The busier I get, the worse I buy

The kids go down around seven thirty. Somewhere near nine, after the dishwasher is loaded and before I have the discipline to stop looking at my phone, I make the same thing I’ve made most nights since September. Nonfat Greek yogurt in a bowl, a scoop of chocolate protein powder stirred through until it goes thick like soft serve, a small handful of chocolate chips on top. It is the most reliably good forty seconds of my day and it gets me to thirty or forty grams of protein before bed.

That bowl is the last thing in a day that started at five. I’m on the West Coast running an East Coast calendar, so the first call lands before anyone in my house is awake. Then drop-off, then a sales huddle, then whatever the labs need from me that day, then pickup, then the stretch between five and seven thirty that belongs entirely to a four-year-old and a one-year-old. Training goes wherever it fits. Lunch is frequently something I remember having skipped.

Protein powder exists in my kitchen because of those gaps. It isn’t a preference. It’s what happens when eating has to get decided in ninety seconds between two other things.

I’ve been telling people I make that parfait for the casein. Slow-digesting protein overnight, the thinking goes, so you’re not running on empty for eight hours.

I pulled all four containers off the shelf last week to write this, and I read the ingredient list on that bag properly for the first time in months.

There is no casein in it.

Whey protein concentrate, collagen, cocoa, butter powder, coconut milk powder, banana powder, sea salt, buttermilk powder, stevia, monk fruit, cordyceps, reishi. That’s the whole list. The slow-digesting casein in my bedtime parfait is coming from the Greek yogurt, the way it comes from all dairy protein, which runs about eighty percent casein. The powder is adding fast-absorbing whey on top of it.

The habit was fine. My explanation for the habit was wrong, and I’d said it out loud more than once.

So I did what I do for a living, to my own kitchen counter.

Every nutrition panel gives you grams of protein. You know this number. It’s the one on the front of the package in a big font.

Some panels carry a second number right beside it, a percent Daily Value, and that one is doing something completely different. Under federal labeling rules, when a brand makes a protein claim on a package, it has to print a quality-adjusted percentage on the back, calculated by multiplying the grams by PDCAAS, the protein digestibility corrected amino acid score, against a Daily Value of fifty grams.

PDCAAS is a quality score, and it gets set by the weakest essential amino acid in the product. If a protein runs short on one of the nine your body cannot manufacture itself, the whole score falls to match, because protein gets assembled from a complete set and a missing part stops the build.

So the grams tell you how much is in the tub. The percentage tells you how much of it your body can put to work. They sit two inches apart, and in fifteen years of reading these labels I have never once watched another person in an aisle look at the second one.

Here’s the part that took me a second pass to appreciate. That percentage only has to appear if the brand makes a protein claim in the first place.

A company that prints 25g PROTEIN on the front of the bag is legally obligated to show you on the back how much of that twenty-five actually counts.

The person most exposed to a misleading front panel is the person with the least time to read the back.

With an hour, you cook. You buy chicken and rice and you know exactly what you got. Powder is a shortcut, and the whole value of a shortcut is not having to think about it. So you pick it up, you read the big number, and you keep moving, because there’s a call in four minutes and a kid in the car.

Which means the busier I get, the more of my judgment I hand to whoever designed the package. I make that trade maybe forty times a week across groceries, vendors, software and candidates. Most of the time it costs me nothing. The bill arrives in the small fraction where the front was engineered precisely for someone moving at my speed.

Here’s what makes it tractable. Reading the back is about fifteen seconds, one time, per product you buy on repeat. You pay it once and it covers every purchase of that item after. That’s the only reason I think this is worth doing at all for somebody whose calendar looks like mine.

* Thorne prints no %DV because Thorne makes no protein claim. Whey isolate scores 1.0 on PDCAAS, so I’m treating all twenty-one grams as usable. That’s my inference from the protein source and not a number Thorne published, and the entire point of this issue is the difference between those two things.

Thrive collagen reads 0%. Not a low percentage. Zero. Thrive tells you why on their own bag, in a footnote: collagen peptides are not a complete protein as they lack the essential amino acid tryptophan. Look at their amino acid table and tryptophan is simply missing. Eighteen amino acids printed, and the one that would complete the set is absent.

Let me be careful here, because this is where people get loud. Zero percent is a statement about protein quality and nothing else. Collagen runs about ninety percent protein by weight, it’s the cheapest thing in this comparison by a wide margin, and I stir a scoop into my coffee most mornings. What I can tell you is what the label says. What I can’t tell you is whether it’s doing the things people take it for. It is not counting toward my protein target, and until last week I wasn’t being rigorous about that.

FlavCity reads 33%. Thirty-three percent of fifty grams is sixteen and a half usable grams out of the twenty-five on the label. Now look at the front of the bag, which says 25g PROTEIN and 10g COLLAGEN PER SERVING, phrasing that reads like thirty-five. The Nutrition Facts puts total protein at twenty-five, so the collagen sits inside that number rather than on top of it. Ten grams of a twenty-five gram serving is collagen, collagen scores zero, and the 33% is that arithmetic showing up in print.

Nobody lied to me. Both numbers on the front are true. The bag only required me to know that collagen counts as protein by the lab method and gets discounted as protein by the quality method, and that those two facts live on opposite sides of the package.

It’s also the only one here printing no amino acid profile at all. And the cordyceps and reishi sit last in the ingredient list, after the stevia and the monk fruit. Ingredient lists run in order of weight. I won’t tell you what those mushrooms do. I’ll tell you where they sit.

Sunwarrior reads 25%, which works out to twelve and a half usable grams, and the company prints the evidence for its own score. Methionine comes in at 193 milligrams, the lowest essential amino acid in the set and the known weak point of pea protein. That’s the number holding the percentage down, and they published it. The flag is the ingredient line, which reads Proprietary Protein Blend and contains organic pea protein, organic goji berry and organic hemp seed protein. Goji berry is not a meaningful protein source, and proprietary means you learn what’s in there without learning how much of each.

Thorne prints nothing in that column. At first that looked to me like the weakest disclosure of the four, and it’s the opposite. There’s no percentage because there’s no claim to trigger one. Turn the container to the front and there’s no gram count anywhere on it. The product name and the words dietary supplement, and that’s the entire pitch.

What they do print is the full amino acid profile, tryptophan at 0.6 grams and leucine at 2.2 grams, close to double the next highest on my shelf. Plus an NSF Certified for Sport mark, which means an outside lab opened a container and measured what came out against what the label claims. Nobody else here carries one. The other marks are real and they’re about religious certification, corporate structure, farming practice and manufacturing process, none of which is somebody testing the contents.

I paid sixty-five dollars for the Thorne and twenty-three for the collagen, and for most of this year I’d have told you the collagen was the better buy.

Ranked the ordinary way, by cost per labeled gram, that order nearly reverses: collagen at four and a half cents, Sunwarrior at eight point three, Thorne at ten point three, FlavCity at twelve. The cheapest protein in my kitchen delivers zero usable grams, and the sixty-five dollar tub I’d been feeling slightly guilty about is the best value in the house.

Nothing is getting thrown out. All four stay, all four get used this week, and what changed is what I think each one is for.

That last row is the change. For about a year I was quietly adding ten grams to my daily number every morning on the strength of a figure the bag itself scores at zero.

One more thing, said carefully, because this is the kind of claim I spend my professional life taking apart. On nights I have the parfait, I don’t find myself back in the kitchen at ten thirty. On nights I skip it, sometimes I do. That’s one person, no control group, with sleep and training and stress all moving at once. I can tell you what I noticed. I can’t tell you what caused it, and anyone who tells you otherwise about their own kitchen is selling something.

Go get the protein you keep in the house and turn it over.

Find the protein line. If there’s a percentage next to the grams, multiply it by fifty and you have the grams your body can use. Twenty-five at 33% is sixteen and a half. Seventeen at 25% is twelve and a half. Ten at 0% is ten grams of something that isn’t doing the job you bought it for.

If there’s no percentage, don’t panic and don’t assume the worst. Check the front of the container. If nobody made a claim, nobody owed you a number, and the quiet label is sometimes the better product.

Then divide what you paid by the usable grams in the whole container. I went about a year buying protein without once doing that, and I run laboratories for a living.

The habit transfers, which is the part I didn’t expect. Once you’ve run it on a protein tub you start running it on a vendor deck, and the question turns out to be identical both times. What did they choose to put on the front, and what did the rules make them print on the back?

Trust the front. Read the back.

A lot of this powder never sees a shaker bottle. It goes into cornbread, into granola, into Sunday pancakes, into banana bread the kids will actually eat.

Hit reply and I’ll send you the recipes.

And if this was useful, forward it to the person in your life who owns four tubs of protein powder and has never turned one over.

What’s one advantage you could compound from here?

Hit reply and tell me. I read everything, and what you send shapes what I write next.

— Austin

Austin Stevenson is CRO at ACT Global Lab Services and a co-founder of Vertosa.