Whey protein intake

It's totally healthy. I wouldn't go over 50g in a single serving, personally. While the most important thing is get your total protein in during the whole day, there may be some benefit to spacing it out, so I'll have a scoop in the morning and night rather than say two scoops in one go.

If you find you have digestive issues, try whey isolate instead of regular whey. It's more expensive though. And if you still have issues, you'll have to try vegan options.

As for the brand, it doesn't really matter. If it has at least 70% calories from protein and it's about $7-$8 per pound and from a brand I've heard of, that's usually good enough for me. I mix cookies and cream flavor whey into my overnight oats. I mix chocolate flavor whey into pancake mix. Everything else I mix in a blender bottle with a small amount of milk + water.

Consider taking creatine too. It's cheap, safe and effective, and new research is showing benefits beyond simply muscle building.

It's always best to get your macros from whole foods, but it can be hard to hit a high protein goal on a restricted calorie intake.

I do one protein shake a day (whey) as part of my breakfast. It's fine to add, as long as you are concentrating on mostly whole foods and a variety of protein sources. Whey is a good protein, but not a completel protein source (doesn't have all of the required amino acids)

This is too freakin' obscure, but:

Whey is a complete protein. It has a limiting amino acid(s), i.e. an essential amino acid(s) that is less present than would be an utterly perfectly balanced complete protein source.

Here's the catch: Pretty much every "complete" protein source - literally every one as far as I know, but I don't know everything in the whole universe 😉😆 - has one or more limiting amino acids. Beef has limiting amino acids, fish has limiting amino acids, etc. Whole milk comes close, maybe eggs, too, IMU, but even those can vary depending on things like what the cows/chickens ate. It's complicated.

It's also not a big deal in this context. "Complete protein" sources are those that come pretty close to the "perfect" essential amino acid balance. They have all of the essential amino acids, and the limiting amino acid(s) are not profoundly low compared to the others.

Varying protein sources across the day can potentially help balance essential amino acids more fully ("protein complementarity"). Maybe that's useful for everyone, dunno, but it can be important for people who get more of their protein from less EAA-complete, less EAA-balanced sources.

I wouldn't consider whey protein to be meaningfully incomplete or unbalanced. Perfect? No. But very little if anything is perfect.

Whey is just a by-product of dairy foods production, and should just be considered a basic "food" rather than a supplement despite the industry's hyperbolic marketing and bizarre packaging fun and games with jar sizes, scoop sizes, concentrations with cheaper ingredients, and wild pricing fluctuations. Funnily in Canada, whey brands sold without the marketing hype do not charge the national value-added tax - GST - while brands of the same content but with "supplement" marketing and labeling claims do, significantly surcharging their already jacked pricing.

(On a sidebar note, I just AI-checked a fitness podcast (Menno Henselmanns) reporting that any ordinary protein source, including whey, supplemented by vitamin C will generally provide as much bodily collagen production as the various animal or marine collagen source alternatives - am inclining to cycle out of collagen and continue with the vitamin C and whey protein alone.)

What does clean actually mean? It's a highly processed product.

Whey is a great source to get your daily protein requirement, which can be challenging to hit. It's very flexible as it can be added to a variety of meals and shakes. Just make sure that there's not much added sugar. I like the Optimal Nutrition (ON) brand. It's good quality, readily available (including at Costco), reasonably priced and tastes good. One scoop has 24g protein, 2g fat, 3g carb.