Ever wondered just what whey protein does, and how it works? Watch on!

Our bodies are constantly breaking down and repairing. In fact people will often tout the impressive fact that in 7 years nearly every cell in your body will be replaced. While it has been determined that this isn’t really true, certain cells in your brain last your entire lifetime, it still really hammers in the importance of giving your body the raw materials to replace itself with. This is where the magic of Whey comes in.

Second to water, amino acids make up the most of your body, while water is the filler, amino acids are our structure.

Cells that make up your muscle tissue and organs are constantly being replaced and lost, creating a demand for new amino acids to take their place. If you engage in any type of training, you increase the breakdown rate even further. Staying alive and healthy means giving your body a constant supply of replacements through the food you eat. Especially if one of your goals is to add muscle mass, in that case you’ll want to take in not only a sufficient amount, but the optimal amount.

This is why getting all the amino acids we need in our diets is so important. Lucky for us scientists have determined the exact blend of amino acids we need our diet, and when they all show up in one food source, it even has a name, protein. Thats all a protein is, a blend of the aimo acids that are essential to humans. So essential to health in fact, its even been shown that if you aren’t getting enough protein in your diet, simply adding more will aid in fat loss.

In a 23 week study, bringing protein intake up from 12% of the diet to 23% was able to reduce fat mass by 2.8kg, thats 7 pounds…

A lot of the time proteins are found in complete food sources, which also contain the other two energy producing macronutrients…. fats and carbs.

The issue becomes, in todays world we are surounded with lots of carb and fat rich foods, both of which provide us energy, energy that will get stored as fat if not used. So with all the benefits of protein in mind, how do you increase JUST protein. Typically I would recommend just picking learner foods, but life happens and that isn’t always feasible. While it’s pretty tricky to find foods which are only protein, supplements can get very close.


Simply put, protein supplements try and be, just that protein, without the other two macronutrients (fat and carbs).

One of the most popular sources is whey.

Whey, is a byproduct of the cheese making process and one of the most popular types of protein supplement.

First identified by OLOF HAMMARSTEN, the renowned swedish biochemist, Whey protein is a component of milk and thus, a by product of the cheese making process.

Cheese makers figured out that if you take the excess water and concentrate it, you can make a powder that is up to 80% protein, while also containing immunogobulins which help keep you healthy, and a few carbs and fats. These are called whey protein concentrates.

Then researchers took it further, realizing that they could purify it and isolate the protein,

Two competing methods of purification developed.

One group of people felt that a combination of micro and ultrafiltration was the way to go, while another group felt that ion exchange was preferable. These Whey Protein Isolates are both very low in anything other than protein. In fact it is usually over 90% protein. You can buy both today, the primary difference is the filtration method allows slightly larger molecules, including the casein fragment caseino-glycomacropeptide through, which has some immune system benefits.

For labs which required an even purer form of protein, whey hydroisolate was developed, this is an even purer form of protein, up to 99%. However it is highly processed, so it costs more to buy, and has lost all of the immune boosting effects, it is also known for not tasting that great.

I’m gonna focus on Whey Isolates which are the most common type of whey protein.

So how do they stack up versus other protein sources?

For a long time the go to measure was the
Protein Efficiency Ratio. This hundred year old measure depended on feeding protein to baby rats, and then measuring their weight gain from a single gram of protein. Anything above 2.7 (the score of Caesin) was considered good, whey scored 3.2. But as time went on more and more issues arose due to the fact that humans and rats are different. Human milk actually performed poorly on the test, which makes sense considering while human milk contains just 8.5 g of ammino acids per litre, rat milk contains 86.9 grams, thats four times more than cows milk.