I need to read through all this more carefully but first want to say thanks for all this helpful information!
I am 5’9” and my weight varies between 150-160. I’m guessing I get about 50-65 grams of protein a day without really thinking much about it. Might be more–I don’t think of things like bagels or sweet potatoes as having protein. I do eat it it throughout the day but not necessarily in large amounts at each meal. I’ve read things that suggest I should be getting closer to 125 grams if I want to build muscle–but also that the body can’t utilize more than 30 grams at a time. Which is a lot of protein to space out during the day! Have also read that the body can use more than 30 grams at a time. Lots of contradictory info out there.
We did a hike today that I definitely couldn’t have done a few months ago so I must be building some muscle! Next summer’s trip is just a really ambitious one–we’ll average ten miles and 4000 feet vertical rise a day. At the moment 2500 feet vertical rise really wipes me out–and that’s not day after day.
Talking about protein is a great way for muscle nerds to geek out on the Internet so please don’t fixate on the discussion. Quantity of info isn’t the same thing as importance!
Like I said, your issue could be that you don’t have heavier weights or something else. Keep everything in mind, experiment, and see what works for you!
Well, first, let’s go full spherical cow and then move back into reality.
Let’s say that there’s “good protein” and “bad protein”. E.g., red protein is less healthy (but still protein) and white protein is more healthy (and also still protein). Either works just fine for building muscle, they just have different health qualities (heart health, longevity, etc.). Again, I’m not saying that this is true nor relates to any real world thing, we’re just building the outline of our spherical cow.
And let’s say that the amount of muscle that you have is just purely a factor of how much protein you eat. Maybe, in reality, your body can convert starch into muscle, maybe amino acid profiles play a part, maybe genetics play a part, etc. In our hypothetical, that’s all dispensed with.
So now, from a muscle standpoint, I can cut a 10g slice of white protein and eat it or a 10g slice of red protein, and either way, I’m going to support 10kg of muscle on my body. It’s just that easy. If I eat 9g of either, I have 9kg of muscle on my frame; 15g supports 15kg.
From a selection standpoint, I’d just be dumb to ever eat any red protein at all. There’s no muscle benefit and I just lose out on health. If I’m selecting with care, then I eat 100% white protein.
So, I take my slab of white protein, get out a tiny surgical scalpel, a microscope, and slice off a piece that would make a grain of rice look like a semi truck. This is my perfectly selected, healthy, purest of pure protein for the day. Consequently, I have zero muscle. Did I eat protein? Yes. Was it healthy protein? Yes. Was it a large enough quantity of protein to support the amount of muscle that I desire? No. If I want 30kg of muscle, then I need to eat 30g of protein. How selective I am of my proteins is a complete red herring of an issue. It’s a topic related to health, not hypertrophy.
Now, backing away from the hypothetical, you do start to get into issues like amino acid profile and so on where “selectivity” might matter for hypertrophy. And if we were talking about a vegan, who only ate flax seeds and broccoli as sources of protein, I might be concerned about the selection of proteins, as regards hypertrophy. If she’s eating fish and chicken, then I’m not too concerned on the selection side of things.
But what I do observe, in everyday life, is that a person might take a whole chicken breast (lots of protein!), shred it, mix it into a salad (wow, 30g of protein!), and then split the salad between themselves and their partner. One partner gets 80% of the chicken and the other, smaller person gets like 20% - just a two or three out of 10-12 shreds - who leans more into the leafy greens and tomatoes.
Is the chicken perfectly good protein for hypertrophy? Well, yes it is. Was there 30g of protein in the salad? Yes, there was. Did the person that we’re looking at actually eat 30g of protein? Not by a long shot, they probably ate less than 10!
This is where doing things by checklist can miss important details. Knowing that someone eats chicken doesn’t tell me much. They might be sucking every bite off a whole chicken carcass, all on their lonesome, once a day, every day. They might eat a few bites of a chicken breast, once, every other week. Those are just going to produce widely disparate results, and yet they look exactly the same on a checkoff list of foods that they consume “regularly”.
Coming back to this (I wanted to reply to @DSeid 's post first)…
I’m not on top of the precise numeric limit (could be 30, I can’t say). I am aware that, in general, there’s evidence that there are some limits to how fast you can take in protein. And it’s for that reason that professional bodybuilders are eating 6 meals a day and sipping protein shakes through the day.
In general, I’d just say that it is probably better - if you do want to build muscle - to try and ensure that every meal you have has some amount of protein, and that it’s not all bunching into dinner or later meals in the day. Your body is healing from tissue damage, after you’ve done a hard workout, non-stop until everything’s fixed again and it’s going to decide whether to rebuild at the same size or bigger, as it sees available proteins floating around in your blood system. If you have protein in your diet all day, that’s going to have an impact versus half of the day.
In terms of hitting the max, though… I mean, if you really get into bodybuilding and start going out to compete at the top levels then I’m sure that you’ll need to worry about maxing out, and need to start strategizing how best to spread out your eating to stay under the threshold. (Nothing bad happens by going over the limit, physically, it’s just a waste of money to buy a bunch of protein that your body can’t use.) For you, right now, it’s probably not a concern.
I am trying to follow the roll of your spherical cow. Really I am.
As you roll it towards the real world is the key.
My perspective is that the person who had mostly leafy salad and little chicken in that salad also had fairly few calories and will be hungry again soon. They will eat more sooner. And more of what they will eat will have protein in it than you may think.
This is what happens in the real world that I know of: people who select enough food to eat that leaves them not hungry from a reasonable variety of quality food choices will usually get enough of protein, adequate fiber, enough vitamins, etc. And tend to not overeat. My experience is that measuring and calculating is superfluous at best given that initial set of assumptions. Uncommon diet restrictions can throw that off. A vegan may have to think about protein more. But the average person eating a mostly Mediterranean Diet is almost always going to be fine. Again that significantly calorie restricted hypothetical one was pretty fine, hitting what your cite labeled “moderately high protein” (which indeed did better at dealing with sarcopenia than “low” did).
I will try to be more consistent about spacing protein out over the day. Definitely not into serious bodybuilding–just want to get this body up mountains. I was quite sedentary until my retirement two years ago so I’m pretty much starting from scratch.
Or they eat nuts or they eat candies. That’s all supposition, not real numbers.
Why rely on supposition if you can explain the criteria for success and highlight some of the known or plausible error cases, in case they’re able to identify possible disconnects that they might have been experiencing between what they understood to be the correct procedure and what results they were achieving?
If I tell someone that they can use a hammer to break through a wall, that’s certainly a true statement. If they come back and tell me, “I took a hammer. I hit the wall. I wasn’t able to make a dent.” It’s not useful to say, “Well, hammers are sufficient for this task. Clearly the hammer isn’t the issue, you need to try a different spot.” Because, for all I know, they’re using a kid’s inflatable hammer from a toy store, the wall is just as tough at every other spot. More likely the problem is that it’s a concrete wall, but even then the most practicable solution might be a bigger and stronger hammer, with a longer handle. The hammer might still be the most amenable solution.
My imagination of what’s occurring isn’t the reality. I shouldn’t pick an imagined cause, assume that I’m correct in my imagination, deny the possibility that I might be wrong, and run along with that one vision. I should try to think of potential and especially common pitfalls and highlight as many of them as I can. I should try to ensure that the underlying rationale is understood, so that they can understand what things to start paying attention to. This isn’t to say that my first guess is wrong, or that I shouldn’t offer it as well, just that I’m not doing my best by applying tunnel vision to myself.
The timing doesn’t really matter. Eat most in one meal or spread out.
Longer version. Different proteins are absorbed at different rates. Most are absorbed over multiple hours.
The data strongly suggests that the benefit of dietary protein increase increases gradually up to roughly 0.7g per pound. Then no more benefit. So 100 is tops. That is not a threshold. That is for someone who is only looking at maximizing hypertrophy. And the impact of protein intake above more modest amounts is small compared to the impact of the strength training.
Of those nuts are on the list of the quality choices; candy not. If nuts and getting to not hungry they will be fine.
We often get to a point in these discussions where people image the body as a simple machine. It isn’t. The brain responds to different inputs and changes behaviors, even metabolism itself. I have become very convinced that the brain, given a circumstance of quality intake (as a Mediterranean Diet pattern is just one option of) and regular exercise, including cardiorespiratory and strength focused, will regulate intake more ideally than anyone trying to calculate and measure out will. As long we limit exposure to the crap that mucks the brain up.
I’d agree with the general idea that maxing out isn’t so important but I’d probably advise against paying too much attention to that particular article. It’s not even consistent with itself:
In fact, if you perform exercise, you will get a greater response in muscle building from every meal you ingest up to 24 hours later
So yeah, you can do, say, 1.6 g/kg on days you lift heavy and get 0.8 g/kg on days you don’t.
If a person works out in the morning, then day of and “the 24 hours after” are pretty close overlaps of one another. If they work out in the evening, then “day of” is almost completely different from “the 24 hours after”, it would be the following day that matters.
In general, I’d expect that the best results come from:
Having some fiber to go with your protein, so that it’s getting slowly metabolized as-needed, rather than ending up as waste.
Having protein in your system while you are asleep - when your body is most geared towards healing.
Having protein when you feel muscle soreness, due to tissue damage.
I believe that there used to be some theories that you needed to “protein up” in the hours around your workout. These days, the most reliable research is simply saying, “Have a high daily average and don’t worry about it.” I wouldn’t say that the research is fully to where I’m at, advising that you keep protein a bit higher during the recovery window of the 24-48 hours following the workout, trying to keep the flow into your bloodstream steady rather than spiky, but it’s certainly not in conflict with it.
To be sure, the Inuit ate almost entirely seal blubber for months on end; early man probably mostly ate tubers, leaves, and river fish. These are wildly different diets and yet both groups were able to grow, be physically active, and prosper.
I don’t know that I’d call the ability for the body to adapt to its inputs a product of the brain - it’s almost certainly all handled through the evolution of the gut bacteria and our processing pathways - but if you want to view it as an active choice, I’m fine with the image.
But there’s certainly a difference between “able to do a thing” and “best for a thing”, like I could take cardboard, push the air out of it, mix with Elmer’s Glue, and press sheets together to create a wood product comparable to raw timber. The end result is a perfectly good product for construction, but it doesn’t mean that this is the best process.
If my end product is equivalent to raw timber, then I haven’t gained anything over using raw timber. All I’ve done is add extra processing in order to get to the same end result. I needed Elmer’s Glue as an additional input and I needed to spend extra energy getting the air out and assembling everything. (Reusing junk materials might be a reason for doing this, in real life, but that’s not a factor in diet, unless we’re talking about coprophagia.)
I’d grant that humanity’s beginning attempts to understand diet more often lead people astray - driving them to hydrogenated oils, preferring sugars over fats, narrowing their diet down to core crops rather than diversity, etc. But, we can also say that the Inuit weren’t living to be a 120 years old, on average.
We often compare ourselves to Europeans, Japanese, and other modern societies, forgetting about all the rest. If you chart the average height by nation, e.g.:
You’ll see that, even though the US has a generally worse diet than Europe, we’re still able to build bigger bodies than dozens of other countries that are still living pastoral, traditional lives eating whole foods and “everything but the oink” when it comes to their animals.
A map of longevity is relatively similar image:
If a family has good whole, natural food they can still end up with kids of shorter stature, who live shorter lives. Why? They weren’t getting enough of what they needed, in an optimal form. The body doesn’t just magically create vitamin B12 out of thin air. It can create muscle from lesser plant proteins, and likely even from sugar and other forms of energy, but it’s a harder process. If there’s just not enough of what is needed, and what can be gotten is hard to convert into what it needs to be, then that will stunt you and shorten your life.
The body can work around gaps and adapt, and that is amazing. But it’s not magic.
We probably understand diet well enough that we can do better than blind guessing and traditional diets. Obsessing over it probably leads to more stress than it’s worth, but having a reasonable sense of the parameters will probably help you to live a longer, more healthy, and more jacked existence.
Some of even that might be, but those are not the sorts of within individual brain based changes of behavior and metabolism I am referencing. The individual brain responds variably to different nutritional input patterns controlling how much desire we have to eat, what we choose to eat, how active we are when not exercising, and even our baseline metabolism. Yes gut microbiome also matters.
Since most Westerners on typical diets probably get enough protein (and the resultant outbreak of muscularity has not yet been critiqued in Newsweek), I find these protein discussions overly precise and of middling importance. How many anglerfish can dance in the heat of a pan?
Realistically, nearly all fitness advice boils down to “Just do physical activities, regularly, safely, and progressively harder until you get to a level of fitness that allows you to live your best life.”
This is the whole problem of nutrition and fitness. You can basically tell people everything that they need to know on a page or two. But the people who write big, hundred page books with edgy ideas gain more attention and divert people off the path. The influencers have more of a profit motive and they’re usually offering solutions that make it seem like there’s a way to accomplish something more quickly and easily than simply putting in the work, and suffering.
And then you have to get just as complicated to explain why they’re wrong…
One thing I don’t see mentioned is that there are complete and incomplete proteins.
Complete proteins have all the essential amino acids that you need to grow muscle. Incomplete proteins don’t.
That is one advantage to eating animal sources of protein over plant based. They give you all the aminos you need.
That’s not to say that you can’t get all of your aminos from plants; you just have to combine sources (one common one is rice and beans).
I only offer that because if a person is counting a bagel as a quality protein source (and never adds in any animal sources like fish), then they may be delinquent in their nutrition, even if they are ingesting a nominally sufficient quantity.
There are certainly better sources of protein, but eating a variety of healthy foods solves many problems. Eat more beans, whole nuts, unprocessed^ meat, eggs, milk, whole fruit and vegetables, Eat less of the stuff you quite like but already know should be enjoyed in limited quantities less often. Make your snacks healthier.
^ I do not believe meat to be unhealthy but its production has large environmental effects and type, processing and cooking style matter somewhat. I said “unprocessed” because of the confusion of saying eat more “less processed” meat.
Yeah, just like the guidelines for healthy exercise are pretty simple, do are the rules for nutrition. Eat a variety of whole foods, not too many processed foods, and especially avoid foods with added sugar. An excess of sausage, bacon, and other processed meats should also be avoided. And try to eat lots of minimally processed vegetables.
(I guess i say “try” because i don’t like most vegetables. If you enjoy eating a big salad with lots of veggies and not much dressing or croutons or stuff, then you are in better shape than i am.)
Eat when you are hungry, don’t eat out of boredom or just because it tastes good.
