Skim milk is too high in calories.
Just saying that … leaves me shaking my head.
Think of this as round 2, of this prior post below, that briefly profiled burgers, eggs, and beans as protein sources. This time around, it’s off-the-shelf animal-based protein supplements.
Less-than-meat, in a good way, is how I look at this.
Post #2005: 55 pounds and still a loser. Maybe boring is good.
Protein supplements, digested
The narrative below refers to the table above. I make no claim that this reflects all the available options. This is a table of the animal-based substances I am currently using to supplement the protein in my diet. Here’s how I see it:
Nonfat powdered milk (and by inference, skim milk in general) has a high sugar content. It does not taste sweet because lactose is not a particularly sweet sugar, but a glass of milk has about half as much sugar as a glass of Coke. Within the set of options considered here, nonfat milk is the high-calorie option for meeting daily protein needs.
Source: Wikipedia.
Nonfat yogurt is not shown, mostly because nearly all commercial yogurt is incompletely fermented and so contains a significant but varying residue of unfermented lactose. To me, this makes grocery-store nonfat yogurt sort of skim-milk-lite. With probiotics!
Even a cursory glance within your grocer’s dairy case will show significant variations in the protein:carbohydrate ratio in nonfat yogurt. Safeway store brand is about 7:16, while a random name-brand nonfat Greek yogurt was just about the reverse, 18:5.
Whey protein from Costco is the hands-down winner for cost. But it comes with a drawback of some non-zero cholesterol (why, I am not sure).
The cheap stuff from Costco is outstandingly convenient to use. In no small part, that’s because it has an emulsifier (organic sunflower lecethin), as well as artificial sweetener sucralose (Splenda), along with some of the usual cast of conditioners and such found in junk food (e.g., guar gum, xanthan gum).
By contrast, whey protein isolate is whey protein that has gone through some additional processing, resulting in nearly-chemically-pure protein. In particular, there’s only a trace amount of cholesterol. It’s expensive in this context. (But note that, per pound of protein, it’s cheaper than lean ground beef, per prior post.) It’s reasonably convenient to use. If you buy it plain, then you need to flavor it yourself, e.g., I put it in my coffee, taking care not to curdle the protein.
Then there’s good old pasteurized egg whites. I’m still not quite sure what (chemically) is in egg whites, but for all intents and purposes, it’s a protein that is different from whey. And nothing else that matters, I think. It’s as pure as protein gets. (I waffle because I can’t get the nutrition label on my carton of egg whites to “add up” to listed total calories, but I guess that’s plausibly due to rounding.) The downside is that egg whites are inconvenient to use because you have to cook them. (And, to be fair, egg-white omelets, while clearly somewhere in the omelet family tree, are not typically discussed in polite company.)
Conclusion
If you ignore the side-effects, it’s all good.
At the end of the day, the powders (whey protein and whey protein isolate) are so convenient that, if I have no qualms about their purity or processing, it’s tough to see a downside.
(Plus or minus concerns about artificial sweeteners, flavors, colors, (and to a degree, cholesterol) for the cheap stuff from Costco. But not for the unflavored whey protein isolate.)
Either way, a shot of that stuff, in your morning coffee — with care, so you don’t curdle the protein — gives you one-fourth of a 100-gram-a-day protein requirement. That’s a nice head-start on the day, assuming you already drink coffee in the morning. For something around 100 calories to maybe 130 calories.
For in-coffee use, two approaches work for me, to avoid curdling the whey protein or whey protein isolate. I start by mixing the powder with a small amount of water, in the cup, to form a smooth-ish slurry. Smushing globs with the back of the spoon is optional but encouraged. Then, for instant coffee, fill with water, microwave, then add instant coffee and stir. For brewed coffee, stir constantly as you slowly pour the hot brewed coffee into the protein/water mix. In either case, the goal is not to curdle the protein. Because that’s a mess — yet, technically speaking, still edible. Eating a couple of coagulated protein-coffees is great motivation for getting this right.
At this point, I find that egg whites are relegated to a backup position. Just something to change up the amino acid mix of the usual protein supplement. If nothing else, something to cut down on the amount of whey-based supplement consumed.
