If you’ve ever tested a protein powder or been involved in the manufacturing process, you’ll likely know the terms “as is” and “dry basis”. When you look at the nutrition profile of something like a protein powder or even other protein-based supplements, from our knowledge, it’s always “as is”. That is plain and simple the product as is, or at least theoretically, what you would get by scooping it right out of the tub.
The other form, “dry basis”, is what you get without any presence of moisture, which, as you can imagine, leads to leaner macros in something like a protein powder because the serving is lighter, but the nutrition remains. As mentioned though, it’s not necessarily what you get when you crack open a tub and throw a scoop or two in your shaker bottle.
We’ve done some testing in the past, and as an example, we had a supplement years ago that when dried, the serving downsized by 5.35%. If you apply something like that to a 32g serving with 25g of protein, that would get you 25g of protein from about 30.29g of powder. While that doesn’t sound like much, if you were going off a dry basis and measured that 30.29g exactly; because the powder is “as is”, you will potentially only get 23.66g of protein.
We prefer to know the amount we need to get the 25g or how ever much protein it is, as “dry basis” is not what we’d be putting in our shaker bottles. The only reason we bring this up is that a reader reached out and mentioned there are two protein powders in Canada that have a dry basis weight for their serving size in Perfect Sports Diesel and AllMax Nutrition’s isolate-based Isoflex.
This isn’t a knock on either supplement by any means because they each say on their label that the serving weight is “dry basis” not “as is”, but it’s not common and not something we’ve ever seen. We felt it was necessary to highlight this in case some people were using those products and were unaware or didn’t know what dry basis is. It would be helpful to have both “dry basis” and “as is” serving sizes on the label; either way, it’s something worth knowing when it comes to protein supplements in general.
