drink wholesome is the best non artificial protein powder.
What are the artificial ingredients in protein powder?
When most people think of artificial ingredients in protein powder, they think of artificial sweeteners like sucralose. Although sweeteners are the most common artificial ingredients in protein powder, they are not the only ones. Keep reading to learn more about the ingredients in your protein powder.
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), artificial ingredients cannot be found in nature and must be synthetically produced. This definition seems straightforward, but is complicated by the fact that many artificial ingredients are molecularly identical to natural ingredients. Vitamin C (ascorbic acid), for example, may be derived from an orange or produced in a laboratory, and there is no way of knowing just by looking at the ingredient list. Natural ingredients, on the other hand, can be found in nature or derived from natural sources according to the FDA. Although seemingly straightforward, this definition gets blurry too. Let us use soy lecithin, a common ingredient in protein powder, as an example of why this is so.
The FDA considers soy lecithin to be a natural ingredient because it comes from soybeans, but if you know anything about lecithin, you know that it looks nothing (physically or chemically) like a soybean. To make soy lecithin, soybean oil is extracted from raw soybeans using a chemical solvent (usually hexane). The solvent is then boiled off, leaving behind lecithins (a mixture of fats). Next, the lecithins are hydrated to form a sludge, which is then subjected to a process called desliming (yes, that is a technical term), in which the lecithins are placed in a centrifuge. During desliming, the lecithins are often treated with hydrogen peroxide to make them light in color. The last step this process is drying, at which time calcium may be added to make the final product more viscous.
Now that you know how soy lecithin is made, how can you possibly say that both soybeans and soy lecithin are natural? It makes no sense. One looks like a plant, and the other looks like a science experiment.
Another great example of the ambiguity of FDA language is the term ‘natural flavor.’ A natural flavor is more or less a catch-all term for everything that a manufacturer would rather not spell out on the ingredient list. While food manufacturers are required to disclose their ingredients, natural flavor manufacturers are not. They can add solvents, preservatives, emulsifiers, carriers, and other additives to a flavor that qualifies as ‘natural’ under current regulations. The FDA should therefore reconsider what it defines as natural because the current language is way too ambiguous, allowing for deceptive manufacturing practices.
Here is the FDA definition of ‘natural flavor’:
The term natural flavor or natural flavoring means the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.
Is it just me, or does this definition ^ scream UNNATURAL! As you might imagine, many flavors, although technically ‘natural’ by FDA standards, are far removed from anything that you can find in nature. This might be somewhat presumptuous of me, but I am going to say that most of the ingredients in your average protein powder are artificial. Take a look at the two ingredient lists below: