The Protein Craze Needs to Die

I don't care what Kim Kardashian's butt wants.

One night, while sleeping, Kim Kardashian’s once mighty, once proud, once Volvo-sized rear end, now quite diminished in breadth, got so worked up that its anguished twerks roused Ms. Kardashian from her slumber.

Kim looked over her shoulder and said, “What’s wrong, my sweet little tush?”

“Ha!” responded her tush in a derisive tone. “‘Little’ is exactly what’s wrong! I demand you FEED ME and restore me to my former Brobdingnagian proportions lest I lose my identity and what’s left of my ass meat completely!”

Well, Kim didn’t know what Brobdingnagian meant, but she sure understood FEED ME. Crestfallen, she reached out to her sister, Khloe, for help.

That’s when Khloe told her about her new food brand, “Khloud Foods,” and its first product, “Khloud Protein Popcorn”. The popcorn contains 7 grams of the macronutrient per serving. The protein is a proprietary blend called “Khloud Dust” which includes milk protein and seasoning.

Protein! Of course! Suddenly, everything became so khlear. Kim could build up her butt meat by eating extra protein! Kim khlouldn’t be happier. She and her butt khlapped her hands/cheeks in delight.

Okay, I don’t know how much of the preceding is true – whether Kim’s butt really talks and if it feels anguish over its diminished size – but the existence of Khloe’s protein popcorn is certainly true.

If you’ve set foot in a grocery store lately, you’ve no doubt noticed that we’re in the midst of a protein war. Back in February, The Wall Street Journal noted that the fastest growing sector of grocery store items were those with the most protein per serving – 25 grams or more.

Maybe the protein craze is a natural evolution as it’s the only macronutrient that’s escaped demonization (people were anti-fat in the 1990’s and then anti-carb in the early 2000’s and lasting until the current day). Plus, focusing on protein is smart marketing. As Jessica Grouse, writing in The New York Times put it, “Dieting in general is female coded, but men can focus on protein without feeling emasculated because body builders do it and it comes in the form of literal red meat and gym-rat powders.”

Okay, why poor wussy men would feel emasculated by the concept of dieting is beyond me and maybe the subject of another article, but the point is perceptive. Protein is perceived as masculine. Eating lots of it conjures up meat fests and muscle while supposedly simultaneously erasing dad bods. Women too could embrace it because they’ve lately come to believe that it’s healthier than other macronutrients and that it could lead to fat loss while making their armatures curvier by adding muscle in the right places.

Protein has even become politicized, becoming a component of the culture wars. Members of the alt-right and white nationalists link high protein with masculinity and affording men the strong bodies necessary to fight “globalism” (see media personality called “the Raw Egg Nationalist”).

With apologies to Garrison Keillor’s Powdermilk biscuits slogan, protein apparently gives shy Nazis the strength to get up and do what needs to be done.

Nutjob Marjorie Taylor Greene scares the less educated by telling them the government is going to come out and “zap” people if they ate real cheeseburgers, forcing them to eat fake meat grown in a “peach tree dish” by Bill Gates. For real.

Journalist Kenny Torrella, speaking on an NPR segment, thinks meat and protein are “baked into the mythology of America’s founding in some ways. You know, you have images of, like, the cowboy on the open range. So that’s always been kind of tied to the American identity…”

So, the idea of meat was latched on by conservatives (and certainly many liberals) and was deemed iconically American, or rather Amurrican. Likewise, protein is Amurrican. No wonder we now have high-protein yogurts, high-protein ice creams, pancake mixes, cookies, breads, coffees, and yeah, even high-protein popcorn. No wonder Instagram is thickly populated with recipes that guarantee at least 50 grams of protein per serving. No wonder we have frauds like The Liver King advocating an almost all-meat diet (but especially, raw liver and the occasional testicle. For real).

But once we hack away at all obfuscating cobwebs of misinformation and identity and history and culture, it all comes down to this:

Just how much protein does the average person need? Should they be counting grams of protein the way members of the financially-struggling Weight Watcher’s organization count calories? Or should most of us, you know, relax a little?

The answer is that most Americans shouldn’t bother counting grams of protein. It’s true that a typical person needs roughly .8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight (that’s about 47 grams a day for a 130-pound person; roughly 62 grams a day for a 175-pound person; and about 72 grams a day for a 200-pound person), but if they live in America and they don’t fall considerably under the poverty line, they’re likely getting enough through their Big-Mac laden, ribeye-steak stacked diets.

Instead of focusing on or obsessing about protein, Americans should instead focus on fiber, in addition to doing the Michael Pollan thing. You know, eat more plants, mostly leaves. Oh, and ditch the highly processed food-stuffs. You know the drill.

The only people who might justifiably take great pains to monitor protein intake are infants… well, the people who take care of them at least; old people; and athletes, especially of the muscle building kind.

So, just how much protein do the members of the three preceding categories need?

(BTW, “The Bum” pictured at the beginning of this article is an exact wearable replica of Kardashian's former booty and it made its debut at New York Fashion Week at an event for Elle magazine in 2020).

End of part 1.