Today, Explained - Whey too much protein

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Added protein really seems to be in all the food lately. Reporter Chris Gayomali says to thank environmental regulations, GLP-1s, and Arnold Schwarzenegger for our modern protein boom. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Matthew Billy, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Protein bars on display at a CVS pharmacy in Queens, New York. Photo by Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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, 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. Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is A-T-T-I-O. What do they do? It's an AI native CRM built for

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You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. You and me and everyone we know is going to the gym lately, and so is writer Chris Sciomali. Chris publishes the health and wellness newsletter, Heavies, and he recently wrote a big piece about protein for Grub Street that started with his path to protein obsession. This actually started a few years ago here in New York. Once lockdown restrictions sort of eased up,

the gyms were kind of the first thing to open. And so mostly out of boredom, I started going to my Muay Thai gym like five or six days a week and got really, really fit. Around that same time, I started listening to health podcasts like Huberman Lab. When I heard this, I thought there's no way this is true, which was making sure that you get 30 or so grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking. And I was constantly getting all these messages that like, you're not getting enough protein

in your diet. And so that sort of triggered my fall down this trap door towards the protein event horizon. People think it's crazy that I've eaten 200 grams of protein for almost 20 straight years every single day. The biggest lie that you're telling yourself is that you can't hit your protein goals. Stop overcomplicating it. I blend chicken twice a day. To be an open, pro bodybuilder.

Chug that baby down. Somebody get this messed up protein! I myself do listen to Huberman and I have gotten the message too. I think a lot more about protein than I ever thought I would think about protein. Same here. Me of 36 months ago would not recognize this person. Tell me where protein mania begins. Is this a recent phenomenon? So it actually really starts with whey protein and for that you have to go back to right after World War II. The Japanese have accepted our terms fully. That is the word we have just received from the White House in

Washington. And I didn't expect to hear a celebration here in our newsroom in New York, but you can hear one going on behind me. A lot of farming became really industrialized. And around that time, we really saw dairy production really start to ratchet up here in the United States. Milk is one of our most wholesome foods. Now where are the milk cows and the dairy farms

of the United States located? In an area commonly called the Dairy Belt. There was just like so much cheese that they were making, especially in Vermont and Wisconsin. Cheese, a more concentrated food, is more valuable per pound than milk. When you make cheese, its liquid byproduct is whey, which has historically been treated as a refuse that was like either dumped in the rivers

or fed to pigs and cattle. Once the whey is discarded at least, it kind of has nowhere to go. And there was one cheese plant in 1942 that actually used to dump all its whey product into an old drinking well. The substance produced so much gas that at one point the well's cover blew off. Things really started to change in the 1970s when a couple of things started happening in tandem. The big one was there was kind of this swell of environmental legislation that came out that sort of just made

Dumping whey not the move all these manufacturers had to find a use for this stuff. That was essentially garbage and Meanwhile, there were technological breakthroughs in fields like micro filtration Which made it easier to transform the whey into a powder that you could actually mix with water and drink down So that's kind of how we got to this point where you're able to drink whey protein, as we know it today. And then the other thing that happened was in 1977, there was this big documentary that came out called Pumping Iron. And now we come to the heavyweights, over 200 pounds. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The greatest feeling you can get in a gym, or the most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym, is the pump.

It was kind of a mind-blowing thing at the time. Like this guy came out of nowhere and had biceps on top of his biceps. Blood is rushing into your muscles, and that's what we call the pump. Your muscles get a really tight feeling, like your skin is going to explode any minute. It kind of kicked off a real bodybuilding boom, and from there people just really wanted protein and to look like the Terminator. I'll be back.

Whey protein, like that kind of set the model for a lot of different plant proteins. It was basically the same model where it was like, we have all this excess trash and mush, especially from the soybean oil industry. And they were like, hey, we have all this soy mush left over from extracting oil. What should we do with it?

And then they figured out that you can really transform this stuff into soluble powders. And it's actually pretty nutrient dense too. But what's really funny about it is like this whole protein boom is like people just figured out that you can take existing garbage essentially and sell it to people. And so that's how we got to where we are today. But more recently, you know, they're sort of synthesizing all sorts of plants. There's soy, there's pea, there's algae, there's hemp, there's rice. Yeah, all sorts of stuff that they're sort of mushing up and extracting protein from and turning

it into powders that they can jam into. All sorts of wacky snacks, which I've tasted a lot of during this journey. You also tasted a protein soda. Tell me about that. Oh my gosh. So when I came across this, the existence of this protein soda called Feisty, I was like protein soda. That's that's so wild. But then I talked to the founder. Yeah.

Hi, my name is V. I'm the founder of Feisty. And she's a former designer at Louis Vuitton based in London and she actually had her own interesting journey with protein. She had like a gnarly knee injury not too long ago and her PT was basically like you should get into lifting. And I gave it a go. I've never been sporting my whole life. I never had this feeling of like an endorphins hit before and I was like wow this is so incredible and just like fell in love with like all things fitness. And from the lifting she kind of fell in love with the sport and then started researching how to create her own drink that wasn't as heavy, not like a shake that you would have to guzzle down and so she landed on this idea for a

fizzy protein soda. I heard of this hydrolyzed pea protein, which is like a pea protein which dissolves in water as clear. And I was like, why has no one put this in a soda? This is cool. You did talk to some plant protein scientists. What does that job entail? There's a lot of research being done right now in genetically modifying certain plants, say pea or even potatoes.

So protein is really tricky and I'm by no means an expert in how all that stuff sort of holds together. My name is David Julian McClements and I'm a distinguished professor in the Department of Food Science at the University of Massachusetts. And I do a lot of work on protein fortification of plant-based foods. First of all, ridiculous that that exists. I love it. So we're trying to make plant-based alternatives.

The most common way is you just basically take the plant, you grind it up into a powder, then you put it in water, and then you make it very alkaline, and that causes the proteins to dissolve. And then you collect them, and then you change the the pH again and they all come out of solution and you get this big curd that you can take and dry and use as a protein isolate. So we've made a sort of plant-based scallops. I admittedly like I get a little bit squeamish around like fake meats like that. Plant-based chicken and plant-based eggs that are fortified with proteins and other healthy

ingredients. So things like potatoes or peas or soybeans or nettles. 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, right? 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. The 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 a verboten at one point. The analogy I like to use is protein's kind of like the Dolly Parton of macronutrients. We can all agree that she's pretty great regardless of your identity or 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 a woman, I don't aspire to look like Arnold. But the algorithm has found me anyway. 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 often that takes us in 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? It has to do with the sort of normalizing of fitness culture, which you have also fallen into in the past. I work out all the time. I can bench you. And it's addicting, right? And I think part of it is like, post-pandemic,

we were just so concerned about our mortality and watching death sort of surround us in a real way that a lot of people decided to get healthy kind of at the same time. But also, your point about influencers is really interesting. One of the big ones is Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. She's a part of the sort of Huberman cinematic universe. There is not one macronutrient more important to an aging individual than protein.

Really compelling figure in her mid-50s, I think, and she looks like she could deadlift like a Miata if she needed to. But she's argued that women, especially as they enter menopause, need to be lifting weights and eating way more protein to stay healthy. Protein for dummies, source, meat, which include pork, beef, lamb. She's so turbo, but I think she's onto something. And I think that's really like hitting a note with a lot of people across all stripes. The other big cultural moment that we're in is the moment of Ozempic and Mungaro and other GLP1s.

Those also affect how much protein we want or need? You know, retailers like Walmart especially are like sort of already stocking their shelves with foods that are a little bit more nutrient-dense and high in protein. Nestle just announced a new frozen food brand that it says is intended to be a companion for GLP-1 weight loss medication users and consumers focused on weight management. The makers of KitKat are coming out with some food items that you'll be able to find on your local grocery shelves soon and these foods will be geared towards you and me users of GLP-1 medications. Let's take a look at what they are. Mostly because these kind of drugs are so popular right now and

they really do limit the amount of food you can eat. So if you can't eat as much food, the thinking goes that you need stuff that's just packed with more nutrients in order to feel okay and good and healthy. So that's it's kind of really shaping the industry in a very real way right now. What I eat in a day on Mrs. Zempi, I always start my day with some Greek yogurt, Chobani is my favorite and then- Today's the day that we take our Ozempi shots. So you already know what that means. We need to get in a good high protein meal before doing so. Let's make a protein coffee while I talk about the importance of protein while on a GLP-1 medication. I was like, um, shopping for breakfast cereals for my three year old, just like looking around

and I noticed this svelte new box of Wheaties protein, which advertised 20-something grams of protein on the cover. There was no old Wheaties. It had been replaced seemingly overnight by this very buff new insurgent, I guess. And so I was like, huh. And so in the course of this, I hit up General Mills, which owns this big portfolio of food products and Wheaties especially. Ben asked if I could come out and check out what they're doing over there.

And weirdly enough, they said yes. Coming up, Chris goes behind the veil at General Mills. Support for Today Explained comes from Bowl and Branch. You all know that feeling, there's too much to do and not enough time to do it in, and it's especially hard to get started when you're exhausted. Brother, let me tell ya, maybe you don't get enough sleep or maybe your sleep just isn't up to par and all that tossing and turning and the opening and closing of windows isn't exactly helping you

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That's VoxMedia.com slash S-X-S-W. Today Explained is back with me, Noelle from work and Chris Gaomali. Now as you've skittered around the aisles of your local grocery store, you have likely wondered at some point, how are they getting the protein into all this stuff? Chris had the same thought and then he scored an invitation. So, last November, I landed in Minneapolis and took an Uber out to General Mills' headquarters. And it's this beautiful, picturesque campus just outside of Minneapolis.

They have, like, this sculpture garden outside. It's just this beautiful campus with duck ponds, and there was, like, foliage everywhere. And then I'm inside this building where they make all these snack products. General Mills, they began looking into you know jamming protein into a lot of their products maybe a little over 10 years ago. They had this nature valley bar that they had like jammed a little bit more protein in and then once they started selling it they realized they could make a lot of money off of this stuff.

I think it did like $100 million in its first year or something like that. So they were like, okay, maybe there's other products we can put protein into that would make us a ton of money. And so Wheaties being, you know, their flagship sort of cereal product that like, you know, has Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and Serena Williams and all those people on the cover.

Better eat your Wheaties. I better eat my Wheaties. They realized Wheaties would be a good test for this stuff. And so they went out to the roster of like fitness enthusiasts and the information they were hearing back was, you know, a Wheaties protein product would ideally have at least 15 grams of protein preserving, which is kind of a lot, you know?

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, like 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. 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 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 the like, granular level. granular level. 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 all these calculations about 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. You know, you're pointing at something here. Listeners will know I am obsessed with ultra-processed foods and what they may be doing to us. I drank a protein shake the other day and I was like, oh my god, none of this is stuff that I could find in my own kitchen. And so a thing I wonder is, are we just eating junk food? Is all the high protein stuff crap?

Yeah, you know, where I sort of landed, and this flip-flops every day, if you ask me the same question tomorrow, I might have a different answer for you. But it's still junk, but it's kind of a lesser evil situation to my mind. A lot of the researchers I talked to, there was this one guy named Alan Aragon who's sort of like been at the forefront of a lot of protein and fitness research over these past couple decades. He made the point that really kind of shocked me that this stuff is actually really useful

for people who are maybe a little bit older and they're dealing with the age-related muscle loss and it's just so much easier for them to eat a bowl of cereal versus like a huge sirloin steak that a carnivore diet influencer would like make for themselves and eat off a cutting board or something like that. It's maybe not ideal.

Maybe we should be getting our protein from whole sources like, you know, fish and like grass-fed meat and tofu and stuff like that. But you know, we don't live in a sort of ideal world. We're always on the move and like need convenience when we can. So I'll occasionally indulge in like a protein thing that tastes like a pop chart and feel not too bad about it if I can help it. There's a thing that tastes like a pop chart and feel not too bad about it if I can help it. There's a thing that happens.

It has certainly happened to me, probably most people, where you realize that you're not getting enough calcium, right, or enough iron, and then suddenly you are slamming iron tablets and spinach and steak, and then you read something that's like, oh, you should only actually be getting such and such milligrams every day. We are, as a culture, really obsessed with protein right now. Has anyone dug into whether we are getting too much? So in terms of how much protein a person might need, the RDA works out to basically 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.

That's a lot of math, but more recent research suggests that it should be probably closer to 1.6, which is double what the old RDA was. Most people probably aren't getting enough, especially if you work out. And protein is a source of our cellular healing and all that stuff. So yeah, we're probably all not eating enough, honestly. We've all learned to be suspicious of big food companies, right? There are a lot of problems with the American diet

and we're all aware of it. There are a lot of chronic conditions that stem from the American diet. When you think about what the story of protein and its rise and then continued rise tells us about ourselves. What do you think is the story behind the story here? I feel like we're just getting so much smarter about nutrition now. I always think back to my youth when the food pyramid and the bottom of it was like your

foundation of a healthy diet is like 6 to 11 daily breads or something. That's so many carbs, that's so much bread. It's so weird because some of this stuff gets really rigid really fast but then research is also moving fast and so it's kind of weird because you have to balance some conspiratorial thinking with all these podcasters and people, randos on TikTok who are making really strong health recommendations not founded in any sort of real science with sort of what sounds about right. And so it's kind of like a personal calculation is where I've kind of landed on it. If eating a little bit more protein helps you feel good, then by all means do it. I've personally sort of started eating double the amount that I was eating prior to reporting this story.

Then I feel pretty good and not too terrible with myself. So that's where I've landed with all of that. And your muscles got bigger. Yeah, my muscles are so bralic right now, dude. There you go. There you go. That is it. That is why we do it. I know. All right. Chris Gaio-Mali. Check him out at Heavies on Substack. Gabrielle Barbet produced today's show. Amina El-Sadi edited. Matthew, Billy and Andrea Christen's daughter engineered. And Laura Bullard checks the facts. Hadi Mouwagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Devin Schwartz, Victoria Chamberlain,

Travis Larchuk, Miles Bryan, and Avishai Artsy produced Today Explained. Miranda Kennedy is our EP and Jolie Myers is our deputy EP. Sean Ramos Firm is taking an airplane to South by Southwest this week to ask Minnesota Governor Tim Walz about all those JD Vance memes. If you're in Austin, stop by. The Vox Media Podcast stage is presented by Smartsheet. And this Sunday, right here in this feed, you're going to find our new weekend show

Explain It to Me, hosted by Jonqueline Hill. J.Q., what's the show about on Sunday? Hello. Okay. So this week on the show, we're going to go on a journey to help a man in the love department. You know, Noelle, we've gonna go on a journey to help a man in the love department. You know, Noelle, we've talked about this. Dating is changing and it's changing very quickly. A lot of guys feel like they've been left behind. So I talked to a listener who told me he's never tried to approach a woman in person because he's worried about coming off creepy.

Poor guy. Yeah, it's rough out here. I fell for him. But we hit a men's group at a bar in Austin, Texas and found some inspiration from a bunch of guys that get together to help each other with stuff like this. You can hear that show on Sunday morning in the Today Explained feed. And people can call you if they have a question they want you to answer. What's the number? 1-800-618-8545.

Thanks, JQ. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC, and the show is a part of Vox. Alright, Sean, you can do this promo talking about all the great Vox Media podcasts that are going to be on stage live at South by Southwest this March. You just need a big idea to get people's attention to help them, you know, keep them from hitting the skip button. I don't know. I'm going to throw it out to the group chat. know, keep them from hitting the skip button. I don't know. I'm going to throw it out to the group chat. Kara, do you have any ideas? In these challenging times, we're a group of mighty hosts who have banded together to

fight disinformation by speaking truth to power, like the Avengers, but with more spandex. What do you think, Scott? I'm more of an X-Man fan myself. Call me professor. Can I read minds? I can't really read minds, but I can empathize with anyone having a midlife crisis, which is essentially any tech leader. Minds are important, Scott, but we're more than that. I think that you can't really separate minds from feelings,

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