As an athlete a big question that comes in our mind is, should I take protein shakes or should I just keep myself to natural food.
VS It is easy to fall into the commercials where you see huge men with incredible muscles holding protein shakes. Many thinks that if they start to take protein they will be huge and muscular but I am sorry to let you down, that is the biggest NO! Protein is just a source our body uses to feed our muscles when they are working out or healing. This means that if protein is going to have a huge effect on you, than you have to be working out like an ANIMAL at the gym.
Unfortunately many believe that protein shake is the same as steroids and that is a funny thing to say because these two things don’t have anything common. Steroids are fake male hormones that some stupid people take to become “bigger”, but I am not going in to this topic so much in this post.
The advantages of taking protein shakes are Time, Money and less effort. Compare to cook a meal, shaking a protein shake takes no time. Money wise a pound meat costs around $6 in New York and about 6 ounces lean meat gives about 50 grams protein and 500 calories. But a protein shake costs $40 for 5lb at GNC and in every servings it about 25 grams protein and every 5lb covers at least 75 servings and only has 125 calories per servings. You do the math and you see that the shake will save you money. Like I described before about shaking the shake, it takes less effort to do it compare to cook.
But we should not forget that protein shakes should not substitute real food! Our body is made to eat real food and digest real food or else we will have some real issues with our intestines.
So to the main question, should I eat food or take the protein shake? If you are working out a lot and with “a lot” I mean at least once or twice per day then I recommend you to take protein shake additional to your meals. But remember that you need to break down your muscles to gain anything and that’s where protein comes and play a big game.
