WheyProteinPowder.org is published by EnergyFirst and earns revenue from purchases made at energyfirst.com.
WheyProteinPowder.org is published by EnergyFirstand earns revenue from purchases made at energyfirst.com.
WheyProteinPowder.org is published by EnergyFirst and earns revenue from purchases made at energyfirst.com.
Answer these in order with the jar in your hand and the panel facing you. Each answer narrows the field, and by the sixth you will know both what to buy and how much of it you need.
Concentrate runs from 29% to 89% protein by weight and typically lands near 70 to 80% at retail. What is not protein is lactose, milk fat, and moisture, which is why concentrate is cheaper, creamier, and harder on sensitive digestion.
Isolate is filtered past 90% on a dry basis, which strips out most of the lactose and nearly all of the fat. It costs more, mixes thinner, and is the form to choose if dairy sugar has caused you problems before.
Hydrolysate is isolate that has been enzymatically broken into shorter peptide chains. It absorbs faster and it tastes bitter, which is why hydrolysates carry heavier flavouring. For most people the absorption difference is not detectable in any outcome that matters.
Aim for 1 g or less of sugar per serving and total carbohydrate under 3 to 4 g. Anything above that is a mass gainer wearing a protein powder label.
Sugar hides behind a long list of names on ingredient panels: sucrose, high fructose corn syrup, fructose, dextrose, glucose, and lactose. A product can carry three of them and still look modest on any single line, because each appears separately in the ordering by weight.
Sugar alcohols, sorbitol, mannitol, maltitol, and xylitol, are only partially absorbed. What is not absorbed ferments in the large intestine, which is the mechanism behind the bloating and looseness people report from sweetened protein powders.
Artificial sweeteners such as sucralose and acesulfame potassium hold regulatory approval at the doses used. The relevant question is not whether one serving is safe, it is whether you want to consume them daily for years, and that is a decision rather than a fact.
Stevia leaf extract and monk fruit are the common natural options. Both are zero sugar, and both leave an aftertaste that a proportion of people cannot get past.
A true isolate is close to zero on both, because the filtration that removes lactose removes milk fat with it, and cholesterol travels with the fat.
More than 2 g of fat per serving tells you that you are holding a concentrate or a blend, regardless of what the front of the jar claims. This is a useful cross-check against the protein-by-weight calculation.
The FDA requires that the major food allergens be declared on the label, and gluten is not among them. Its absence from an allergen statement therefore tells you nothing at all.
The claim has to be explicit. Whey itself contains no gluten, but flavouring systems, added grains, and shared manufacturing lines can introduce it, which is why an explicit gluten free claim is the only version worth relying on.
Between 0.8 and 1.5 grams per pound of bodyweight per day, depending on training load and goal. Sedentary adults sit at the bottom. People in a calorie deficit, people training hard, and older adults defending muscle mass sit at the top.
Protein is not stored the way carbohydrate and fat are, so what counts is daily intake rather than any single meal. The calculator below does the arithmetic and shows how many ProEnergy servings would cover a share of your target.
Biological value measures the proportion of absorbed nitrogen the body retains. Whey scores around 104 on that scale and soy around 74, with whole egg set at 100 as the original reference.
The gap comes down to amino acid profile. Soy’s limiting amino acid is methionine, meaning methionine runs out before the other essential amino acids do and caps how much of the protein can be used for tissue synthesis. Whey has no such limitation and carries more leucine, which is the amino acid most closely associated with triggering muscle protein synthesis.
20 g of protein in a 25 g scoop, zero sugar, stevia sweetened, grass fed, and explicitly gluten free.