Recently, there was an article on the matter of protein shake supplements.
And the headline… wasn’t pretty: STOP DRINKING PROTEIN SHAKES!
As the article would say, as it can lead to… weight gain, depression, and even a shorter
life span.
Unsurprisingly, this made a quite the rumble within the fitness community.
But does this article hold enough merit for us to actually abandon our precious protein
companions?
As we always do here, we can’t simply take something like this at face value without
doing a little bit more digging.
So, let’s do it.
In this article and others like it, it references a new study from the University of Sydney,
which reported that some muscle-building amino acids are bad for overall health.
These amino acid culprits are known as branched-chain amino acids, aka BCAAs.
The concern here, according to the article, is that getting too much protein from protein
shakes, which do contain BCAAs, would lead to BCAA overconsumption.
However, the focus of the study wasn’t actually on overconsumption.
Instead, it was about a higher ratio of BCAAs to other amino acids.
A subtle yet distinctively important difference.
And it’s funny because we would know that by just reading a few lines into the study,
with researchers stating, “These effects are not due to elevated BCAA per se… but
instead are due to a shift in the relative quantity of dietary BCAAs and other amino
acids…”
Basically, the concern here is creating an amino acid imbalance.
Also, how this applies to protein shakes exactly is unclear.
After all, protein shakes have a relatively normal amount of BCAAs and also contain a
good amount of these other essential amino acids.
But anyway, onto the study.
The researchers noted that the negative health impacts observed with a high-BCAA to non-BCAA
imbalance was a consequence of hyperphagia, or a ravenous increase in food appetite.
And when given the opportunity, subjects with this imbalance ate much more than their more
balanced counterparts.
However, a little something about the actual subjects… they were mice.
Now, I’m not one to blindly discredit mice studies as there are some clear physiological
consistencies between the two species, but there’s also been plenty of instances where
scientific results in mice did not translate into human trials.
But the importance of pointing this out is more about feeding behavior.
It is true that the BCAA imbalance led to significantly more eating, thus more negative
health impacts like obesity and a shortened lifespan.
However, in another experiment in the study where the mice’s food was restricted, in
this case a 20% calorie restriction, those negative health impacts were drastically reduced
with both BCAA-imbalance and balanced groups observing similar outcomes.
Now, this type of restriction would be comparable to a scenario where someone drinks protein
shakes to meet their protein goals while trying to lose weight.
As long as overeating as a whole was prevented, the negative health impacts would be mitigated
as well.
So, my takeaway from the article after reading this study: what the heck does this have to
do with protein shakes?
If anything, protein shakes would actually counteract the issues found in this study.
It has all the other essential amino acids that these poor mice were lacking that led
to the imbalance in the first place.
If there’s somewhere to point the finger, it would be specifically at BCAA supplements.
And if you’ve followed this channel for a while, you’d know I’d be totally on
board with more reasons to throw your BCAA supplements down the toilet.
But the main moral of this story is that don’t blindly trust everything you read, especially
on the internet.
As juicy of a headline as “PROTEIN SHAKES BAD” might be, best to do yourself a favor
and research it for yourself.
Or instead of clicking on overly sensational articles, why not click on my sensational
PictureFit videos! (crickets?)
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As always, thank you for watching and most certainly GET YOUR PROTEIN!