This story is part of a series on navigating the new world of peak protein, from the latest packaged products to emerging research. Read the rest of the stories here.
“I’VE GOT FOUR kids,” Kyung Kim told me as I shoved one of his high-protein MoonPies into my mouth.
Kim is the founder of Redefine Foods, which sells protein-enhanced MoonPies, oatmeal pies, and a high-protein doughnut. Kim was ripped, which only enhanced his pitch. “I would pack their lunch, and I would be throwing in a Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie, which had [almost] 30 grams of sugar. I’m like, What am I doing? I need to come up with something that’s healthy for you.”
Kim was just one of the many (many) vendors at Natural Products Expo West, a four-day convention I attended in Anaheim, California, in March. Expo West is built around “empowering your future in the world of natural and organic products.” I still don’t know what that means, so I’ll describe the event as a snack convention where big brands and upstarts alike pitch hungry professionals new eats.
More than 64,000 people attended the 44th annual event, a hungry crowd that, according to their lanyards, included food distributors, retailers, and buyers from Giant Food, Kroger, and Southwest Airlines. Some 3,000 brands had set up booths—including titans like Liquid Death and Oatly—but 30 percent of the companies were new to Expo West.
The stakes felt high—or as high as they could, for an industry trade show. I listened to many impassioned speeches from pitch people like Kim. I witnessed attendees filling giant bags with free samples of foodstuffs. I saw lines dozens-deep for Wilde protein chips (made from chicken breast), Immi Ramen (the only brand of ramen sold at GNC!), and Kodiak Cakes, a boxed pancake mix that counts the ever-buff Zac Efron as its chief brand officer.
And most of these companies seemed to be marketing items loaded with protein, a nutrient that has recently become Big Snack’s big sell: a muscle-building, weight-losing ingredient they could add to anything. Apparently even MoonPies.
Whether a MoonPie—even one with 14 grams of protein—can really be considered “healthy” is up for debate. But Kim picked the right market. The value of high-protein foods is projected to grow by more than $50 billion between 2023 and 2028, according to a report from Research and Markets, with buy-in from the likes of General Mills, Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola.
High-protein cereals, pastas, chips, oatmeal, pancakes, yogurt, bagels, ramen, soda—despite the flood of new high-protein products on the market, 42 percent of consumers say they want even more, per a 2024 Kantar survey.
In the last several years, protein has grown into a hot topic for the fad diet crowd, the same people who until recently were praising the benefits of “plant-based” eating, or intermittent fasting, or paleo, or keto. High-protein as a global search term has steadily risen since the start of the COVID pandemic and spiked in February. Proteinmaxxing, in which fitfluencers try to consume as much of the nutrient as possible, is now A Thing.
Most of this isn’t a surprise to us at Men’s Health. We’ve been protein-forward for 35-plus years because of the nutrient’s many benefits beyond just muscle growth. But what seems off the rails is the sheer volume of high-protein ultra-processed products pushing their way to market right now.
Industry experts credit two key factors for driving the recent protein mania: “consumer focus on fitness, athletic activities, and weight management” (driven by the pandemic) and “increased knowledge of the health advantages of protein consumption” (fueled by social media), according to Fortune Business Insights. You’d think dietitians would be thrilled by all this. But they’re kind of not, as I learned talking to a few after Expo West, perhaps too late—because, in the name of science, I ate everything that was put in front of me.
And it was science. A rep for those chicken breast chips told me the product had recently been “reformulated.” Which is not the most inviting way to talk about, ya know, food.
But I chewed and sipped; I gnawed and glugged. And I had questions. Like why, after the likely billions spent on formulating high-protein foods, do so many of them still taste so awful? Is any company even close to solving this problem? As if in my childhood dreams, could a MoonPie actually help me build muscle? And really, was all this protein actually good for me?
A Matter of Taste
In the third season of The White Lotus, Patrick Schwarzenegger plays Saxon Ratliff, a prototypical Duke d-bag on a family vacation to Thailand. Considering the resort’s lush surroundings, the character spends a lot of time talking about his protein shakes. When his kid brother asks how they taste, Ratliff shouts, “It’s not about the taste. It’s about the pump!”
He’s right about that (and whatever he’s doing in the gym). But let’s first talk about the pump. As you likely know, there is decades of research behind protein’s ability to build and maintain muscle. But beyond sculpting your glutes, protein assists with multitudes of everyday boring bodily functions, ranging from nail growth to cell metabolism to immune system function.
Also boring (but important!): Protein is made from amino acids. It has 20 twenty types of them in total—and your body needs them all to function. Amino acids are found naturally in many foods, and they can also survive processing, which means that manufacturers can use them to pump up the protein in packaged products. The two primary forms of protein powder you’ll find in these products are whey (a by-product of making cheese) and pea (the yellow kind, not the green).
Both powders have one problem: “Amino acids are very nasty. You don’t eat them for fun,” says Sander Kersten, PhD, director of Cornell University’s Division of Nutritional Sciences. Amino acids' primary flavor is bitter—and not in the kind-of-fun IPA way. They have a chalky bitterness, a bitterness so strong that it requires a ton of sweetness to balance out.
Historically, this is why the protein powders and bars of the 1990s came in ice-cream shop flavors like chocolate peanut butter and vanilla milkshake—but who are they fooling? Jason Walsh, a celebrity trainer who got Pedro Pascal in shape for 2024’s Gladiator II, told me, “The old-school mentality that bodybuilders had was: We don’t care about the flippin’ taste. We're choking it down.” (Last year, Walsh launched his own small-batch protein powder, Rise311, made with Madagascar vanilla and what he calls “the Cadillac of stevias.”)
That said, protein products taste way better now than they did in the early Met-Rx and PowerBar days, largely due to advancements in whey processing and flavor science. Quest Nutrition, which muscled into the market in 2010, did so with not bad protein-infused BBQ snack chips and white chocolate raspberry protein bars. Today you can enjoy cross-branded Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles protein powder. But still, the bitterness of aminos remains.
Food manufacturers have tried to work around the yuck factor in two ways.
The first is by going hard on sugar alcohols (low-carb sweeteners such as xylitol and sorbitol) and what researchers call “nonnutritive sweeteners.” Those Quest raspberry bars, despite their decadent-sounding name, don’t actually contain any added sugar—which keeps carbs, the enemy of most modern fad diets, low. Instead, they feature stevia and sucralose, two ingredients that taste supersweet to the human tongue but contain no calories.
Other nonnutritive sweeteners include monk fruit, aspartame, and lactase, which you can find in high-protein dairy products. It often takes a motley mix of these pseudo-sugars to make protein-enhanced foods edible. If I’m being honest, a lot of them still aren’t.
Some of them taste about as bad as the amino acids they’re meant to cover up. And although scientific research has largely shown that nonnutritive sweeteners won’t cause cancer, there is evidence that they, as well as sugar alcohols, can lead to bloating, gas, and diarrhea (one explanation for the dreaded “protein shake farts”).
The second work-around is dropping the processed powders and pseudo-sugars altogether and; instead leaning on the protein of actual whole foods.
Brami, a maker of high-protein pasta, creates its fusilli with nutrient-dense lupini beans. Carnal, studs their beef sticks with black garlic and truffle, was developed by two veterans of the legendary NYC fine-dining restaurant Eleven Madison Park. Yay’s, which sells a snack chip I can only describe as air-dried beef carpaccio, has found a way to make jerky crispy.
All this stuff tastes great—with no strange aftertaste. By going savory instead of sweet, you avoid the pseudo-sugars. But many of these products are way more expensive than the kind made with all the processed stuff. (Yay’s beef crisps are priced at $18 per bag, and I regret to inform you they’re delicious.)
A few people Expo West told me that consumers had “protein-bar fatigue” and that, rest assured, the Protein Industrial Complex was innovating to hit the dual target of flavor and price. But I was already suffering from protein everything fatigue—and that was before I heard there’s a high-protein Mars bar and that Khloé Kardashian just launched a line of high-protein popcorn called Khloud.
Chips, popcorn, candy bars—wait, aren't these exactly the ultra-processed foods we’re all now supposed to be avoiding? To find out if protein somehow overrules all the life-shortening horrors I’ve been hearing about UPFs, I had to head outside Expo West and talk to someone who wasn’t trying to sell me something.
Food Versus Fad
BRIAN ST. PIERRE is the kind of guy who has so many credentials after his name, you’re pretty sure he’s making some up. He’s a registered dietitian (RD), a certified strength and condition coach (CSCS), a certified sports nutritionist (CISSN), and, yes, all those things are very real. St. Pierre is the longtime director of nutrition at Precision Nutrition, where his clients have included the Carolina Panthers, Cleveland Browns, and San Antonio Spurs. He’s also the kind of guy whose T-shirt can’t seem to contain his biceps and delts—and that’s not the T-shirt’s fault.
For decades, St. Pierre, who is also a Men’s Health advisor, has promoted a simple, research-backed approach to protein. While the USDA's recommended daily allowance for the nutrient is currently 0.8 grams per kilogram of target bodyweight, that’s the bare minimum, St. Pierre says. “If you’re someone who’s really looking to push the envelope and every ounce of muscle gain matters, a gram per pound is good,” he says. Ideally, you want all that protein to come from whole foods. Granted, if you’re an 180-pound guy, that means you’d have to eat 180 grams of protein a day, the equivalent of about six roasted chicken breasts.
St. Pierre isn’t anti-protein powder, and in fact, he regularly drinks protein shakes himself. He’s not even anti-packaged protein products—at least not all of them. “A pasta that has a little more protein in it isn’t inherently a bad thing,” he says. “But I’m not looking at it as a really key part of protein intake. I’m looking for more protein-rich, protein-dominant foods.” That means roasted chicken breast, sure, but also lean turkey, beef, pork, fish, shellfish, and dairy, along with eggs, tofu, and tempeh. In other words, largely unprocessed (and, compared to white chocolate raspberry protein bars, un-fun) foods.
Yes, the protein in these foods is important for your health, but so are all the other nutrients: the blood-oxygenating iron of red meat, the heart-healthy omega-3s of seafood, the disease-fighting antioxidants of eggs. The vast majority of packaged protein products—Mars Hi Protein, Cinnamon Cheerios Protein—do not have nearly as much of this stuff. So you might be able to build more muscle with high-protein packaged products, but an overreliance on them may result in undernourishment in other key areas (which, in some instances, could be counterproductive to your muscle-building goals).
Worse yet, some “high-protein” packaged products don’t contain enough protein to matter. “What is a fad are products with, say, seven grams of protein,” says St. Pierre. “That’s a halo effect. It’s not moving the needle.” To hit that goal of one per pound of target bodyweight, St. Pierre recommends consuming at least 30 grams of protein at each meal, 15 grams in each snack, and making up the rest through shakes—or, sure, a high-protein packaged product that helps you hit your daily goal.
Over the six hours I spent at Expo West, I had many conversations about “functional foods.” One vendor hawking high-protein fava bean chips told me that “people are looking to consume something but derive multiple benefits from it,” he explained. “So you’re going to snack. But what else is it?” A sales rep for Goodles—whose boxed macaroni-and-cheese products boast 14 grams of protein per serving—told me to enjoy one of childhood’s greatest pleasures without “snack-rificing nutrition.” (I’ll admit, I laughed.)
But a slab of salmon is already a functional food. It contains protein, omega-3s, and loads of vitamins and minerals. And St. Pierre told me that I didn’t need to snack-rifice anything if my diet was relatively dialed in.
High-protein products are now everywhere, but they’re actually just reformulated, well-marketed versions of high-protein products that have been available for decades. What’s the difference, other than flavor and format, between Goodles and a PowerBar?
Which leads us directly into peak protein’s next phase.
Raising the Bar
THE BIGGEST HIGH-PROTEIN product release of the past year hasn’t been a box of cereal, a bag of jerky, or even a protein powder. No, the thing that everyone seemed to be talking about at Expo West and in the interviews I conducted with experts afterward was…a protein bar.
Specifically, a bar called David.
David was created by Peter Rahal, a serial entrepreneur who has made a fortune in protein snacks. He’s a cofounder of RxBar, whose protein bars you’ve surely seen at your supermarket’s checkout counter. The ingredients are listed on the front of the package. For the chocolate sea salt flavor, it's “3 egg whites, 6 almonds, 5 cashews, 2 dates.” They have 12 grams of protein. They’re also, to my taste, disgusting. But what do I know? In 2017, Rahal sold RxBar to the Kellogg Company for $600 million.
What’s more interesting to me is what Rahal did next. When his noncompete expired, he immediately set about creating David, a brand he launched in late 2024. (The bar is named after Michelangelo’s David lol.) According to marketing materials, David bars are “the most effective portable protein on this planet” Protein-bar fatigue be damned.
Rahal says they took years to develop with the help of longevity expert and health podcasting phenom Peter Attia, MD. (David also has the financial backing of fellow healthfluencer Andrew Huberman, PhD.) David bars come in fun flavors like blueberry pie, cake batter, and salted peanut butter.
It's the packaging, though, that really hits you. The wrapper is a gold foil reminiscent of the original PowerBar from the 1980s, which Rahal says was an intentional throwback to the iconic post-workout snack. But underneath the slim “David” on the is what Rahal says is the major improvement on the classic: "28 grams of protein, 150 calories, 0g sugar."
When I read those stats to St. Pierre, he has to take a breath. “On the surface,” he says, “that sounds really good.” PowerBars have seven grams of protein for 200 calories. Many Quest Nutrition bars have 21 grams for 190 calories. David was able to push the protein higher with a proprietary blend of whey, collagen, and egg whites. The lower calorie count is due to allulose, an emerging, naturally occurring pseudo-sugar. It’s truly a modern food engineering feat.
“RxBar was a good product. Minimal, whole food ingredients is a very righteous thing,” Rahal says. “But when I think about maximizing nutrition, you’re limiting yourself. At David, we’re agnostic to ingredients. We just say, ‘How do they objectively affect the human body?'” The bars also include stuff like “modified plant fat (EPG),” “acesulfame potassium,” and two of those pseudo-sugars (sucralose being the second).
While David bars are available online and in stores like the Vitamin Shoppe, they’re notably absent at Other natural grocers have also banned them in part over concerns that a nontraditional sugar like allulose may adversely affect the human microbiome. Some preliminary studies in mice have shown a link, though others have found beneficial effects on gut diversity. (And here’s where the high-protein health movement is meeting the push against ultra-processed foods.)
Rahal thinks Whole Foods will change its stance in time, reminding me that Jeff Bezos’s supermarket chain once had a ban on genetically modified foods. When it comes to our diets, he has three rules: “Adequate protein, don’t overeat calories, and don’t spike your blood sugar.” David bars check all three boxes.
And the flavors? The blueberry pie bar did indeed taste like a combination of pie filling and crust (though it also contained white chocolate chunks?). The cake batter swirled together vanilla icing and yellow bakery cake. The salted peanut butter was the best of both those things. But then, after the initial wave of sweetness, there followed the chemical tang of fake sugar that runs through most—if not all—high-protein treats. I detected a hint of aminos.
If the goal is for people to consume as much protein as possible—from as few calories as possible—was it inevitable that we’d come back to convenient, predictable, portable bars? Rahal thinks so. “If you really don’t want to eat processed food,” he says, “then eat a boiled egg.”
More Protein
