US, 2024 - 61% of people said they upped their protein intake, up from 48% back in 2019. In India, the price of Whey Protein grew 4x within this time-period. High-protein product revenue in some categories grew more than fivefold between 2020 and 2024. A whole aisle rebuilt itself around one macro.

The math made sense (for the most part). Protein is genuinely useful; it’s satiating, it supports muscle and it’s the nutrient people had the easiest time understanding.

One number, one decision, life became easier. The truth however is that – it’s never that simple.

How did the protein trend rise?

The protein wave didn’t come out of nowhere, it was the outcome of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle.

Sedentary lifestyle increased. Health problems increased. The awareness for fitness increased. Fitness culture went mainstream. Sports nutrition stopped being a niche for athletes and started showing up in office pantries and airport kiosks. Brands noticed, and “high protein” became a synonym for healthy. A badge that could sit on almost anything, from a milkshake to a packet of chips, and instantly reframe it. It became the green-colour-on-packaging for muscles.

For a while, this approach worked: it gave people a quick, easy way to feel good about a purchase without digging any deeper. And the category rewarded that simplicity, since protein-tagged products in snacking, dairy, and beverages kept outselling their standard counterparts, sometimes by a wide margin.

A single macro though can never suffice for “nutrition” and people are starting to notice the rest of the label.

Walk through a grocery aisle with a conscious shopper today and you’ll see something rare. Something which wouldn’t take place at all five years ago. They flip the pack over, read the ingredients. Then, they see the protein, then the calories, they do quick math on protein per calorie.

They ask what the rest of the macros look like.

The Calorie Tax

Call it the calorie tax: the price your body pays for a big protein number when everything else on the label is working against it. A “high protein” cookie stacked with sugar and refined carbs often costs more than it gives. Dietitians heading into 2026 are already flagging this directly. The “maxxing” era, where consumers chased as much protein or fibre as a label would allow, is giving way to something more considered. People aren’t done caring about protein. They’re just done treating it as the only variable that matters.

The nutrition conversation is getting wider, not softer. Total calories are part of it. So is sugar, fibre, ingredient quality, and something less measurable- how a food actually makes you feel three hours after eating it.

Protein is still the anchor. It’s just no longer allowed to work alone.

How does this change the future?

This is, in the long run, a healthier way to shop. A single macro is easy to market and easy to misuse. Protein can be the headline while sugar quietly does its own thing in paragraph two. The shift toward macro literacy means shoppers are asking better questions, and brands have to answer with better math, not louder claims.


The bar isn’t just about how much protein a product can carry anymore. It’s about what it costs you to get there. More people, every week, are doing that math for themselves.

This has been something that’s been tugging at my side. Researching trends, the “why?”s and the “how?”s has been a lot of fun lately.

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-KaavKo@getphab

We’ve collectively decided that protein is the answer. To fat loss. To muscle gain. To energy. To looking better in photos. If you’re not hitting your protein, you’re basically not trying.

I feel... that effort is amiss not because protein doesn’t matter, it does, genuinely. Rather because the way we’ve turned a single macronutrient into north star of good health and in doing so, we’ve made it easier for the food industry to sell us things that technically qualify as “high protein” while quietly ignoring everything else on the label.

Why is one-macro thinking wrong?

Here’s what gets lost when protein becomes the only number you track: your body doesn’t run on protein alone.

Carbohydrates are your brain’s primary fuel source. They power your workouts, regulate your mood, and determine how effectively your body can actually use the protein you’re consuming. Eat too little carbohydrate while loading up on protein, and your body will simply convert a portion of that protein into glucose anyway, defeating the point, and leaving you tired, foggy, and wondering why the gym isn’t working.

Fat is not the enemy. It was the enemy in the 1990s, briefly, before we realised that removing fat from food just meant replacing it with sugar. Healthy fats are essential for hormone production, joint health, and absorbing fat-soluble vitamins. They also slow digestion, which is part of why a meal with adequate fat keeps you full longer than a fat-free protein shake that leaves you hungry forty minutes later.

The three macronutrients — protein, carbohydrates, fat — aren’t competitors. They’re a system. You can’t optimise one at the expense of the others.

What’s the right question?

The problem is that “high protein” tells you nothing about the overall nutritional quality of what you’re eating. A snack bar can be 20g of protein and 400 calories. A yogurt can be “packed with protein” and be so loaded with sugar that the protein is functionally irrelevant to your goals. These products aren’t lying. They’re just answering a question no one should have been asking in the first place.

The right question isn’t how much protein does this have? It’s what is the full macro picture, and does it fit the way I actually eat?

How to think about macros holistically?

Most people don’t need to track macros obsessively. That level of precision is useful for competitive athletes and people with specific clinical goals, Not for an everyday athlete trying to eat better and feel less terrible by 4pm.

What you do need is a rough mental model that treats all three macros as relevant.

A useful starting framework: think about each meal in terms of what it’s doing. Where’s the protein (muscle repair, satiety, thermic effect)? Where are the carbs (fuel, fibre, energy availability)? Where’s the fat (hormones, absorption, satisfaction)? You don’t need to weigh anything. You just need to make sure all of them are there, in balance.

The practical implication is that a “high protein” snack that’s also high in calories is only doing part of the job. If you’re eating it as a protein hit but it’s costing you 350 calories, you’ve taken in a lot of food for a modest nutritional return. The ratio that is Protein per Calorie is what actually matters for most people’s day-to-day eating. That’s a harder sell on a packet, but it’s a more honest metric.

Similarly, the carb phobia that tends to accompany protein culture leads people to under-fuel workouts and over-rely on protein for energy; which is an expensive, inefficient process that leaves you more fatigued, not less. Carbs aren’t the problem. Undifferentiated carbs in excess of your energy needs are a problem. Those are different things.

In Conclusion

You remember your parents telling you “excess of everything is bad”? Yeah, that’s solid advice. Keep that in mind.

Eating for your goals isn’t about maximising any single thing. Rather maxing out anything shouldn’t be on your plan. You should be eating smaller portions, not eating till you’re 100% full and you should definitelyyyy not be “maxing out my protein bro”.

It’s about building a diet that’s balanced. Where the macros work together, where the calories make sense relative to your activity level, and where what you’re eating plan is actually sustainable enough to keep eating.

The protein number matters but so does whether you have enough carbohydrate to perform and recover. So does whether you have enough fat to feel satisfied and keep your hormones in order. A diet that nails protein while neglecting everything else isn’t a good diet.

The food industry is very good at selling partial solutions. The fitness internet is very good at amplifying them. You don’t have to buy either.

Eat the protein. Also the carbs. Also the fat.

Think in systems, not single numbers.

- KaavKo@getphab

This isn’t a one-article topic. It’s not even a one-year topic. But the deeper you go into nutrition science, the more you realise how much of what we accept as fact is actually just... consensus by repetition.

So let’s start today with a riddle.

Riddle me this: What’s the one thing that almost every adult on the planet - regardless of nationality, gender, age, income, or how many pickleball groups they’re in - actively tracks, and yet the less of it they have, the happier they get?

(If you said “weight,” go to the top of the class. If you said “my ex’s Instagram activity,” also valid, but wrong quiz.)

The pursuit of being lighter is genuinely one of the most universal human obsessions there is. It transcends borders. For decades - arguably centuries - we’ve been trying to game this one outcome, and our strategy has mostly stayed the same:

• Eat low cal

• Move more

• Eat low cal and move more

All three run on one belief: the body is a simple machine, and calories-in vs. calories-out is the whole equation. Eat less than you burn, weight goes down. Simple. Mechanical. Almost comforting in how tidy it sounds.

Here’s what I’d offer instead: calling your body a “calories in, calories out” machine is a bit like calling a rainforest a garden. Technically both have plants. But one is a closed loop you can control with a watering can, and the other is a self-regulating, endlessly adaptive ecosystem that will rebalance itself the moment you try to intervene. Your body isn’t a machine you operate. It’s an ecosystem you’re a guest in.

Homeostasis. Remember this word - we’re going to keep coming back to it through this blog. It’s the body’s built-in drive to protect equilibrium. Not your goals. Not your Notes app target weight. Its own internal balance.

And here’s the part that changes everything: your body doesn’t want to lose weight or gain it. It wants to stay wherever it currently believes it should be - a kind of internal set point it will defend, quietly and relentlessly, in the background, without asking your permission.

Which means: eat more consistently, and your output - your metabolic burn - creeps up to compensate. Eat less consistently, and - ding ding ding - your output drops right along with it, to protect the equilibrium.

Remember those diets where you cut calories, saw a kg drop, then had to cut even further just to see the scale move again? That wasn’t a lack of discipline. That was your body, very calmly, telling you: I noticed. I’m adjusting. I will keep burning less until you stop doing this.

And no, exercise doesn’t get you out of this one either. You can run 8km or 80km - your body will still find a way to conserve energy elsewhere, because this ecosystem’s one job is to keep you alive, not lean.

So - is losing weight actually impossible? Do fat people stay fat, thin people stay thin, and the rest of us are just fighting our own biology for nothing?

The honest answer is no.

But the reason isn’t calories. The reason is the word in this article’s title: glucose.

Of course, it’s more complicated than glucose alone - it always is. But stay with me, because by the end of this thread, you’ll have the actual answer to the weight-loss question everyone’s been trying to solve with a weighing scale and sheer willpower.

More to come.

— Alpha@getphab

Here’s what history tells us about it;

A few hundred years back, in most parts of India, millets were eaten more than rice. Every region had its own grain; Ragi in Karnataka, Bajra across Rajasthan and Gujarat, Jowar through the Deccan.

The British Raj

The British loved, and wanted, tea. Tea came from China. The only thing China accepted as payment was Gold or Silver neither of which the British wanted part with.

So, they implemented a plan to sell opium. They would sell opium in China, take the gold/silver and with the same buy their beloved tea. This opium was to be grown in India.

Soon, large portions of land which grew food (like millets) started growing opium exclusively.

This change made famines worse. To handle this bad situation, the British started handing out rice and wheat.

The Green Revolution

Then came the Green Revolution, a possible moment of correction but that didn’t happen.

The government promised to buy rice and wheat (among other grains) from farmers at a fixed minimum price, then sell it cheap through the ration system but Millets never made the cut.

The stability of income from the other grains made farmers not choose Millet. As times (and marketing) went on, white rice and fluffy wheat rotis became “progressive foods” the rest became “coarse grains” and people started phasing it out.

Hence, what started as a swap out for drugs continued over centuries.

The Prodigal Grain Returns

Now, the exact same grain we pushed away is making a comeback as a “super food”. The seed that no one wanted to pay for; now people are willing to pay premiums for it.

The comeback is wonderful, but the problem; our ways of life have changed, our habits have changed drastically.

So we needed the same grain in newer formats. Formats that fit in well to our current lives. Which is why you see products like ragi chips and phab millet wafer bars rolling into the market.

What we’re witnessing with millets isn’t a trend. It’s a pattern we’re seeing across the board. People adopting older methods/items/foods that were benched because of our long and complicated history. A slow, satisfying return to something that was always ours.

The question isn’t whether older grains will find their place in modern life - they already are. The question is how many more quiet comebacks are still waiting to happen because if history has taught us anything, it’s that what goes around, eventually, comes back around.

Sometimes in a wafer bar.

- KaavKo@getphab

India is trying to get fitter. And the hallmark of any journey is a metric to track progress against. Ours, almost universally, is the weighing scale.

Scales sales in India have been on a quiet tear — CAGR running around 5% over the last few years. Fitting, in a way. A country on a health journey reverting to the most primal form of measurement.

But that begs the real question: is weight the right number?

I’ll be clear — I’m not writing this from some elevated position. I’m one of those people who finishes their morning routine and immediately gets on the scale to see where things land. Motivating one day, devastating the next, occasionally both before 8am.

But spending time at Phab - and enough conversations with Gayatri, our founder and nutritionist - has surfaced a few things worth sitting with.

Weight is one of the most misleading numbers your body produces.

Why the scale lies

Your weight can swing 1–3 kg within a single day. For those of us tracking daily, 3 kg isn’t a fluctuation — it feels like a verdict. And it’s not fat you’re gaining and losing. It’s water retention, bloating, hormonal shifts, where you are in your cycle. None of it has anything to do with whether you’re actually healthier.

There’s also bone density. Remember that teacher who told you that you weren’t overweight, you just had heavy bones? She wasn’t entirely wrong. Skeletal mass is real, it varies, and the scale doesn’t know the difference.

The muscle argument (again, but stay with it)

I know we’re all tired of hearing about muscle. But here’s what actually matters: muscle increases your basal metabolic rate. Those people who seem to eat whatever they want without much consequence — they’re likely sitting on more lean mass. The reason is simple: your body burns significantly more calories maintaining muscle than it does maintaining fat. The internal combustion is different.

Beyond metabolism, muscle mass correlates with longevity — functional strength, cognitive health, long-term resilience. Whether muscular people are smarter remains an open research question. We’ll come back to that one.

The downstream consequence

More muscle, less visceral fat. Less visceral fat, lower risk of insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease. The chain is fairly direct — and none of it shows up on a weighing scale.

So the next time you step on it, ask yourself whether that number is actually telling you anything useful. If the answer is no - and there’s a reasonable case it isn’t - then body fat percentage is the number you should be tracking instead. It tells you how the composition is actually distributed, and that’s what gives you something to actually optimise.

More to come.

- Alpha@getphab