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Andrew Cortado's avatar

Great article, I’m interested to see if why the reason low BCAA works has to do with your previous article on the body being toxic. I’ve read that when humans started eating meat their livers got bigger, athletes also have bigger livers and that was partially the reason for evolving livers was to aid in breaking down bcaa. High circulating bcaa are Indicators in both NAFLD and Obesity.

Is it possible that low protein aids in lowering the burden on the liver allowing the body to detox faster? Keep up the good work

Reposting this article if you want to see exfatloss work on BCAA https://open.substack.com/pub/exfatloss/p/show-me-the-bcaa-studies?r=btzus&utm_medium=ios

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Matt Quinn's avatar

I personally haven't made that connection and haven't seen that connection suggested. In fact, I know that people who follow the liver detox route try to ensure they eat a good amount of meat because taurine plays a role in toxin metabolism.

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LastBlueDog's avatar

Worth noting that most of the 1 gram per lb heuristic promoted for year by bodybuilders is for guys on significant amounts of gear, which probably does allow you use more of it since steroids promote muscle growth. But that doesn’t apply to natural athletes.

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Matt Quinn's avatar

There are also like co-nutrients you need to synthesize that much protein, like biotin. Most people are deficient in that.

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Becky N's avatar

When I was getting frosty again last year the trainer had me on 1.3 and it was way too much. 24/7 itis

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Matt Quinn's avatar

For women, especially, that is absolutely enough to trash your thyroid and the rest of your hormones

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Becky N's avatar

That explains so much actually. It was a weird time

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Jackieone's avatar

I always thought the advice was 0.8-1 gram per kilo, not one pound. I guess I’m out of touch with this subject. 😁

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Matt Quinn's avatar

It definitely evolved over time.

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Jackieone's avatar

Enjoyed your article btw. Thanks!

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Ministry of Truth's avatar

Very often I heard in Europe 2g/kg - for some reason it's always one whole number multiplied with another whole number so for some reason the metric system changes your protein requirements in subtle ways ;)

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Matt Quinn's avatar

lol

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SorenJ's avatar

Nice article, but I think you are missing one thing. For a lot of people 0.7 grams/lb *is* “a lot” of protein. I think, especially for some women, a lot of folks get around half of that.

If you are used to interacting with protein bros then you will get the opposite picture, but I don’t think they are representative of the average.

For myself, on a random day I might get around 20g of protein with breakfast, 30g for lunch, then 30g for dinner. I weigh 160, so this is less than recommended. I have a scoop of protein powder in the morning, a salad with some meat for lunch, then something random for dinner.

My girlfriend will get even less. A lot of girls might have cereal and a latte for breakfast, mac & cheese with no meat for lunch (or something like cold sesame noodles), etc.

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Matt Quinn's avatar

If you are not doing tons of exercise, I am not sure that 80 grams a day is less than recommended.

But yes, women are notoriously protein deficient.

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SorenJ's avatar

I do some light strength training stuff 3 times a week. But yeah 80g is probably fine for most of my purposes.

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Harold's avatar

I used to go for 1.2g protein per lb of body weight. But you become sort of neurotic at that level of protein. ~.8g of protein works for me. My diet became more varied and interesting when I dropped the protein a bit.

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Matt Quinn's avatar

Yeah, no one talks about it that when you ramp up that much protein, you actually push out the other parts of your diet which fundamentally are the ones that give you energy.

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Caralee Lacie's avatar

Yes, this is an excellent article! I was writing about this on my instagram 2 years ago and it was bringing so much anger my way. I showed many of the same studies you have here and another one that was super interesting about the damage from protein metabolites over time on the high protein diet (which if memory serves was 1.5g/lb body weight and above). I can't remember the exact numbers right now, but now i'm inspired to go back and find what i wrote. I dropped the topic because i didn't like the type of people it was attracting. I had men hollering in the comments about how they ate 30% of their diet as pure protein and because they want to keep up their muscles. But this is the first time i've seen someone else talking about this!

I love how clearly you laid out the studies and that you've had personal experience with this. I've been an athlete in the past, but I never forced myself to eat more than .7g/lb in a day. Though some long days rock climbing i would naturally desire 1g/lb, but the following days i would end up eating much less protein. I think naturally or bodies will balance out our needs day to day in that way.

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Matt Quinn's avatar

I tweeted about this a couple weeks ago, and I got the most vitriol I've ever received on the internet.

Someone went on a rampant search for pictures of me and found pictures of me from when I was overweight. They posted them saying "don't listen to this guy.".

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Caralee Lacie's avatar

Oof that's gnarly! I'm sorry that happened to you. I was mostly attacked for being a dumb girl and not understanding protein because i'm not a bodybuilder or gym rat. It's also amusing because the angry trolls never have a rebuttal, they only have personal insults.

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S. MacPavel's avatar

All these numbers use total body weight, what about lean body mass? It's a very obese person going to need .7g per lb when over a third of their weight is fat?

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Matt Quinn's avatar

Most likely not. As covered in another post, when you're obese, you're in a protein-sparing mode, and you can probably get by on 50-80 grams of protein a day. When you're obese, you shouldn't be doing loads of intense exercise, and your protein oxidation will be much lower.

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Tom Welsh's avatar

Unless you want to live a long, healthy life.

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Matt Quinn's avatar

Did you read any of the scientific papers I linked to?

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Tom Welsh's avatar

No, I didn’t. Sorry, I misunderstood your headline. My mistake.

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