What is the worst sports supplement ever? A top contender was around over 60 years ago. Maybe your grandpa downed some before doing his full-body workout in a dank YMCA basement. It had a too-on-the-nose name and a taste no one ever acquired. We’re sailing way, way back to revisit a dubious classic, an aquatic misfire. Even now, long after the stench has lifted, grandpa may wince while reading the name: Protein from the Sea.
PROTEIN FROM THE SEA
In the aftermath of the Great Protein Rush of 1952, when industry titans Bob Hoffman and Joe Weider copied Irvin Johnson’s Hi-Protein with their own soy protein powders—Hi-Proteen and Hi Protein—the nascent sports supplement industry was all about protein, protein, and lots more protein. For more than a decade, soy or dairy powder was marketed as a miracle food that turned bullied weaklings into sand-kicking supermen.
But how do you distinguish products when even their names sound identical? Hoffman thought way out of the box—and into the ocean. After a visit to Hawaii, he was inspired to create a supplement made of “a blend of special protein nutrients obtained from the seas of the world.” Protein from the Sea, available in powder and tablets, was first advertised in Strength & Health magazine in 1961.
Ingredients were absent from supplements then, so there’s no telling what swam into Protein from the Sea, which claimed to be 96.5% protein. (Tuna and cod both derive 89% of their calories from protein, the highest percentages we’ve seen for any food.) Some say it reeked of seaweed, others insist it stank of fish. Seemingly no one thought it smelled or tasted even okay. Bodybuilder Lance Dreher, who competed in the 1982 and 1983 Mr. Olympias years after the teenage trauma of trying Protein from the Sea, remembers, “It tasted worse than rotten tuna. I bought that once and threw it out.”
That was the consensus opinion, in marked contrast to the muscle magazine ad above insisting, as if to stifle doubts, that the chewable tablets were “tasty.” (By the way, that “Exotic Oriental food” Forinake on the ad above doesn’t sound too appetizing either.) A few years after its launch, Hoffman’s Protein from the Sea sunk, though the bad taste seems to have never left landlubbers lured in by the promised “amazing burst of nutritive power!”
