Protein powders are an extremely popular way for people to ’get’ their daily protein intake. They come in a wide variety of flavors and formulations, using everything from Whey protein to Hemp protein as their protein source. Generally, most protein powders actually do provide a quality source of protein to your diet. However, what most people forget is that protein is a commodity like anything else, and for this reason, your protein powder can change in quality from batch to batch.

These days protein powders such as whey and casein are used in much more than just muscle building protein supplements. They can be found in everything from yogurt and ice-cream to pizza and baby formula. Combine this with the increased demand for dairy based protein from China, the middle east and North Africa and you can see how protein prices can rapidly increase.

(Also keep in mind Protein is big business - One of the largest protein suppliers has annual earnings of over 2 billion US dollars annually!)

So when the cost of whey protein goes up because of supply or demand issues (and whey protein is considerably more expensive these days than it was a decade ago) it also increases the cost of making protein supplements, so some companies ’spike’ their protein powder formulas with non-protein amino acids like taurine or creatine.

(note Ð even amino acids see price increases, usually based on popularity. At the moment both beta-alanine and branched chain amino acids are incredibly expensive too, so companies have to be very selective with which amino acids they use in their protein supplements).

So why would you want to spike your protein powder? Well, both taurine and creatine have at times been much less expensive than your typical whey or casein protein. And, more importantly, when a protein supplement is tested for its protein content, the test measures not protein per se, but rather nitrogen. So by adding ingredients that are high in nitrogen, you can trick the tests to think your product is higher in protein than it really is.

In other words, if the protein has been spiked with amino acids, the results of the protein content tests will be similar (or even higher in the case of adding creatine)

You may be wondering how you can determine which companies are cutting corners by performing this stunt? Unfortunately you really can’t. The easiest thing is to look on the label and hope the companies are ethical enough to include all of their ingredients in their ingredient deck (most are, but not all). If you see tuarine or creatine, you can assume theyÕve been counted as ’protein’.

An expensive solution would be to pay a lab to perform tests on a protein supplement to measure the molecular weight of its contents - but again, this doesn’t ensure that your protein is ’spike’ free every single time. It only provides evidence for that one single batch. Really, you have no way of knowing. This is why I suggest going for the BIG name products from large supplement companies - after all, the more money the company has, the more reason they have to keep everything on the up and up.

The other thing that gets affected by the price of protein is the taste of your protein powder. Whey protein (probably the most popular protein powder at the moment), is a by-product of the cheese making process. Different protein suppliers get their whey from the production of different kinds of cheese -mozzarella, Swiss, cheddar, etc.

The interesting thing is that the process of making each type of cheese also imparts a ’uniqueness’ to the whey protein it produces. This can be found in the taste, texture and mouth feel of the protein powder.

If the cost from one supplier goes up, a supplement company could switch to another protein supplier with devastating results on their protein powder. This means the same brand and product, with the same whey protein concentrate on the label and the same quality of whey protein inside the tub could end up with radically different tastes.

Again, thereÕs not much you can do to avoid this problem. If anything sticking with big name brands is your best bet, since they by their protein in massive ’6-month’ at a time purchases.

Truth be told this issue is not unique to the supplement industry, as all food companies have to deal with the changing commodity prices - but it does help you to know that if your protein powder tastes different, the protein is still probably high quality - just from a different protein supplier.

The bottom line is that you can use amino acids to spike the protein content of your protein powder, but only by a little bit. By and large, almost all protein powders meet label claims, and while the taste may vary from batch to batch this is mostly due to the protein source, and not an indicator in the quality of the protein powder. So if you choose to use protein powders to supplement your high protein diet, you are probably getting roughly the amount of protein on the label.


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