If these claims sound familiar then you need to read the rest of this article and discover why wasting $50+ per month on protein foods and supplements may be doing NOTHING to help you pack on extra muscle.
I’m not saying this to throw mud at the supplement industry. I’m revealing this information to protect you from becoming obsessive compulsive about Protein in the hopes that it will build you more muscle. I’m trying to take the blinders off your eyes and reveal what’s REALLY going on behind the scenes. Here’s some proof of just how obsessed we’ve become with protein.
I recently decided to browse around a popular forum and type in the word "protein" to see just how many people were talking about protein powders. And I found one post in particular which literally dropped my jaw. Turns out, someone started a thread asking the other members what they thought was the "best" protein powder. And as of early May 2009 – there were 6,632 posts in that 1 thread alone! It also had 792,655 page views, which shows just how big of a topic protein really is in the bodybuilding world. Type "protein powder" into Google and you get 129,000,000 hits. That means there are 129,000,000 websites out there talking about protein.
That’s a lot of protein talk! ? And I’m convinced it is all leading to a form of Obsessive Compulsive Eating called Protein Guilt ?
Have you ever gone out to eat and tried to base your order on whether or not it had enough protein? Ever wake up and immediately eat breakfast to make sure you introduced protein back into your body after the long night of sleep? Ever spend extra money at the store because you wanted to make sure you had protein with each meal? Do you spend hours of your life each week cooking food and putting it in plastic containers, carrying it around with you so you could make sure you have protein every 3 hours? If you said yes to ANY of those…you are suffering from protein guilt.
I was the person spending hundreds of dollars on protein foods and supplements each month, buying extra meat at the grocery store, eating "slow-release" protein at night before bed, and worrying myself sick if I didn’t get my "protein-fix" every 3 hours.
I can still remember the time I first realized that protein may not be the iron-clad muscle builder it was made out to be. It was during a very exclusive dinner in Glasgow Scotland. I’d just put the finishing touches on a new research contract examining the muscle-building and ergogenic (performance enhancing) effects of a new supplement. During the closing comments of the dinner, protein came up. I had made a suggestion that adding protein to the new formula would increase the muscle building effects which in turn would make it an easier sell. The lead scientist looked at me and said (in a sarcastic manner):
As soon as I heard this I realized they understood and knew something about protein and muscle building that I didn’t. I realized I was missing some vital information about the connection between protein and building muscle. After all, everything I’d ever read in fitness books and magazines suggested that protein was THE KEY to building muscle. I felt as though I was right back to square one, a naïve kid going to the gym and learning about muscle building nutrition for the first time all over again. The concept of ‘belief’ has no place in a conversation about known scientific facts.
Simply put – if a scientist needed to caudle my feelings of belief about consuming protein then they also recognized that I simply had not done enough research to bring a sound scientific argument to this dinner table. Simply put, they were just entertaining me. Obviously I was confused and a little embarr ed. Everything I’d ever heard from fitness experts said protein was the key to building muscle, yet my fellow research scientists who’ve spent their entire life studying the scientifically proven effects of protein were suggesting that protein wasn’t all it was hyped up to be.
I’ll admit – I honestly wanted to prove my colleagues wrong. I wanted to prove to them that protein WAS the key to building muscle. Yet I was discovering that it simply wasn’t.
On one side I didn’t want to give up the belief I already had about protein, while the other side wanted to figure out the truth about protein. After all, I was spending over 220 dollars on protein EVERY month already so I figured at the very least; I could save myself a lot of money.
Eventually the rational side of my brain… 
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