Per-Meal Protein Servings….

There are plenty of myths about protein intake, serving sizes and timing. 

“The protein you eat will stay in the stomach/intestines as long as is needed to be digested. The carbs, fats and fibre you digested will move along once they are dealt with, and protein will stay there until they are dealt with fully (unless you truly overload the system, but that isn’t practically relevant given how humans actually eat). The amount you consume at one meal doesn’t matter to any huge extent. If you ate 50g of whey, it will be digested over a 4-5 hour period.

Although you will find countless studies that suggest 20g of high quality protein (such as whey) is all that is need to maximally stimulate muscle protein synthesis, this has more to do with the leucine content of that protein rather than it being the maximal amount humans can digest. If 20-30g was the maximal amount of protein that could be digested, you would see huge protein excretion after a meal high in protein (over the 20-30g “limit”) and this simply doesn’t bear out in the research. It also doesn’t make evolutionary sense.

Imagine you are a caveman who makes a fresh kill, are they going to stop eating that meat after eating 100g of it and then continue to eat roughly 100g every 2-3 hours for the rest of the day, for fear of eating too much protein and excreting it all out? No, they eat what they can when they can, and if the human body wasn’t able to regulate its metabolism of protein we would cease to exist as a race.

This is also another issue with some of the myths surrounding protein intake around your workout. If max protein digestion is pretty much held steady at somewhere between 8-10g/hour then does it make sense that you need to slam a post workout protein shake to get the most from your training session? Does that mean the protein serving you had before training is more important than the one you have after the gym? Do you need to drink grams of BCAAs or EAAs?

You don’t need to slam a protein shake in your “anabolic window”, especially if you have eaten protein in the last 2-3 hours before your workout ends. If it still a good idea? Yeah, you do want to ensure you are providing the amino acids required to build muscle, but I wouldn’t worry too much as long as you are eating enough protein spread out over the course of a day.”

This is just a quick excerpt from one of our articles in the Triage Militia. We really hope that brief insight helps you out.

Kind Regards,

Gary & Paddy

Triage Method