Why Are We All Eating So Much Protein?
A cultural history of the protein bar and how we got so protein-pilled.
It’s 6:12 a.m. and I am naked, late, and chewing 20 grams of whey protein in the shower.
I have 15 minutes to wash, dry off, slap on clothes, and catch the train. I am soaked under the shower head, but my inbox is on fire. The toddler is screaming in the other room, but I can still hear my phone buzzing with Slack pings. I put my head under the water and shove another chunk of bar into my mouth.
There’s nothing more American than a protein bar. Behold the crackling wrapper, adornment of rectangular slurry: molded, tooled, assembled—not quite food, yet not quite not food. Instead something else entirely: an edible concoction removed from its original materials—milk, sugarcane, peas, cocoa, and soybeans—all rendered into pure protein abstraction.
I’m mad for protein bars. I chomp then down. I’ve used powdered protein too. It’s fine, better calibrated for “gains,” as they say. But I’m on the go, with meetings on my calendar, a long commute, and a workout to squeeze in. There’s no time for mixing powders like some 19th-century apothecary concocting potions in a far-flung shire.
Irrespective of the form factor, protein is having a moment. It’s in the discourse, as they say—social feeds filled with calls to action to eat more protein.
Thought-fluencers are certainly pushing protein. Dr. Peter Attia, a physician and podcaster, suggests healthy people consume two and a half times the federal recommendations. Or take Thomas DeLauer, whose gym science YouTube channel encourages protein consumption amid broader bio-hacking commentary. Then there is Dr. Gabrielle Lyons, whose TikToks center around muscle development and hefty intake of protein.
It seems we’re all concerned about protein. A New York Times article fact-checking the protein craze cited a 2024 survey of 3,000 American adults. Seventy-one percent said they were trying to consume more.
Dietary journalists, venture capitalists, and elected officials are all trying to get us to eat more protein. This comes at a time when 42% of Americans are obese, American meat consumption has reached record levels, and mass-market animal agriculture make up 18% of global carbon emissions.
Most of the chatter about protein focuses on physiology: how much or what kinds we should eat. It’s focused on amount and sources. But this misses a deeper question: why have we become so fixated on protein? And why now?
Our current protein craze reflects cultural and material anxieties from specific economic, historic, and media circumstances. Human nutritional needs have not changed. Something else has.
So let us treat the humble protein bar a vehicle. Let us follow its trail through history, marketing, regulation, and social media. If we can understand how protein began to pack our grocery shelves, we might better understand why we’ve become so determined to pack so much of it into ourselves.
Fuel for the final frontier
The protein bar, as we know it today, has roots in both the gym and space age.
In the early 20th century, a small community of bodybuilders began experimenting with high-protein meals to support muscle growth. After World War II, Bob Hoffman, a Pennsylvania weightlifter and owner of Strength and Health magazine, began selling Hi-Proteen, a soy-based protein powder. By the 1950s, he expanded into cookies and bread infused with the same protein blend.
The space race rocketed bar-based food into the public imagination. In the 1960s, NASA partnered with food scientists at Pillsbury to develop compact, high-nutrition meals for astronauts. The effort built upon military C-rations, precursors to the MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) developed in the 1960s, which pioneered calorie-dense, individually wrapped meals with long shelf lives. One outcome was “Space Food Sticks,” a chewy, rod-shaped bar designed to be eaten in zero gravity or through an astronaut’s helmet.
By then, protein supplements like Tiger’s Milk were already being sold in specialty stores. But Space Food Sticks launched bar-based nutrition into the American mainstream. Bars became symbols of utility, futurism, food for the edge of the human frontier.
The energy bar era
With the fitness boom of the 1970s and 1980s, demand surged for on-the-go nutrition. The rise of bodybuilding culture and the aesthetics of fitness elevated the idea of performance eating, this time as a tool for sculpting the self.
Running helped define the modern form factor. In 1986, after bonking in a marathon, Brian Maxwell worked with nutritionist Jennifer Biddulph to develop Powerbar. A few years later Clif Bar developed a more palatable, rice-based energy bar, wrapping itself in the granola-tinged ethos of natural energy and sustainability.
By the 1990s, as the Cold War ended and China entered the World Trade Organization, America’s economy turned toward outsourcing. But food manufacturing kept growing in the United States and Europe, even as other industries increasingly moved production to Asia. Giants like Nestlé, Kellogg, and General Mills bought or built bar brands. Their food-science labs optimized flavors, textures, and ingredients to appeal to most consumer segments.
Deregulation gains
In 1994, the federal government gave the growing protein market a hearty push forward with the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which sharply restricted FDA oversight of supplements.1
Products like multivitamins served as gateway commodities, normalizing new types of consumption and socializing once-niche items like the protein bar as culturally acceptable, even routine goods. By the early 2000s protein and energy bars filled entire shelves of grocery stores. You could find them in gas stations and pharmacies.
After the 2008 recession, with cheap, zero-interest capital sloshing through the economy, Silicon Valley got into the nutrition game. Venture firms bet on meal replacement startups that promoted food as function. In 2013, Soylent launched, named after a dystopian Charlton Heston film in which food bars are made from human bodies.
By 2020, as the pandemic shattered the last norms of a 9-to-5 workday, the protein bar became the consultant’s breakfast, the UX designer’s lunch, the engineer’s snack.
And here we are. A report in March 2025 valued the global energy bar market at $8.7 billion in 2020. It’s projected to reach $13.7 billion by 2027.
A muscular anxiety
That’s the history of the protein supply. But what about demand? Why, in an age of obesity, do Americans want to make “gains”? Why, amid global warming, do we want to burn more calories? Why, in a time of trade war and looming scarcity, are we bulking up?
One culprit is a new cultural nervousness, a muscular anxiety, driving us to reach for both the barbell and the protein bar. It’s a reformulation of old questions about what it means to be a woman or a man.
Much of the protein discourse is aimed at women, usually through two interwoven discursive themes.
First, there’s a new rhetoric of corporeal expansion, a reversal of the old 1990s imperative that women should shrink with diet culture. Now we’re seeing a major rhetorical change: women encouraged to build, fuel, and take up space. This shift is visual as much as verbal, the Instagram before/after shot reimagined not as loss, but as gain.
It’s not a far reach to understand admonitions to eat more protein and develop muscle with the rejection of patriarchal forms of dietary restriction, a reckoning with the real problems of disordered eating and a fat phobic culture that defined millennial girlhood.
But these expressions of autonomy are often braided with another strand of thought: an ascendant norm of empowered, capitalist femininity. This rhetoric of growth does not so much reject traditional beauty norms as reconfigure them in a form of strength that lifts up the self as an empowered entrepreneur.
This folds rather easily into a libertarian skepticism of government interventions into public health. Gabrielle Lyons is a good case study here. Her posts ride the political currents of the moment, critiquing FDA nutritional standards as outdated and inaccurate, if not deceptive. Such pro-protein content keys off the ambient sense of conspiracy that permeates the 2025 media ecosystem.
But what of men?
Researching this piece turned my YouTube ads positively unhinged: shredded guys pitching protein-enhancement supplements and ChatGPT-created hypertrophy training plans.
Such adverts are mostly harmless recession indicators, but they reflect the hyper-muscular, protein-fueled aesthetics of the manosphere. This is a chorus of ten-thousand bros, shredded, loud, and fighting for the eyeballs of young men and boys around the world.
Posts weave in themes of self-help, resilience, and an ascetic ethic of self-restraint in the service of gains, both muscular and monetary. Protein content surges because protein content performs. And performance is everything when visibility online means power and wealth. When multiple members of the Presidential Cabinet post performative strength workouts online, your society has crossed a new threshold of musclebound cultural narcissism.
Small wonder we’re obsessed with the ripples of our flesh. We’re captured in mimesis, eating protein to give us the gravity we fear we lack.
It’s easy to just blame the internet. But material reasons also have fed the rise of protein.
Protein supplements prop up an economy that is precarious by design. They fill the gaps left by missed meals from early mornings on a job site or long commutes to distant corporate campuses.
There aren’t many lunch breaks left in America. The slacks and emails keep arriving. The logistics warehouse items keep stacking. Our burdens, delivered ping by digital ping, only increase with the fantasy of AI automation—merely another set of skills we have to learn during our leisure time. Small wonder we turn to packaged nutrition.
The pensions are gone. The U.S. retirement system rests on erroneous assumptions of perpetual market growth. Social Security won’t survive the fertility crisis. Maybe we’re lifting and chomping protein in the hopes strong muscles will keep us healthy and hale into our sixties and seventies. We pack in the protein because we fear we’ll be working until the day we die.
We are haunted by the specter of productivity, whispering when we rest or relax: You could be hustling. Or finishing that deck or upleveling your craft. We’re overtrained, overeducated, over-calibrated. We are driven. We are inclusive. We are collaborative. We are active participants in our own exploitation. And the protein bar is our fuel.
So hand me that bar. Let me feel the wrapper beneath my fingers. I hear its petroleum crinkle, the sound that defines our plastic age. I peel it open, the glue yielding with tendon-like release.
Then it’s between my teeth. Sticky whey gloms onto my molars, sugar dissolves upon my gums. An entire cultural and economic assemblage breaks down into the component nutrients. Bits of atomized ideology, converted into my own mass.
For a moment, it feels good.
The 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act also launched an industry of grifty supplement and multi-level marketing companies hawking pills and powders of dubious value.
I've only ever eaten a couple of protein bars, I thought they were gross. Beef is better :-)
I lived off those Tiger Milk bars back in the day.