Did you know that EAAs and BCAAs have calories?

Did you know your EAAs and BCAAs have calories and protein?

This can be confusing because of examples like you see here where Ghost lists little or no calories, while brands like Jay Cutlers generate list a more accurate 50 calories per scoop.

Ghost isn’t really doing anything wrong here, because due to an FDA exclusion, they are not required to list free amino acids as protein or calories. ¹

However, amino acids are the building blocks of protein, so when you drink EAAs or BCAAs you are still ingesting protein. In order to find out how many calories and protein your supplement provides, you can just add up the totals that the labels provide for the amino acids and consider that total as grams of protein.

Normally you would multiply grams of protein by 4 to get your calories, but free amino acids have a chemical nuance where they actually provide 17% less protein and calories than their total represents.² For example, if you had 100g of total amino acids that would normally be 400 calories if considered as normal protein, but will actually only provide you with 340 calories and 83 grams of protein.³

1. https://www.fda.gov/food/dietary-supplements-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/dietary-supplement-labeling-guide-chapter-iv-nutrition-labeling#4-12 ??
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652302539X ??
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5372920/ ??