By: Scott Welch

The most disgusting thing I’ve learned about supplements in a while took place at this year’s SupplySide West conference. The topic of discussion was “how amino acids were made”. Now I’ve always believed that manufacturers just took protein powder, hydrolyzed it and then added extra enzymes to cleave the residue into free-form amino acids. Well I stopped by the AJINOMOTO booth (who are based in Japan and are one of the largest supplier of amino acids in the world), and spoke with sales manager Mike Tesch who told me something shocking! He said that many chinese manufacturing companies make amino acids by taking human hair and bird feathers (yes, bird feathers) and treat them with an acid that breaks them down into amino acids! Talk about YUUUUK! What’s worse is that he said a great number of amino acid supplements are made by this method.