Do You NEED To Take A Protein Shake?

Are you a high performance athlete, with extremely high nutritional demands? If not then the answer is probably not.

Protein and meal replacement shakes originally were designed to help athletes reach their nutritional goals when standard nutrition would prove to extremely difficult to achieve.

For instance some athlete have demands in excess of 5000 calories a day and the sheer volume of food that would need to be consumed is not only expensive, but also an extremely unpleasant experience as well.

All good nutritionists and dieticians would recommend Food in favour of shakes, and that shakes came about for those extreme cases when, it was either impractical or near impossible to meet certain goals effectively.

This was due to whey protein shakes, providing a fast and quickly digestible source of protein, to help athletes get the protein in when they need them to help enhance muscle repair and recovery times.

The average person doesn't need protein / meal replacement shakes and in fact they can to a certain degree be detrimental to your actual goals.

Yes a shake can seem highly convenient, they are quick and easy to make and in theory allow us to meet certain nutrition goals with relative ease, but there is a significant flaw in this approach.


your stomach is a muscle! give it a workout!

your stomach is a muscle! give it a workout!

In fact all our organs are a type of muscle known as “smooth” muscle and digesting food burns calories, and helps maintain a healthy metabolic rate (the speed at which your body burns calories).

Eating solid food will take around 2 hours to pass through your stomach, whereas a shake which is liquid based will pass through in around 30 minutes. So ask yourself the question, which one is burning more calories in digestion and keeping your metabolism where is should be? The solid food of course!

The liquid one though it may have the same equivalent calories, will have used LESS energy in digestion, which in turn can affect your metabolic rate, slowing it down, meaning you should need fewer calories, and causing your body to become catabolic consuming muscle instead of fat to access energy reserves.

People often notice rapid weight loss on shakes, but this is a “false achievement” because as liquid has lubricated your intestines, the food stored in there (upto 4lbs at a time) will move through it much easier and be evacuated faster, allowing you to drop several lbs extremely quickly. This is usually accompanied by a low carb diet, which enhances this by tricking the body into losing water weight as well, (not fat).

“So i shouldn't take protein/ meal replacement shakes?”

Unless you're a high end athlete you should probably steer clear of meal replacement shakes, in general it is unlikely you're calorie requirement would be high enough to warrant one. Protein shakes maybe but only AFTER a workout and this is only because you're body is primed at that point to receive the protein.

The one caveat to all this however is if you find yourself desperately short of protein in your diet, you can use the protein powder that is used to make the shake, to add it to other foods that maybe used in baking as an additive or even to you're porridge oats or “PROATS” as the are popularly called once you add protein powder to porridge.

This can ensure that you are getting the protein that you need, whilst also making sure you are continuing to eat solid food! Achieving the best of both worlds.

Remember protein shakes were designed only to be a SUPPLEMENT to a healthy diet, never a replacement, and the “replacement” should only be really for athletes with extreme nutrient requirements.

How the Body Uses Carbohydrates, Proteins, and Fats

The human body is exceptionally clever machine that will make do with whatever type of foods are available to it. The mere fact we can survive on a variety of diets has been a vital tool for a species that evolved under conditions where food sources were scarce and unpredictable. Imagine a world where you had to depend on successfully hunting a woolly mammoth, discovering the carcass of a previous predators kill or finding berry bush for survive and you have the world our ancestors evolved in!

Today, for many of us, calories are mostly cheap and plentiful, and in reality probably too easily available. Understanding what the basic macronutrients have to offer can help us make better choices when it comes to structuring our own diets.

With every bite of food we eat, each portion of nutrition starts to be broken down for use by the body and so our bodies metabolism gets to work. A series of chemical reactions begins, that transforms food into components that can be used for the body's basic processes. These being Proteins, carbohydrates, and fats travel through various sets of metabolic routes that are specific to each major nutrient.

Basically if all three nutrients are available in your diet, then carbohydrates and fats will be used primarily for energy while proteins provide the raw materials for making hormones, muscle, and other essential biological equipment.

Think carbs and fats = fuel, protein = bodies building blocks.


Proteins in food are broken down into pieces (called amino acids) that are then used to build new proteins with specific functions, such as allowing communication between different cells, or transporting biological molecules from here to there. When there is a shortage of fats or carbohydrates, proteins can also yield energy. It really is the bodies swiss army knife that can do it all.


Fats typically provide more than half of the body's energy needs. Fat from food is broken down into fatty acids, which can travel in the blood and be captured by hungry cells. Fatty acids that aren't needed right away are packaged in bundles called triglycerides and stored in fat cells, which have unlimited capacity.


Carbohydrates, on the other hand, can only be stored in limited quantities, so the body is eager to use them for energy. We can only store a day or two of carbs, with in the muscles before they are stored as fats. The carbohydrates in food are digested into small molecules known as glucose or a sugar that is easily converted to glucose, (like fructose or lactose), that can be absorbed through the small intestine's walls. After a quick stop in the liver, glucose enters the circulatory system, causing blood glucose levels to rise. The body's cells hoover up this mealtime glut of glucose more readily than fat.

Once the cells are full of glucose, the liver stores some of the excess for distribution between meals should blood glucose levels start to fall below a certain level. If there is leftover glucose beyond what the liver can hold, it can be turned into fat for long-term storage so none is wasted (fat). When carbohydrates are scarce, the body runs mainly on fats. If energy needs exceed those provided by fats in the diet, the body must liquidate some of its fat tissue for energy (achieved through creating caloric deficit).

While these fats are a welcome source of energy for most of the body, a few types of cells, such as brain cells, have special needs. These cells could easily run on glucose from the diet, but they can't run on fatty acids directly. So under low-carbohydrate conditions, these cells need the body to make fat-like molecules called ketones. This is why a very low carbohydrate diet is often referred to  as a "ketogenic." Ketone bodies could on their own provide enough energy for the parts of the body that can't metabolize fatty acids, but some tissues still require at least some glucose, which isn't normally made from fat. Instead, glucose can be made in the liver and kidneys using protein from elsewhere in the body. But take care: If not enough protein is provided by the diet, the body starts chewing on muscle cells.