Advanced Amino Powder Review: Eight Amino Acids, Not Nine

Per one 9 g scoop, 30 servings per container: 25 calories, and a proprietary blend totalling 5 g containing L-leucine, L-valine, L-isoleucine, L-lysine HCl, L-phenylalanine, L-threonine, L-methionine and L-tryptophan. No individual amount is given for any of the eight. Other ingredients are mixed berry and natural flavours, malic acid, citric acid, Mediterranean sea salt, rebaudioside A from stevia leaf, and monk fruit extract. The arithmetic worth doing is that 5 g of a 9 g scoop is amino acids, so a little under half of what you are scooping is something else.

Histidine. The eight on the label are the classical set: a 1987 review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition states that in healthy adult humans eight amino acids — isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan and valine — were shown classically by nitrogen balance studies to be indispensable, and the same paper then reviews the subsequent studies that classified histidine as indispensable too. Modern scoring patterns treat histidine as one of the indispensable amino acids. This product contains the earlier eight, not the nine.

It depends entirely on what you are asking the product to do, and this page will not overstate it. Histidine is present in ordinary dietary protein, so somebody eating a mixed diet is not going without it because a supplement omits it. The point is narrower and it is about the claim rather than the risk: a product sold on the premise that it supplies what your body needs to build protein, at 99% efficiency, is supplying eight of the nine. If the pitch were about efficiency you would expect the set to be complete.

We cannot tell you, because the product page does not say where the numbers come from. The chart places Advanced Amino Powder at 99%, whole eggs at 48%, meat, poultry and fish at 32%, whey, soy and nuts at 18% and BCAAs at 1%, with the remainder in each case labelled converted to sugars or fats. Those figures do not correspond to PDCAAS or DIAAS, which are the two internationally used frameworks for scoring protein quality. A 2017 British Journal of Nutrition study measuring both found that the standardised ileal digestibility of most indispensable amino acids in whey protein isolate and whey protein concentrate was significantly greater than in soya protein isolate, soya flour and wheat — which is the opposite direction to a chart that groups whey with soy and nuts at 18%. An uncited chart is not evidence, whichever way it points.

Yes, and it is worth noting because the same company does not always do this. Advanced Memory Formula, from Advanced Bionutritionals, quantifies every active ingredient on its panel. Here, eight amino acids are pooled into a single 5 g figure. That means you cannot tell how much leucine you are getting, which matters more than usual with amino acids because the ratios are the entire subject of the research literature.

On the label rather than on the chart: a 9 g scoop supplies 5 g of free amino acids at 25 calories. A typical whey serving supplies substantially more protein by weight at a higher calorie cost. Whether free amino acids are preferable to intact protein is a real question with a real literature, and it is not one an uncited bar chart settles. What this page can tell you is what is in the tub and what the label does and does not disclose.

The company lists it from $33.25 per container at the multi-container price, for 30 servings, so roughly $1.11 a day. Per gram of amino acid that is a premium price, which is defensible if free-form amino acids are what you specifically want and less defensible if you are paying it because of the 99% figure.

If you want free-form essential amino acids in a flavoured drink and you are comfortable not knowing the individual amounts, this is one of those, at a premium price, missing histidine. If you are buying because of the Protein Utilization Chart, you are buying on the strength of numbers the seller has not sourced, and that is the part of this review worth carrying away. Anyone with kidney disease or on a protein-restricted diet should not add an amino acid supplement without medical advice.