Protein Tunnel Vision
Why obsessing about a single nutrient serves marketing more than health
In a world of endless information, our brains crave simplicity—and food marketers know it. We've built an entire nutrition culture around the folly of isolating single ingredients as saviors or villains, not because it's accurate, but because it's marketable.
Our attention economy simply can't handle nuance; it requires heroes to worship and enemies to avoid. So we dutifully reduce the intricate symphony of nutrition to a solo performance, elevating one element—protein, today—above all others.
It's not that we don't understand complexity; it's that our systems of communication and commerce can't sell it. When every message must compete for microseconds of attention, "it's complicated" loses to "high protein" every time.
In food, in health, in nutrition, very few things are truly binary. The answer to "is this healthy?" is almost always: it depends. It depends on who you are, what else you eat, how much of it you're having, what your body needs, how it was grown, and what it replaces. But that kind of nuance doesn't trend. It doesn't go viral. It doesn't fit neatly on a food label, a TikTok, or a morning show segment.
So instead, we collapse all that complexity into simplicity. One nutrient becomes the hero. Another becomes the villain. And everyone—consumers, brands, policymakers, media outlets—gets to play their part in a story that feels satisfyingly clear-cut.
Right now, that story is about protein. But it used to be about fat. Then it was carbs. Then it was sugar. And if history's any guide, the moment protein falls out of fashion, something else will rise to take its place. The cycle continues. The spotlight shifts. The system never actually changes.
Protein is just the current vessel for an old habit: nutritional reductionism. It's the tendency to focus on one number, one ingredient, one magic bullet—while ignoring the system that surrounds it. And while it's easy to criticize this from the outside, the truth is that the food industry is built on it. Because telling a simple story sells better than explaining a complex truth.
This reductionist thinking mirrors what we've done to our agricultural landscapes—replacing diverse ecosystems with vast monocultures that produce a single crop with ruthless efficiency. Just as we've reduced nutrition to "protein good, carbs bad," we've simplified farming to maximize yield of a single commodity while dismissing the complex ecological relationships that sustain healthy soil and resilient food systems. Both are forms of tunnel vision that trade long-term resilience for short-term productivity.
If you're trying to sell a new food product today, you basically have two options:
Tell people it will make them stronger, skinnier, younger, smarter, or happier—in one phrase or sentence.
Or…try to teach them about metabolic health, satiety, micronutrient synergy, and sustainable sourcing—and watch their eyes glaze over.
I think it’s obvious which marketing approach dominates today. We've created a marketplace that rewards oversimplification and punishes nuance.
That's not because consumers are dumb. It's because they're drowning in noise. There's too much content. Too many claims. Too many headlines with conflicting takes. And in that chaos, simplicity becomes a survival tool. When you're overwhelmed, it feels safer to grab the thing that says "HIGH PROTEIN" than to stop and wonder, "Do I actually need this?"
This is how reductionism wins. It provides an answer when the real one is too long, too messy, or too conditional to hold people's attention. And because marketing lives in a space where attention is everything, complexity becomes a liability. No one has time for the nuanced truth when someone else is shouting a simple lie louder.
But that tradeoff has real consequences. We build entire supply chains around the nutrient of the moment. We subsidize ingredients, fund startups, and write policy based on whatever is trending. We teach consumers to chase macros instead of balance. We train people to think of food as a math problem instead of a cultural act.
Nature teaches us that monocultures—whether in agriculture or nutrition—are inherently unstable. A field of identical crops is efficient to plant and harvest but catastrophically vulnerable to a single pest or weather event. Similarly, a diet or food system obsessed with optimizing for a single nutrient creates hidden vulnerabilities. In both cases, we've traded the resilience that comes from diversity for the efficiency that comes from simplification. We've created systems that are incredibly productive in one dimension but precarious in all others.
And we erode public trust in nutrition altogether. Because eventually, every nutrient that gets put on a pedestal ends up being knocked off. Fat was bad, then good. Carbs were fuel, then poison. Sugar was innocent, now it's toxic. Protein is riding high now—but are its days numbered?
So what's the way out?
Do we just need better communicators? People who can explain complex ideas with clarity, humility, and resonance? Probably. But that's not a scalable solution unless the marketplace starts rewarding that kind of messaging. And right now, it doesn't. Social media doesn't reward it. Retail shelves don't reward it. VC pitch decks don't reward it.
Do we need consumers to develop longer attention spans and higher nutrition literacy? That's the dream. But if we're being honest, it feels borderline impossible. People are more distracted than ever. Expecting the average eater to dive deep into biochemistry before lunch is not realistic.
So maybe the better question is: can we design food systems that work even when people don't fully understand them?
Can we build defaults that favor nutritional balance, culinary diversity, and environmental health—without asking every consumer to become a dietitian or regenerative ag expert? Can we make the easy choice also the right one, even if the packaging doesn't have a catchy health claim on it?
Just as we're learning that regenerative agriculture—with its emphasis on diversity, relationship, and balance—produces more resilient landscapes than monocultures, perhaps we need a regenerative approach to nutrition. One that acknowledges the complex interplay between nutrients, the foods that contain them, the systems that produce them, and the bodies that consume them. One that values resilience over reductionism.
Because if we don't, we're stuck in the same loop. The faces change, the products evolve, but the reductionist thinking remains. And the next time the spotlight shifts—from protein to adaptogens, from omega-3s to glycemic index—it'll all happen again.
What we're up against isn't just a fad. It's a structural failure of how we talk about food. And unless we start rewarding nuance instead of volume, nothing will really change.
This post was inspired by my latest episode of The Tomorrow Today Show: “The Future of Protein,” with guests Nicki Briggs (Here/There), Bryan Mayer (Culinary Institute of the Pacific), Isha Datar (New Harvest), Tony Pavel (Keller and Heckman LLP), and Thomas Jonas (Nature’s Fynd). Listen wherever you get your podcast or at the links below.