Chapter 1: What drives the current obsession with protein in our diets?
We are going to extreme lengths to get more protein these days. The powders, the shakes, the cottage cheese and the oatmeal, the peanut butter and everything, and the chicken smoothie.
I went to the store, got like some chicken breast, boiled it, blended it in a blender. It was like... I added a splash of water and then it smelled like, you know, I was just like, dude, I'm making soup here. This is so weird. So then I added like every berry, every frozen banana, like everything I could basically find in my freezer. And, you know, to make it a little bit more tolerable.
Have you tried the chicken smoothie?
And then my wife tried it, too. And she was like, oh, yeah, you could definitely feel the chicken on that. And so I had this like, you know, venti sized chicken smoothie that I had to drink all myself because I can't waste anything in my house.
Coming up on Today Explained, protein madness.
Hi, this is Bella Freud. I'm the host of Fashion Neurosis. This week on the show, Esther Perel is on my couch.
Erotic recovery is part of trauma healing. God, that's interesting. It's not the reward at the end. Yeah. That's the difference. And I think we both come together around that construct.
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Chapter 2: How did the trend of adding protein to everyday foods start?
There's no way I should be eating this burger that is designed to taste like a cow but isn't a cow. I'm kind of like, just be yourself, burger.
So there's two parallel tracks here. And one is we are able to just make more kinds of proteins and put them into more types of foods.
Exactly.
And then sell them to people. And the other is people want them. People are also buying the stuff. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Or is this just a nice confluence of what the customer wants the industry is prepared now to provide?
In my reporting, I sort of found that, you know, of all the macronutrients, the big three are fat, carbohydrates, and protein. Protein's kind of the only one that's never really been demonized by marketers and, like, pop scientists and Atkins and, like, all that stuff. It's like, you think of carbohydrates, it was like that was verboten at one point.
It's a great diet debate, low carb or low fat. You probably have had some friends or family members or yourself trying the no-carb or low-carb diets.
Fat, definitely verboten at one point. The analogy I like to use is protein's kind of like the Dolly Parton of macronutrients. Like, we can all agree that she's pretty great, regardless of your identity or, like, political affiliation.
My hopes for the new year is a little more kindness, a little more love. So, speaking of Dolly, and also speaking of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I love Arnold, but... As like a woman, I don't aspire to look like Arnold. But the algorithm has found me anyway. Like I go on Instagram and the ladies are serving me protein. Most women are not eating enough protein.
Oh my God, you're looking for a high protein breakfast option that takes less than 10 minutes to make and it's 65 grams of protein? Yeah, buddy. I know. That's what you wanted. And I'm a giver. I'm a lover. How did we go from this is kind of male-dominated, muscles on muscles on muscles, to a lot of female health influencers are evangelizing it also? When does that turn happen?
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Chapter 3: What role did whey protein play in the protein boom?
They realized Wheaties would be a good test for this stuff. And so they went out to their roster of fitness enthusiasts. And the information they were hearing back was a Wheaties protein product would ideally have at least 15 grams of protein per serving, which is kind of a lot.
The challenge for them was preserving the fidelity of the flake because Wheaties eaters are surprisingly hardcore about what a Wheaties should taste like and how hard it should be. how crunchy it should be. So it was actually wheat germ and soy protein isolate that they had to combine and make it somehow taste like the old version of Wheaties.
And they went through 40 different iterations over it, over a multi-year R&D period. And it was kind of funny because they rolled out all these different versions over the years in little glass containers, kind of like little, I don't know, like Jurassic Park embryos or something. And I asked them to take a picture of it. And then they were just like, oh, no, we can't do that.
Like it was like Illuminati levels of secrecy for all these cereal shapes.
Speaking of Jurassic Park, I was trying to picture how do you get protein into food? Because it's it's not just Wheaties. It's also Cheerios. It's also like you said, it's granola bars. It's everything. And all I can imagine is a person with like a big needle. Somehow the needle has liquid protein. They're just like plunging the needle into a weedy flake. I'm guessing no. But how does it work?
Like, how do they get the protein in there?
Yeah, it isn't too far off from Jurassic Park, as I understand it. You're altering the DNA of whatever the food is on a very granular level. You know, it's like they'll take the wheat germ that they were using for Wheaties, for example. put in some protein and then they have like all these calculations about like how much liquid to use.
And they're just calibrating that until they get something that sort of resembles the traditional product, but is maybe just a little bit off.
And then on top of that, they'll try to mask it with, you know, nut clusters and all this other stuff to sort of like take your eye off the ball a little bit that this isn't the old one you're eating, but it's a little bit different, but it can't be too different. And I think that's kind of the trick towards all these new protein food products, honestly.
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