I spent most of my childhood completely unaware of protein.<\/p>\n
I never remember my mother putting my dinner down on the table and telling me: \u201cThat chicken breast has 32 grams of protein, and if you eat the broccoli it has another 12 grams.\u201d<\/p>\n
I did get the whole \u201ceat your dinner; there are people in the world starving\u201d routine, but I never felt I had to hit a macro target by 6pm.<\/p>\n
We ate ham, beef, and the odd boiled egg, but I\u2019m pretty sure we didn\u2019t know it was called protein.<\/p>\n
Walking around the supermarket today, the word itself is now a brand. It\u2019s written on everything.<\/p>\n
Today, alone, on my daily food aisle jaunt, it was plastered across yoghurt, milk, bread, cereal, bars, pudding, and a mind-boggling array of \u2018protein shakes\u2019.<\/p>\n
Apparently, it wasn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n
I joked on my Instagram last week: “What if I just started writing \u2018protein\u2019 on my food? Would it then have protein in it? Maybe I should start writing it on my underwear, socks, clothes, and bed sheets so I could be lathered in it 24 hours a day. Imagine the macros I\u2019d hit then.\u201d<\/p>\n
I often imagine what would have happened if someone had had the smarts to copyright the word \u2018protein\u2019 20 years ago. They would be billionaires today.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m thinking of copywriting the following words: Chewing, breathing, sitting, napping, and regular.<\/p>\n
I think I could make a fortune off \u2018regular\u2019. I can easily see shoppers doling out their hard-earned money on regular cabbage, regular pears, even regular toilet paper.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s the supermarket where the protein anxiety begins. I\u2019d reach for an ordinary yoghurt, but the one beside it has \u201825 GRAMS OF PROTEIN\u2019, with an image of a person who has just finished an Ironman, and that face is looking at me, thinking, \u2018You\u2019re a weakling\u2019.<\/p>\n
Of course I\u2019m going to buy it. I panic. My internal voice starts: \u201cYou are not getting enough protein, and we could die. How could you do this to yourself?\u201d<\/p>\n
I go to buy the regular milk, but out of the corner of my eye I see the protein milk, and if I don\u2019t get that one, my kids will be almost instantly deficient in this essential nutrient.<\/p>\n
Within a matter of minutes, pushing the trolley, I\u2019m a bad parent and, even worse, I can feel my muscles deteriorating.<\/p>\n
However, I welcome its addition to ice cream. Where once I\u2019d eat, slurp, and gulp over 1,000 calories a night when the kids went to bed, now I\u2019m just topping up my protein. It says it on the tub, so it must be good for me.<\/p>\n
I know there is science behind it. I know protein is important. Especially in middle age, we need to consume it a bit more.<\/p>\n
When you were 20 years of age, you ate a chicken fillet roll because you were hungry or hungover or both. Today, it\u2019s because I\u2019m preserving my muscle mass, which makes this trend even more annoying, since there is an awful lot of truth to it.<\/p>\n
But the truth is passed out in the pit lane by a heavily branded car, and the race is only competed when you hit your targets.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where I begin to think: Since when did eating become homework?<\/p>\n
Like millions of other people, I now finish my day by looking at my MyFitnessPal app.<\/p>\n
Mostly, I\u2019ve had a bad day because I didn\u2019t hit my fibre, protein, vitamin D, and god knows what other target. Yet miraculously I\u2019m still alive. Am I some incredible superhuman being?<\/p>\n
Are our parents extraterrestrials? They must be. My father walked three times a day for 70 years. I never heard him say to my mum, “Mary, I didn\u2019t hit 10,000 steps today”.<\/p>\n
My mother has never tracked her daily protein intake in her life. They have to be from another planet, or at least be involved in some high-end US military experiment.<\/p>\n
Or maybe we just knew less growing up. Maybe our diets weren\u2019t perfect. But there was something lovely about dinner simply being dinner. Nobody scanned it, logged it, photographed it, or asked what its macros were.<\/p>\n
Someone put it in front of you. You ate it. I should copyright that!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I spent most of my childhood completely unaware of protein. I never remember my mother putting my dinner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":879379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[448666,64,63,8410,137,532],"class_list":["post-879378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-bernard-oshea","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-gut-health","tag-health","tag-nutrition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}