[alan aragon]

casein/whey research, etc:

before i get to your question, think about the contradictory nature of what's being espoused.. no milk postW because it slows absorption down, yet they warn against encouraging absorption that's too quick for your physiology to handle without fat storage? c'mon man.. consider the existing research on casein. lands' team (1999) compared a whey supplement (immunocal) with a casein placebo & found whey to be superior to casein for increasing strength & decreasing oxidation & body fat. a year later, demling's team pumped out a more elegant/applicable study comparing casein versus whey, & found casein to be vastly superior to whey for gains in muscle mass, strength, nitrogen retention, & body fat loss. so thus far in research, casein & whey are going 1 for 1. i've already discussed the benefit of milk's insulinogenic nature, as well as casein's IGF-1 binding capacity (a good thing for muscular gain). this is why i believe that having BOTH is best. guys who can tolerate milk & ingest it proximally to their training are usually pretty beastly looking. notice i said usually, heh...

AND, doesnt milk slow down the protein being digested along with it?

yes, but this is not at all a bad thing in the case of milk. you see, milk has substantial insulin-generating ability AND other growth factors. casein allows IGF-1 to maintain its binding capacity & structure whereas IGF-1 would normally undergo significant denaturation by the time it hits the blood. this quality tends to counterbalance & even supercede its slow absorption & processing. whey does not exert these same positive effects on IGF-1 the way casein does, nor does it have the same positive effect on nitrogen retention. there is nothing particularly special about making sure casein doesn't get in the way of whey absorption. in fact, to play devil's advocate, one might better ask why include any whey if it's gonna get in the way of casein . the answer to this is that whey contains, among other things, a significant hit of much needed BCAAs, a uniquely anabolic amino profile, and it also can synergize with milk/casein to hike insulin levels beyond either protein source by itself. chemical teamwork.

About osmolarity & combining malto & dex:

maltodextrin is simply a polysaccharide that's linearly chained glucose. the reason folks say you should add it to your postworkout glucose (dextrose) is to activate additional transport mechanisms for quicker gastric emptying, as well as lower the osmolarity (solute concentration) of the solution due to the longer chains as opposed to just the single-unit glucose molecules. the theory of malto + dex speeding gastric emptying is fine & dandy -- assuming that those are the only components in your shake. but one itty bitty detail that everyone seems to miss is that the addition of protein (and other substrates for that matter) blows the whole equation & negates the need to attempt to speed up gastric emptying with malto. this is because the introduction of additional factors such as amino acids changes the ENTIRE behavior of the mix. malto is not a necessary component for maximal gastric evacuation unless your postW solution is strictly composed of carbohydrate (a suboptimal scenario to begin with).