The Protein Problem
We likely can't stop the protein craze — but we can make it less cruel
People can’t get enough protein. Fully 61% of Americans say they ate more protein last year — and 85% intended to eat more this year. Last week, dairy giant Danone said it can’t keep up with US demand for its high-protein yogurt. Other food makers are rushing to pack protein into everything from Doritos to Pop-Tarts.
The craze is global. The net percentage of Europeans wanting more protein has more than doubled since 2023, driven by protein-hungry Brits, Poles, and Spaniards. (The epicurean French and Italians remain holdouts.) Chinese per capita protein supply recently overtook already-high American levels.
Young people are leading the charge. Across Asia, Europe, and the US, most Gen Z’ers want more protein, suggesting this trend may persist. In one recent British university survey, “protein” was the top reason students gave for not giving up meat. Doctors are also telling the 6 - 10% of Americans now taking GLP-1 weight loss drugs to eat more protein to prevent muscle loss.
This is bad news for animals, who supply two thirds of the protein Americans eat. It’s especially bad for the smallest animals — chicken, fish, and shrimp — who happen to be the most protein-dense. While global per capita consumption of beef and pork is slowly falling, consumption of chicken, eggs, and seafood is surging.
So what can we do? There are three broad options: push less protein, more plant protein, or less cruel animal proteins. Let’s take each in turn.
Let the people eat protein
Most Americans likely already eat enough protein. U.S. dietary guidelines recommend about 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight daily — roughly 50 grams for the average person. Yet the American food system now churns out more than twice that amount per person.
Protein influencers dismiss these guidelines as obsolete. The top health podcaster, Andrew Huberman, tells his millions of listeners to eat 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight daily. But a recent federally-commissioned review of all studies from 2000 to 2024 found little reason to update the guidelines. While it was ultimately “inconclusive,” its authors mostly seemed unsure what to recommend within a range of 0.7 to 1 gram per kilogram daily.
Still, the anti-protein fight feels futile. Protein has such a positive halo — Strength! Energy! Vitality! — that opposing it feels a bit like being anti-puppies. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if decades of vegan anti-protein advocacy has mostly convinced people that vegans don’t get enough protein.
There’s no alternative to alternative proteins
One more promising strategy is to meet the protein craze with plants. For a moment, this was working. Plant protein sales surged from 2020-22, propelled by Beyond and Impossible product launches and The Game Changers documentary. Then they stalled and, in many markets, declined.
One likely reason: the backlash against “ultra-processed” foods. Google searches for plant-based protein have fallen right as searches for ultra-processed food have spiked (see chart). In a 2024 survey of 10,000 Europeans, 54% agreed that “I avoid plant-based meat replacements because they are ultra-processed.”
The anti-processing panic has some advocating a return to whole plant proteins: tofu, beans, lentils. I’m a fan. But most Americans aren’t: tofu was the fourth most disliked food in a recent YouGov survey. And beans and lentils are almost three times less protein-dense than tuna, shrimp, and chicken breast — a dealbreaker for protein maximizers.
That’s why we need alternative proteins. Extracting and concentrating protein from peas and soybeans creates products that are tastier and more protein-dense than whole plants. This will always require processing. So we need to find a better way to market processed plant proteins. I don’t know how to do this; I hope to write more on the challenge next year.
For now I’ll just note that people are confused about processing — and the “experts” are part of the problem. That same 2024 survey of 10,000 Europeans, run by the EU- and FAO-backed EIT Food group, categorized chicken as “unprocessed” and plant-based chicken as “ultra-processed.” But both products come from processing plants. And both start as soybeans, corn, and additives. The main difference is that the chicken version includes an extra layer of “unnatural” processing — inside the stomach of a Franken-chicken confined in an animal factory.
Some proteins are crueler than others
Still, most people won’t be sold on just eating plants anytime soon. So we need to present people with less cruel animal protein options. There are two ways to identify these: by species or conditions.
The choice of species likely matters more. Smaller animals typically suffer longer in worse conditions per serving for three reasons:
Size: a cow yields far more beef than a chicken yields meat. Though chickens grow faster, a serving of chicken still requires over 10x more days of animal suffering than beef. Due to dairy cows’ efficiency, a serving of milk requires even less time (see chart below).
Lifespan: farmed fish like salmon grow slowly, living 1-2 years — much longer than most farmed animals. They’re also small. So one salmon serving can require over 1,000 hours of animal suffering. (Wild-caught salmon suffers less, but buying it likely increases demand for farmed salmon since wild stocks are supply-limited.)
Typical conditions: smaller animals are treated worse because they’re less valuable and more replaceable. As one indicator: US pre-slaughter mortality rates — annualized to account for different lifespans — are 2-6% for beef cattle, 18% for pigs, and 36% for broiler chickens.
This counterintuitively suggests animal advocates may be wrong to decry carnivore influencers promoting beef. If the alternative is chicken, beef is better.
But most people won’t give up chicken, eggs, and fish. So we need less cruel versions of them. There may be an opening here: many protein influencers who promote meat, like Joe Rogan, also condemn factory farming. The appetite for change is there. The problem is that the market isn’t.
Corporate campaigns have been our most powerful tool for fixing that. They don’t just lift the floor for welfare; they raise the ceiling for better products. As cage-free has become the new default in Europe and the US, free-range and pasture-raised eggs have taken off. Today, 11% of US hens, 16% of European hens, and 72% of British hens have outdoor access (at least when avian flu doesn’t close the doors). Pasture-raised brands like Vital Farms are booming.
Other sectors face bigger obstacles, exacerbated by fraudulent labels. When Tyson can sell factory-farmed chickens as “all-natural” and “premium” for $5 apiece, honest producers of genuinely naturally-raised birds can’t compete. Governments could fix this with honest labeling laws, but few have shown much interest in doing so.
That makes private certifications critical. In Germany and the Netherlands, nearly all retail chicken carries Haltungsform or Beter Leven labels. Both use tiered systems that let retailers gradually raise standards while offering credible premium options. In the US and UK, Global Animal Partnership and RSPCA Assured have tried to build similar schemes, only to be attacked by PETA and Animal Rising.
This is shortsighted. With protein demand surging, we need every tool available. Some people (including me) will choose plant proteins. Some will stick mostly to beef and dairy. But most will eat chicken, eggs, and fish regardless. We need to give them better choices.
Protein isn’t the enemy — cruelty is. That’s actually good news. We don’t know how to get people to eat less protein. But we have proven ways to reduce the cruelty behind the protein they consume. We should use all of them.
I wish seitan made it onto more of these charts. It is reliably above 20gp/100kcal and easy to find and prepare.
Thanks for this analysis, Lewis, but I'm old enough to have seen protein fads & pushers come & go many times, about once a decade at least since the post-World War II & Great Depression years. Protein fads tend to collapse of their own weight within a year or two, so as with any other food fad, trying to project dietary trends from the short term tends to go far awry. Over time, the major consumption trends always tend to center on the same foods people have eaten for centuries, in amounts roughly proportional to affluence & production capacity: wheat, corn, beans, lentils, rice, oats & chickpeas, with relatively small amounts of meat, coming mostly from the animals most economically produced in or near the points of consumption. Where raising any animals is costly, mostly due to water scarcity, diets and indeed whole cultures shift toward consumption of plant protein, as in much of India, China, and Africa, even though relatively few people in those places are completely vegan or vegetarian. As global warming increases water scarcity, it is unlikely that current U.S. & other developed world trends will deviate far from global historical trends in the long run of history, no matter what we see going on right here & now.