Types of Protein Powders

[musclebeauty]

Want to consume one gram of protein per pound of body weight? Protein powders are devised to be the ideal meal in a quick and easy shake. How do you select a protein out of the hundreds that you can choose from? You will presumably want a low carb, low calorie protein if you are trying to lose fat. The three most popular types of protein are whey, egg and soy.

The most important factor in your metabolism besides exercise is protein ingestion. Feed your muscles, and your muscles will fuel your body's fat-burning power. Consuming an adequate amount of high quality protein each day during weight loss protects against the loss of lean body mass. At one time the egg was the "gold standard" of protein, but modern technology has created whey proteinsthat are even more easily used and absorbed by the body than are those found in eggs.

Words like "protein" and "amino acids" have been thrown together so much over the years that they usually mean the same thing to a lot of bodybuilders. While it takes a lot longer to get digested, dietary protein is important because it gives your body the basic building blocks it needs: a wide range of amino acids that can be used to restore amino acid levels in the body to help new tissue growth and regulate important body functions.

Protein is made up of amino acids: 20 in all. When you eat protein from an animal source, your body takes the protein molecule (specific to the animal), breaks it down into amino acids, and then forms "human" protein. You are also getting amino acids when you eat veggies, nuts, cereals and legumes, and if you have enough variety, you can get all the essential amino acids in one meal.

Are protein supplements really better than protein foods? Nutrition companies supply information full of medical and technical language not easily understood by the consumer, in order to generate sales and promote their products. The fancy words protein makers throw around, like cross flow microfiltration, oligopeptides, ion exchange, protein efficiency ratio, biological value, nitrogen retention and glycomacropeptides sure sound believable, particularly when scores of scientific sources are quoted. Many nutrition "authorities" affirm that there are distinct advantages of protein supplements over whole foods.

There are a thousand reasons why you need more protein in your diet. A lot of people who tried protein products in the past unfortunately barfed them down in the nearest sink, and pledged they would never surrender their taste buds to that kind of agony again. If this describes you, how long ago did you try protein powder? These days, a lot of protein shakes can actually be judged good tasting by most people's standards.

Once total protein and caloric intake is met, no protein source has a distinct advantage over another, as long as your protein sources are high quality to begin with. Spending twice as much for a protein supplement that may give a few percent improvement is sheer folly. To a great degree protein is protein and amino acids are amino acids and the body will treat them all the same in the end.

Protein powder has long been recognized as a basic element of any health and fitness program. Whey, a particular type of protein (a by-product of the cheese manufacturing process), has been found to be a useful supplement in mending and building lean muscle mass.

There is a discrepancy between how popular whey protein is, and how much confusion there is regarding this immensely popular supplement. There are many types of whey, such as concentrates, isolates, micro filtered and ion exchange. Whey is a compound made up of protein, lactose, fat and minerals. The protein is made up of subfractions and minor peptides, and until quite recently, separating the subfractions on a large scale was either impossible or prohibitively expensive for anything but research purposes.

Much of the confusion about whey lies in the different types of whey and the filtration processes used. If you can understand the filtration processes then you have more than enough knowledge to understand which whey protein is for you:
Ultra-filtered and dia-filtered Whey Protein Concentrate – the process of using a partly permeable membrane to separate much of the lactose and soluble minerals from the whey.
Ion exchange filtered Whey Protein Isolate – the whey is acidified to a degree whereby the proteins have a net positive charge.
Cross flow micro-filtered Whey Protein Isolate – this process uses natural ceramic filters to isolate lactose and soluble minerals from the whey with minimal damage to the all-important protein micro-fractions.
Hydrolyzed Whey Protein Isolate – the protein is put through a very specific enzymatic process and broken down into di- and tri-peptides.

Whey is highly bioavailable, fast acting and inexpensive. It is top of the line, as far as protein quality goes. In addition to being a fast-acting protein, whey contains very high amounts of glutamine and branched chain amino acids as well as other essential amino acids. Studies support the idea that whey protein exerts an anabolic response when taken before and after workouts.

Soy is another excellent source of protein. During its early stages as a supplement soy was notorious for causing the unpopular side effect of gas. It has come a long way since those days and now ranks up there with milk protein sources such as whey. Soy is particularly high in branched chain amino acids as well as glutamine, all of which are very beneficial for building muscle and recovery.