Protein in Everything

Protein obsession is no longer a fringe gym-culture phenomenon. In January 2026, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, unveiled new dietary guidelines urging Americans to prioritize protein at every meal — increasing the recommended daily intake from 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight to 1.2 to 1.6 grams. Former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary declared when announcing the new guidelines, “for decades we have been fed a corrupt food pyramid that has demonized protein like eggs and steak” and “ignored a giant blind spot – refined carbohydrates, ultra-processed foods….That is an epidemic.” The old guidelines were “to prevent starvation and withering away.” The new ones are “designed for American kids to thrive and they are based on science, not on dogma.”

Beyond a general cultural shift in attitudes away from high carb and processed foods and towards more keto-friendly diets, the protein industrial complex has a few drivers. The mass adoption of GLP-1 medications has created an unanticipated muscle-loss crisis: consumers chemically suppressing their appetites are losing weight, but a disproportionate share of that weight may be coming from lean muscle rather than fat.¹

Women separately face another challenge. Estrogen loss during perimenopause and menopause accelerates the breakdown of bone and muscle mass, putting women at outsized risk for osteoporosis and sarcopenia.

The answer? More protein – and resistance training. Protein provides the essential amino acids needed to repair microscopic tears caused by exercise and build new muscle tissue. This drives muscle protein synthesis, the physiological process where the body creates new muscle proteins, leading to hypertrophy.

And apparently, protein pays. According to CoBank research, brands can command a 12% price premium for products marketed as protein-rich. And so, the economic incentive to attach the word “protein” to anything edible has never been stronger.

The market is responding accordingly. David, founded by RXBAR co-founder Peter Rahal in September 2024, raised a $75 million Series A led by Greenoaks in May 2025, bringing its total funding to $85 million — for its bars delivering 28 grams of protein in just 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. Magic Spoon, the high-protein cereal brand delivering 12 to 14 grams of protein per serving with no sugar and low net carbs, has raised approximately $120 million, including a $106 million Series B led by HighPost Capital. And Slate Milk, the high-protein dairy brand offering 20-42 grams of protein per can, closed a $23 million Series B in September 2025 led by Foundership, bringing its total funding to $54 million.

Not All Protein Is Created Equal

I spoke with Roger Barnett, Chairman and CEO of Shaklee, a 70-year-old wellness company, which operates as a direct-to-consumer, community-marketing product model, about the art of engineering protein.

Shaklee has spent over $500 million on research and development across its various product lines and operates an R&D production facility in San Francisco, where formulations move through clinical testing before going to market.

Barnett explained, there are several different kinds of protein and not all are created equal. “So, for example, you have collagen, which is a protein, and a peptide protein, but it doesn’t have all nine essential amino acids in it.” Three specific essential amino acids—leucine, isoleucine, and valine—are called Branched-Chain Amino Acids. They make up about 35% of the essential amino acids in your muscle proteins. Among them, leucine plays an outsized role. “It is the primary signaling molecule that triggers muscle protein synthesis, which is why high-performance protein formulations are increasingly engineered to concentrate it.” The other six essential amino acids required to build and repair muscle are histidine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, and tryptophan.

The company launched a new product, Shaklee Sparkling Protein, in October 2025 and showcased it the following month at the Eudēmonia Wellness Summit in West Palm Beach — a 40-gram protein sparkling water.

According to Barnett, the differentiation in Shaklee’s protein product comes from formulation discipline — stripping away fat, sugar and carbohydrate baggage. “What separates clinical-grade protein from commodity protein is not the gram count on the package. It is the underlying ingredient design — sufficient leucine concentration and bioavailability.”

Fiber Enters the Chat

Like protein, fiber is a growing category of importance in consumer wellness. Only 5% of Americans are eating the amount of daily recommended fiber, 25 to 28 grams per day for women and 31 to 38 grams per day for men. GLP-1 medications also factor into the rising importance of fiber. GLP-1 medications work by significantly slowing down stomach emptying and reducing overall gut motility. And this slow digestion causes constipation because food sits in the intestines longer, allowing the colon to absorb excess water and resulting in hard, dry stools.

“Fiber is the new protein. It’s a huge category,” shared Frank Woodbridge, Founder and Managing Partner of Vanquish Equity, a venture capital firm investing exclusively across health and wellness. According to Grand View Research, the global dietary fibers market size was valued at USD 6.15 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach USD 10.63 billion by 2033. Woodbridge continued, “there are five top wellness trends right now — gut health, GLP-1 and weight management, protein, longevity and biohacking and women’s health. And fiber combines two of those categories with gut health and GLP-1s.”

Vanquish Equity recently invested in Supergut, a metabolic health company founded by veteran wellness executive Marc Washington, which sells a clinically tested and patented prebiotic fiber blend with 6g of fiber per serving. Supergut’s $22 million Series B was led by Full Frame Growth Partners, and brought the startup’s total funding to approximately $36 million.

Pendulum: Biotech Building Bugs to Heal the Gut

Pendulum Therapeutics is another consumer brand which is innovating in the gut health sector. Its flagship products have run through peer-reviewed clinical trials, including studies published in BMJ Open Diabetes Research and Care and BMC Microbiology. Its Glucose Control product, validated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial, was shown to reduce A1C levels by 0.6 points and post-meal glucose spikes by 32.5% in Type 2 diabetics — though it is noteworthy that the products are not FDA-approved.

Originally co-founded in 2012 by Colleen Cutcliffe, a PhD biochemist, alongside a team of scientists with backgrounds in DNA sequencing and microbiology, the gut health company is closely affiliated with actress Halle Berry, who joined as an investor and Chief Communications Officer in 2023 after being a customer of Pendulum’s products.

In the early days, the capital raising challenge for Pendulum was significant. Cutcliffe recalls "getting rejected up and down Silicon Valley", but she persevered, and with seed capital from the Mayo Clinic, Pendulum was able to engineer its own oxygen-free fermentation process to manufacture Akkermansia as well as other proprietary strains. The company now holds 22 patents with 63 more pending and has raised over $150 million from investors including Meritech Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures and the Mayo Clinic.

“Akkermansia is probably the most important strain in your gut that you’ve never heard of,” Cutcliffe explained.² “It’s known to stimulate your body’s natural GLP-1 hormone, and it's responsible for maintaining the structure of your gut lining.”

Research points to a broader range of benefits. By degrading and recycling the mucus layer, Akkermansia stimulates the gut to produce fresh, healthy mucus — repairing the intestinal barrier and preventing leaky gut. It also lowers pro-inflammatory cytokines, reducing chronic systemic inflammation. Emerging research suggests it may even boost the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors in cancer patients by activating specific T-cells — a finding that has drawn significant interest from the oncology community.

"It is abundant in healthy people but is lost surprisingly easily. When you take an antibiotic, you are taking a nuclear bomb to your microbiome.” There are also several other factors that can cause a loss of Akkermansia. “We lose it due to periods of intense stress. We lose it when our circadian rhythm is disrupted. We lose it when we go through menopause," Cutcliffe elaborated.

And what makes Akkermansia deficiency uniquely difficult to treat is that it cannot be replenished through diet. “Akkermansia has not been found to date, in any food or any beverage,” Cutcliffe explained. “Things like high fibers and polyphenols can help feed it, but that means you’ve got to have some in you. And it has only been found in one place — breast milk. And so the theory is you get it from your mother as a child, and then you spend the rest of your life trying not to lose it.”

Understanding What’s Inside Your Gut

Ultimately, supplementation begins with understanding deficiencies in the microbiome on a personalized level. Akkermansia is only one of 500 - 1,000 distinct species of bacteria in the body; humans have about 38 trillion bacteria cells (compared to 30 trillion human cells).

“The number of bacterial genes in the body is vast… and the list of diseases which have been associated with the microbiome is massive….including various cancers, autoimmune disorders, diabetes, neuro-degeneration, behavioral issues, addiction…it all comes back to the gut, to the microbiome,” shared Paul Denslow, co-founder and Chief Executive of Intus Bio, a microbiome-focused digital health company.

Historically, scientists could only study microbes by growing them in a lab petri dish, but over 60% of microbial species are “unculturable” and cannot survive outside their natural environments. Fortunately, “we now have an enhanced ability to see the microbiome through an innovative technology called next generation sequencing, or NGS,” according to Denslow. A recent study published in 2022 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation found that with NGS, scientists can identify more unique species than traditional culture methods and better explain microbial dysbiosis, where there is an imbalance in the bacterial communities in the body characterized by a loss of beneficial microbes, an overgrowth of harmful ones, and a sharp reduction in overall microbial diversity.

Denslow’s company has developed an AI-powered proprietary technology — Titan-1, which analyzes stool samples taken with an at-home gut health test called Gut ID, and visualizes the various bacterial strains at a high level of granularity with "50 million data points." Denslow shared a pie-chart, with a complex mapping of the microbiome of one patient suffering from IBS. The visualization, he said, reflects a much weaker microbiome in dysbiosis on the left, versus a much more diverse and healthy gut on the right, after a three month intervention with fiber supplementation.

This is Not Your Grandma's Metamucil

Pendulum’s newest product represents a deliberate expansion beyond probiotics into the prebiotic category. The logic is straightforward: the bacterial strains Pendulum spent a decade manufacturing need something to eat. Without the right prebiotic fibers and polyphenols, they cannot establish, multiply, or produce the compounds that drive the health benefits the company is banking on. Gut Fuel, a prebiotic fiber and polyphenol powdered blend, made up of baobab fruit pulp, acacia seyal gum, solnul resistant potato starch, oat bran and grape seed extract, is designed to blend into smoothies, sauces and yogurt — without affecting the taste.

At a chef-curated luncheon hosted in New York City in March 2026, the prebiotic fiber powder, was woven into a multi-course menu, featuring a bone broth, salad with pumpkin seeds, branzino, pasture raised chicken, organic beets with ricotta and roasted baby carrots. And Cutcliffe made the case for a fiber facelift. “I’m not talking about old school torture in a glass,” she said. Existing fiber supplements are typically derived from seed husks and roots, and are typically thick, viscous, and bulky. Cutcliffe exclaimed, “This is not your grandma’s Metamucil! This is modern fiber.” Over the last 20 years, there has been significant research and learning about the gut microbiome and about fiber’s role in feeding the gut microbiome. “We now know that fiber is important for healthy digestion, your metabolic health, your cardiovascular health, even your immune health and your brain health. It’s about a new nutrition movement.”

Fiber Brands Race to Become Billion-Dollar Brands

Just like with protein, fiber and particularly the prebiotic fiber that feeds the gut bacteria is showing up on the grocery shelves in non-traditional places like soda, iced tea, snack bars, cereal and bagels. Perhaps most notably, Poppi, the prebiotic soda brand founded by husband-and-wife duo Stephen and Allison Ellsworth, was acquired by PepsiCo in May 2025 for $1.95 billion — a transaction that signaled to the broader consumer health market that prebiotic products had crossed into mainstream demand. Its rival Olipop, which controls roughly 60% of the global prebiotic soda market and contains 9g of plant fiber per can, raised a $50 million Series C in February 2025 led by J.P. Morgan Private Capital’s Growth Equity Partners, bringing its total funding to $96 million. And Seed Health, which has raised approximately $44 million including a $40 million Series A in April 2021 led by The Craftory, produces a prebiotic and probiotic supplement that includes 24 strains of bacteria that support gut health.

Woodbridge of Vanquish Equity, is a former PepsiCo executive who watched the Poppi acquisition closely. He drew a parallel to Metamucil, the psyllium-based fiber supplement manufactured by Procter & Gamble, explaining, “that is a global brand worth over a billion dollars. Companies like Supergut, operating in the fiber segment have the opportunity to scale and become an international global brand as well.”

The Menopause Gut and Women’s Health

The conversation that is just starting to cross over into the mainstream is related to The Menopause Gut, a recently published book by Cynthia Thurlow, a nurse practitioner and TEDx speaker. Thurlow argues that the gut microbiome shifts dramatically over the course of a woman's lifetime — peaking around age 40 — and that the hormonal changes of perimenopause and menopause accelerate microbial depletion in ways that affect immune function, metabolism, mood, cognition, and bone health.

Cutcliffe has seen the same pattern firsthand. When going through perimenopause and menopause, there’s all kinds of changes happening to the body. “One of the most common things is that people all of a sudden start to become sensitive to foods they weren’t sensitive to before, and at the same time, their metabolism is slowing down.” The science behind that experience, she argues, points directly to the microbiome. “One of the things that I was shocked to find is that if you take a woman who is between puberty and menopause and look at her microbiome, you can tell if it is a man or a woman. But after we go through menopause, I actually can’t tell you anymore. Our microbiomes start to look much more like a man's microbiome.” Pendulum is currently working with the Mayo clinic to better understand the role of the microbiome in improving the menopause transition.

At the Pendulum luncheon, Chef Johanna Hellrigl, a James Beard semifinalist whose cooking is rooted in food as medicine — shared her own testimonial as a woman deeply affected by gut challenges. After five rounds of antibiotics, Chef Johanna’s Akkermansia was wiped out entirely, her gut lining was severely compromised, and she developed SIBO — small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, a condition in which harmful bacteria colonize the small intestine unchecked, causing painful bloating, nutrient malabsorption, and digestive dysfunction. And so unfortunately, when she had her son via C-section, she had no Akkermansia left to pass along through breast milk. Chef Johanna emphasized the importance of optimizing the microbiome by focusing on whole foods and avoiding ultra processed foods.

As the science continues to evolve, the fiber renaissance will be fueled, at least in part, by the seventy-five million women moving through perimenopause, menopause and post-menopause, who are seeking answers to what is happening inside their bodies, and how they can better optimize bacterial strains to improve digestion and metabolic functioning. And in the meantime, I anticipate more prebiotic fiber products will begin to proliferate grocery shelves, as consumer food brands carve their piece of the fiber rush.