Takedown of this wack protein article I read
Why do gen pop writers have to treat powders and bars like a black box?
Short post today, been on my mind for a minute.
Was reading this Atlantic piece from a couple weeks ago: Are protein bars just candy bars? That’s what they say in it. They are candy. Yes. Protein bars are treats. Per this article, they are treats because they are hyper-processed and because they often contain sugar. Nearly based conclusion. To reach this point the story author looks at the bars in his cabinet and on the market, interviews a respected academic (Dr. Marion Nestle), gets a quote from the David bar founder and digs around in the literature. In the story, he mentions the Barebell bar—supposed to be good; I’ve never had it—and the Gatorade bar, which was a favorite of Jeffrey Epstein:
Confusing inclusion—terrible macros and the David and others.
It’s a respectably skeptical piece, and timely. Protein is everywhere, mostly processed, in traditionally non-proteinated foods. I mostly agree with its thesis. Protein bars are not exactly food. Protein powders too. Bars are deeply processed—or let’s say completely: made in factories by machines—like Doritos. The macros are good. The health halo they have around them is growing, because for some people, macros matter. I’ve addressed this as much in earlier newsletters:
But the rigorous skepticism ends there. The problem with the article is it doesn’t have any answers. Or even deep questions about protein. It’s how mainstream writing about nutrition and health goes, but it’s just not good enough to compete with, I don’t know, content from Saladino or a Chad bodybuilder.
What I mean is there’s scant context here. No context for protein, why people might need it, conditions when it’s good or bad, no placing the bar on a continuum of “healthy” proteins, and a short look at the scientific literature. Not a ding on the article. It’s pretty good: nice and skeptical, and clear. It just leaves readers in the dust.
Why?
What I mean is some of the questions that came up for me when reading this article:
In what way, exactly, are protein bars ultra-processed?
What specifically about the production process makes bars “unhealthy”?
Are all p. bars equally unhealthy?
Are some protein bars “healthy”?
May we define what is healthy?
Why is a protein bar inferior to whole foods, exactly, and which whole foods are “healthier”?
Is it unhealthier?
Why, also, is a protein bar better than Snickers, like the story says?
Not answered.
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The problem
The answers aren’t threaded out or hinted at in the story because the story is protein-skeptical. Even though the author uses bars. That’s fine. But really the argument is protein bars are new, kind of maybe healthy, but not really. The scientists addressed here are saying what’s healthy is what’s always been healthy—and are dismissive of macros. Protein bars are processed and are all mostly the same. Are we eating too much protein? Probably. Especially since we get this protein from processed foods.
Just kind of a gen-pop argument. Not all protein bars are the same, even though they share production processes. More than this, protein bars leave a lot of nutrition on the table. They’re missing a lot of shit. Bioavailability, the thermic effect of food. Ingredients. Quality of ingredients. What’s actually in the bars, how this is made. Not really addressed in the piece. Frustrating since this skeptical piece, written for gen pop—people who are hearing about protein bars, and the proteinization of the marketplace, for the first time—really just hand waves protein as this one single thing.
Not specific enough
One particular paragraph in this story jumped out to me. It’s towards the end:
Kind of true, but not sure about peanuts. Worthless halo food to single out. The “speculative” quote is deeply cope. And three, the David quote is wild. The first two arguments in fine print here:
Peanuts higher calories, fat dominant, lots of linoleic fat (veg. oils), and equally processed: emulsifiers, stabilizers, added oils. Food, yes, but processed/with sus ingredients. I’d say Brazil nut would be a better pick here.
Two, the “largely speculative” argument here. The science remains speculative because of the lack of effective long-term trials on the very downstream effects of vegetable oils (wrote about this here). Structural issues with nutrition research—no one remembers what they eat; people try and impress researchers—also a problem. More radically, the onus should not be on consumers to demonstrate to scientists and nutrition editors why they don’t want to eat a specific food; the onus should be on the meritocratic class to explain why it’s without a doubt safe to eat in the long-term.
But it’s the third quote that’s wild. As in it just creates more questions. The David CEO says “Macronutrients matter the most.” Cool. What do the academics quoted in the piece say? Matter how? What does the literature say? Over how long a time? Matter to who? Does this mean micronutrients don’t matter at all? Or how about—what is a macronutrient?
Highlighting the problems about writing on this stuff in a dinosaur article way for gen pop. While the answers are simple, they’re contradictory, and cannot be explained in a narrative way. They’re about context. Answers in fineprint below:
Macros matter for body composition, i.e. muscles and being lean. Micronutrients matter as well, but perhaps less superficially. Nailing macros with correct sleep, activity, movement will probably help you put on muscles, which, if it’s new for you, will be great, and which is also very predictive of long-term health. If you ignore micronutrients (or carbs) there may be wild effects down the line, or you might just go bald. The literature doesn’t pit macros against micros in a satisfying long-term study, but observational analysis from bodybuilders does. (Robust data, but not gold-standard.) The other academics aren’t quoted here but Nestle, in other articles, is protein bar-skeptical. Macros and protein bars are everywhere in our health culture because everything gen pop people see about health comes from bodybuilding, and they used to be/are obsessed with it (wrote about this before here). There are other paths beyond macros—Zhōngyī, some esoteric diets—but they’re hard to write about.
Tricky
Nutrition (or “health”) is simple, but only if you accept that a lot of contradictory truths come up at once. The example here are the responses to the first set of questions I asked after reading this article:
Are protein bars unhealthy because they’re processed? They’re not “unhealthy” because they are processed, but because they’re processed they’re not really food, which tends to be unhealthy. The process: all bars mostly require several steps: extracting the protein or environs from milk or milk solids/other, combining that with other ingredients—sugars, flavorings, additives—for taste and often emulsifiers/stabilizers for packaging, shipping.
Are all protein bars equally “unhealthy”? We could argue the mechanization process is uniquely unhealthy—but that’s a whole thing. Let’s be charitable and say mechanization and shipping often/almost always requires specific additives and oils to ensure that these processed foods pass FDA standards, don’t fall apart during shipping, can stay on shelves and hit the bar’s macros. These oils and emulsifiers added to these protein bars are, roughly/mostly the culprit. It’s the process, sure, but not qua. Rather it’s what the process generally is here.
Are some “healthy”? I don’t know dude, maybe if there’s an emulsifier-free bar. Some are “more processed,” or dependent on emulsifiers and stabilizers. To me that’s a David bar, if only because they rely on their proprietary hyper-processed vegetable oil, EPG, made from canola. If you’re seed oil-agnostic, this means nothing. If you’re trying to avoid them, though, they’re a no-go.
A bit on emulsifiers. A small asterisk in the story but a major part of the production process in most proteins. The bars mentioned have them, though not every powder does. They help processed foods stay in one piece/not separate. The downside is they have been said in studies to cause metabolic disfunction. (Anecdotally, they make foods undigestable.) YMMV, but my heuristic is that processing is not a black box; emulsifiers and oils tend to be the pan points.
May we define what is healthy? Trying to do this is the working concept of this newsletter. Read the archives and subscribe so I can keep doing this. One definition might be “healthy food” is easy to digest high nutrient less toxic food, with the caveat that “more healthy food” or more of one spec. food isn’t always “healthier.”
Why is a protein bar inferior to whole foods, exactly? Which whole foods are “healthier”? Probably no “unhealthy foods,” since one 1. it’s crazy out there 2. some poison now and then is adaptive to people without metabolic disfunction—like tough exercise now and then. Really this is why gen pop writing is narratively unsatisfying. You need a hook and a story, but anyone with a mobile, functional understanding of “healthy” knows there isn’t a black and white list. Instead it’s frequency, satiety, taste, maybe the zero-sum of other foods that explain why some food, if it’s a staple, may be detrimental.
Why is a protein bar better than Snickers? Probably isn’t. Both are kind of not food. Ironically Snickers has actual nuts.
Gen pop writing can’t discuss protein
Charitably, this is a difficult topic to write about, either for health freaks or for full civilians. The Atlantic story is helpfully skeptical about unnatural semi-foods, like protein bars, but it doesn’t get granular about why. Not gonna bag on it. Attention-grabbing headline but we need skeptical, mainstream reporting here. It’s not like the skepticism’s gonna come from the influencers. Still, though, the questions it asks, both through coverage and through omission, aren’t answered.
Which is wild, because there are answers. There are answers here. To protein, bioavailability, scam bars, decent bars, powders, what to do. If there weren’t—if protein was this complicated, if it was something you had to study for years before taking more, if it was something you had to rely on a double-blind study to wade into, long-term, to get an answer—we’d all be fucked, dead. There are answers. Some are demon bodybuilding mistakes other people have made. Some are trad foods. Some are theories, heuristics. They are real, but exist in a third space: narratively unsatisfactory, maybe not proven, but context based and completely true. Or mabe just this: The doctor is right about swapping out the bar with a real food, it’s just not peanuts.
What I mean is if you want a more detailed answer on macros and veg. oils and replacement bars and proteins that don’t contain emulsifiers or stabilizers, and the dark energy answer to lean protein, that’s beneath the paywall. Behind the paywall because I’ll be straight up that I don’t think these answers can be explained narratively. They cannot just be quoted. They need to exist in a bullshit-free truth zone that cannot be plucked of context. It’s vague, but it’s true. People do it. Hence, the paywall.
