein supplements. More than two-thirds of the products tested had more lead in a single serving than food safety experts say is safe to consume in an entire day.
Hannah Cutting-Jones is a food historian and assistant professor in the University of Oregon’s global studies department. She’s written about the rise of protein as a diet trend and joins us to talk about what it’s meant for consumers.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Demand for protein powders and shakes has soared in recent years as doctors, health gurus and influencers have touted the nutrients’ benefits for weight loss and muscle gain. But those benefits could come at a cost. A recent Consumer Reports investigation found unsafe levels of lead in more than two-thirds of the protein supplements they tested.
Hannah Cutting-Jones is a food historian and an assistant professor in the University of Oregon’s global studies department. She’s written about the rise of protein as a diet trend for years now, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Hannah Cutting-Jones: Thank you so much. Happy to be with you.
Miller: So I noted that you are a historian. How far back does an intense focus on protein in our diets go?
Cutting-Jones: Well, the initial focus on protein really begins in the 1800s, in the mid-1800s. People like Justus von Liebig, Carl von Voit, different physiologists and chemists, really, in Germany and in other places started to identify the macronutrients in the mid-1840s – so fats, carbs, and proteins. And they pretty quickly settled on protein as the component of food that was most important for building muscle. There was not much understanding at that point, of course, in terms of how much muscle, how much digestion and food, how it all worked and came together. But they did know that there was a component within food that was a muscle builder and one of the most important components.
It starts in the 1860s, when Justus von Liebig and others start promoting certain products that are considered to be high in protein. Justus von Liebig – he dies right around the same time in the 1860s – there’s a product attached to his name, called an extract of beef, that starts to be produced in Argentina and marketed all around the world. So there’s been a long history of products that have been touted as being really high in dietary protein. And very early on, it’s important to note that protein was linked to the consumption of animal products, and meat in particular.
So people for a long time really felt that it was important to be eating meat, even though for most of human history meat was not so much a central component of people’s diets. But certainly, in America, the meat industry really gets going in the 1860s, so there’s a lot of correlation between this focus on protein and meat consumption, even starting as early as the 1800s.
Miller: What has changed in the last couple of decades in terms of a focus on protein?
Cutting-Jones: Some other big turning points, for most of the 1900s – in the 1920s, the vitamins and micronutrients were discovered and isolated, and there were several key turning points that are important and that I have written about. But I would say that for most of the 20th century, the focus was primarily on bodybuilding and athletics. Those were the people who were really concerned about getting sufficient grams of protein in their daily diets.
A real turning point comes in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, when some studies come out that link protein consumption with weight loss and weight maintenance. And this was a really important turning point. For example, one study came out in the Journal of Nutrition in 2003, and there had long been this kind of vilification at that point of dietary fats. Any of us who lived in the 1990s remember the horrors of the low-fat, no-fat dietary craze ...
Miller: Meaning that, in the same way, on all packaging now it touts protein amounts and grams of protein … then, it was how little fat things had.
Cutting-Jones: Exactly, exactly. Nobody was as focused on protein during those years. We had Slim Fast shakes and all these different dietary shakes. But the big, big focus on protein as the most important component, again, has that big shift in the early 2000s. And at that point, not only are people who are into bodybuilding and athletics – they were consuming protein all along – but now, it becomes this crossover into grocery stores. This is when different bars like the Balance Bar, the Quest Bar, all of these new products start to be on the market in the early 2000s. And it’s kind of off to the races.
Because protein at that point is about everybody’s health, right? So it’s not just for one thing or another. If you’re older and you don’t want to lose muscle mass and you’re worried about sarcopenia, you need to eat more protein. If you’re a child who’s growing and you need a certain amount of protein in your formula or your baby products, if you are an adolescent, if you’re a bodybuilder, an athlete, if you are a menopausal woman and you want to keep muscle and lose fat. So for everybody, protein is really touted as “the thing,” and that’s a key turning point.
Miller: You were talking there a little bit about trends in dieting, or the way we think about the components of our food. I remember when margarine was seen as better for us than butter. And you haven’t mentioned carbs yet, but I do remember a time when carbs were not demonized. Is protein different from these other orthodoxies, trends or fads?
Cutting-Jones: It really is, because fat, saturated fat, was really … This is part of a longer story, but in essence, in 1955 in September, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the President of the United States, has a heart attack. And his doctor, Dr. Paul Dudley White, was close colleagues with Ancel Keys, who was the person who started studying the links between saturated fat in the diet and coronary heart disease.
I won’t go down that rabbit hole too far, but just to say that, from that point on, really, from the ‘60s and ‘70s up till the 1990s … and we’re still really dealing with it today, linking fat consumption and fat accumulation. So fat was something that was just oversimplified – if you ate fat, you would gain fat. Carbs and sugar, those have taken their turns at being vilified also.
Protein has just never been vilified in the same way. It hasn’t been the central focus for different decades, but it certainly has never been vilified in the same way. It’s always been held up as a key component to good health. And that’s for good reason. It is part of what we need and building blocks for our nutrition, but I think it has been overhyped and I think it has really been marketed to the point that it has been a problem. And I think there are certain more recent developments – with the pandemic, with Ozempic, with the rise of social media – that have exacerbated this obsession with protein.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the gulf between the daily amount of protein that the most popular and very visible protein evangelists [are] calling for, and what the existing USDA nutritional guidance is for an average adult?
Cutting-Jones: The existing RDA, or Recommended Daily Allowance, is about 0.8, something like that, 0.8 grams per kilogram of weight. This would come out to, if someone weighs 150 pounds, they would maybe need, what, 60, 70 grams per day, something like that. You can do the calculations. But people who are social media influencers, a lot of people who are really, really into protein, they will recommend as much as 150 grams, 175 grams, as much as 1 gram per pound of weight ...
Miller: These are people like Peter Atiyeh, people who are unbelievably popular in podcasts or books or social media. How do you think about this? It’s a gigantic discrepancy and it can make eating protein feel like a part-time job. It can make those of us who aren’t eating that much feel like we’re letting ourselves down. How do you think about this gigantic discrepancy?
Cutting-Jones: I think that it is damaging. I think that it really, really stresses people out. I talk to my students about it, and my kids. And I think the reality is, from what I’ve read … And again, full disclosure: I’m a historian, I’m a social cultural historian. I’m not a nutritionist and I’m not trained as a medical doctor. Although I will say that medical doctors really receive very, very little in terms of nutrition education … so we’ll say that.
But from my perspective, the study that I’ve done on this, most people don’t have a protein deficiency. If you are getting enough calories and you’re getting enough nutrient dense foods, you feel good and your energy is where it needs to be, you’re probably getting enough protein. I think the other parts of whole foods like fiber, for example, are something that Americans really don’t get enough of in their diets. And a lot of these protein supplements, as you mentioned in the introduction, they’re very ultra processed. There’s very little oversight of protein supplements.
So my main concern is that if we’re eating a lot of extra protein, what are we leaving out of our diets? What are we not eating in terms of whole foods? And how much money and time are we spending buying these very highly processed supplemental products? So I think it’s something that creates a lot of unnecessary stress. I think that it also becomes an issue of access and what you can afford.
Miller: I’m glad you brought that up because we’re talking about this at a time when millions of Americans do not know if they’re going to get federal food assistance this month. We’ll be talking about that again tomorrow. How does class play into this conversation?
Cutting-Jones: I think it really does, because it becomes an issue of who has access – not only to what information, but what types of products. I mean, there’s a whole culture, and we can call it “wellness culture,” but I think often wellness culture is kind of an umbrella for what is essentially diet culture.
But to be able to have access to a place to work out, to have access to all of these protein products, they’re very, very expensive. One product that just launched on the market a few months ago that you may have seen is called David Protein Bar.
Miller: Yes, I have. It confused me when I first saw it.
Cutting-Jones: And I think it really summarizes a lot of what we’re talking about, right? Because the packaging harkens back to the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and this sculpture, and it’s wrapped in gold. They’re $3.50 a bar, and they’re talking about optimal nutrition, and there’s this idea like, you need to put the time and energy into creating this optimal version of yourself. And it is about access because most people, many, many people don’t have the luxury of focusing that way on their sources of food. When we think about access and where people live, transportation – all of these factors should be considered. And it does become an issue, I think, of social justice.
Also, when we’re thinking about younger people, I was just doing some research recently looking at the role, for example, of social media, and something like 96% of young people now turn to social media to get dietary, nutritional advice. During the pandemic, many, many people, something like, it dropped 30 or 40%, the percentage of people who trust medical professionals to give them dietary advice.
So we have a situation where people are looking for someone to give them some guidance, but, as always, there’s not one magic bullet or one magic pill that can fix all of our concerns.
Miller: Just briefly, what happens when we, more and more, start to think about our meals not as, “this is what I cooked, here is the food,” but, “this has ‘X’ grams of this particular nutrient?”
Cutting-Jones: That’s a great point and it’s really part of a very long-term process that some nutritionists and writers have called “nutritionism,” which is this very reductionist way of seeing nutrition and seeing dietary components – vitamins and nutrients – as being completely detached from the actual foods that they are a part of.
I think when we see foods in that way, we are really becoming even more removed from our sources of food. And that’s a big problem, because food, at its best, it’s meant to connect us to other people. It’s about much more than just how many grams of proteins or carbs that you’re getting. I think our focus needs to be on what food brings us beyond thinking of ourselves as a machine, but thinking of how we connect with other people and thinking about this wide array of benefits from eating whole foods.
Miller: Hannah Cutting-Jones, thanks very much.
Cutting-Jones: Thank you. Great to talk to you.
Miller: Hannah Cutting-Jones is a food historian and an assistant professor in the University of Oregon’s global studies department.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
