Muscle math ping.
It’s important to ingest protein soon after a workout session (within a half hour). When I was weight-training, I drank a quart of skim milk and ate a can of tuna fish within a half hour of every weight-lifting session. The muscle gain was amazing.
That said, your body can only process so much of any nutrient you ingest. It excretes the rest. I never went with protein powders or any of those supplements.
Thanks. This article goes to my 20-y-o son, just back from Iraq!
There are so many variables involved that making a blanket statement of fact is dubious, at best.
Age is a major factor, as well as digestion, overall nutrition, metabolic differences, gastrointestinal flora, type and quantity of exercise, status of the liver and kidneys, and any other supplements being taken.
In other words, there are so many variables that it is subjective. If it works for you, great. If it doesn’t, don’t bother.
“Wasting money...”
Funny, they never mention that the protein in a good protein powder is higher-quality and CHEAPER than the protein you get at the grocery store by buying milk, eggs, poultry, beef, etc.
I remember decades ago, the training coach instructing us to eat regular meals plus had us set our alarm clocks for 2:00 am when we were to get up and eat a large can of pork and beans, then go back to sleep.
Back in the days before steroids, his regimen including lots of dead weight lifting would put about 30 pounds on his linemen.
Seriously, it smells like a combination of large pharmaceutical companies and the Obama administration combining to demonize an industry.
The main problem is not lack of efficacy per se but rather the lack of expertise to make sure an individual has a condition which a particular supplement might help.
That, and the fact that a lot of the raw materials and manufacturing is done in China. (See also melamine in dog food, dry wall H2S, cadmium in children's jewelry, Toyota's gas pedals (CTS is in China). Can supplements be far behind?)
I would like to see one of these "debunking" sites or studies, instead of "scattershot" criticism leading to the impression that all nutritional supplementation is the work of charlatans preying on sheep, show the peer-reviewed studies detailing what each supplement is good *for*, and then explaining whether or not the negative studies used a large enough cohort, sufficient dose, or long enough duration to test the claims actually made by the proponents, or were a slap-dash job designed to discredit them with the imprimatur of "science"...
Cheers!