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Nils Steiger: Essentially everything of the Sauerbraten is connected with my grandmother. For me, I can’t put it apart with the emotions.
One of Nils Steiger’s core childhood memories is his grandmother making him sauerbraten. It’s a traditional German dish. Basically, a pot roast, made with beef marinated in vinegar and spices. The name literally translates as “sour roast” because of its tangy taste.
Nils Steiger: My grandmother always asked me when I visited her: What do you want to eat? And there was never a moment I didn’t say sauerbraten.
After all those years of his grandmother lovingly making him sauerbraten, Nils, who runs a gym, recently decided to return the favor when she visited him in Dresden. A city in east Germany known for its restored Baroque buildings.
Nils Steiger: And she said, is it really not meat? And I totally loved it. It was such a nice memory, her eating it and not believing it’s not meat. for her, like I cooked the same thing for her, she did for me.
Even nicer when she was not realizing it’s not meat. And my wife was sitting on the table and we just smiled at each other and was like, yeah that’s cool.
Neil: But why was fitness-mad Nils Steiger — a man who says he once
Nils Steiger: …ate like a ton of meat, like too much meat at all.
Why was he cooking a vegan sauerbraten for his definitively not vegan grandmother? And why did his shift from power-lifting meat-maniac to gym-going vegan butcher, bother certain people so much that they sent death threats?
I’m Neil King, and this week on Living Planet we’re talking protein — and all the strange places it’s suddenly turning up.
Because if you’ve been to a grocery store or even glanced at the internet lately, you’ve probably noticed something weird: protein is everywhere. Cottage cheese that used to brag about being low-fat now screams “high in protein.” Entire store aisles are now devoted to high-protein everything and supplements galore.
And it seems we are not getting enough of the stuff either …
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Or we’re getting it from the wrong source…
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Today, we’re breaking down the protein boom — how much we actually need, what the science says about animal versus plant sources, and why the answer matters far beyond our plates. Because here’s the thing: animal agriculture accounts for about 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions yearly, and if we don’t rethink how we eat and farm, we won’t be able to slow global warming.
And to understand how we got here, we’re starting with someone who grew up inside this protein-obsessed culture — Nils Steiger — and how his personal journey mirrors a global shift.
Nils Steiger: I started when I was 14 because it was the earliest possible age I could go to the gym. Essentially, I started because I would like I think it was time the sports industry started like with all the social media and stuff like 20 or was it 20 2010 2012 so there was like the first hype of gyms.
Okay, quick time-travel back to the early 2010s — that dim, distant era before there was a gym on every corner and before every second video on social media was someone shouting about gains. Facebook ruled the world. Instagram had just been born, and both were mostly places for badly filtered photos. Around that time, gym culture really took off — helped along by a whole new wave of impossibly toned fitness influencers online.
So, Nils gets sucked into the gym scene. He’s in school, and he has a lot of time to go lift weights every day. But he’s also competitive.
Nils Steiger: So, I thought for myself, okay, I’m doing it just for me, but how can I do something where I can measure myself with others?
He gets into competitive powerlifting. And if you’ve never seen powerlifting before, it’s pretty straightforward. And pretty intense. Athletes do three lifts: the squat, the bench press and the deadlift. The whole goal is to move as much weight as humanly possible in each one.
And Nils loves it. There’s a high you get from lifting really heavy weights.
Nils Steiger: But also when you do competitive there’s a pressure, I guess, like to the point where you are very, yeah, kind of, I have so much under pressure when you don’t get stronger every month and month and of course the stronger you are, the slower the progression gets.
And the key to building muscle and getting strong when working out? You guessed it: eating tons of protein. Nils is eating about 200 grams of protein a day at this point in his competitive career. That’s about 7 ounces for our US listeners. And where is all that protein coming from? Not tofu, or plants
Nils Steiger: Like if you don’t supplement, it’s basically meat … say like 300 to 500 grams every day. Like bare minimum. Yeah, like quite a lot. Just like typical gym diet like pasta or rice and some vegetables and whatever meat you come by but mostly chicken.
500 grams of meat is about three average sized chicken fillets a day. Nils eats like this for about 10 years.
Nils Steiger: Because like the bubble, like the fitness and sports bubble is so close to that and they have like their, I would say, own belief system. Like, you need to eat meat to get muscles, you need to eat a lot of meat to be strong and everything around that. And of course, when you are young, you believe in that.
But then, when Nils was about 24, came a moment that changed everything. He witnessed something he simply couldn’t look away from, and it reshaped his relationship with food — and his career.
Nils Steiger: It was just eye-opening and mind-blowing. Yeah, it was like, from now on, I can’t do this anymore. Like I visualize every product and the pictures behind it.
But we’ll come back to the moment that changed Nils’ life later in the episode. Because now we’re going to take a closer look at the protein craze.
Protein is big business right now. We’re talking a global growing multi-billion-dollar market. And it’s reshaping our food system and the way we eat. One survey found around 44% of US consumers — and over half of Gen Z and millennials — are actively trying to crank up their protein intake.
For most Americans, that means more meat and dairy. The US market for red meat is expected to grow to around 120 billion dollars in 2025. While, whey, once a waste product of cheese-making, has become the go-to protein supplement.
Our obsession with protein has deeper roots than you might think. In the mid-1800s, German scientist Justus von Liebig claimed protein was the fuel for muscle energy — and even flogged a supposedly high-protein syrupy beef extract. Fast-forward to the early 1900s, and US dietary guidelines were saying working men needed about 110 grams a day.
By the mid-20th century, some were concerned that many people — especially in low-income regions — weren’t getting enough of the essential growth nutrient. So that sparked a lot of research, says Bettina Mittendorfer, a health professor of medicine and nutrition and exercise physiology at the University of Missouri.
Bettina Mittendorfer: The research focused a lot on the beneficial effects of protein primarily because when the field got really interested in it, think 50, 60 years ago or so, we didn’t have the same nutritional status that we have now.
The protein supplement industry took off around this time, though it mostly stayed in bodybuilding circles.
But the big shift came with social media. Open TikTok or Instagram now and you’re flooded with messages telling you to eat more protein to get lean, get ripped, or just stay healthy.
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Bettina Mittendorfer: I personally think it’s a food fad, right? …We’ve gone through these phases, right? Where was fat was the evil, then the carbs were the evil. It leaves very little. So it’s like the next thing. What should you eat if you can’t eat fat, if you can’t eat carbs, need to eat protein.
Our craving for animal protein — beef, dairy, and whey — comes with a big climate price. Apart from being a major contributor to the emissions driving climate change, livestock farming fuels deforestation, and wipes out habitats. Raising cows, sheep, and pigs also gobbles up far more land and water than growing plant proteins like beans and lentils.
Plant proteins need a relatively small patch of land — under 10 m² per kilo of protein — but beef from pasture-raised cows can take up over 2,000 m² per kilo, according to one study.
The EAT-Lancet commission, a group of leading researchers, recommends a switch to what it calls the Planetary Health Diet. It’s a mostly plant-based, flexitarian approach that boosts whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes while sharply cutting red meat and sugar.
The potential climate payoff is big, say the scientists. If widely adopted, the diet could cut global agricultural emissions of non‑CO2 greenhouse gases, like methane and nitrous oxide, by about 15% by 2050.
But the diet was attacked online by carnivore diet influencers like pro-meat doctor Shawn Baker. Some claimed EAT Lancet wants to force everyone to become vegan, even though, it actually recommends a flexitarian diet. And that a switch to the diet will harm people’s health.
Clip Shawn Baker talking about being public enemy no 1 and the EAT Lancet Commission.
But do the assertions about the superiority of animal protein in staying fit and healthy really bear out? We asked protein expert Bettina Mittendorfer to check some of the claims, so stay tuned for some myth busting and to find out if you’re getting enough quality protein.
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Bettina’s work zeroes in on how protein actually functions in the body. So when she’s asked that classic sound level check question from radio hosts and podcasters — “What did you have for breakfast?” — her answer might seem a little unexpected…
Bettina Mittendorfer: Today actually I had cinnamon raisin toast.
No obvious protein there, right?
Bettina Mittendorfer: I had a cappuccino. There is protein in there. And it’s actually the thing, you know, cinnamon raisin bread does have protein too. Just it’s not a obvious protein source.
And that’s one of the misconceptions about protein: almost everything we eat contains at least some. It’s just that some foods pack much more of it than others.
And quick flashback to school biology before we bust any myths: protein isn’t optional. It’s essential because it delivers the amino acids our bodies need to build and repair… well, us.
Bettina Mittendorfer: This is critical because essential amino acids like essential vitamins are those that the body cannot make themselves.
When kids, for instance, don’t get enough of certain amino acids, their growth can stall. That’s how fundamental protein is. All of our lean body mass depends on it. Our organs, our muscles, even the cells that power our immune system. They’re all built from protein.
Bettina Mittendorfer: There’s a certain amount that we need to consume in the diet to make sure that we have a functioning body and body size.
This brings us to claim #1: Most people are getting too little protein. Bettina says…
Bettina Mittendorfer: The underlying premise of the whole promotion of protein is that we are deficient, that we need to fix something that’s wrong, when really it isn’t wrong. There’s just no no sign or data really to support that the majority of the population has insufficient protein intake. It just isn’t right I think and that I think is at the core of the whole, right, craze.
The average, lean person needs around 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day to maintain healthy functioning. For a person weighing 68 kilograms or about 150 pounds that’s about 54 grams of protein, which is about 8 large eggs.
Bettina Mittendorfer: This is sufficient for 97.5% of the population. This estimate has a little bit of a cushion already, the real true mean requirement for the average would be lower than that, 0.6 grams per kg per day. That is, of course, there’s inter-individual variability during people who need more during certain conditions.
But if 8 eggs sounds like a lot to you — it does to me — most of us in the West are actually overdoing it on food in general, Bettina says. We’re already getting plenty of protein, usually around 1.1 grams per kilo of body weight without even trying.
Now, of course, there are a few caveats. If your diet is basically sugary drinks and beige food, yeah… you might need to supplement. And some studies indicate a percentage of older adults may not be getting enough protein. Research suggests…
Bettina Mittendorfer: That there’s higher requirements to combat some of the…age-associated changes in metabolism, particularly lean body mass and muscle mass loss. The thought is pumping it up to one gram per kilogram per day.
And then if you’re active, exercising a lot and in the gym, and trying to build muscle, adding more protein will help aid that, as well as tissue repair. Everyone is a bit different, but evidence suggests aiming for around 1.4 to 2 grams per kilogram of body weight per day is generally enough here. How much protein you eat and when depends on your goals.
Bettina Mittendorfer: Are you exercising to maintain health or are you exercising for physical performance? The same thing is like, if you want to maximize your muscle mass and strength, what you do in the gym and what you eat is going to be different. And it’s exactly that nuance, right?
Just to recap: The claim that most of us are protein deficient has been well and truly busted. That brings us to claim number 2: More protein means more muscle.
That’s not entirely wrong, but again there are some nuances.
Bettina Mittendorfer: I think this is to me, really rather than focusing on one type of experiment or the results from that, and I think this is where the protein craze came from a lot too, is focusing really on those studies that show amino acids are essential for building muscle and it’s true for a certain amount. It’s a dose response within a normal physiological range, but then it levels off, right?
Basically, results from lab experiments aren’t going to translate perfectly to real life and can inflate expectations of how much extra protein will translate to measurable muscle growth.
Studies show at a certain point, piling on more protein just doesn’t do you any favors. Bettina’s research has found that for the average adult, around 20 to 30 grams of protein per meal — that’s roughly 60 to 90 grams a day — is plenty to keep your body healthy.
And it turns out you can have too much of a good thing, even protein. When conducting small human trials and mouse experiments, Bettina’s team found that once protein creeps above about 22% of your daily calories, things can start heading in the wrong direction. We’re talking a higher risk of atherosclerosis — basically the arteries hardening and narrowing — which is a major risk factor for heart attacks and strokes. There’s also evidence that too much is linked to type-2 diabetes.
Bettina Mittendorfer: I think just like with everything, you have to just be careful. Going over is just as risky as going under. I think with the protein particularly, it is such a critical component of our diet, it’s necessary.
And so I think it’s not that you have to choose, I gonna be, do I have the old enough muscle? and get arthrosclerosis or do I prevent arthrosclerosis but then have too little muscle? It’s really that balance where it becomes only harmful when it’s over that limit because there is a capacity limit on the ability to build lean mass with amino acid or protein intake.
Bettina says more research is definitely needed on optimal amounts of protein for building muscle and what is too much. But now onto claim number three: Eating a lot of protein makes you fuller so helps with weight loss.
Bettina Mittendorfer: Longer term studies don’t support that either …
Short-term studies find that protein can make you feel fuller, but when you look at long-term research, that effect doesn’t reliably lead to eating less or losing more weight — partly because high-protein diets are hard to stick with
Bettina says some of the nuances are lost. When you cut calories to lose weight, you actually need a higher percentage of protein just to maintain basic nutritional needs, not because protein speeds weight loss necessarily, but because eating less food can push you into protein deficiency if you’re not careful. It’s easier to cut out non-essential fats without risking nutrition.
Bettina Mittendorfer: It’s very easy to convey the message too, that protein is lean. It’s like the lean meat and we all strive to be lean. It’s a little faulty, the thinking of course.
And now to our fourth and final claim: Animal protein beats plant protein
Bettina Mittendorfer: You don’t really need to eat animal proteins, but you have to make sure that you have a good balance and the variety in your diet, right? And this is very well known oftentimes where corn and beans are a classic sort of combination in some societies that eat it because together they provide the right portfolio of amino acids or, you know, one provides what the other one doesn’t have a whole lot in.
Really it’s the variety that’s important is important because some plant proteins are missing small amounts of key amino acids. Mixing foods like beans and grains over the course of the day ensures your body gets the full set it needs to build protein. While more research is needed, studies show no major difference between an an omnivore diet and a vegan diet when it comes to building muscle or gaining strength. Your body just breaks protein down into amino acids and rebuilds what it needs — it doesn’t matter whether it came from a cow or a bean.
So what should we be eating then?
Bettina Mittendorfer: So the Mediterranean type diet or so, plants, heavy on plants and everything. It doesn’t have to be that extra piece of chicken, right? Like it’s a… Again, the classic sort of deck of cards size meat type protein or so is sufficient. And I think that again, it really needs to be reinforced again that this is sufficient, right? That we do not need to double up or triple up and triple burger, whatever, right? It’s just not needed.
The Mediterranean diet focuses on plants, keeps red and processed meats to a minimum, and includes fish and poultry in moderation. And in many ways, it mirrors the EAT-Lancet Planetary Health diet — a way of eating that researchers say supports both human health and the health of the planet.
But for Nils Steiger, back in his competitive powerlifting days, that kind of plant-forward eating wasn’t even on his radar. He was convinced that real strength came from consuming meat.
Nils Steiger: You do it because whatever it takes and then you don’t ask like is it right or wrong. Everyone does it, you do it as well and then just when you ask the right questions then you open your eyes and like oh there’s another way.
His turning point came out of nowhere — the day his wife put on a documentary. It was about animal agriculture and factory farming. He was shocked by what he saw.
Nils Steiger: I think we ignore the fact how animals are treated when we go to the supermarket. We just see the products and don’t visualize what is happening behind every product. And just seeing images and slaughterhouses and animal agriculture and everything around that … I couldn’t see it. So I became vegan and that’s six years ago .
Nils remembers the moment clearly — like a switch flipping.
Nils Steiger: It was a black and white moment. One day I ate meat and then the other quit everything.
Having been such an avid meat-eater, his switch to veganism caused…
Nils Steiger: …mostly confusion. So why are you doing it? And then when do you quit it again? So people thought it’s just a one two three month and then I’ll quit again.
And one guy from his gym community? Let’s just say he took it… personally.
Nils Steiger: It’s just the reaction of now you eat less meat, so I’ll go eat more meat. And for every tofu you eat, I’m going to eat one more steak and like the typical going full force into the other direction.
Over time though, even the staunch meat-lovers around him softened a bit. Still, Nils had to relearn almost everything about how he shopped and cooked.
Nils Steiger: So at first to be brutally honest I just had a lot of supplements just to get a protein in and like a lot of protein shakes and a lot of protein bars and everything and then I started thinking about okay. What can I eat actually?
It made going shopping much more easier because you just basically ignore 80 % of every supermarket. You don’t need to look at everything anymore. Just go by the cheese aisle and you just go by the everything with meat and you just go by basically 80 % of everything. And then you concentrate on things you can eat and relearn cooking, I think. Like what can I mix with each other and… Like never before I looked so much into new recipes and everything. So it was quite a fun way in a thing.
And even though he no longer eats it, he still misses the taste of meat — especially his grandmother’s sauerbraten. Trying to recreate it without animal products ended up setting him on an entirely new path to launching a vegan butcher shop and food company.
Nils Steiger: At first it just should be a hobby. At the beginning, I never thought about having like the business, the size we have right now. I just wanted to make products and produce products. I myself like to eat and I tend to like the traditional kind of tastes.
Atmo: Walkie-talkie – Oh it’s like walkie talkie behind us.
Every room has a walkie-talkie, so if you are in the kitchen and downstairs, And at beginning we had like code names and said over after everything but then we realize it’s making things harder.
The Friends Not Food office and production kitchen sit tucked behind an ordinary residential building in Dresden. It’s just before Christmas — a pretty busy time for the company as orders roll in for sauerbraten, vegan cheeses and traditional German festive treats like Stollen, a kind of sweet bread.
Inside the busy kitchen in the building’s cellar, the team is turning soy, pea, and gluten proteins into sausages, burgers, leberkäse, döner meat, goulash, gravies — all the comfort foods he grew up with.
The products are sold online and stocked in seven Vegane Fleischerei — vegan butcher shops — across Germany. The first opened in Dresden in 2023. Nils says he wasn’t expecting it to grow so quickly. He and his team initially joked they would just play table tennis in the commercial space they rented if it didn’t work out.
Nils Steiger: So yeah, the scale of it was surprising. And also the feedback was very surprising. people, it felt like people were just waiting on it. So yeah, it was the right time at right place.
The warm reception mirrors a bigger food trend. Plant-based products and protein powders have been booming over the past few years. But not everyone welcomed Nils’ vegan butcher idea with open arms.
Nils Steiger: So of course, in the beginning people were like, why do they name themselves vegan, vegane fleischerei, which means like vegan butcher? Why can’t they name themselves like…the vegetable store or like.
The shops look like traditional butcheries — tiled walls, a deli-style counter of various vegan meats and cheeses — and that alone triggered some strong reactions.
Nils Steiger: And I mean, we had like everything from people wishing us dead and we’re like, we’re gonna attack your store. Like, it was like quite a big dimension in it. But of course nothing happened.
And with time, the backlash faded. Nils thinks it was less about the food and more about what veganism represents in today’s culture wars.
Nils Steiger: So veganism often is a synonym of leftist and woke and all the other things people are fighting with. And then they feel attacked and try to defend even though there is no reason for defense. But yeah, essentially, like, I don’t know if anybody’s really such, like, or has such a hard time with broccoli steak, but they’ve more feel attacked in their belief system. So that’s why their reaction is such a harsh one, I think.
The fight over vegan food labels has gone all the way to Brussels. European Union lawmakers voted to ban words like “burger” and “steak” for plant-based versions, saying they’re confusing shoppers. Nils says if that does eventually become law, his business will have to adapt.
But in the meantime, he’s even convinced his steak-loving gym friend to try some vegan meats.
Nils Steiger: And he’s saying like, it’s not that bad and it’s not, you can eat it. If I would die, I would eat it. So it’s a little change.
Trust me — for a German, that is glowing praise. Nils still trains six days a week — every morning like clockwork except on Sundays. And he gets about 150 grams of plant-based protein a day. Turns out he really loves tofu.
Nils Steiger: And yeah, just like, since I started being vegan, I realized I don’t even need meat. Like, still I’m strong, still I have a lot of muscles and I don’t need to eat it.
And while he doesn’t expect everyone to go vegan, he hopes he can nudge people toward eating more plants — the same direction recommended by the EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet.
Nils Steiger: It just comes down to being open-minded, I guess. And I feel taste is something we could all agree on. Something tastes good, it tastes good. You can’t argue with that. If you take a bite, there’s a great texture and great taste. Why wouldn’t you eat it?
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