A guide to removing artificial sweeteners from your protein shakes!

This article is a small guide that will teach you how to remove artificial sweeteners from your nutrition, especially if your diet relies on protein shakes.

Our appearance, performance (physical and cognitive), social status and our mental and spiritual state all depend on our nutrition. And since we tend to live in a fast paced society bombarded by information, we often find ourselves unable to distinguish between good and bad choices and we also tend to rely on supplementation in order to meet our daily nutritional needs.

Protein shakes are awesome!

For many busy people who work out, protein shakes are a very fast and convenient way to get some good nutrition without having to resort to unhealthy options.

I myself used to carry around small single use containers with protein powder so that if I happen to find myself without any proper nutritional resources with the only choices being snacks in a vending machine, I just pour some water over my powder and presto… I have “food”.

The only problem with protein powders however, (other than the fact that it is dried food without any enzymes, fiber or other micronutrients, minerals and vitamins) is that they are full of unhealthy additives such as artificial sweeteners. This stuff is dangerous and can be found literally everywhere as I have explained in an earlier article.

In the past year, I managed to completely remove them from my nutrition and I strongly advise you to do the same if you want to get or stay healthy. The path was not easy, mostly because it is not easy to find good quality, flavorless protein especially in Europe where I live. (While it is easier to order unflavored protein when you live in the States or Canada.)

Here are the steps I took in order to remove aspartame and all other artificial ingredients from my diet:

Step 1: Get some flavorless protein

This is obvious but there is a huge problem. Have you ever tried protein powder without taste? It tastes like dirt.

Now you know why they have to put all those nasty and artificial stuff in your protein.

Protein by nature does taste like dirt. Take meat for example. Have you eaten 0% fat meat? Well it tastes like nothing. It is the fat that gives meat (and other foods) its lovely flavor.

Taste is one of the most important senses in our lives for a variety of reasons, the most important ones being preparing your system for food intake and raising dopamine and serotonin levels. So you need to be mentally prepared for the tasteless protein challenge because believe me, a tasteless shake will be like drinking liquid chalk. This is where your mental power kicks in. How badly do you want it?

This also helps you keep protein powders at a minimum as it is always best to get your nutrients from real foods like meat, fish, eggs and chicken.

Step 2: Look for different types of protein

One of the biggest challenges I faced was the lack of variety in my protein powders. And when I did find something different, the price tag was really high and out of my budget.

WHEY

The most famous type is the whey protein. I was happy and lucky enough to have found a whey isolate.

The other types of flavorless proteins included egg, pea, rice and hemp.

EGG

Egg is one of the strongest proteins with high biological value. Unfortunately, when mixed with water, this had the consistency of sperm (no joke). So having my egg protein shake was not fun at all.

PLANT-BASED PROTEINS