“Protein Spiking,” or “Amino Spiking,” has recently become a common deceptive practice throughout the sports supplements industry. In efforts to combat declining profits due to rising raw protein costs, companies are slashing the amount of true, whole protein within their products and replacing with cheap, free-form amino acids such as taurine, glycine, alanine, etc... They get away with this because they exploit a testing loophole whereby using these nitrogen rich amino acids, they fool the benchmark lab tests for protein content. Functionally, this test relies on and measures nitrogen content to determine the amount of protein within a given sample; therefore, deceptively nitrogen-rich free form amino acids will not only register as whole protein gram for gram, but they register as far more protein than this allowing companies to use even LESS protein in their products. They mask these modifications by masquerading like they are adding extra amino acids, when in fact, they are substituting them for the whole protein you are paying for.