While this might sound like good evidence to support increasing your protein intake to build more muscle, it doesn't take into account the adverse effects of protein intake above the RDA of ~0.8g/kg of healthy body weight, unless you're over 65.
> The adverse effects associated with long-term high protein/high meat intake in humans were (a) disorders of bone and calcium homeostasis, (b) disorders of renal function, (c) increased cancer risk, (d) disorders of liver function, and (e) precipitated progression of coronary artery disease.
High protein intake is associated with elevated levels of IGF-1, and "High IGF-1 levels increased the relationship between mortality and high protein":
> Respondents aged 50–65 reporting high protein intake had a 75% increase in overall mortality and a 4-fold increase in cancer death risk during the following 18 years. These associations were either abolished or attenuated if the proteins were plant derived. Conversely, high protein intake was associated with reduced cancer and overall mortality in respondents over 65, but a 5-fold increase in diabetes mortality across all ages.
> These results suggest that low protein intake during middle age followed by moderate to high protein consumption in old adults may optimize healthspan and longevity.
Also important to note that one of the authors of the OP article is an employee of FrieslandCampina, the world's largest dairy co-operative and one of the top 5 dairy companies in the world.
A lot of these studies are observational including every single one of the cancer studies cited, and it's very difficult to separate high-calorie intake from high-protein intake. In the general population the group who eats a lot of protein overlaps a lot with the group who eats too much food in general and that excess in caloric intake is much more likely to be the cause of health problems than the protein intake.
Wow, I've only read the abstract so far but this basically goes against all conventional research on this topic AFAIK. I read probably ~50 papers on this topic (maximal protein dosing) and emailed a few researchers about it as I was writing a book. I believe the saturation point for a relative dose for a single meal is generally held to be ~0.25g per kg of bodyweight. Of course, there are some obvious observable issues with this belief given that there are people who practice intermittent fasting and have no issues building muscle, so it'll be really interesting to see if this study replicates
EDIT: After skimming the paper, I don't see anything immediately wrong with it. But there are some important nuances to note: the subjects were all fasted and given milk protein (casein in milk protein is known to take longer to absorb than pure whey protein which is a popular choice for these studies), and the measurements were made after an hour of exercise. This would skew the results towards more protein sensitivity than in normal settings where a person is pretty much always somewhat well-fed and not always eating after exercise. This is still encouraging because the results for post-exercise protein metabolism have still indicated a much lower limit than a 100g dose. Their report that oxidation rates didn't increase significantly is also notable since the belief has generally been that excess protein is oxidized and burned for energy instead of being incorporated into muscle. However, it would've been nice for them to include a 50g group as well to see if the dose-response relationship was really still linear between 25-50-100
Ultimately, this result seems encouraging for increasing post-exercise protein consumption for muscle gain, but we shouldn't discount the fact that the subjects were fasted before exercise. It would be interesting to see this study prolonged over the course of a day with further protein ingestions to see if the area-under-the-curve of muscle protein synthesis would eventually equalize in both groups, or if the larger immediately-post-exercise dose made a lasting difference. Existing research seems to not indicate such an "anabolic window". I might speculate that there is a daily limit for protein ingestion, but it doesn't matter if you hit that limit in one meal or five. That said, I have previously come across a paper that found medium-sized, spaced out doses to be more effective than infrequent large doses and overly frequent small doses, so there's still more to discover here
Yeah, I think the least controversial takeaway is that you can afford to have a large protein shake immediately after workout. I personally don't think you need to. But this study and some others indicate that muscle responds best to protein consumption when it's in some post-exercise state (but it's unclear if that state is 30 minutes or 3 hours or longer etc). I'd say it's more important to focus on your overall daily consumption rather than the timing of it
A summary of my own looking into it is “don’t worry too much about it”.
For the average gym goer the most important thing is working out consistently to failure and periodically reevaluating your training so that it’s safe and optimal based on the latest research. How much protein you can shove in your face is rarely a concern, westerners get enough. Getting a bigger chest or shoulders when what you are doing isn’t working requires looking at your body mechanics and how to activate those muscle groups. As an example, I couldn’t squat for shit until I learned that I require a different stance than most people, due to how my hip sockets are angled (my feet naturally come to rest when standing at about a 80 degree angle, extremely wide compared to most)
Everything I’ve read seems to indicate that it’s probably ideal to eat something within a few hours after a heavy workout, but you don’t need to immediately rush down 2 scoops of protein shake or waste away. Excess protein doesn’t really hurt you either. Protein eaten is gradually absorbed throughout a surprisingly long time as it travels through the gut (the time of which varies greatly between people, I digest extremely slowly), which in practice can act like a “store” of amino acids despite the body not really having something dedicated for that purpose like fatty acids and carbohydrates. I haven’t seen studies on this, but I personally also suspect some amount protein is “stored” and released via gut bacteria, much like what happens with soil bacteria and nitrogen fertilizer. And that’s ignoring all the recycling of amino acids the body does anyways.
Likewise, muscle repair is a progressive demand over days, not an instant demand. Photos of muscle cells over time after a workout are illustrative of this.
Basically you don’t need to treat protein like a diabetic treats blood sugar.
For those people at an advanced enough level where they need to find optimizations to obtain more results, then yes, individual amino acids have metabolic effects that can likely be exploited. In fact, some amino acids (like leucine) can likely be a contributor of not just muscle gain, but also obesity because of how they work. Some people can benefit from restricting “protein” in order to lose weight, because they start burning body fat for fuel again. Likewise, fat isn’t just fat, but each fatty acid has its own complex waterfall of metabolic impacts (beware omega-6’s, which are very high in western raised pork and chicken fat).
Food can be thought of as a load of chemical signals for your body. So the above study isn’t surprising.
For anyone reading this in the future, please be aware the working out "to failure" is this posters' opinion. From my research, I'd tend to say it's actually not favoured in the current state of the art.
From what I understand, achieving (example) 80% of failure can achieve most of the same level of gains while avoiding a disproprionately significant amount of fatigue resulting from achieving full failure.
Not published yet sadly. I'm close to signing a contract with a publisher that would see it get released in the summer. I've contemplated self-publishing though so it can see the light of day sooner
Indeed. Milk has 3.4g protein per 100g. In the study they fed 100g of protein, which was "the largest amount of protein that we consider feasible to consume in a single meal (100 g)". It is the equivalent of drinking 3 liters of milk.
Whey Protein, Casein Protein or Whey Protein Isolate is a more like-for-like replacement for milk than a plant based alternative.
There’s also nothing inherently wrong with consuming fat, it’s more than twice the energy per gram compared to carbs and protein. If you are bulking or need to consume more calories, there’s no issue with drinking milk or using it in smoothies.
I’ve been weight training consistently for more than a decade, keep up to date on the science, and I don’t find this that surprising.
mTOR is stimulated by a rising plasma concentration of leucine. It can only be stimulated to a certain extent at a given time (known as the “muscle full” effect), but if the leucine level remains chronically elevated until after the refractory period, it makes sense that another bout would trigger.
You can even see in their results that the smaller protein feeding produced a larger percentage-wise incorporation of that protein into muscle protein (17% vs 13%). If the subjects consumed that 25g four times across the 12 hours, I imagine they would have produced a larger net accumulation of muscle protein than the 100g group. This is because each discrete feeding could produce other anabolic effects, such as stimulating the release of insulin.
You can also see that the 25g dosing was insufficient to saturate even short-term muscle protein synthesis rates from figure 6C. Based on that graph, I’d guess that about a 40g bolus would have been sufficient.
So, no groundbreaking practical implications, IMO. Single bolus is still suboptimal, just maybe less suboptimal than the researchers thought. When evaluating practical implications, it is also worth noting that most humans do not fast after consuming a single protein shake, or after consuming four protein shakes. Our diets are typically a little more complex and varied than that.
Really surprising stuff (to me). I'm coming from the prior that large amounts of protein ingestion in one sitting are "wasted" and do not contribute much above a certain moderate amount. This is obviously only a single study, but it at least opened me up more to the possibility that this is wrong.
Some important limitations as listed in the paper:
- Study only assessed a short-term assessment window (~12 hr), and the researchers speculate that metabolic changes over time might skew these results:
"it is possible that the metabolic response to protein ingestion is modified
over time. For example, it could be speculated that amino acid
oxidation may increase in response to frequent, prolonged epi-
sodes of hyperaminoacidemia or that large postprandial protein
gains are compensated for by upregulation of amino acid oxida-
tion in a subsequent fasted state"
- Study was with healthy young men after a bout of whole-body resistance exercise. May not extrapolate to other populations or conditions (i.e. at rest).
- Other study "limitations" point out that they were conservative in their conclusions, and the results of eating large amounts of protein at one time may be even stronger than stated in the paper.
"Anabolic response to protein ingestion has no upper limit in humans - according to a single paper, that might not replicate and be full of methodology errors and/or conflicts of interest, time will tell..."
Here's a better title, before people start jumping to conclusion about how this "invalidates conventional research" or how they'll start following this, etc.
> we show that the ingestion of 100 g protein results in a greater and more prolonged (>12 h) anabolic response when compared to the ingestion of 25 g protein
So the 25g protein group didn't consume any more protein/meal within 12h post-workout after their 25g protein meal? This seems like a hole in the study.
Not from what I can tell. There still seems to be a spike in anabolic response shortly after ingestion that curtails over the course of the following 12 hours, with a 2-3 hour window holding the most concentration of lysine/most other amino acids. From what I've read, my key take-away is that the previously assumed limits of protein ingestion aren't as low as this study suggests. Though, it's worth pointing out that protein consumption in this trial was 0g, 25g and 100g, missing the ~50g mark* that most bodybuilders assumed to be the cap.
I think it makes no sense that one would need to time protein intake. After all the way muscle grows is in response to damage after use. We don’t worry about a “calcium window” when we break a bone.
I don’t think this should be surprising. Traditional knowledge (which I would group bro-science under) contains a lot of legitimate insights. Bro scientists are focused on getting measurable results, and they know when they achieve that. The main downsides of their lack of rigour are that they don’t have very good mechanisms for eliminating useless superstitions, and of course the lack of safety controls in their experiments (which I think most of them probably understand and accept).
Sumerian shamans were also right about chewing willow bark (along with countless other examples of that sort of thing).
Surviving is exercise for a gorilla. They carry their mass around, climb with it, occasionally compete with other gorillas, etc.
It's also key to consider that they're genetically programmed to develop more muscle mass with relatively large amounts of rest and no need to explicitly work out. Humans have survived in less abundant conditions, with leaner times and lower energy requirements. We've adapted to sacrifice mass and strength at times. In order to develop strength, we need to do hard work. While we're remarkably similar to gorillas, this is one way in which we differ quite a bit.
> We've adapted to sacrifice mass and strength at times.
Can we please find a way to un-sacrifice mass, un-fit to survive in less abundant conditions? Right now, the food is so abundant it is actively killing us. But we are fat and not muscular.
Are we sentient species, after all?
I do not joke when I say it would be multiple Nobel prizes. Everybody will get around five quality-adjusted life years on average if you do it correctly.
Why is 500g of frozen pizza made up of modified starches and sugary sauce easier to eat and less filling than 500g of sourdough pizza of whole grains and real cheese/tomato
Maybe because our body is better equipped to register the calorie intake from the real food
I wonder what happens if we would break this protein, such as by erasing its start codon. Will we get gorilla strength (and appetite, which is also a good thing in XXI?)
I bet somebody out there already has this mutation.
I've heard they're not that healthy. Gorillas on the other hand are.
I wonder if there's some floor dosage which is far from affecting your health but already significant in affecting your well-being. Why aren't we all on steroids. Why people who are trying to get rid of fat are not on steroids.
> Why people who are trying to get rid of fat are not on steroids.
A lot of people are. Anavar and Clenbuterol is a very popular fat loss regimen (though likely not acquired via a legitimate prescription very often), and not just for bodybuilders. The amount of middle age men on Testosterone Replacement Therapy is also likely a lot higher than you think it is, and body fat management is one of the more appealing benefits of TRT.
The risks of messing with your natural sex hormones never go away though, so there’s always going to be risks that a lot of people don’t want to take. Like high blood pressure, heart disease, suppression of natural testosterone production, hypogonadism (and infertility), gynecomastia… and for women there’s the androgenising effects, as steroids are part of the pharmaceutical side of a gender reassignment for them (which is why it’s not uncommon for some of the larger female bodybuilders to have especially deep voices, or even masculine-looking facial hair).
I just want to clarify a little for other people less familiar with these chemicals. Clenbuterol is not an anabolic steroid, despite being classified as that by WADA. It's more of a stimulant. And no one is prescribing it, at least in the US.
The rest of your comment about complications of anabolic steroid use is totally correct.
Yes that’s absolutely correct. To add a little more, stimulants have a rather sordid history as weight loss supplements (almost always ending up banned), being used to increase your basal metabolic rate (burning more energy at rest). Anabolic steroids are used because your body can extract stored energy from both fat and the protein in your muscles, and they ultimately have the net effect of getting your body to extract more of that energy from the fat. Use of either stimulants or anabolics alone would have an effect on body fat, just a greater effect when used together.
Of course the better option is to use neither of them, and just have a healthy diet and exercise routine. The health risks are incredibly serious, even if you manage to avoid outright dropping dead at a young age (like many “enhanced” fitness influencers have, such as Zyzz, Jo Linder, Rich Piana…).
If you just want to be lean you can achieve that with diet alone. But if you want a lot of muscle mass, then you need to exercise. If you gave an entirely sedentary person anabolic steroids, they’d probably end up with slightly more muscle mass then they otherwise would have had, but you’re not getting a gorilla physique without a lot of exercise.
I suspect that bodybuilding is unhealthy for a number of reasons and is obviously associated with steroid use. It seems possible to me (and I really don't know that much here) that some amount of steroid use may possibly increase health, but that is not what bodybuilders are interested in. Either way, I do not take them.
The vast majority of competitive bodybuilders are on very high doses of anabolic steroids (AAS) and compete in an "open" (untested) league. Absurdly high dose AAS use is associated with (at least) a couple kinds of heart disease. It's not good for you. (There are also some "natural" bodybuilders and a smaller tested/natural league.)
Why are gorillas healthy? They aren't getting diabetes, sure, but most wild animals teeter on the edge of survival all the time - not a state of vibrant health.
Gorillas aren't just "a bit strong" such that it could be explained by different exercise routines; they're stronger than world-class weightlifters. They're not strong because they don't sit at desks, they're strong because their bodies are tuned for strength and because they don't route as much energy to their brains.
Contrary to a lot of nature documentaries, homo sapiens has quite a lot of advantages; well above average vision, exquisite muscular control, quite excellent hearing, almost unmatched vocalization abilities, and of course, the supernal brain, among many other attributes of note. But we do quite literally punch well below our weight, by any metric; body size, muscle mass, etc. The sci-fi trope of human being weaker than orcs, weaker than Vulcans, weaker than Klingons, etc. actually has some basis in fact.
The only land animals that can match us for endurance are certain breeds of horses and dogs, because we bred them specifically to keep up with us. There are lots of tribes around the world whose hunting tactic is to walk at a particular deer until it falls over dead.
We also have really good immune systems, giving us the ability to live all over the world in various filthy conditions without immediately dying from infection.
And our digestive systems are very flexible. Some prehistoric people were completely vegeterian, some lived entirely off of fish, etc.
I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me, or amplifying, but to be clear, I am specifically referring to strength. Not endurance or any other sort of "toughness".
Can't have it all. All in all it's a good trade when you have "tools", which includes "weapons".
> The adverse effects associated with long-term high protein/high meat intake in humans were (a) disorders of bone and calcium homeostasis, (b) disorders of renal function, (c) increased cancer risk, (d) disorders of liver function, and (e) precipitated progression of coronary artery disease.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4045293/
High protein intake is associated with elevated levels of IGF-1, and "High IGF-1 levels increased the relationship between mortality and high protein":
> Respondents aged 50–65 reporting high protein intake had a 75% increase in overall mortality and a 4-fold increase in cancer death risk during the following 18 years. These associations were either abolished or attenuated if the proteins were plant derived. Conversely, high protein intake was associated with reduced cancer and overall mortality in respondents over 65, but a 5-fold increase in diabetes mortality across all ages.
> These results suggest that low protein intake during middle age followed by moderate to high protein consumption in old adults may optimize healthspan and longevity.
- https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S1550-4131(14)00062-X
Also important to note that one of the authors of the OP article is an employee of FrieslandCampina, the world's largest dairy co-operative and one of the top 5 dairy companies in the world.