Sam Sanders

speaker

960 appearances 14 recordings 6 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 3 Jun

Sam Sanders’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 5.

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Apple News Today · Americans are obsessed with protein. How much do you actually need? · 28 Mar 2026 podcast

Before Liebig came to that conclusion, he kept experimenting with protein.

He even created his own protein supplement, Liebig's extract of meat.

Basically, boiled down beef juice.

Liebig eventually began producing his extract at scale, using cheap cuts of meat from the cattle industry.

It became a thriving commercial product, it was sold as a high-protein supplement, and it helped spark what Sammy and Gavin called the first protein boom in the 1860s and 70s.

There was only one problem.

So Liebig's science and his product were faulty.

But the ideas about protein that he popularized took root and endured into the next big protein boom, which happened in the 1950s and 60s.

This one was driven by international development efforts in places like South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Public health officials had turned their attention to widespread child malnutrition following decades of colonization and upheaval.

This effort became known as the Great Protein Fiasco.

Aid organizations pumped resources into creating protein-enriched products that took the form of powders, sludges, and bars.

In particular, they relied on the booming US dairy industry and shipped tons of powdered milk overseas.

But by the mid-1970s, most experts came to agree that the real problem was not a global protein gap.

It was a food gap.

People just didn't have access to enough food, period.

A food supply issue.

And beyond that, Sammy says that these campaigns did lasting damage to those communities' cultural relationships to food.

So how do we go from this moment of pushing protein on undernourished people abroad to today, where consumers in the US are clamoring to buy this stuff?

Gavin says it all traces back to that same thriving dairy industry in the US.

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