TikTok content creators are hawking powders from Just Move and Ryse. Netflix is teasing its documentary Untold: The Liver King, which tracks the rise and fall of the raw-meat enthusiast, out later this month. Influential podcast bros, from the physician Peter Attia to the very well-paid Joe Rogan, swap protein-heavy diet anecdotes and share their “current state of protein supplementation.” One of this year’s most talked about shows, season three of The White Lotus, derived a whole thread of narrative tension from what can only be described as Chekhov’s protein shake.
For decades, an American protein mania has been building. This year, it may be hitting its peak. News and takes have abounded, from Vogue’s “4 Signs You’re Not Getting Enough Protein” and Grub Street’s deep dive on added-protein foods to The New Yorker’s profile of a protein bar company and The New York Times’ fact-check of “big protein claims.”
“I don’t have a good sense on what’s driving that right now, other than if it’s just the usual manosphere—or manomania, here in the United States,” says Pieter Cohen, an internist at Cambridge Health Alliance and associate professor at Harvard Medical School who leads the center’s Supplement Research Program. “Everyone’s letting their testosterone out these days.” One thing he’s noticed: More men than women arrive at his office “interested in protein.”
It’s not only men who care about protein, but a mosey through recent history suggests a strong correlation between the rise of the likes of the men’s rights movement and our national lust for protein—which is how we got to the quagmire of contradiction wherein a “manosphere” helmed by Donald Trump (he of the diet dubbed by his own health secretary, the admittedly often incorrect Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to be “really, like, bad”) has such a vocal contingent of intense protein-maxing “health” obsessives.
The intertwinement of masculinity and red meat (and its attendant health properties, namely protein) is strong and deep-seated. A 2023 study found that men were “more likely to eat foods to the extent that those foods were perceived as higher in masculinity and lower in femininity,” which correlated with foods that were seen as higher in protein. Another, from this year, found that men who have what they describe as a strong “meat-eating identity” also “tend to perceive themselves as more masculine.” An obsession with protein affords a masculine-coded cover on the feminine-coded world of body image and dieting—and a subject over which men can bond as bros.
While discussing the carnivore diet, Joe Rogan and Theo Von—both members of the podcast contingent widely seen to have played a major part in turning the election for Trump—laud the powers of red meat, while acknowledging that some people do well on a vegetarian diet (“Not for me, dude,” Rogan says with grim resolve) before sliding into a tangent about Rogan’s avoidance of pizza that becomes, somehow, aggressively erotic.
“If I had a couple of cocktails,” Rogan murmurs, “I probably would have grabbed a slice.”
Von begins shifting in his chair. “Oh fuck yeah, boy.”
“A couple of tequilas?” Rogan smiles coyly at his interlocutor. “Next thing you know, I want some pizza.”
“Oh dude, I’ll”—Von grits his teeth—“I’ll do whatever after that, boy.”
The so-called Liver King, who rips into raw animal hearts, testicles, and livers with his teeth, hawks protein supplements purportedly “high in organs including blood, colostrum, and tallow” (none of which, it should be noted, is an organ). His ensuing online popularity afforded him entry into a world populated by his right-wing idols. Last year, he posted a video compilation of himself fanboying over Trump, Logan Paul, and others.
According to the food historian Hannah Cutting-Jones, we can trace today’s relationship to protein back to the 19th-century chemist and early macronutrient expert Justus von Liebig, who called it “the only true nutrient”—and, in the 1860s, promptly started making and selling his own protein supplement of sorts: Liebig’s Extract of Meat. In the 1950s and ’60s, doctors and scientists homed in on protein supplementation as an important tool in treating malnutrition in places like North Africa, India, and postwar Korea.
For almost as long as there’s been enthusiasm for protein, there’s been controversy: over how it’s made, how much to get, and from where. In the mid-1970s, the FTC was reporting that “marketing of [protein supplement] products is almost universally dependent upon consumer misinformation and misconceptions about the nutritional characteristics of protein.” A series of New York Times articles from the same era read like the plot of a body-horror film: In 1974, an animal science professor came up with a process to “recycle” cows by turning slaughterhouse waste products into a protein supplement that could be fed to “feedlot steers”; by 1977, the FDA was linking “liquid protein supplements” for humans—also made from cattle-slaughtering by-products—with the deaths of 16 women, leading to a substantial decrease in sales.
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