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Decoder Ring | How Protein Muscled Its Way to the Top
00:44:50
Two hundred years of protein frenzy, from beef tea to whey powder.
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- [00:01]
A
Hey, decoder ring listeners, you know how much I love a good deep dive. And since you're tuning into the show, I know you do too. This holiday season, you can give the gift of endless exploration to like minded friends and family with Apple gift card. They can use it for research apps on the App Store, documentaries on the Apple TV app, or even ad free podcasts. It's the perfect present for the curious mind. Visit applegiftcard.apple.com to learn more and gift one today. Hey, decoder ring listeners, you know how much I love a good deep dive. And since you're tuning into the show, I know you do too. This holiday season, you can give the gift of endless exploration to like minded friends and family with Apple gift card. They can use it for research apps on the app Store, documentaries on the Apple TV app, or even ad free podcasts. It's the perfect present for the curious mind. Visit applegiftcard.apple.com to learn more and gift one today. All right, let's see what happens when we go into this supermarket. A couple of weeks ago, I took a trip to my local grocery store. You know what you're having for dinner tonight? No, actually, I don't. I was looking for something in particular. Okay, so I'm now in the soup aisle. I've got a Progresso. I was looking for protein. 20 grams of protein on a Mediterranean style meatball and chicken. 17 grams of protein on a chickpea and noodle. These are all right on the front of the progresso. It's like 19 grams of protein. It's like actually the biggest piece of text on the can, including Progresso. It's bigger than Progresso. When I say I was looking for protein, I don't mean I was trying to find some steak or chicken or beans or tofu. I mean I was trying to get a sense of the product's bragging, like all of those Progresso soups about how many grams of protein they contain and boy, did I find them. Oop, chobani zero sugar. 12 grams of protein's telling me right on the packaging. Ooh, ratio's got 25 grams of protein. All these yogurts every like most of them have on them, how much protein they have. Bumblebee, tuna, albacore. 18 grams of protein in water and then protein plus rigatoni from Barilla. The pasta tastes. You love protein plus. Look at that. These are like lunchables and they're yellow top, nice big lunchables font. And then the protein is in a big red circle. On them. 20 grams of protein in hardwood smoked oysters. Oh, protein crackers. Milton's protein crackers. Ooh, a Lean Cuisine. Even protein kick. Swedish meatball. Here's protein pints. There we go. Mint chip. 30 grams of complete protein in the pint wild. There were also frozen dinners, bone broth and chilies, veggie burgers and beef burgers. Stouffer's hot Pockets. I was in the grocery store for over an hour and I'm sure I didn't see it all. And I'm also sure I'm not alone in noticing protein's proliferation. Protein packed food now seems to be.
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Everywhere you turn, adding protein to everything.
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From ice cream pancake mix to Starbucks lattes.
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Searches for protein have doubled in the last year alone.
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The truth is though, I didn't even need to leave the house to observe protein being sold to me. It could have just gone on the Internet. Listen to a podcast.
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This episode is brought to you by Cacava. Each serving delivers 25 grams of plant based protein. Code DAX for 15% off.
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Americans are currently besotted with protein. The protein supplement market alone is $21 billion and growing. And according to some studies, as many as 85% of Americans want to consume more of it. It's touted as being good for basically everything. Strength and muscle growth, but also weight loss, nicer skin, mental acuity, toning and longe. And while men who are really into fitness make up the bulk of the market, protein is getting sold to all kinds of different people. Protein provides a number of amazing benefits for women of all different shapes and sizes.
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I want to show you three ways.
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Your kids can boost their protein intake. There is not one macronutrient more important to an elderly person than protein. Personally, I know so many people thinking and talking about protein. They're eating more of it. They're trying to eat more of it. Someone told them they should eat more of it. And earlier this year, when Khloe Kardashian started selling popcorn dappled with protein powder like some nutritional fairy dust, I finally decided I gotta figure out what's going on here. Cloud popcorn.
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My protein popcorn, you good buddy.
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Capitalism has a knack for taking things we genuinely need and selling them back to us as though we need them even more than we really do. We've talked talked about this before, namely in our episode about the modern day fixation on hydration. And a quick scan of the lattes, face creams and frozen foods currently boasting about their protein content supports the idea that's happening right now with protein, too. But what I've learned by looking at protein is that there really is something unique about Turns out when it comes to protein, we've done this before. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. What's happening right now is not the first protein boom. It's not even the second protein boom. Instead, it's something we've been doing with protein for nearly two centuries. And with the help of two authors of a forthcoming book, All About Protein, we're going to look closely at our past protein fixations and see what they can tell us about our current one. Because though each protein mania is unique in its own way, they also have a lot in common. Not only does each one feature people getting very passionate about a charismatic nutrient, they also have at their centers products made out of garbage, like actual waste we decide to eat. And these crazes have also, up to now at least, always ended. So today on Decoder Ring, let's get to the meat of the matter. What's so irresistible about protein? Quint delivers everyday essentials that feel luxurious, look timeless, and make holiday dressing effortless. I recently got a pair of jeans from Quince that I have basically worn every single day since. They just have really good flat front pockets, a crop wide leg. I don't know. I'm into them. I also have a nice boxy cotton fisherman sweater in blue and brown and they have $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters too. They're good for everyday wear and so is the denim that never goes out of style. Silk tops and skirts that add polish and down outerwear built to take on the season. Step into the holiday season with layers made to feel good, look polished and last. From Quince, perfect for gifting or keeping for yourself. Go to quints.com decoder for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I n c e.com decoder to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com decoder this podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Audio Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive Car Insurance quote with rates from other companies so you can save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this episode@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. So, as I just said, we've gone nuts for protein before. And to talk us through exactly when and where and why are the two authors of the forthcoming book, the Making of a Nutritional Superstar.
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My name is Samantha King and I'm a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
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My name is Gavin Weeden. I'm an associate professor at Nottingham Trent University in the sociology of sport, health and the body.
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And for both of them, their curiosity about our protein obsession began in the same place.
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I remember going to the gym and having kind of protein promoted to me, as obviously something would benefit me irrespective of what my goals were, because it seemed like there weren't really any goals that wouldn't be boosted by not just protein consumption, but supplementation.
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A few thousand miles away, Sammy saw the same thing happening at her gym.
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And I just thought that was really strange. Here we were relatively privileged bunch of people going to this private gym with personal training and eating very well. And I was just curious why they thought that we needed more protein.
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The idea that we need more protein is one you hear all the time.
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I can guarantee you you are not getting enough protein.
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There is no point in exercising if you're not eating enough protein, sweetie, you need to eat more protein. And yet, Sammy found need to be an odd phrase here, because protein deficiency is almost unheard of in people who are getting enough food.
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If you have enough to eat, you're getting enough protein.
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So if you're talking about what we need to live, most people already get what they need just by consuming food, any food, basically. And to understand how we simultaneously have as much protein as we need, but also apparently need more, we need to do a little protein primer. Proteans make possible this incredibly complex organization that we call life. In 1838, a Dutch chemist theorized that there was a universal substance found in all animal and plant tissues. He gave the substance a name, protein, from the Greek word proteos, meaning primary or first. But it would take scientists many more decades to understand what proteins actually are. And simply put, they are complex molecules made up of smaller molecules. These small molecules are called amino acids. Our DNA is basically a set of instructions for how to make amino acids. When they link together into proteins, they perform a dizzying amount of functions.
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There are millions, if not billions of proteins. They play at least some part, maybe a pivotal part, in almost every cellular process within our bodies.
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So we need proteins, and we need Amino acids to make proteins. We make some amino acids ourselves, but there are others we only get from our food. Meat, dairy, vegetables, bread, they all contain protein.
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So when someone says it's really important to have enough protein in your diet, it'd be difficult not to get enough protein in your diet. If you've got access to enough food.
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It would be difficult not to get enough to live. But protein has become about something other than survival. In fact, when someone says you need more protein, survival is almost surely not what they're talking about. They're talking about how you need it to live longer, stay sharper, and especially to get bigger muscles. But even then, there is quite a lot of debate about what exactly it means to need protein in these ways. How much protein you should eat in a day, when you should eat it, what it can help with, how much it can help whether or not protein really makes you feel more full nutrition. Scientists are still debating these things, and they have been for close to 200 years.
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All these different debates, sometimes fierce debates. I think you can pull that thread back to the mid 19th century, to the beginnings of protein as a category.
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So let's head back there to what Gavin and Sammy think are the roots of our protein dusted Kardashian popcorn age. Let's head back to the first protein boom, and we're going to pick it up with a bunch of foxes in the lab of a scientist named Justus von Liebig.
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Justus von Liebig was a larger than life German biochemist entrepreneur who is recognized as one of the founding fathers of organic chemistry.
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And like many of his contemporaries, he was fascinated by the question of what our bodies are made of. So in the 1840s, he conducted some experiments on animals, including on two different kinds of foxes. Some had been shot and killed while being chased, and one was slaughtered after far less exertion.
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They had had a fox that they had kept in a cage for 200 days and fed only meat.
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Liebig examined all the fox's muscles under a microscope, and he observed that the muscles of the ones killed while on the run look different from the captive one. Specifically, they had more of the amino.
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Acid creatine, 10 times more creatine.
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And he concluded from that what he.
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Concluded that proteinous compounds must be responsible for muscle action. That protein provided not only the substance of our muscles, what they're made of, but also the energy required to fuel their work.
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He was not entirely right. We actually get most of the energy to move our muscles from carbohydrates and fats are important, too, But Liebig didn't have the tools or techniques to figure that out. All he could see when he looked at muscle tissue under a microscope was protein. And so he decided that protein was everything. Based on this not complete information, he assumed that protein was the most important nutrient. And this idea spread very quickly. That's because Liebig was not just some cloistered scientist. He was an evangelist.
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He was a dogged self promoter, running around all over Europe, you know, giving lectures, writing for popular audiences, and promoting a model of how we should eat.
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And for Liebig, the key thing we should be eating was meat.
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Liebig helps cement the link between meat and protein and meat as the most desirable form of protein.
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Liebig was making his case to the powerful. He convinced many European governments that it was, in today's language, a question of their national security to keep their newly industrialized workers hale and hearty and full of meat.
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Liebig's quite explicit about that. He called it a matter of conscience for Western governments. But where to get that meat from and how to make it affordable for this growing population was a big question.
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And so Liebig did not stop at spreading the gospel of animal protein. He also decided to spread the stuff itself.
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He developed this thick, black, syrupy liquid in his lab that he called extract of beef.
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Extract of beef was made by separating cow flesh from fat, pulverizing it into very small particles, and then boiling it in water for so long that the water largely evaporated, leaving behind a kind of tarry substance, a gooey bouillon. Liebig paraded around Europe, telling heads of states in large crowds that this meaty black sludge could solve the problem of getting workers extra protein. And word of his extract eventually reached a German railway engineer living in Uruguay who had an idea.
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He had come across this scene of great waste. As he described it in his letter.
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To Liebig, what he'd seen was a.
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Bunch of dead cows, piles of carcasses of cattle.
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They'd been killed for their hides to make leather, but then left to rot in the sun.
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We didn't have refrigeration, so meat was not easily shipped around the world.
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And this German in Uruguay saw these piles of rotting cattle and thought, maybe we can do something with them.
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What if we actually use this flesh in this product that Liebig has been shopping around?
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And so he wrote to Liebig with a proposal. Why not set up your beef syrup business here with me in Uruguay? And Liebig did.
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By the end of 1864, they were exporting £50,000 of extract.
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Liebig's extract of meat was sold under the very creative brand name Liebig's Extract of Meat.
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We think of it as the first protein supplement.
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Why?
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Because it was developed and marketed with the idea that it could be added to to food in order to make that food more nutritious. It wasn't seen as something that would suffice on its own, but it was seen as something that would optimize what you were already eating.
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Liebig marketed as a kind of medicine, a cure all that promised all sorts of benefits.
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Muscle and strength and vim and vigor and vitality.
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And he offered a lot of ideas for how to consume his paste.
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People might spread it on their toast, or they might drink it with hot water as a beef tea, or it's a flavor enhancer like MSG or something like that.
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Just how popular was this?
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It was very popular. It was a household name for many, many decades.
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There is just one wrinkle with Liebig's extract of meat, though one way that it does differ from contemporary protein products. How much protein is in Liebig's extract of meat?
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Too small to be measured.
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Protein is in everything but this.
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Yes, exactly.
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Turns out boiling pulverized beef down into a gooey substance was not, in fact, a great way to extract protein. But it didn't matter. Liebig's protein proselytizing had had its intended effect. Other products similar to Liebig's crowded into the marketplace, some of which are still with us today. Spreads and bullions like the British staple Oxo cubes, as well as the beef tea Bovril.
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Bovril.
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Delicious, warming, reviving. There's nothing quite like Bovril's beefy taste to put new heart into you. Vast. By the late 19th century, protein's connection to strength and health had become entrenched. Scientists were avidly studying it, physicians were recommending it, and governments were trying to get people to eat more of it.
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In fact, meat consumption increases exponentially among people, especially who couldn't previously afford it.
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The public had gotten the message that extra protein is a crucial part of a healthy diet.
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So that's the first protein boom.
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But with every boom comes a bust, or at least a fade. In the 1910s and 20s, newly discovered molecules called vitamins began to grab all the attention as they became nutritional superstars. Protein took a back seat, waiting for our scientific understanding to catch up to its complexities. But the idea that eating more protein would help make us strong was out there and so was its corollary that not eating enough might make us strong weak. When we come back, the fear of a protein deficiency spreads. Hey decoder ring listeners. You know how much I love a good deep dive. And since you're tuning into the show, I know you do too. This holiday season you can give the gift of endless exploration to like minded friends and family. Family with Apple Gift Card. They can use it for research, apps on the App Store, documentaries on the Apple TV app, or even ad free podcasts. It's the perfect present for the curious mind. Visit applegiftcard.apple.com to learn more and gift one today. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money. When you bundle your home and auto policies, the process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. If the first protein boom was occasioned by European countries fretting about their industrial workers, the second was driven by their concern for their colonial subjects. The wide stretches of forest on the Gold coast in British West Africa provide the right surroundings for the cocoa trees.
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Which have been introduced to into the country and which flourished there.
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In the 1930s Ghana was under British colonial rule and known as the British Gold Coast. One of the colonial officials working there was an Oxford educated physician named Cicely Williams and she grew concerned about the children she was seeing in her clinic. Many had swollen bellies and limbs, diarrhea and discolored hair and skin.
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It was a condition that would show up in infants who were being weaned from breastfeeding when the mother had to start feeding the newly born child.
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There was a name for this condition in the Ga language already, Kwashiorkor, and in Cicely Williams writings she began to speculate as to what might be causing it.
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She wondered if a lack of protein was responsible. She had many other theories. She mentioned that in passing, but other.
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Colonial researchers picked up on the idea and took it further. Over the next couple decades they became convinced there existed a gap in the amount of protein the inhabitants of rich and poor countries were getting and that this was a problem not just in Ghana, but across the British Empire.
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Protein deficiency came to explain not just a set of Symptoms. But the whole problem of underdevelopment in the global South.
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Much of what was driving the idea of a protein gap was racism. Colonial officials believed they were dealing with a problem created by uneducated mothers with unhealthy diets. They were skeptical that women in these places could properly care for themselves and their children, and they were disdainful of the food they ate to boot.
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There's this mentality of what we eat should be what everyone eats. What we eat is the best.
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And unlike a lot of people in India and sub Saharan Africa, what the colonial nations ate was meat. Especially after the first protein boom. Meat signified strength, vigor. The ideal western body, the counterpart of.
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That is the other. Bodies that don't conform to that diet or don't conform to that appearance and constitution are somehow defective.
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Even as the British Empire and other colonial powers began to splinter and former colonies gained their independence, new international organizations like the UN and the WHO sprung into action to fight protein deficiency.
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A surge of energy and resources was poured into the idea that a deadly protein gap existed between the world's rich and poor.
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Throughout the 1950s, global conferences were held, task forces were formed, and eventually a plan emerged to flood poor countries with protein products. Products that, unlike meat, could be kept for lengths of time without refrigeration. It began with dried milk, but soon they settled on another idea, developing a new kind of synthetic food products engineered to be chock full of protein, like alien techno foods.
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They include a fish protein concentrate that was made from awful leftover from filleting fish. There's a single cell protein developed by BP British Petroleum that was cultivated in oil. And they include chlorella, which is an algae grown on sewage.
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So it's basically like a free for all, for people who are like, can I turn my waste into another product?
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Exactly. Thus continuing this long tradition of trying to capitalize on waste, but less appetizing.
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Even than meat tea.
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It sounds like absolutely less appetizing. And so far removed from the culture and tradition of the context in which they lived.
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Into the 1970s, the International Development community kept a laser focus on the protein gap. Instead of larger systemic issues brought on.
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By colonialism, Protein was really convenient. Like it was much more convenient to have a theory that a single nutrient was in short supply and the cause of malnutrition and not have to address the social and economic roots of poverty and malnourishment.
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Protein was presented as a simple solution to a big problem, but over time, it revealed itself to be a bogus solution to a misdiagnosed problem because it turned out there was no protein gap.
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New science started to emerge that suggested that the problem was actually lack of calories, not a lack of protein.
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In 1974, a nutritionist named Donald McLaren published a paper called the Great Protein Fiasco. He said that all the time and resources that had been spent trying to cope close the supposed protein gap were a tremendous waste. After decades of this, more children were suffering from hunger and malnutrition than ever before.
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It's not just the fact that they failed to assist the people they were supposed to be assisting, but they had done so with very racist rhetoric.
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The fallout from McLaren's paper was swift. The idea of a protein deficiency as the cause of global malnutrition was discredited. But as you already know, the fear of not getting enough protein was hardly gone forever. Just about everyone is deficient in quality protein in their diet. There's a lot of people out there that are under eating their protein without enough protein. You're really not going to go that far. If I listen to one more girl tell me me that they don't have energy, they feel off, they're fatigued, and they are not eating remotely enough protein, I'm going to. I'm going to lose my mind. Protein anxiety heads for the 21st century after the break. Hey decoder ring listeners. You know how much I love a good deep dive. And since you're tuning into the show, I know you do too. This holiday season you can give the gift of endless exploration to like minded friends and family with Apple Gift Card. They can use it for research apps on the App Store, documentaries on the Apple TV app, or even ad free podcasts. It's the perfect present for the curious mind. Visit applegiftcard.apple.com to learn more and gift one today. This episode is brought to you by Saks Fifth Avenue. Saks makes it easy to find the perfect gifts and holiday looks that suit your personal style. The holidays can be a lot of things fun, relaxing, heartwarming, and yes, sometimes even a little stressful. That's why it's fun to go to Saks.com where shopping feels easy and exciting. Whether it's for me or my family and friends, or even the pickiest person on my list who also happens to be me. Saks actually has truly so many designers to choose from. It is an incredibly robust amount. I had a number of nice looking Vince sweaters, including one with a very wide neck that looks chic and cozy. Also, I've been toying with the idea of button downs. And boy, does sax.com have button downs. Everything from a classic white version from Max Mara to a Ralph Lauren Pussy Bow version to an Alice and Olivia Silk number in I'm Not Kidding Willa Style. If you're looking for shopping to be personalized and easy this holiday season, then head to Saks Fifth Avenue for inspiring ways to shop for everyone on your list. I hope you're starting to see all the history that has been leading us to the third great protein boom, the 21st century one we are in right now. But there is one more origin story I want to tell you about. It's about the beginnings of the product without which our current protein boom could never have happened. And like Justus von Liebig's extract of meat made from cow carcasses rotting in the sun. And like products made from fish guts and oil and algae during the great protein fiasco, it too is tied up with garbage. Garbage made by cows again. Only this time the issue was not their carcasses, it was their milk. It all starts around the two world wars.
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That's when dairy farmers first start ramping up production to help soldiers to get sustenance.
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The job of supply gets more difficult as a million men go overseas. Space is saved through dehydration. Thus one ship can carry the load of 10. Milk was powdered and evaporated and sent to soldiers on a massive scale. But when the wars ended, demand for milk immediately started to decline.
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You never really reach those heights again. But dairy farmers have already ramped up their modes of production and they're left with the surpluses and all this other stuff.
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Farmers had too many cows making too much milk and not enough customers to turn a profit. The federal government started heavily subsidizing the dairy industry, which continues to this day. But the farmers still needed to figure out what to do with all that extra milk. And you know what they tell you to say?
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Say cheese and you please.
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The family agrees. They love every way you serve cheese every day for breakfast, lunch, dinner and tea.
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Restore lost protein and energy.
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Make the most of cheese.
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The amount of cheese that people started to eat in the post war era grew significantly at the same moment that there was this downtrend in milk consumption.
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Cheese. Glorious cheese.
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The turn to cheese and away from milk was so successful that the amount that Americans eat had almost tripled by 1970.
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Making cheese on an industrial scale solved the immediate problem of having too much milk, but it created another one with.
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The industrialization of that production. You get an unprecedented scale of whey.
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So what is whey?
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Whey is the thick, yellowy liquid that remains after cheese production.
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I think I've seen whey. It's like maybe I've seen it in a Sesame street video about like making mozzarella or something. When the milk cur, it turns into curds. And whey curds are like the lumps and cut into cheese and whey is in milky liquid.
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That's the stuff, yeah.
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Cheese is made from the curds and the whey is poured off. Only about 10% of the milk used in the process actually gets turned into cheese. The 90% that's left over is the whey. That is a lot of excess, basically just runoff to have to deal with. In the thousands of years before this that humans had been making cheese, they'd always found uses for all the whey they were left with.
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You might use it as fertilizer, you might use it as feed elsewhere on your farm. You might use it in some artisanal recipes.
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If you were a little Miss Muffet sitting on your tuffet, you might even have some for yourself. But as cheese production exploded in the 50s and 60s, dairy farmers were now dealing with way more, more whey than anyone could manage at the time. A normal cheesemaking factory in Wisconsin would typically be producing 100,000 gallons of whey per day. By 1965, the state was producing 7 billion pounds a year.
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So it presents people on these dairy farms with the question, well, what do we do with this vastly accumulating substance that we previously didn't have to think too much about?
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And they start to do what with it?
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They start to dump it. They dump it in local rivers and lakes and streams.
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Fully half of the 700 cheese factories in the state were dumping all of their whey into local bodies of water. And this was doing something far worse than raising the water levels.
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Liquid whey, untreated, it's extremely potent. It's about 175 times more toxic than untreated human sewage.
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175 times.
- [34:53]
C
I know, I really. We have checked that number.
- [34:55]
A
Why? What's so toxic?
- [34:57]
C
Well, its nitrogen density is extremely high.
- [35:01]
A
And its nitrogen levels are so high because whey is really high in protein. Amino acids, the molecules that make up whey protein, are full of nitrogen. Often we measure how much protein something contains by measuring the amount of nitrogen in it. Nitrogen is also a key element in fertilizer, which makes it a problem. When you dump it into rivers and.
- [35:28]
C
Lakes, it would stimulate plant growth and ultimately rob fish of the oxygen they need to survive. And as you can imagine, this was environmentally devastating to the aquatic life in those bodies of water.
- [35:41]
A
In places like Wisconsin, those whey filled bodies of water started to reek and turn scummy. And there were huge die offs of local fish. Recreational fishermen and environmentalists complained in newspapers and town halls, and local and state government would hand out fines.
- [35:57]
C
And so you have these waves of activism and investigative journalism.
- [36:02]
A
And so the pressure was on for dairy farmers to find some use for all that excess whey.
- [36:08]
C
Maybe there's something that you could do with this substance that wouldn't be just wasting it, but that could actually create value.
- [36:15]
A
To preserve whey for any length of time, it has to be dried into a powder. But at this time, the process was expensive and the results were unappetizing. On its own, the dried powder was so clumpy and gross that it was not considered suitable for human consumption, just for animal feed. Whey powder that was better, or at least somewhat edible, that was the holy grail.
- [36:37]
C
And so that's the point at which you see this enormous investment in desiccation and filtration technologies.
- [36:44]
A
In the early 1970s, a handful of technicians working in Wisconsin's dairies made the fateful leap forward using techniques that had first been developed to desalinate water. The result was a more affordable, easier to produce, finer grained, less clumpy, edible, very high in protein, whey powder. It was heralded immediately as a breakthrough, or as a Wisconsin paper put it, a minor revolution. Finally, here was a method to take whey, something literally being dumped into streams, and turn it into a potential revenue stream. And the thinking was mostly to use it as a dried milk substitute to go in things like cake mixes and baby food. And perhaps subbing in for dried milk would have remained whey powder's primary use case if a subculture hadn't come up with their own use for it. Mighty men of muscle from many countries flexed, tensed and bulged biceps in a bid to become Mr. Universe.
- [37:43]
C
Each and every one looking like the.
- [37:45]
A
Ancient Greek idea of a God. Bodybuilders have always been looking for help bulking up. And so for as long as professional bodybuilding has existed, they have been dabbling in protein.
- [37:56]
C
Protein has always had this association with growth, right? And growth of muscle particularly. So it was naturally going to find this home, maybe in bodybuilding subcultures.
- [38:06]
A
In the mid-1970s, bodybuilders began to take notice of this new dried whey powder, which was full of protein and now not totally disgusting. And they took Notice just as the bodybuilding community started to swell. You are the top bodybuilder, right? Yeah. How long have you been the top bodybuilder? Well, I've not been beaten for the last seven years. That's a clip from Pumping Iron, a 1977 documentary about bodybuilding that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star. I don't have any weak points.
- [38:39]
C
My goal always was to even out everything to a point that everything is perfect.
- [38:45]
A
Perfect. Bodybuilding, while absolutely still a subculture, was now more popular than ever before. Big enough, in fact, to be worth selling to, which is exactly what Dairy Farm started to do. This is how cheese waste dried into a powder started to make its way onto health food store shelves. Muscle men and gym rats wanted to buy tubs of protein, but at the time, not that many other people did. Because outside the bodybuilding subculture, another substance was hoovering up all the attention.
- [39:21]
C
Carbohydrates was having its moment in the 1970s, because that's the source of energy, right? That's what helps you do marathon running, which is really popular then, whether in.
- [39:29]
A
Training for the marathon or just jogging around the block, millions of Americans have got the running fever. Tonight, a look at the running craze. Is it good for the health or dangerous?
- [39:40]
C
Jim Carb loading was a thing people would try and work out based on the knowledge available to you, how long before you run the race that you should be eating an enormous plate of pasta.
- [39:50]
A
You know, it's so funny, Gavin, because of course I know about carbo loading, but it never really occurred to me that it was born out of a moment when people were like, no, carbs are good for you. Because as a person born in the very early 1980s, I feel like the only thing I've ever, anytime I've ever heard about carbs, it was like, absolutely, we should all be eating so many less of them. Like, the idea that there could have been a craze for carbs cast into sharp relief just how mercurial and changeable we are about all these things.
- [40:18]
C
Yeah, you're right. When you start to look at it over long periods of time, it's hard not to see them just sort of vying for nutrientric status.
- [40:26]
A
And protein didn't take over for carbs for quite some time. Even as the carb backlash set in during the 90s and 2000s, carbs were still taking up all the attention. People were fixated on them. As you can hear in this talk show interview with the creator of the infamous no carb Atkins diet. What we're trying to do is restrict carbohydrate. Exactly what you mean when you say low carbohydrate. Potatoes and bread. And what, what else is a carbohydrate? Sweets and fruit and milk. But restricting what you eat sucks. Who wouldn't prefer to eat more, even if in an extremely regulated way? And so, as carbs and fats continued to be vilified, as nutritionists and doctors did research about the importance of muscle to overall long term health, and as more and more Americans started to care about fitness, protein was ready to re enter the spotlight. The new diets were very similar to the Atkins diet, just now rebranded as high in protein instead of low in carbs. And they also offered a tool for getting as much protein as you could possibly want. Whey protein powder. The right way to supplement protein is with whey protein, a protein source naturally found in milk. Today I'm going to share with you guys the 10 really unique benefits of whey protein powder and why I use it as a nutritionist.
- [41:49]
B
Got some fitness goals you're looking to hit. Find your whey with whey.
- [41:54]
A
It took a couple of decades to become omnipresent, but all that cheese waste didn't just find a market, it created one. Desiccated whey powder is now the most visible form of supplemental protein. And it and other protein powders are slipped into a wide variety of products.
- [42:12]
C
You start to see it in bars and gels and gummies and yogurts and breads and all these weird and wonderful products.
- [42:19]
B
Yeah, the Starbucks protein latte, the whey infused beer.
- [42:23]
C
I mean, the dissonance of the whey infused beer. What are you trying to achieve in that moment?
- [42:30]
A
But the argument that Sammy and Gavin are making is that cold foam lattes and whey infused beer are just newfangled interpretations of something old.
- [42:39]
C
It begins with Justus von Liebig's extract of meat all the way back to the mid 19th century.
- [42:46]
A
And now, 200 years later, protein is more ubiquitous and popular than ever before. It's for men and women, the old and the young, the protein obsessed and the merely protein curious and more besides.
- [43:01]
B
I also think it's the one thing that unites the left and the right and everyone else in between. Right? We're so polarized politically, this seems like the one thing on which we can.
- [43:14]
A
All agree, have more protein, have more protein alone. Among the nutrients, protein is undinged. It falls out of favor, but never out of grace.
- [43:28]
B
It doesn't have that history of stigma that carbs and fats have. So even though it's it's definitely gone through peaks and troughs, it's never been demonized, it's never been pathologized. Right? It doesn't come with all that baggage.
- [43:45]
A
But what all this history suggests is that maybe there ought to be a little baggage. Though without disdaining or dismissing protein or anyone's protein regimens, we might still stand to get something from looking at it more holistically. That we might see then that the way we talk about protein breaks food down into strange parts. We might observe that protein, like water and sleep, is a necessity now, being commodified and oversold to us. We might notice that we are always looking for one magic thing to solve complicated nutritional problems. And we might realize that when something is as cyclical as protein seems to be, we won't feel this way about it forever.
- [44:29]
B
It's hard to predict the future, but history would suggest that this is not permanent. Nothing's permanent.
- [44:52]
A
This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you aren't already a Slate plus member, please subscribe now from the Decoder Ring show page or Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or visit slate.com decodaringplus to get access. Wherever you listen, Slate plus members get access to our bonus episodes and they get to hear our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads. This episode this episode was produced by Max Friedman. Decoder Ring is also produced by me, Katie shepherd and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. We had editing help from Josh Levine, fact checking from Sophie Summergrad and Merritt Jacob is senior technical director. Samantha King and Gavin Weeden's book the Making of a Nutritional Superstar will be out in March. Go get it. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us@thedecoderinglate.com you can also call us now at our Decoder ring phone number that is 347-460-7281. Give us a shout and we'll see you in two weeks. This episode is brought to you by Saks Fifth Avenue. Saks makes it easy to find the perfect gifts and holiday looks that suit your personal style. The holidays can be a lot of things fun, relaxing, heartwarming and yes, sometimes even a little stressful. That's why it's fun to go to Saks.com where shopping feels easy and exciting. Whether it's for me or my family and friends, or even the pickiest person on my list who also happens to be me. Saks actually has truly so many designers to choose from it is an incredibly robust amount. I had a number of nice looking VIN sweaters, including one with a very wide neck that looks chic and cozy. Also, I've been toying with the idea of button downs and boy does Saks.com have button downs. Everything from a classic white version from Max Mara to a Ralph Lauren Pussy Bow version to an Alice and Olivia Silk number in I'm not Kidding Willa Style. If you're looking for shopping to be personalized and easy this holiday season, then head to Saks Fifth Avenue for inspiring ways to shop for everyone on your list.
- [47:11]
C
And Doug, here we have the Limu.
- [47:14]
A
Emu in its natural habitat, helping people.
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C
Customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
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A
Fascinating.
- [47:23]
C
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [47:26]
A
Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
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C
They see us.
- [47:31]
A
Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Ferry Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates Excludes Massachusetts.