Next up in the search for vegetarian replacements for animal-based protein powder is whey. If you've ever read an article, book or blog post about the "best protein supplement for athletes in training" you were probably told that whey is the gold standard. It's been studied extensively and repeatedly shown to be the most effective at helping people in training build strength and grow their muscles.
For those of us who'd prefer to minimize the amount of cheese-and-butter-making byproducts, I decided to compute which mix of five vegetable protein sources would most closely mimic the amino acid profile of whey protein.
Again this time the list of possible ingredients was:
- Pea/gemma protein isolate
- Rice protein isolate
- Hemp protein isolate
- Potato protein isolate
- Sacha inchi protein isolate
The non-linear solver problem was setup in this MS Excel spreadsheet and the solver engine was run. The goal function was to minimize the sum of the squared differences per amino acid. This produced the following match:
The mixture that computed used was:
Please keep in mind that just because the amino acid profiles are similar, I am not going to claim that the two powders will have the same physiological effect. Feel free to experiment with your own custom mixes the next time you order.