Chocolate Milk?
Over my many years as an Austin personal trainer, I’ve written many blog posts and essays covering nutrition, supplements, workout theories, etc. There have been any number of the latest, and greatest products as well as, of course, “revolutionary” fitness ideas and methodologies that have come down the pike, that ultimately fall by the wayside. One such thing was the idea that chocolate milk was a superior post workout drink to virtually everything else during that crucial anabolic window.
The argument was made that if you consume roughly 4 grams of carbohydrates per every 1 gram of protein, it will help the muscles recover quicker as the sugar gets turned into glycogen during the digestive process. Regular milk contains some sugar naturally, called lactose. Chocolate milk, or even strawberry flavored milk, has the same lactose concentration as regular milk, but because of the flavoring, it contains that much more sugar. The secret, they said, was not in the chocolate, but rather in the sugar.
Further arguments were made that the sugars created an insulin spike, which further aided the sugar to glycogen conversion. Considering that regular milk contains 13 grams of sugar per cup, that’s a lot of potential insulin spiking and glycogen converting.
The problem with all of this revolutionary thinking, besides the fact that a lot of people are lactose intolerant to some degree, and will suffer anywhere from moderate, to severe gastrointestinal problems from it’s ingestion, is the copious amounts of sugar. That’s simply too much sugar for anyone, regardless of their digestive capabilities. Considering that milk has merely 8 grams of protein per cup, you’re going to have drink quite a bit of chocolate milk to get enough protein, post workout, or otherwise.
If we use the example of a 200 pound male athlete needing to consume a post workout drink, depending upon the sport, etc, he is going to need a minimum of 35 grams, but likely closer to 45 or 50 grams of protein. Simple math tells us that equates to 5 or 6 chips of chocolate milk. If regular milk has 13 grams of sugar, it’s safe to say that, depending upon the mixture, chocolate milk has exponentially more. Even if we do a conservative computation, and said the chocolate milk had 20 grams of sugar per cup, that’s still an overall ingestion of 100 to 120 grams of sugar! If we consider that a cup is 8 ounces, the aforementioned athlete will be consuming 40 to 48 ounces of chocolate milk post workout in order to satisfy his protein requirements. That’s a lot of chocolate milk, by even the most enthusiastic chocolate milk aficionados, and if you ask me, a big stomach ache. I can’t imagine being able to hold it down, in fact.
All of the professional athletes I work with drink protein shakes immediately after they complete their workouts. How much protein they consume, is a very individual thing, as they vary in size as well sport. One underlying consistency, however, is that we mix the milk based protein powder, known as whey protein, with water in order to minimize the sugars. Carbohydrates don’t build muscles. Protein does. Carbs are simply fuel, and like anything else, some are naturally better than others. Lactose, cocoa, and artificially sweetened strawberry syrup, aren’t very high up on the list of things that I prescribe my personal training clients to supplement with.
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Andy
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