Ep 24: Science Says - Protein Distribution to Increase Muscle Mass
This is our first "Science Says" episode, where we break down a single recent article relevant to the fitness (lifting, nutrition, health) industry and strategies you can apply right away based on what the science says.
Today's article is "Evenly distributed protein intake over 3 meals augments resistance exercise–induced muscle hypertrophy in healthy young men" by Yasuda, et al. (2020).
The main question is, can we build more muscle mass by evenly distributing protein throughout the day (primarily by increasing protein at breakfast if it is low to begin with)?
RELATED LINKS
Yasuda, J., Tomita, T., Arimitsu, T., & Fujita, S. (2020). Evenly distributed protein intake over 3 meals augments resistance exercise–induced muscle hypertrophy in healthy young men. The Journal of Nutrition, 150(7), 1845-1851.
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Transcript
Philip Pape 00:08
Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and sustainable diet. I'm your host, Philip pape, and in each episode will examine strategies to help you achieve physical self mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.
Philip Pape 00:31
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Wits & Weights. Today is the first episode of what I'm calling science says, where I go over a single research article relevant to the fitness lifting health nutrition industry, and break it down. We'll go over the methodology, the results, and how you can apply that to your life and gain value from what the science says. And I would like to give credit where credit is due. Because I will be referring with many of these episodes, to a research review being published by Dr. Bill Campbell. And he just started this a few months ago. If you're not familiar with a research review, it's what it sounds like an expert in the industry. And Dr. Campbell definitely qualifies as that breaks down a scientific article for you with a summary of the relevant aspects of the study. Like the participants, the methodology, the process, the results, the some of the statistical findings, and then what we can learn from it, what we can gain from it. And what I like about Dr. Campbell's review, it's called body by science is that he also invites two experts, these might be coaches, physique athletes, power lifters, what have you to break down the results and discuss how they would apply it to their clients and how you can apply it in your life. So today, I'm actually going over the very first study published in that review, and a study is called evenly distributed protein intake over three meals augments resistance exercise induced muscle hypertrophy in healthy young men, by your SUTA in 2020. And the main question it was trying to answer is, how should we divide protein across our meals throughout the day, most people who are not intentionally trying to get a lot of protein tend to have more protein toward dinner, he might have very little if any, at breakfast, some at lunch, maybe in a sandwich, for example. And then quite a bit at dinner, or at least the majority of the protein at dinner. But as we've talked about many times, we are trying to eat quite a bit more protein than the average person, something around 0.7 to 1.2 grams per pound. And so to do that, one of the basic ideas basic concepts is to just divide that across X number of meals. So if we have to have 160 grams of protein, and we're going to eat four times, we have to shoot for 40 grams of protein per meal. So the question this study was trying to address is, what if you have more protein at breakfast? What if you have a very high protein breakfast, can you build more muscle, and this was performed on as the title suggests, males in the early 20s. And they were not resistance trained. They were 26 Total in sample. So all of the all of the participants actually started resistance training as part of the study. It was a 12 week program. And they were split into two groups, one that had a high protein breakfast, and one that had a low protein breakfast, they log their food intake at the beginning and then at the end. And just to be clear, the group's ate roughly the same amount of calories around 2500. And about the same amount of protein about 90 to 100 grams of protein. And the only difference was the high versus low protein breakfast. And the researchers
Philip Pape 04:10
reported a fairly high adherence to this protocol. So I would say that they did a pretty good job of accounting for potential confounders, such that the variable of interest whether the high protein breakfast caused a difference in muscle gain, could be sussed out from the research and you could make a claim that potentially there's a correlation or causation there. As far as what the resistance training program looked like, it was a three day per week program. With three upper body exercises and two lower body exercises. It was two by 10. So two sets of 10 of each movement, and then one more set within AMRAP as many reps as possible. The researchers use DEXA to measure their change in body count.
Philip Pape 05:00
Opposition. And I've talked before about the the challenges with the quality of measuring body fat using just about any method. There's always a little bit of error that's there. But the idea is if you can control the environment, if you can control the conditions, from one to the next, use the same manufacturer use the exact same equipment, in fact, which they probably did in the study, that at least the relative change has some validity to it. So what were the results? Well, turns out that both groups gained a lot of muscle mass. All right, so good news. For those of us who want to resistance train and eat protein, you will gain muscle. Great. All right? Well, that's not the question the study was trying to answer. However, the question was, would you gain more muscle if you had a higher protein breakfast. And it turns out that the high protein breakfast group gained five and a half pounds of muscle mass, the low protein breakfast group gained 3.9 pounds of muscle mass. Now, this was a 40% difference. But according to the researchers, it did not pass the threshold of statistical significance, which in this case, was a p value of less than 0.05. For anybody who's familiar with statistics, but it was close to being statistically significant. And there's another statistical measure they use called the Cohen's d effect size, which was large in this study. And then the authors, the researchers interpreted that as the group of the higher protein breakfast, gain more muscle mass than the group of the lower protein breakfast. Now, does this mean you need to eat more protein in your breakfast, that's not what they're saying, what they're saying is, you should, if you don't get very much protein in your breakfast today, eating more, and having a protein more evenly distributed, could be better for muscle building, for those of us who already spread our protein out and eat roughly the same, it does not suggest that you can eat an even larger protein breakfast and have more muscle mass. So I want to make that clear. Basically, it's saying it's validating something we talked about a lot, which is you should spread out your protein and get a decent amount somewhere close to the average, do the best you can at your four or five meals throughout the day. Now there were some limitations of the study. And the one that I want to clue in on is the fact that the total protein that The participants ate was around point six, five grams, which is quite a bit less than we recommend. It's not even in that range of point seven to 1.2, that I often talk about. And despite that, they were still able to gain a decent amount of muscle mass. So imagine what they could have done with even more protein. This might raise one more question for you then, okay, if I have to distribute my protein evenly throughout the day, how do I do that. And I always recommend thinking of your of your meals as meals and snacks. Your Meals would be things like breakfast, lunch and dinner, where you have a decent amount of calories in each meal. And you can often include a Whole Foods source of protein, be it eggs, lean meat, dairy, and then you would have one or two snacks. And at those snacks, you can use more convenient forms of protein. And those would often be dairy like cottage cheese, or Greek yogurt. But it could also be protein shakes, or even a protein bar. But I prefer less processed forms of food if possible. So the rule of thumb would be three meals with protein, and then one or two snacks with maybe dairy or a protein shake. Now where people find this challenging, are in a couple of scenarios. One scenario is when you simply don't eat very many meals, maybe you come from a background of time restricted feeding or intermittent fasting, and you are used to eating twice or three times. And all of a sudden, I'm asking you to eat 150 grams of protein, well, it's gonna be very hard to have 75 grams of protein in two meals, versus having three or four meals at something like 40 grams of protein. Another challenge is if you eat too close to each other, if your meals are not spaced far enough apart, you may get full, you may not feel like eating that much protein. And then the solution is to space them farther apart. You might even have one snack that doesn't have protein, and then more protein at the other meals. So it's not as filling. And then finally, if you have too many meals and your protein target isn't exceptionally high, like maybe for a smaller female, my only concern there would be if you spread them out too thin and have too low of a protein threshold at every single meal. We'd like to hit that roughly 25 Maybe even 30 grams, and the older you get even a little bit higher at a single meal. So again, in that case, I would opt for one of the meals or snacks having quite a bit less protein and giving that to another so that you have the 25 or 30 grams and you can hit that muscle proteins
Philip Pape 10:00
synthesis threshold. So that's it for the first episode of Science says, Again the study that was reviewed is evenly distributed protein intake over three meals augments resistance exercise induced muscle hypertrophy in healthy young men by Yasuda 2020. I'll include the link in the show notes. I'll also include a link to body by science, the research review that I subscribe to, I highly recommend it. And as always, if you liked the show, please let others know. Give it a five star review. Reach out to me with questions, or just to say hi, and I will always get back to you with an answer or a high right back. Stay strong. Thank you so much for joining me today. Before you go, I do have a quick favor to ask. If you enjoy the podcast, just let me know by leaving a review in Apple podcasts. This will help others find the podcast in search results, which makes a huge difference. Thanks again for joining me, your host Philip Pape in this episode of Wits & Weights. I'll see you next time and stay strong.
