People think they’re hitting their macros on Little Debbie snack cakes and protein-fortified beer or w/e. I’ve tried some foods where they add protein and they all taste like ass.
I watched a video once (so please take this with a grain of salt) that said a lot of ‘added protein’ is really cheap proteins or amino acids that do not provide a complete protein (all amino acids necessary for a human).
Capitalism would never do that!
Collagen is a favourite for this. It advertises well because people have this vague association between collagen and skin or joints and tendons. Which is true, because that’s what it’s made of. It’s just a byproduct of the meat industry, yet it commands a premium price now.
It isn’t even a particularly good protein, and because of the structure it’s really hard to digest without preprocessing.
start labeling that shit as “now with 50% more connective tissue”
It’s depressing how many older women are falling for the collagen grift to meet some ideal of youtful looking skin and such that they’ve been told they need to have, forever.
The body digests the food, the amino acids are amino acids and will be used for what the body needs them for. The super expensive collagen supplement is not going to remain collagen.
Was gifted some collagen powder after a joint / bone injury and that stuff tasted so bad I wanted to vomit
Is there any difference between Collagen and Gelatine?
Gelatine is hydrolised collagen. Same source just processed more. Same basic makeup but behaves differently on account of the protein structure being broken up.
The big thing is that “eat X amount of protein” is good dietary advice because high protein foods tend to be lower carb and make you feel more full for longer per calorie. If you feel more full while eating fewer calories you’ll be more likely to lose weight.
If you stick some protein powder in Cheetos you’re not getting that benefit, you’re still just housing Cheetos.
Yeah but the same goes for fiber plus any food.
I started writing this comment further down the thread but couldn’t get it succinct enough to post.
also often contains lead
wait… what?
Protein supplements are wildly popular, but CR’s tests of 23 products found that more than two-thirds of them contain more lead in a single serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day
Damn. But why? Bioaccumulation? Are they milking cows into lead buckets or what?
Here’s a maddening detail from the article:
The lead levels in plant-based products were, on average, nine times the amount found in those made with dairy proteins like whey, and twice as great as beef-based ones.
:beanis-agony:
Fortunately, though, legumes themselves are subject to FDA regulations (for now), as opposed to supplements. So you can still just eat your beans.
I wonder why. Certainly something to do with the refining process, but I can’t imagine what.
It’s generally because of trace lead uptaken by the crops used for vegetable protein that gets concentrated.
So like, there’s already lead in the peas (or w/e) and then refining it concentrates the lead that’s already present.
I wonder if there’s a way to remove it from the powder itself during the refining process. It’s diamagnetic, very weakly repelled by magnetic fields, but any magnetic field strong enough to repel lead is going to rip all the other metals out too (and also be enormously expensive to generate).
Maybe it’s just a matter of specially preparing fields to be as low in lead as possible before growing peas meant for protein supplements? No idea.
A lot of it depends on how much lead is in the soil. And the decades of leaded gasoline (and the ongoing “better living through chemistry”) have put lead all over the built environment, like paint, glazes, solder, ammunition, and weights.
I wonder if planting a bunch of bioaccumulators and then burning them into a filter would do anything. I’m not a chemical or environmental engineer though.
Don’t panic. Peas provide you with more than enough protein on their own, without it being extracted and concentrated. Most veggies do.
complete proteins are way overrated. more practical to combine many sources throughout the day/week it doesn’t all need to be on one plate
Please, I can only get so swole. Make it stop
We have all seen your tiny legs.
My legs are a Christmas miracle
It’s utter horseshit. People think more protein = more muscles = more good but miss the part where you need to actually put in work if you’re trying to build muscle. You don’t just drink protein shake get ripped.
The average person doesn’t even need that much protein; somewhere around 0.6 - 0.8 grams per Kg bodyweight will more or less meet your needs unless you’re doing something extreme. And it’s in fucking everything. If you’re eating a relatively healthy balanced diet, it’s really hard to not get enough.
Adding slaughterhouse floor scrapings to everything is just a cheap way to make slop look healthy.
It’s like the people who drink a lot of sports drink but don’t do enough physical work to really need it.
Thinking of it, I need to exercise more lmao
Or drink a lot of Mountain Dew but don’t even game.
back in my day mountain dew was for XXXTREME SPORTS
Truly the most oppressed demographic
Electrolytes are great for preventing hangovers though
Did you consider gatorade is delicious though?
A friend of mine started training, immediately started daily protein shakes, stopped/reduced training but kept up the shakes and now is just fatter every time I see him.
I’m like you do you but I don’t think that was the intended outcome.
It’s the mean girls bulking bars
tbh i don’t think it’s that people became convinced that eating protein snack foods would make them swole, it’s more from the line of thinking that protein keeps you feeling fuller for longer, so by some twisted logic eating proteinifed junk food is better than non-proteinified since theoretically you’ll have less cravings for food in the long run with the higher protein
These products were targeted at GLP-1 agonist users, and based on a partial understanding of incretin hormones. The manufacturers set up these product lines a few years ago before we improved our understanding of these drugs and before dual-acting agonists became available. They’re now sitting on all this junk food that nobody wants.
If you take these meds, you need very high protein intake regardless of activity to prevent muscle atrophy during weight loss. Like 1-2g/kg daily minimum, if you’re just sitting around. Adding protein to everything seems like a good idea at first.
The problem here is that these products are still carb-heavy junk food and these agonist drugs completely cure the addictive aspects of carbohydrates for as long as you’re taking them. They also significantly reduce your volume of food intake. People on these drugs don’t want carby snack foods at all, even if they have pea or soy protein added.
Fascinating. The utterly soulless machinations of capital never cease to amaze and disgust me.
Like half of the companies in the grocery store have an identical business model and marketing strategy to Philip Morris, the only difference is the substance to which they’re trying to get people addicted.
Oh I’m well aware. I just didn’t realise the protein thing originated as part of that, I only caught the pivot to generalised fitness marketing. Although it makes total sense in perspective. GLP-1 agonists would have been a huge problem for these companies so of course they’d try formulate something to circumvent it.
I think the next big thing is going to be trying to integrate allulose (D-psicose) into everything in the hopes that they can circumvent these medications and eliminate their health benefits by turning everything in the entire grocery store into processed slop.
Renaissance for actually serious bodybuilders tho
yeah i actually like a lot of the high protein fad stuff. it’s like a coinflip on it being animal abuse derived protein though, because that’s cheapest. a lot of the time it’s soy though
generally we’ve found the vegan stuff digests faster so you can keep the protein conveyor belt going more easily
I might be a reactionary but half the point of bodybuilding is the suffering. Eat your boiled chicken and broccoli and stare into the abyss.
my SO can leg press 1200 pounds without even really trying, but i remember when they first got to that point and they turned blue like smurfette pushing over 1200 for the first time
i like to start my day with some high protein pre-workout shake, then a 2 hour goon sesh. i refuel with a 128oz protein shake, [using a recipe personally certified by Dr. Joe Rogan] sipping it over the next 6 hours as i get all caught up on influencer drama and beefs on X, facebook, and youtube.
after that, i have 2 pounds of beef cubes to power up my body for achieve maximum T before my uncles hose me off in the driveway.
beefcake!
Shakeweight < 4 hour goon sesh
CW: dairy, nsfw
Thanks, I just edited the title and made the pic NSFW.
I wonder if the “adding fiber into everything” bit isn’t catching on because high fiber foods make people feel full?
We need a high fiber + high protein craze smh, best of both worlds
I mean, Hexbear is pretty crazy for beans, we just need to scale it up.
Socialism cannot be achieved without the deliberate proliferation of bean(is).
That’s probably because adding just more fiber doesn’t improve palatability. You need to add something that makes it taste good for it to sell good, which requires more imagination and less profit than sawdust and sawdust accessories that you actually get with “double fiber” variants
Ida I find extra protein stuff also tastes worse, neither is really palatable, I think it’s just easier to sell a mythology around protein than fiber
There is always a bit of a cummy quality to the protein bars.
Fibre is associated with old age and immotility (slow digestion/excretion). It’s hard to market to gymbros who think that shitting pure liquid means that all the solids went straight to your pecs
Actually that’s a good point. Protein tastes kind of sweet I think, whereas fiber tastes woody (even if it’s from psyllium husk and not swept off the floor of woodshops)
Protein makes you feel full too, though.
True but a lot of the high protein stuff is designed to be pretty calorie dense.
fr they could pack more fiber into stuff but like they choose not to
Fiber is still a decade away from being a Health Supplement in that way
I think if anything it has become less of a thing to have whole grain versions than a decade ago.
That’s because colon cancer is manly
True
In most products this seems to just be justifying a huge price increase. In most products when you actually look at the nutritional information and ingredient list, it is such a grift.
My conspiracy theory is that the Protein Grift mostly started from the dairy and cattle industry, plus the fitness industry. It has now expanded to everything it seems.
The amount of protein some of the protein things have in them are often way too high for our bodies to even absorb. And nobody really needs that much protein, not even on a diet. The protein push in the glp-1 space is ridiculous, but completely the same it ever was in the brosciency fitness spaces.
People need to just eat a normal diet. If anything, I’d worry about fibre in your average meat loving protein bros gym diet.
It’s pretty funny there is now straight up snickers bars in the health food section.
Yup and tbh the basic Snickers bar is pretty ok for a snack, it is already pretty high in protein thanks to the peanuts and even has some fibre in it. But now “with added protein” it is somehow “more healthier”. Which is a moving target and defined far more by the wellness industry and vibes than actual nutritional science.
I’ve seen most popular candy bars now with the protein edition. Just eat the candy bar, carbs are not the enemy, but a necessary main fuel for our bodies. It’s the quantity that counts.
I tried a “protein cookie” just for the hell of it a few weeks ago, it was almost 40% sugar.
The “nutrition shakes” in pharmacies are mostly corn syrup (glucose) and whey, and it’s been that way for decades.
I’m sure it helps their bottom line
They are adding all the bits of protien that would have gone to waste or scrap into products and charging a premium price. The creeping pressure of capitalism is more annoying to me than the actual enshitification of snack chips.
Are you sure the protein is the diverted waste product, and not the primary commodity? For instance, seitan is produced by washing out the starch.
Protein is chemically more intensive to make than carbs or fats. I suspect there are milk solids and pea/soy solids that are discarded as a byproduct of making the high-demand protein products.
I know at one point why protien was sourced from cheese making. So it would have been wasted. It is good thst wasnt wasted. But capitalism did the thing and now how knows what counts as which
They should instead add fiber to baked goods so that people stop shitting themselves.
Please and thank you.
In Brazil a frozen meat company started advertising their products with a “protein” line. So, burgers and lasagna with a “protein” tag.
Did they change the recipe or just add the label to the box?
AFAIK, just the label. As in, “our meat is made of protein!”
can’t find a screenshot but if anyone is interested in a good GTA2-like game with anti-capitalist themes (not communist but like enshittification level understanding) then Shakedown Hawaii has a good bit about this protein trend.
I’m pretty sure all of this is targeted at people on GLP-1s and they’re stupid as hell.
I know someone on a GLP-1 and they literally eat like a handful a Peanut Butter Captain Crunch and a couple Mountain Dews a day. But they’ve commented they want “more protein” so I could see it.
Doesn’t seem ideal to market products that are designed for gym bros trying to increase their body weight to people who want to lose weight.
Gym bros are not a big enough demographic for these companies to focus on them, nor are they big snackers. GLP-1 users are almost entirely former customers of these companies who stopped buying all their stuff because on glp-1 meds, you no longer desire carbs and mostly just want protein. Gym bros were never buying that many cheez-its, but GLP-1 users were typically their best customers before they started the medication.
Protein signals satiety a lot better than carb heavy foods, plus with the small quantity of food you can even eat on GLP-1s, high protein is necessary for getting even close to your macros. Since you’re pretty rapidly losing weight, not just fat, having protein heavy meals prevents muscle atrophy.
The goal of all these products is to make people who no longer crave carb heavy foods continue to eat them, because otherwise their profits are fucked. The intention is to get people re-addicted to eating junk food. They’re running scared because these meds are turning the Gacha Whales of the snacking world into people that only consume like 6 oz of jerky and a bottle of Liquid IV every day.
Unfortunately for these companies, these products are based on a preliminary misunderstanding of GLP-1 and how it works in the body. It’s a powerful anti-addiction medication which interrupts the pathways that made addiction possible and easy. Since highly processed snack foods are largely playing on those addiction pathways, these foods are still not very desirable to people on these meds.
You can find heavy discussion on these foods in forums for GLP-1 users, and the consensus seems to be that they’re a huge misstep on the part of all these companies. Nobody wants them, and they largely feel gleeful at the fact that they can now see junk food as addictive slop and ignore it completely. Hence the failing pivot towards gym bros.
Ok this is a lot more reasonable than I thought it would be.
The realest conspiracy theories are also the most boring ones. 9 times out of 10 it’s just some company that is drowning in the deep end of the sunk cost fallacy.
Dude, my sister accidentally bought “high-protein” soy milk thinking it was “high-protein” milk, which if I had to guess is probably just regular milk with even more skim milk added or something stupid.
They add extra whey that’s not naturally present, usually from skim/light/whatever milk. It’s basically just concentrated milk.
Milk2
The latest trend is that they put it through a really fine molecular filter, which lets some of the water out but keeps all the macromolecules in. It’s more feasible to do this than to source whey to add to milk.
This reverse osmosis milk sells for about 4x as much as regular milk.
so condensed milk?
Not sweetened
