Kara Oakes, content creator

Unless you’ve been living in the “Berry Bubble” for too long, you can see a rampant trend that has bombarded grocery items when you go off campus to a store. Protein. Protein Cheerios, protein Pop-Tarts and protein water – yes, it exists. Protein everything. You get
the point.

The global protein supplement market alone is currently valued at nearly $30 billion and is projected to surpass $37 billion by 2030, growing steadily year after year. This isn’t a mere micro-trend; it’s a mass cultural shift in the American diet that has, quite frankly, become absurd.

Now the question I’ve wondered – and I’m sure you have too – is where did this ‘protein-ification’ come from? I don’t believe there is one exact answer, but rather a few leading causes that have led to this shift. There have always been health trends that glamorize or demonize one food group, often oversimplifying nutrition.

For example, in the 1960s the low-fat diet movement took off after physiologist Ancel Keys proposed his ‘diet-heart hypothesis,’ claiming that high fat and cholesterol intake caused heart disease. During this time, people severely limited their fat intake. What went wrong was that people tried to simplify nutrition.

Our bodies are a complex system that will do everything possible to keep us alive, and that requires more nuance. I think any health trend that involves cutting out or taking an extreme approach to a certain food group is not good for you.

What goes wrong with this trend is the fact that people are putting protein on a pedestal while often neglecting their other macro and micronutrients. This is also a contributing factor for those on GLP-1s.

The popularity and accessibility of GLP-1s have rapidly increased this past year, and without adequate nutrition, like protein, can lead to malnutrition due to a lack of desire to eat. You’d think that more protein-infused food items would be a good thing, but oftentimes companies are just following the money.

A lot of these brands that have adopted the high-protein trend are marketing their products as wellness foods just because they have a few extra grams of protein, which does not make up for the fact that there is still excessive added sugar and saturated fat. When companies thrive off exploiting a population that lacks nutritional knowledge, customers can come to a false conclusion that what they’re eating is healthy.

Although I believe this trend has gotten out of hand, I do think there are some genuine benefits to it. Protein is necessary for muscle recovery and overall health. There’s nothing wrong with wanting more of it. The issue is that most Americans aren’t actually protein deficient and if anything, we need to be consuming more dietary fiber. Approximately 95% of Americans are not meeting their daily fiber needs. I believe the best way to fix this is to choose foods that naturally contain protein, better nutrients,
and fiber.

We’ve been chasing the wrong things while ignoring the one that might actually be missing from our diets. The extremes are rarely the answer, whether that means cutting out entire food groups or overloading on a single nutrient because it’s trending. You need to take everything in moderation.

The true benefit to the high-protein trend comes from whole foods rather than processed snacks chasing a marketing trend. There is so much nuance to nutrition, and balance matters more than any single macronutrient.

Protein is great, it just does not need to be in everything, especially water.