Did you know your EAAs and BCAAs have calories and protein?
This can be confusing because of examples like you see here where Ghost Amino lists little or no calories, while brands like Jay Cutler’s Generate EAA 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
References
- Human Foods Program. Dietary Supplement Labeling Guide: Chapter IV. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Published 2024. Accessed December 31, 2025. https://www.fda.gov/food/dietary-supplements-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/dietary-supplement-labeling-guide-chapter-iv-nutrition-labeling#4-12 ↩︎
- Hoffer LJ. How much protein do parenteral amino acid mixtures provide? The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2011;94(6):1396-1398. doi:https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.111.023390 ↩︎
- Hoffer LJ. Parenteral Nutrition: Amino Acids. Nutrients. 2017;9(3):257. doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/nu9030257 ↩︎
