All the powder but not all of the protein.

When it comes to building muscle and making great gains, an athlete must train accordingly. You have to lift weight, train consistently, and maintain a great diet. You can’t get swole off of bread and water alone. You have to eat a balanced diet that consists of a certain percentage of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Any of those eaten in the wrong percentages can vastly affect your gains.

The thing is about macronutrients is that depending on what you plan on doing, either losing body fat or bulking up, you may not get all you need from the foods you eat. In that case what is an athlete to do? Well, for a long time we thought that supplements were the way to go in order to get much needed macronutrients. One supplement in particular has been many athlete’s best friend: protein powder. Whether you just don’t have access to enough meat based protein or if you’re a vegetarian or vegan, protein powder has been the answer to many athlete’s macronutrient woes for many years.

It’s always been a helpful tool to help with maintaining or gaining muscle mass. But it seems like these days supplements are becoming less and less useful. Recently we’ve been learning that protein powder has been the packing far less grams of the good stuff than we once thought. For someone with so much riding on getting the adequate amount of protein, having fillers in powders can prove to be pretty detrimental to an athlete’s gains.

It would appear that the brand New Dawn Nutrition, Inc. is that latest in a slew of companies that have been accused in misrepresenting their products, specifically protein powders. For more info click here. There’s a lot of technical stuff in there – but what it boils down to is that the amount of protein tested in their products actually didn’t match what they claim to provide. With more and more companies being implicated in these allegations of representation, you have to wonder which products are legit and which are just selling a lie. In a sport that focuses so much importance on what exactly goes into your body – it’s a scary thought that a supplement so many bodybuilders rely on might be putting a bunch of crap into your body – and even worse, not giving you the protein that it promises.

Bodybuilding diets aren’t cheap either – so it would be pretty upsetting to find out a lot of us are throwing money down the drain.

What do you think about these filler allegations? Let us know in the comments and forums. Also, be sure to follow Generation Iron on Facebook and Twitter.

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