from teh AST web site
Q: My gym sells several brands of pre-made protein drinks. Companies call them RTDs. I can see where they could be very convenient. Is it a good idea to drink these?
A: Convenient? It would be real convenient to just get the water hose and fill up your gas tank when you need to instead of driving to a gas station half way across town. But that’s not smart and neither is wasting money on these pre-made drinks. I won’t even call them protein drinks because that would be like calling Jello a high protein food source.
Look, I’ll put this bluntly. Pre-made drinks or RTDs are pure junk. They absolutely suck. You’re wasting money and missing valuable muscle-growth opportunities when you drink this garbage.
Let me explain. Do you know how they make these? If you did, you wouldn’t drink them even if the companies paid you to.
Imagine this, take a pot of water and set it on the stove. Bring this pot of water to a raging boil. Take a very low-grade protein powder and add it to the boiling water. Stir it in and let it boil for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes of boiling, add some preservatives. Allow the liquid to cool slightly. Next, poor the scalding hot liquid into a plastic bottle. You’ll have to do this several times to find the right temperature so that the hot liquid does not melt the plastic bottle. Next, seal the bottle and let cool. After it’s cool, set in the storage shed in your backyard for a few months. After a few months take the bottle of liquid from your storage shed and put it in the refrigerator. When it cools, enjoy.
Crazy huh? What do you think this does to quality of the protein? What do you think this does to the protein's ability to deliver a muscle building effect? I’ll tell you, it destroys it. As bad as the quality of the protein was to begin with, it is virtually useless now.
Can you imagine boiling your protein shake before you drink it? That’s the process these pre-made drinks go through when they are produced. I don’t care how great the ads claim these drinks are, bottom line is, the very process in which they are made destroys the proteins effectiveness. Heat destroys delicate whey proteins. Therefore, not only are you paying a premium for this so-called convenience, but you are paying this premium for a drastically damaged and virtually worthless protein.
Be smart. Don’t waste your time with these worthless drinks. Leave them to weekend want-to-bes and those that just pretend they train hard. That’s who these companies make them for any way.