The Protein Sold to Women
In January 2026 the US government raised its protein guidance from 0.8 to 1.2–1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight, and the shelves were already full of protein soda and protein popcorn. Here is what the nutrition evidence actually supports, and what a gram of protein costs from a bar versus from an egg.
By Teona Abuladze · 7 min read
On 7 January 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture published the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025–2030. On protein it says to eat 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight a day.
The number that had stood since 2005 was 0.8. The new document never mentions it and never explains the change.
In The Journal of Nutrition of 24 July 2026, Stefan Pasiakos of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and co-authors granted that the evidence for higher protein is strong in particular groups, then said the guidelines “fall short” of the standard needed to justify a universal higher-protein recommendation. Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, was blunter on 9 January 2026: “Substantially raising overall protein intake without distinguishing between different protein sources may have unintended long-term health implications.”
That argument is still running inside nutrition science. Outside it, the number was already sold.
Ten protein sodas in six months
Mintel’s analysts counted ten protein soda launches in the United States between January and 23 June 2026. Before 2024 there were essentially none: protein claims on carbonated soft drinks were, in Mintel’s word, virtually non-existent. In April 2026 Starbucks put a ready-to-drink Coffee & Protein into grocery retail, 22 grams of protein and five grams of prebiotic fibre. Barebells moved from bars into soda, and Koia did the same.
SPINS retail data reported in October 2025 shows where the money went. Shelf-stable cookies as a category grew one percent. Cookies carrying 20 to 25 grams of protein grew 50.8 percent. Shelf-stable coffee and cocoa grew 5.4 percent overall, and 30.6 percent in the same protein band. By 2025 the US protein supplement market was worth about $12 billion, up 12.4 percent.
Now the part specifically about women. Euromonitor’s Health and Nutrition Survey, fielded across January and February 2025 among 21,207 respondents, found 22 percent of women looking for protein on labels, up four points from 2019. The male figure did not move. Women now outnumber men globally among people actively adding protein, and the most eager group anywhere is North American girls aged 15 to 19.
The products followed. Khloé Kardashian launched Khloud protein popcorn into Target on 7 May 2025, $5.99 for a five-ounce bag, seven grams of protein per serving. David, the bar company valued at $725 million in 2025, released Bronze in early 2026, a bar with less protein than its flagship and flavours like s’mores chocolate, sold openly as indulgence. Starbucks sells a Caramel Protein Matcha.
By Euromonitor’s 2025 count, the most eager protein consumers in the world are North American girls aged 15 to 19.
Where 0.8 came from, and what women already eat
The 0.8 figure is not an opinion. It comes from a meta-analysis by William Rand, Peter Pellett and Vernon Young in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003, pooling 19 nitrogen-balance studies covering 235 people. The median requirement was 0.65 grams per kilogram a day. The 97.5th percentile, the point covering almost everybody, was 0.83. The Institute of Medicine rounded that to 0.8 and made it the RDA in 2005. The European Food Safety Authority ran the same arithmetic and in 2012 set its reference intake at 0.83.
Here the critics of the RDA are right. It is the amount that keeps a healthy adult in nitrogen balance, a floor against deficiency, and was never claimed to be an optimum. Rand and colleagues also noted in passing an indication that women’s requirements might be lower than men’s.
Most women clear it comfortably. USDA’s What We Eat in America, using NHANES 2015–2016, put average intake for adult American women at 69 grams a day against 97 for men. At the old RDA, 69 grams covers any woman weighing under about 86 kilograms. EFSA found European women eating 56 to 82 grams a day, and put mean European intakes “at, or more often above” the reference value.
So the average woman buying a protein soda is not correcting a deficiency. She is buying past a line she already crossed at breakfast.
1.0 grams for older women, 1.6 for lifters
Some cases really are different. The first is ageing muscle. The PROT-AGE Study Group, in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association in 2013, recommended 1.0 to 1.2 grams per kilogram a day for healthy older adults, 1.2 to 1.5 with acute or chronic disease, up to 2.0 for severe illness or injury. The ESPEN Expert Group reached the same range in Clinical Nutrition in 2014. PROT-AGE also specified the shape of it: 25 to 30 grams per meal, carrying roughly 2.5 to 2.8 grams of leucine, because older muscle needs a bigger dose per sitting to respond at all.
The second is resistance training. Robert Morton and colleagues, in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2018, pooled 49 studies and 1,863 participants. Supplementation added 0.30 kilograms of fat-free mass and 2.49 kilograms to one-rep-max strength. Gains plateaued at about 1.62 grams per kilogram, with a confidence interval running from 1.03 to 2.20. Anyone quoting 1.6 as a precise target is quoting the midpoint of a fuzzy estimate.
The third is pregnancy and lactation, where the Institute of Medicine set RDAs of 1.1 and 1.3 grams per kilogram in 2005. Newer indicator amino acid oxidation work puts pregnancy higher still, near 1.2 g/kg early and 1.52 g/kg late.
None of these cases is served by a fortified cookie.
Seven grams in a bag of popcorn
Against PROT-AGE’s threshold of 25 to 30 grams per meal, the seven grams in a serving of protein popcorn does nothing measurable to muscle. It is a label rather than a dose.
The anabolic window is thinner than it looks. Alan Aragon and Brad Schoenfeld’s 2013 review in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition concluded that the importance, and even the existence, of a post-exercise window varies with circumstances. Their own meta-analysis of protein timing gathered 23 studies, and a comment published in the same journal in 2016 pointed out that 20 of the 23 compared a supplement against a placebo without matching total daily protein between groups. Three trials, 77 people, actually isolated timing.
Collagen is the weakest link in the chain. Seung-Kwon Myung and Yunseo Park pooled 23 randomised trials and 1,474 participants in The American Journal of Medicine in 2025. The headline result looked positive for hydration, elasticity and wrinkles. Separate the studies by quality and it falls apart: the high-quality ones showed no significant effect in any category, and only the low-quality ones produced an elasticity benefit. Trials funded by pharmaceutical or supplement companies reported benefit. Trials that were not, did not. BioCell Technology objects that lumping chemically different collagen ingredients together is meaningless, which is worth hearing and does not supply the missing trials.
The labels are in court. Class actions filed between September 2024 and March 2025 against OWYN, PEScience and Huel allege that protein content was overstated using the nitrogen method without the digestibility-corrected Daily Value the FDA requires. None has yet produced a ruling. They are allegations, and the pattern is the point.
Trials funded by supplement companies found collagen worked. Trials that were not funded by them did not.
Eleven cents a gram
This is the part worth keeping.
Take the Bureau of Labor Statistics average retail prices. In August 2026, a dozen Grade A large eggs cost $2.272. A large egg holds about 6.2 grams of protein, using USDA FoodData Central’s figure of 12.4 grams per 100 grams. That is 3.1 cents per gram.
Boneless chicken breast, $4.173 a pound in August 2026 at 22.5 grams per 100 grams raw, works out at 4.1 cents a gram. Dried beans, $1.689 a pound in July 2026 at 21.6 grams per 100 grams, come to 1.7 cents. Whole milk at $4.229 a gallon is a shade over 3 cents. Dried lentils carry 24.6 grams per 100 grams, plain low-fat Greek yoghurt 10, firm tofu 8.
Now the engineered end. A box of twelve David bars is $39.00 on the company’s own site, $3.25 a bar for 28 grams of protein. That is 11.6 cents per gram, close to four times the price of eggs and almost seven times the price of beans. The Bronze bar, 20 grams for the same $3.25, is 16.3 cents. David also sells canned Atlantic cod at $39.00 for four tins of 18 grams each, which is 54 cents per gram, seventeen times what that protein costs in eggs.
A woman eating 69 grams of protein a day from dried beans spends about $1.19 on it. From David bars, $8.00.
What the backlash gets wrong
The scepticism in this piece should not be allowed to swallow what is true.
Protein does make you feel full, and that is measured rather than asserted. A 2016 meta-analysis in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, led by Jaapna Dhillon, found higher-protein preloads produced significantly greater fullness, with a confidence interval nowhere near zero. The authors were careful to say they could not tell what that fullness does to behaviour afterwards.
The kidney claim runs the wrong way, and it is time it was dropped. Michaela Devries and colleagues pooled 28 articles and 1,358 participants in the Journal of Nutrition in 2018, defining higher protein as at least 1.5 g/kg or 20 percent of energy or 100 grams a day. They found a trivial difference in post-intervention glomerular filtration rate and none at all in the change in kidney function. Stuart Phillips, a co-author, said afterwards that the paper provided “a clear and convincing story that people just need to stop saying that protein causes kidney disease or contributes to its progression.” The Institute of Medicine set no upper limit for protein in 2005, for lack of evidence of harm. The real exception, named in PROT-AGE, is severe kidney disease with an eGFR below 30 in someone off dialysis.
And plenty of women genuinely are short. The PROMISS consortium found low protein intake common among community-dwelling older adults across European cohorts, exactly the group whose 1.0 to 1.2 g/kg target has evidence behind it. Older women who barely eat lunch are not the problem the protein aisle is solving, and they are the ones it would help.
The last risk is the hardest to see from inside. A backlash against protein marketing turns very quickly into another set of instructions about what to put in your mouth, delivered with the same confidence and the same air of correction. There is no requirement to have a position on protein. Rand, Pellett and Young’s 235 subjects, measured in metabolic wards decades ago, produced a number good enough for public health and too crude for any single person. The plateau in Morton’s data sits between 1.03 and 2.20 grams per kilogram. Nobody has narrowed it.
Teona Abuladze is the founder and editor of Shansi Magazine.
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