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I Read the Nutrition Facts on 163 Protein Powders So You Don’t Have To

3-day weekends are great for projects you’ve been meaning to do but never had a long enough block of free time for. Recently, I’ve been getting barraged by Instagram ads for protein powders: plant-based, beef, whey, keto, paleo, enhanced with digestive enzymes, paired with adaptogens, all making wild claims about helping you build muscle or enhance focus or lose weight or have the life and body and career and partner you’ve always wanted. It’s overwhelming.

There’s far more brands now than when I first started thinking about supplements when I was in high school and college. Back then, the best option for most people to figure out what to take was to wander down to the local GNC and ask a sales associate — or head to bodybuilding.com and hop on the forums there. Supplementing with protein powder was still a relatively niche thing to do: this was in the days before keto or even Atkins went fully mainstream. Now, you can get protein powder in your smoothie at mass-affluent restaurant and smoothie chains. Protein is mainstream.

With all these options and the blank canvas of a free weekend, I figured I might as well sit down, make a spreadsheet, and compare as many as I had time for side-by-side. I researched ingredients, marketing claims, and nutrition facts. I looked up studies on the bioavailability of different kinds of protein, technical details on protein processing, the influence of synthetic digestive enzymes, variations in amino acid profiles, and all the additional ingredients manufacturers use to enhance their products. I compared different flavors of the same brand of protein because it turns out important elements (e.g. kind of sweetener, amount of sodium) can change significantly just between flavor variants. It was an illuminating weekend.

After all that, here are my most important takeaways.

Supplements are not food

This may sound obvious, but if you spend enough time staring at nutrition labels on protein powders you’ll see how totally devoid of any actual nutrition they are. Most of these products are food components stripped of as many of the non-amino acid parts as possible. No fiber, no fats, no carbs, no micronutrients. Nothing but protein.

Now, some would argue that’s the whole point: anything else would impede your body’s ability to digest and absorb the protein, hindering recovery and muscle growth. If you have as simple of a post-workout shake as possible — just protein and carbs — it spikes your blood sugar in a way that enables better transportation of dietary protein to muscles for faster repair so more of the protein is actually used rather than excreted, and you build muscle faster as a result.

Well, maybe that’s true. Let’s assume for now that it is. Your body needs so much more than that.

The problem is that protein powders are used for far more than just post-workout nutrition: they’re primary components in snack bars, added to pancake and waffle mixes, even included in savory snacks (Quest makes protein chips!). And — in yet another instance of macros lying to you — while all these engineered food products may technically have protein in them, nutritionally they can’t at all compare to eating real, whole, unprocessed, protein-rich foods.

Protein powders may give you amino acids, but they cheat you of everything else real food contributes to your nutrition and well-being. There’s nothing in them to support your gut health (and many things that can harm it), few of the micronutrients that play critical roles in helping your body recover from exercise, and nothing that gives your body any sustainable energy. Don’t confuse the very targeted, isolated amino acids found in protein powders for the full nutritive load carried by actual food — and don’t substitute protein shakes (or processed protein-enriched food products) for real meals.

People put too much emphasis on supplements relative to their impact

This is the corollary to the point above. Protein powders make all kinds of claims about helping you build muscle, recover from workouts, change your body composition, and more. And yes, the protein powders will help — on the margin. But what part of your diet do you think matters more: the 1 scoop of protein powder you have after a workout totaling ~120 calories, or the other ~2700 calories of nutrition you consume in a day?

Supplement companies direct consumers’ attention with very specific nutrition claims — which are visceral and evocative and maybe even technically true — but they also overstate the actual impact of these supplements on your health. After all, they’re called supplements because they’re exactly that: supplemental. If your life — diet, rest, exercise routine, and more — is already dialed in to 98%, they’ll get you to 99%, but if you’re only 40% healthy you’re kidding yourself if you think 1 scoop of powder a day will make the difference.

If you’re sleeping 6 hours a night, doing ineffective workouts twice a week, drinking regularly, and eating out all the time, protein powder won’t magically change your results. Even if you’re only doing 2 of those things — let’s say not getting enough sleep and drinking — you’re severely limiting your body’s ability to recover and flooding your system with excess cortisol. You’re still going to struggle and no protein powder will remedy that.

Good health — even just a portion of that, a good physique — is not something that one supplement can point-solve for you. It’s not something you can do for 6 weeks or even 6 months and then just go back to living and eating and sleeping the way you’ve always done. It’s a consistent set of habits that you live by to the point that you don’t even think about them — it’s just your life. Protein powder can be a part of it, but it’s a really small part of it. Don’t put too much emphasis on it.

Many protein powders are filled with harmful junk

Some people see a protein-enriched snack—protein powder, a ready-to-drink protein shake, a protein bar, a protein waffle, or any of thousands of frankenfoods — and they immediately think, “That must be good for me!” Not exactly.

Lots of protein powders have harmful ingredients in them: from sucralose (which harms your gut — and your gut affects your mood, your metabolism, your immune system, your hormones, and so much more), to excess sodium (one protein powder had 1000mg of sodium in a single serving!) to erythritol (significantly increases risks of blood clots), carrageenan (also harms your gut) to cane sugar (not any better for you than any other kind of sugar, and if you’re going to consume sugar, is this really the way you want to do it?) — I can keep going, but you get the idea.

I’ve already been banging on enough about the importance of eating real food instead of supplement powders, so I’ll say this instead: When choosing a protein powder, the decision is less “what’s the best protein powder?” and more “What protein powder doesn’t contain things that are obviously bad for me?” Fortunately, most of that is fairly easy to spot: it’s right there, listed in the ingredients. But this is just another reminder that real food is often a much better choice.

The differences between protein types (and brands) are overstated

Every protein brand will try to convince you it’s the best at building muscles, keeping you satiated, and helping you recover from workouts. They’ll all talk about their proprietary ingredients or the enyzmes they include to help with protein digestion or the additional fat burning compounds included in their formula. They’ll brag about their complete amino acid profile, how many grams of BCAAs they have, or their variety of protein sources. It turns out very little of this is supported by evidence and — as seems to be the common refrain here — the effects, if there are any, are marginal.

As one example: it’s well-documented that beef protein powder is low in BCAAs relative to, say, whey protein. Beef protein also scores lower on bioavailability than whey. (Also, even a high-quality beef protein powder is upwards of 30% collagen. They’re not exactly grinding up beef steaks to make protein powder!) Despite the pastoral, rustic image of beef, on paper it doesn’t translate to it being a better fuel for rebuilding muscle after workouts. However, a meta-analysis conducted comparing athletes who consumed beef protein to those who consumed whey protein showed little, if any, difference between their results. How does that make sense?

The most obvious answer is that the impact of 1 scoop of protein per day— roughly 20–25g — is going to be outweighed by the rest of your diet more or less regardless of its composition. If that scoop of protein is only 70% efficient rather than 95% efficient, then you’re getting 14–18g of protein out of it rather than 19–24g. That’s a difference of 5–6g in a day. Given the variance inherent in human diets, that’s a rounding error that can be lost in imprecise portioning of other meals. (Another study showed no statistically significant difference between supplementing with whey protein or pea protein. So you can safely ignore everyone making emotional appeals about how proteins from animal sources are better for you or more effective than plant-based proteins.)

The bottom line is: while the marketing content of different protein brands is emotional and evocative, as long as there aren’t any harmful ingredients the differences in effectiveness are minor.

The main distinction between protein powders is the story they tell you — or the story they enable you to tell yourself — about who you are. This is marketing in a nutshell. They’re just trying to sell you an image of an amazing future life that would exist if only you bought their product.

The reason why there are so many brands is because humans are endlessly creative in their self-expression and platforms like Facebook and Instagram have enabled brands to target very specific niches with very specific products. As a result, there’s been an explosion in protein powders and supplement products that all have the same ingredients but have different branding. Do you want the one that markets to yogis, with soothing neutral colors and copy that focuses on muscle toning and recovery? Or do you want the one for Crossfitters that connects functional nutrition to functional fitness so you can crush your next PR? Maybe you just want protein powder… for her. Or maybe you want to be the next Mr. Olympia. No matter what your ideal future life is, there’s likely a protein powder that targets it. But know that they’re all mostly the same and that the real driving force in your journey will be the 99% of things you do for your health that aren’t 1 scoop of protein powder a day.

So what do I do with this information?

1. Take a deep breath. Your protein powder won’t define your results.
2. Keep it simple. Find a protein powder that doesn’t have additives that are clearly bad for you and has a complete amino acid profile. (So, don’t go for a collagen protein. Also, skip casein since it’s slow-digesting and that’s more of a niche use case.) Don’t worry too much about enzymes or adaptogens or other performance enhancers — they’re even more marginal than the protein powder itself is.
3. Try it out to ensure (a) you don’t have any adverse reactions (e.g. digestive upset, sluggishness, etc.) and (b) you like the way it mixes and tastes.
4. Once you’ve found one you like, buy a larger quantity (or put it on a subscription) and stop thinking about protein powders. Focus on the things that actually deserve your attention: food, physical activity, sleeping enough, getting outside, and spending time with people you love. And as a bonus:
5. If you’re going to have a post-workout shake (rather than a post-workout meal), get a blender and fruit and make a post-workout smoothie instead. That way you at least get some fiber and other nutrients from it, as well as the carbs that will help you build muscle. Only if you don’t have access to a blender at all would I suggest things like sweet potato powder or other whole food carb powder. But again, these are just a stopgap — it’s not a meal replacement and it lacks the nutrition your body actually needs.

I really cannot stress this enough: drink fewer protein shakes. Consume fewer frankenfoods. Eat more real food. Your body will thank you.