✍️ By Jenna McCarthy
Unless you’ve been trapped in your windowless home office or engaging in a social media fast for the past half decade, you know that protein is having a moment.
To be fair, every macronutrient eventually gets one. Fat spent ages as a dietary war criminal before being rehabilitated and invited back to breakfast in the form of whole eggs over avocado toast. Carbs enjoyed a long and illustrious run until Atkins made eating a potato feel like a mortal sin. Even fiber—once something only whispered about by old ladies sipping prune juice—had itself a spectacular little glow-up. And now protein has apparently hired Ozempic’s publicist, because you can’t turn your head in public without bumping into something screaming at you in grams.
There’s protein coffee. Protein cereal. Protein chips. Protein pancakes. Protein cookies. Protein water. Protein popcorn. Protein gummies. (No, really.) I assume protein Wi-Fi is already in development (12 grams delivered directly to your biceps every time you refresh Instagram!).
And just like every nutritional craze before it, protein has acquired magical powers of absolution. Was I planning to drink a 400-calorie coffee with enough sugar to stun a hummingbird? No, I was not. But this one has 30 grams of protein. It’s practically a squat in a cup! #goals
The protein halo has become so powerful that manufacturers can apparently dump whey powder into just about anything and suddenly we’re not consuming syrupy, salty, ultra-processed crap; we’re supporting lean muscle mass. We’re fueling our bodies. We’re optimizing our macros. I hope they serve protein cake at the award ceremony!
The annoying part is that the protein people are actually onto something. We do need it. It is good for us. Many of us under-consume it—particularly as we age. The problem is that Big Food figured out how to monetize a legitimate health concern faster than our health agencies could figure out how to give us meaningful advice about it.
Go figure.
For decades, American adults have been told they need about 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. For a 150-pound person, that’s a Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of roughly 54 grams.
You will not be shocked to learn that number isn’t an aspirational target for achieving peak health and maintaining every precious ounce of muscle you’ve got until you’re 97. It’s actually the bare-minimum, deficiency-prevention threshold derived from nitrogen balance studies on sedentary young men. It’s the nutritional equivalent of being told the ideal tire pressure for your car is “just enough air so the rims don’t scrape the pavement.”
Increasingly, researchers studying aging and muscle preservation argue that older adults may benefit from considerably more protein—somewhere around 1.0 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per day, with even higher amounts (up to 2.0 g/kg) recommended for active people or those trying to build or preserve muscle.
Which—unless your doctor has told you otherwise—should be every last one of us.
That last part is still tough for some women to swallow, mostly because generations of us were programmed from birth to believe that the whole goal of exercise was to become smaller. We wanted smaller thighs, smaller waists, smaller numbers on the scale. We did Jazzercise and Reebok Slide and spent approximately forty years lifting adorable little pink dumbbells because God forbid we accidentally woke up one morning looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Now we know that muscle isn’t merely decorative—it’s metabolically active tissue that burns calories around the clock. It helps us manage glucose, supports our bones and joints, and helps determine how long we’ll still be carrying our own groceries or mowing our own lawn. The more muscle we preserve, the less likely we’ll be to find ourselves calling for help because we bent down to tie our shoe and can’t get up.
Frighteningly, we start losing muscle as early as our 30s. The decline is gradual at first—roughly 3 to 8 percent per decade—but tends to accelerate after 60. Inactivity is like leaning on the gas pedal. By the time we’re old enough to really appreciate having functional quadriceps, many of us have been quietly surrendering them for decades.
This is where protein comes in. Weight training tells your body you still need those muscles; protein gives it the raw materials to build and maintain them. And while marketing departments everywhere are working overtime to get you to stockpile their protein Pop-Tarts and Power Twists, the muscle-building macro remains readily available in a quaint category of products known as food. Chicken breast, steak, fish, eggs, cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, edamame, tofu, beans, lentils, nuts, and seeds all existed before some “nutrition scientist” figured out how to cram 20 grams of pea protein into a cinnamon roll and call it wellness. When you build meals around naturally protein-packed staples, spread them reasonably throughout the day, and—this part is annoyingly non-negotiable—give your muscles something to do, you’ll be giving your body what it needs to stay strong… even (make that especially) without any pricey, processed, extra-fortified frankenfoods.
I’m not here to take away anybody’s protein powder. Sometimes “convenience foods” have a place in a healthy diet—particularly when the alternative is something nutritionally disastrous or nothing at all. But a protein cookie is still a cookie. A protein milkshake doesn’t morph into steamed salmon because it has 30 GRAMS OF PROTEIN in hot pink type on the label. And if your “protein-maxxing lifestyle” consists of eating a bunch of junk—now with added whey isolate!—I regret to inform you that while you may be contributing meaningfully to some food executive’s yacht fund, you have not cracked the longevity code.
