Active Low-Carber Forums - View Single Post - soy protein isolate & whey protein

Here's a good start:
Taken from The Weston A. Price Foundation--
http://www.westonaprice.org/modernfood/energybars.html

Quote:

CHEAP PROTEIN
The real boost for the bar business came with the advent of cheap soy and whey proteins that could be added to make a "high-protein" bar. Barry Sears' BioZone "Programmed Nutrition" bars were among the first of these, with several imitators following, including Balance Bars ("The Complete Nutritional Food Bar") and ZonePerfect Bars ("All Natural Nutrition Bars").

But there is nothing natural about the protein used in today's energy bars. Soy protein comes with an initial burden of phytic acid, enzyme inhibitors and isoflavones. More toxins are formed during high-temperature chemical processing, including nitrates, lysinalanine and MSG. Soy protein must be processed at very high temperatures to reduce levels of phytic acid and enzyme inhibitors, a process that over-denatures many of the proteins in soy, especially lysine, making them unavailable to the body.

Whey protein is inherently fragile and must be processed at low temperatures or its qualities as a protein are destroyed. That is why casein rather than whey protein is used in animal chow. When cheese, butter and cream were made on the farm, the whey and skim milk were given to the pigs and chickens. But today these products are made in factories far from the farms where they originated, so the industry has a "whey problem," solved by drying the skim milk and whey at high temperatures and putting the powders into energy drinks, body building powders and high-protein bars.

Other major ingredients include high fructose corn syrup (or concentrated fruit juices, which are high in fructose), an ingredient that has been shown to be worse for test animals than sugar. Other ingredients include "natural" fiber from oats, apples, soy and citrus. Sometimes maltodextrin is given as the fiber source. "Natural flavors" and piles of synthetic vitamins are thrown in so the bars can be called "complete."

On the plus side, the fat source in most energy bars is often palm, palm kernel or coconut oil. Barry Sears' original BioZone bars contained partially hydrogenated soybean oil—until he met up with Mary Enig at an Oil Chem conference where she reminded him about the problems with trans fats and wondered how he could promote bars containing trans fats as nutritious.