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Data story · Singapore · 2019 to 2026Protein bubble tea. Protein chips. This year Singapore put protein in everything. I wanted to know, with data rather than a hunch, whether it is hype that burns out or a habit that stays. So I pulled seven years of Google Trends, lined it up against the national surveys, and tested twelve theories. You can draw your own guess in the interactive version.
The verdict
The habit isn't a guess: Singaporeans are eating about a tenth more protein than before, and in Japan and Korea the everyday word for protein has kept climbing long after the hype. My bet, scored against each new month rather than a fixed date since no model I built could call the turn: interest keeps easing, the way it already is in the US, and settles on a higher floor than before, the way it has in Japan since 2020.
The short version
Not over. Cooling. Down 37% from the peak, still above last year.
Search interest peaked at 100 in April 2026 and fell to 63 by October, but it is still well above the 45 it sat at a year earlier. The fall stayed inside its normal range, so this is a cool down, not a collapse. And the April peak wasn't the Hyrox fitness race, as many assumed: fibre and calorie searches peaked the same month, a wider health wave.
Unlikely. Hype burns out. Protein keeps landing higher.
Keto peaked in June 2020 and scores 3 today; every time it dipped it bottomed out lower. Since 2023, every protein dip has bottomed out higher. Grouping 32 trends by the shape of their curves with k-means, the strict-rule diets sit in the burned-out group, while the high-protein diet, the actual eating habit, sits with the slow climbers that have been building for years.
Searches nearly doubled. Eating and training rose about a tenth.
From 2020 to 2025, searching rose 83%, buying 32%, and both eating protein and strength training only about 11%. Reading about protein doesn't quickly turn into eating more of it, and the money that does move is going to the easiest format, ready-to-drink over powder. The people who need it most are not the ones buying: 93% of adults aged 18 to 49 already meet their protein needs, against 55% of those aged 50 to 69.
Not just the US. Asia is moving together, and Japan went first.
Hong Kong and Malaysia rose in step with Singapore, so it is a regional wave, not an American trend arriving late. Japan is the preview: its carb-restriction diet burned out after 2016, its powder word peaked in 2020 and held at half its high, and the plain nutrient word just kept climbing. The hype cooled, and the conversation moved from the shaker to the plate. Korea tells the same story in its own everyday word for protein.
The craze is cooling. The habit isn't.
Protein is a nutrient, not a diet with rules, so it is harder to abandon than keto ever was. The bigger opportunity isn't another protein bar for gym-goers. It is reaching the adults over 50 who genuinely need more, and whom the protein aisle is not talking to.
How I know
I started because of a headline: a CNA Big Read asking whether the protein craze is a fad or a fixture. It made its case with interviews and market figures, but it had no long view of public interest over time. So I built one, and used it to test the article's claims one by one.
Three findings almost went the wrong way, and each is documented: a Google reclassification that looked like a crash, a declining trend that dressed itself up as a season, and a correlation that pointed backwards until I compared changes instead of levels. Writing my expectations down before each chart is what made the misses easy to catch.
Built in Python on Google Colab with pandas, scikit-learn, statsmodels and Lets-Plot. Data: Google Trends, HPB National Nutrition Survey 2025, MOH National Population Health Survey 2025, and Euromonitor via CNA. A personal project for the DDDM 2026 course.