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For generations, the Meives family made cheese. Tony Meives’s grandfather, a Swiss immigrant, and his father both ran small cheese factories in Wisconsin, in the heart of America’s dairyland. “I worked in the cheese factory my whole life,” Meives says. “I have four world-class cheesemakers in my family.” But when it came time to inherit the family business, Meives found there was more money in the industrial runoff that his grandfather would have once thrown away. Today, the 39-year-old bodybuilder and gym owner runs a company that sells whey protein powder, the watery byproduct of cheesemaking that was once considered waste. “Twenty years ago, the only people who took whey were bodybuilders,” he says. “Over the past five years, the market has really opened up to each and every type of person you can probably think of.”

When Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, declared late last month, that “the war on protein is over”, he sounded a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers of second world war lore, who spent years bunkering in the jungles of south-east Asia, oblivious to the fact that hostilities had long ceased. Perhaps there was a time when advice leaned more towards a diet based around fruit, vegetables and carbohydrates – but by May 2026, the war on protein was surely over. Protein had won.

You can see its victory parade in every supermarket aisle in the US – breakfast cereals, frozen foods, even iced lattes have been souped up with extra protein. Not even traditional “junk foods” such as nacho chips, microwave ramen and pretzels are safe. According to a 2025 survey of 3,000 US adults, 71% said they were trying to eat more protein, up from 59% in 2022. “A lot of different brands are on the protein bandwagon,” Meives says. “They’re putting it in everything.”

The cultural trend towards “proteinmaxxing” has driven demand in whey protein, which was previously considered little more than effluent by most dairy farmers.

“It’s a byproduct no longer,” says Joshua White, vice-president of dairy ingredients at Missouri-based dairy marketer and trader TC Jacoby & Co. “Whey is a co-product now.”

As keen readers of Little Miss Muffet may already know, whey is made during various dairy and cheesemaking processes. Enzymes are added to dairy milk, which causes the desirable curds to separate from the (previously less desirable) watery liquid called whey. Prior to the protein boom, the leftover whey was often used as feed or fertilizer, or reprocessed into other forms of soft cheese (ricotta takes its name from the Italian word for “recooked”, because it was traditionally made by letting whey ferment and then reheating it.) Trying to find something to do with whey is a millenia-old puzzle: around 460 BC, the ancient Greek medic Hippocrates prescribed whey serum to his patients in order to fortify their immune systems.

To make whey powder, liquid whey is filtered to remove fats and carbohydrates, then purified, evaporated and spray dried, producing a powder which can be mixed into protein bars or blended in a shake.

Initially whey protein was marketed to powerlifters, gym rats and people who owned their own shaker cups. But the recent protein boom has made whey so popular that producers are facing shortfalls. “We’ve reached the point where there are shortages,” says Dean Sommers, a cheese and food technologist at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research. “There are a lot of unfilled orders, and demand for orders. There simply isn’t enough product around to fill those orders.”

In response, some manufacturers are adding new equipment, to help produce more whey. Leading manufacturers are building whole new facilities.

All this demand means that in the past few years, the price of whey protein concentrates has shot up as much as fivefold. In the last two years alone, the price of whey concentrates has increased as much as 83%. At the same time, demand for dairy and cheese products has remained relatively stable, meaning there may soon be a point where whey demand and curd demand are out of whack.

“Whey protein is currently driving more a percentage of the farmer’s check than it ever has before,” says dairy trader Joshua White. “That results in the potential of excess cheese production, in order to get to that whey. The cart is driving the horse.”

There are, in the history of agricultural production, some precedents for this. Chicken wings were regarded as undesirable excess until, as the legend goes, an industrious chef from Buffalo, New York, thought to fry them and slather them in hot sauce. Now, chicken wings are so popular that they’re one of the primary drivers of poultry prices, with demand for wings surpassing that for the rest of the bird. (It’s estimated that Americans eat about 1.5bn wings on Super Bowl Sunday alone.)

The relationship between whey and the broader dairy market may be headed towards a similar disequilibrium. In order to head off a case where producers are stuck with excess cheese, dairy boards have increasingly looked to export markets in Latin America, China and as far away as the Pacific Islands.

The whey boom is at least partly attributable to the popularity in GLP-1-style weight loss drugs, which at least one in eight Americans admit to taking. As caloric intakes are tightened, protein consumption becomes even more important.

It’s estimated that anywhere from 25-40% of weight lost during GLP-1 therapies is lean muscle. Drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound do not distinguish between lean muscle and adipose tissue (better known as fat). The drugs’ primary effects – regulating hunger signaling and gastric motility – have a more drastic effect on protein synthesis. Simply put, many people on these drugs are not hungry enough to eat the recommended dietary allowance of protein.

“I was definitely concerned about losing muscle alongside the other weight,” says Alex Sullivan, a 41-year-old who recently started taking Tirzepatide and upped his protein intake in turn. “Doctors talk about how you lose muscle mass as you get older, and you should try to keep as much muscle mass as you can. I wanted to make sure I retained as much as possible, as I lost weight.”

There is, however, a ceiling. It’s generally recommended that most adults aim for 0.8 grams of protein per kg of body weight (or about 0.36 grams per pound). But research by Ian Neeland, a Cleveland-based cardiologist who specializes in diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular health, suggests that protein intake and muscle synthesis does not scale exponentially. In fact, it plateaus after that double-the-recommended-daily-allotment target is hit.

“The muscle building didn’t really improve after 1.6 [grams per kg of bodyweight],” Neeland says. “You really just need to eat enough protein to preserve muscle mass. It’s more about preservation.” In other words, more protein may be key for those on GLP-1s looking to retain muscle. But manic, whey-gobbling proteinmaxxing may not do much to achieve this goal, accomplishing little beyond driving up the price of whey.

If Ozempic and its chemically related cousins are pitched as “wonder drugs”, then whey protein can seem no less remarkable – a relatively easy way to mitigate GLP-1s deleterious effects on muscle and protein synthesis. But demand in whey powders is creating its own raft of side effects on the dairy and cheesemaking industries. While US cheese consumption remains relatively steady – a spokesperson from Vermont’s agency of agriculture tells me that the average American consumes more than 40lbs (18kg) of cheese per year – dairy farmers are pivoting to other protein-rich products: yoghurt and even cottage cheese, those once maligned, nutrient-rich, wiggly curds that (seasoned with ketchup) were a staple of President Richard Nixon’s spartan daily diet. “There’s cheddar cheese manufacturers that are switching over to cottage cheese,” said Sommers on the way protein has upended the industry.

This month’s reporting from the US Department of Agriculture shows that the whey price is only growing, while supply is shrinking. Some retailers, like Tony Meives of Wisconsin, who buys whey from a wholesaler, worry that whey will become so expensive it’ll end up threatening his business and send price-conscious consumers flocking to the cottage cheese aisle. “I hope less people take whey protein!” he laughs. “That way the price does come down, and the cost to make it drops.”