Everyone from RFK Jr. to social media influencers are telling us that the nutrient needs to be maximized in our diet as much as possible. But is that actually good for our bodies?
Illustration by Ryan Inzana.
Imagine that you’ve woken up one morning as a protein-“maxxing” influencer—an online personality focused on maximizing your health and body aesthetics by dialing up your protein intake. Your daily video stream might start with a protein electrolyte water followed by some weightlifting. For breakfast, you might eat several eggs with squash and avocado (to make sure you’re also maxxing healthy fat and beta-carotene), or you might keep it simple with a pound of fried ground beef. Lunch might be a human-brain-size glob of chopped raw tuna, a big juicy steak, or a Japanese fried-rice-and-tempeh dish sponsored by your vegan coaching company. At some point, you will likely consume a protein shake, a perfect opportunity to promote your self-branded protein powder. Dinner might be meat again, or perhaps a chicken quesadilla split into multiple protein-bearing sections. Or, stripping off the thin veneer of normalcy that separates man from goblin, you could feast on raw organ meats just like Liver King, a fitness influencer who claims to emulate the “ancestral lifestyle” of our Paleolithic forebears.
Even if you aren’t plugged into the online proteinverse, you have certainly observed the nutrient’s takeover of your local grocery store. You’ve seen the bars and shakes, the supplements and powders. You’ve ogled the protein water and perhaps even noticed that your favorite brand of heavy cream boasts “uttermost protein.” Pizza crust, Cup Noodles, even cocktails (witness the Espresso Proteini)—no food or drink, it seems, is safe from Big Protein, a multibillion-dollar enterprise since at least 2020. By now, protein is just one more metric to maxx in our never-ending pursuit of the optimal self.
What low fat was to the 1980s and ’90s, and low carb was to the 2000s, high protein is to our current era. As media outlets analyze America’s love affair with this macronutrient, noted protein-enjoyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is helping to revise government nutrition policy. With its top-heavy look, RFK Jr.’s inverted food pyramid recalls the V-shaped male torso idealized by the online self-improvement community of “looksmaxxers.” The discourse, like the processed-food and supplement industries, has itself become protein-rich—and, in the case of the food pyramid, helps signal the Trump administration’s alignment with the masculinist right.
More than an Internet fad, more even than the food industry’s latest effort to wrest profit from an increasingly fickle and economically stressed public, proteinmaxxing is part of the deep-rooted social pathology of nutritionism: the idea that a whole food is no more and no less than the sum of its parts. This reductive approach to eating marks proteinmaxxing as part of what might be called the Great Unbundling, which atomizes our bodies and minds as surely as bag-check fees have been separated out from base airfares. In the Great Unbundling, we experience the logical end point of a culture that regards an overwhelming array of choices as capitalism’s greatest gift. Whether you’re ordering takeout or choosing a healthcare plan, the thinking goes, you’ll be happiest if you can select from multiple options, tailor-making your own bliss.
On the food front, the Great Unbundling has convinced Americans that healthy diets are made up of discrete nutrients that can be chemically disaggregated from their source foods and ingested in optimal doses. Food science has made it possible to isolate, say, an apple’s natural antioxidants and process them into any number of “apple-inspired” derivatives. The problem is that the resulting App’lGlop™ may not be as nourishing as an apple—or it may be so addictive that you can’t stop yourself from consuming 47 pouches, at 7,000 percent of your recommended dietary allowance of sugar. These defects are obscured by marketing and advertising, enabled by the government’s laissez-faire attitude toward the food industry’s health claims.
This regulatory environment pushes consumers into what the 1990s-era conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper called “doing your own research,” or scouring the Internet for clues about which supplement or superfood may be right for them. The gamified logic that has transformed us into a nation of food-science Indiana Joneses also animates our drive for self-optimization. We constantly have to convince ourselves that we’re having a peak experience rather than an impoverished one: Hey, you’re not slowly killing yourself by subsisting exclusively on frozen pizza—you’re getting 32 grams of protein!
In the end, what gets unbundled along with our purchases is our self-perception. We begin to understand ourselves not as an integrated whole but as a collection of swappable parts that can be tuned up ad infinitum. Yet no matter how much time, money, or protein powder we invest in, the human condition guarantees that perfection will remain out of reach.
America has long been a nation of dietary obsessives, our food habits shaped less by our own tastes than by others’ religious beliefs or profit motives. Long before megacorporations like Sysco were reducing restaurant menus to standardized blandness, Americans had learned to elevate convenience and uniformity over enjoyment, freshness, and regional specificity. In the 19th century, the domestic-science movement led a broad shift away from homemade foods based on family tradition toward processed ones. As the food historian Laura Shapiro has written, domestic scientists—drawn from an emerging class of mostly white, East Coast professionals—believed that “if they could reform American eating habits, they could reform Americans” themselves. The nation’s fate, it seemed, hung on the willingness of home cooks, whether ladies of the house or hired hands, to step into the bright, sanitized world of measuring spoons and packaged yeast. Only after the housewife was cleansed of irrational attachments—to her hard-won intuitions, to her country or ethnicity of origin, to her very senses—could she adequately support her family’s pursuit of the American dream.
Enter the cooking schools, which aimed to supplant guesswork with measurement and to cure cognitive overload with planning. Smothering all variations in season, region, and taste beneath a prim, starched, Bostonian sameness, cooking-school instructors helped establish a food culture that proved durable precisely because it was boring. The women who championed this new type of cooking, Shapiro writes, “were proud of their lifeless palates,” which they considered essential to creating a healthful national cuisine. The American food of the future might not taste great, but it would fuel healthy, morally upright workers. In contrast to these lofty goals, Shapiro writes, “the flavors of food were of slight, somewhat anthropological interest.”
The idea of food as a shortcut to Protestant virtue is still with us today. It lives on in the joyless slop served in American hospitals and nursing homes; in Nutraloaf, the homogenized nightmare blob used to punish US prison inmates; and in products like Huel and Soylent, the “nutritionally complete,” “science-backed” bachelor chow beloved by tech bros. This form of pragmatism-maxxing has also enabled the protein bar—the gentleman’s Nutraloaf—to leap from some venture capitalist’s carceral imagination to a bodega near you.
Once food is understood primarily as fuel, and those it is fueling as engines of national prosperity, the path toward dehumanization has been laid. Today, all that remains of the cooking-school teacher’s earnestness, her Quakerish simplicity, is a commitment to hard work and deprivation. Fold in a bottomless appetite for quarterly earnings and you have the perfect food-industry executive. He and a diffuse network of online health-and-wellness influencers—including proteinmaxxers—work symbiotically to convince the American worker-consumer that food is just one more metric to optimize. Just as some 19th-century housewives were enthralled by cooking-school notions of health and hygiene, so are their descendants trapped in the ideal of productivity. Eager to perform efficiency (and thus, we hope, maintain our family’s health-insurance coverage), we will wolf down a sad desk lunch instead of taking a break. All the better if, loaded with protein, this meal helps us soldier on until we can prepare for the next day.
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But should we, in fact, be proteinmaxxing? Signs point to no. The Trump administration may be telling us to “prioritize protein foods at every meal,” but most Americans are eating plenty of protein. In fact, we are probably eating too much—around one gram per kilogram of body weight on average, with two-thirds of it coming from meat. Instead, we could all probably benefit from more fiber. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends 25 grams a day for women and 38 for men, but Americans typically eat only about 10 to 15 grams—far short of the ideal daily dose. Insufficient fiber can lead to constipation, which a recent study linked to major depression. With such low fiber intake, is it any wonder that Americans are as miserable as ever?
The food we consume every day befits our status as pawns in the Great Unbundling. Attractively packaged and flawlessly marketed to the micro-demographic we identify with, our meals are more likely to be heavily processed than fresh-cooked from whole foods. Their ingredients are often shipped from far away rather than produced locally. They may be so sweet or salty, so loaded with satiety-defying ingredients, that our brains forget how little nourishment we’re actually getting. And since this type of food lends itself to solo eating, it often doesn’t provide the social connection that humans are hard-wired to crave.
Lawmakers have not only failed to keep up with the industry guile that makes these foods so ubiquitous in the American diet, but in many cases they have actually aided and abetted it. Since 1906, US law has held food manufacturers to specific labeling requirements for imitation goods, such as alternative proteins. In 1938, it became illegal to sell an imitation unless “its label bears, in type of uniform size and prominence, the word ‘imitation’ and, immediately thereafter, the name of the food imitated.” This is how we got, say, Trader Joe’s Surimi Imitation Crabmeat, or “krab.”
What the 1938 law did not do, however, was to define imitation. Over the years, industry scientists created products that mimicked the taste and texture of foods like hamburgers and ice cream while containing few of their actual ingredients. In 1973, the Food and Drug Administration sought to dispel confusion by distinguishing “imitations” from “substitutes.” The former were defined as nutritionally inferior and required special labeling. Substitutes, on the other hand, were deemed nutritionally equivalent to the products they imitated and could be sold without further ado. “Subsequently,” one analysis of the 1973 law notes, “the range and variety of substitute products on the market significantly increased.”
For food manufacturers, permission to flood the zone with appealingly labeled knockoff foods—from lemonless lemonade to high-protein meatless “crumbles”—was a major victory. Consumers, meanwhile, became increasingly perplexed, not to mention diseased. In 1968, the Senate convened a Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs to help mitigate hunger and malnutrition. Soon, however, the committee began trying to understand why Americans were suffering from such high rates of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Its conclusion—that, far from suffering from malnutrition, “at least 30 million Americans” were actually overeating—was reflected in a 1977 report titled Dietary Goals for the United States. The first edition of Dietary Goals recommended that Americans “reduce consumption of meat,” among other high-calorie foods. Under pressure from the food industry, however, the committee issued a second edition that replaced the “eat less” messaging with ambivalent, unbundled guidance like “decrease consumption of animal fats.”
This seemingly innocuous terminological shift was a boon for the food industry. If, in 1973, manufacturers had won the right to market imitations without labeling them as such, now they could formulate products featuring more or less of whatever nutrients the government favored, then advertise them as health foods. One result was the low-fat-diet craze, which dominated the nutrition landscape from approximately 1980 through the mid-2010s. Newly empowered to make health claims, the food industry began churning out low- or no-fat products packed with sugar, vegetable oils, and fillers. An unintended consequence was the “SnackWell effect,” wherein a person feels so virtuous for having chosen a low-fat food that they gorge themselves on it. But even as many of these products were touted as “reduced-guilt” options, the rates of obesity and other chronic illnesses rose.
When companies began churning out their low-fat creations in the late 1970s, they were, in theory, empowering people to choose how much fat to consume—but they were also contributing to the Great Unbundling. To make their offerings palatable, the industry had to observe a kind of nutritional conservation of energy, swapping in one basic substance (sugar—i.e., carbohydrates) for another (fats). Whole foods were increasingly disintegrated into their constituent chemicals—macronutrients, originally discovered in the early 19th century.
In 1827, the British chemist William Prout concluded that all foods are composed of “the saccharine, the oily, and the albuminous”—that is, carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. By the middle of the century, Justus von Liebig, a German chemist known as the “father of nutrition science,” had settled on protein as the “master nutrient.” So strong was Liebig’s belief in protein’s miraculous powers that in 1847 he developed Extractum carnis Liebig, a beef extract for those too poor to buy actual beef. “To a considerable extent,” the author Michael Pollan writes, “we still have a food system organized around the promotion of protein as the master nutrient.”
For critics of industrial food production like Pollan or Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, nutritionist thinking has done more harm than good. “Because public discussion of nutrition issues tends to focus on single nutrients,” Nestle writes in Food Politics, her landmark study of the US food industry, common-sense dietary recommendations become “hopelessly obscured.” According to Pollan, the emphasis on nutrients over whole foods takes on a “quasireligious” character, with government officials and scientific experts acting as priests shepherding us toward “dietary salvation.” Every fad diet emerges from what Pollan describes as a dualistic ideology with an “evil nutrient for adherents to excoriate” and “a savior nutrient” they can adore. Given that there are only so many good nutrients, it’s no surprise that protein is now king. “It’s the only thing that’s left,” Nestle told me. “There are only four sources of calories: protein, fat, carbohydrate, and alcohol. Fat is out. Carbohydrate is out. And you can’t tell people to eat more alcohol.”
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Proteinmaxxing influencers flourish in this environment of little to no regulation. At the root of our susceptibility to diet fads is neither laziness nor gullibility but rather an anxious desire to deconstruct the black box of expert guidance—which, though scientific in form, is often far from objective in content. Food companies invest significant resources not only in lobbying the government but also in wooing experts by sponsoring their research or endowing professorships. “Co-opting experts—especially academic experts—is an explicit corporate strategy,” Nestle writes. If experts are known to be for sale, is it any wonder that their recommendations are suspect? Those who seek alternative perspectives are attempting to do for health advice what the Protestant Reformation did for Catholic liturgy: translate opaque dead-language texts into an actionable vernacular. Yet this openness to influence makes us vulnerable to online wellness grifters, who have gained power since the Covid-19 pandemic and are now telegraphing their low-fact messaging from the government itself.
Ben Recht, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley and a noted authority in optimization research, finds the popular fixation on maxxing “offensive.” Many contemporary nutrition and fitness practices, from injecting peptides to consuming Joe Rogan–endorsed supplements, are stealing scientific valor. Rather than drawing on empirical observation or study, they rely on vibes. Any “findings” that health influencers report are anecdotal, even apocryphal—and yet, from Rogan on down, they speak with dead-eyed certainty.
A perfect example of optimization logic run amok is the looksmaxxer Clavicular. Born Braden Eric Peters, the twentysomething influencer burst onto the scene in 2025 with videos promoting dubious beauty tips like “bonesmashing” and taking meth to stay lean. His main gift to humanity has been to popularize terms previously confined to incel subcultures, like “frame-mogging” (making another guy look bad by being taller or buffer than him), “foids” (women), or “jestermaxxing” (compulsively striving to impress the foids with attention-seeking behavior). Clavicular’s patter also consists of scientific-sounding acronyms that, on closer inspection, qualify as symptoms of what he would call “brainrotmaxxing”: “PSL” (derived from the names of the Internet forums PUAHate, SlutHate, and Lookism); “SMV” (sexual market value); “LTN” (low-tier normie). These terms suggest a scientific seriousness that belies their origins in the Internet’s foulest abattoirs.
Trying to optimize qualitative variables like “sexual market value” or multitasking with more than one metric at a time catapults would-be maxxers away from logic and reason and into the realm of fantasy. The problem with any form of maxxing, then, is that it’s both too vague and too specific, puffed up with unearned quantitative authority. According to Recht, the outcome is a “corrosive mentality” that “erases a lot of what makes life worth living.” And, indeed, Clavicular and his ilk do not seem especially happy (though they might counter that happiness is not the point—“ascension” is).
Whether you’re fine-tuning your appearance or your diet, maxxing can lead not merely to ill health but to the darkest possibilities of the human experience. “Scientific rigor often takes you to skull-measuring,” Recht says. “We think that the quantified is objective,” but “just because you’re counting doesn’t make you a scientist.” Even the mathematically inclined, as Recht details on his Substack blog arg min, can miss the mark when they try to optimize human behaviors like eating. In 1945, the economist George Stigler published a paper describing the optimal diet. Using information about dozens of foods, he crafted a regimen that could be followed at minimal cost—just 11 cents a day in 1939 money—while satisfying the USDA’s nutritional guidelines for calories, protein, calcium, iron, and vitamins. The only problem was that, as Recht points out, “Stigler’s diet was horrifying,” consisting of about “one pound of flour, two ounces of evaporated milk, five ounces of cabbage, one ounce of spinach, and a pound of dried navy beans” per day. “No one who wasn’t being tortured would eat this,” he writes. Eating, like making art or falling in love, involves numerous subjective, unquantifiable factors. And “if you can’t quantify it,” Recht concludes, “you can’t optimize it.”
This objection is unlikely to deter committed proteinmaxxers, whose behavior is rooted in the most unassailable metric of all: personal belief. What RFK Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again crowd are proposing, Nestle told me, “is for you to develop your own personal ideology around food,” an ambition facilitated by the disinformation vector that is social media. Supplement companies, food manufacturers, and now our own government are happy to stoke even the most irrational beliefs if they move product. “And the people at [the Department of] Health and Human Services, every single one of them,” Nestle added, “are selling wellness products…. At best, they sincerely believe that these things will help.”
This belief-based approach to health is anchored in an ideology of individualism, as are some of the most famous critiques of our food system. When Pollan wrote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that “many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world,” he missed the issue’s systemic underpinnings. Like Whole Foods founder John Mackey, who once compared the Affordable Care Act to fascism, Pollan suggests that people who eat poorly are doing so by choice. Shopping for quality over convenience “takes more money and effort,” he admits, “but as soon as you begin to treat that expenditure” as “a kind of vote—a vote for health in the largest sense—food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize.” The idea seems to be that if we all just “vote with our fork,” the food industry will discontinue practices that spark joy in its shareholders and instead make it financially tenable for Public School Timmy to eat a lunch that couldn’t be confused with prison food. Mackey took a similarly hectoring tone in a 2020 interview with The New York Times: “People have got to become wiser about their food choices. And if people want different foods, the market will provide it.”
The government is now actively testing this hypothesis with guidelines that assume Americans choose their diets in a vacuum. Neither Republicans nor mainstream Democrats have the stomach to regulate the food industry, which is responsible for the torrent of ultra-processed foods and questionable supplements glutting our diets. Instead, the emphasis is on education and personal responsibility: As long as it tells people to “prioritize protein foods at every meal,” the state believes that it has done its job. Yet as Nestle points out, “There is a substantial literature in public health that shows that education doesn’t change behavior.”
A government that was serious about mitigating our poor eating habits would have to upend nearly every aspect of American life. To have the time and money to eat better, Americans would need free healthcare, childcare, and eldercare, not to mention higher wages, longer parental leaves, shorter and more predictable working hours, stronger worker protections, and better infrastructure. On the supplier side, taxes, subsidies, labeling restrictions, and the regulation of marketing tactics would help stop so many ultra-processed foods from being created and sold. As long as food manufacturers are allowed to position ultra-processed foods at eye level on supermarket shelves; to exploit supplement-labeling loopholes to make unproven health claims and to label foods deceptively; to use cartoons to advertise to children; and to sponsor academic research, things are unlikely to change—no matter how many foodies in Marin County and Greenwich Village vote with their forks or how many steaks RFK Jr.’s inverted food pyramid depicts.
Seen through this lens, proteinmaxxing reveals its true form. Accelerationist and blackpilled, irony-poisoned and apocalyptic, it is part of a movement that prioritizes appearance over function. It’s a form of nihilism: The world is over, nothing matters, so you might as well maxx out your muscles and your credit card. And if you can hustle a few dollars out of your followers while you’re at it, even better.
Nestle, who has seen dozens of trendy diets come and go over the years, understands proteinmaxxing as a bid for self-determination. “There’s more and more feeling among people about lack of control,” she says, and food—even faddish or unnourishing food—offers an accessible way to reclaim it. At the end of the day, “people need to feel better,” she says. “They have to have something in their lives that feels good. Because everything outside is so horrible.”
Maya VinokourMaya Vinokour teaches in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and is the author of Work Flows: Stalinist Liquids in Russian Labor Culture.