How much protein should you eat?
I’m often asked how much protein I should eat if I want to build muscle.
There are a lot of myths about this that have been built up over the years. One of the most usual myths is that your body can only consume 30g of protein at once. Any more than that, and you conclude weeing out the amino acids.
This is one of the oldest myths, and it came about due to a published paper that reported those findings (I’ve been unable to find the paper, so I may be adding to the myth!).
The original research was done on OAPs and females (who have lower muscle mass). This is really flawed, and the myth stays on. Only yesterday, one of my rugby players asked me, can’t we only absorb that amount. I was like, dude, I would have been in your tribe 100,000 years ago! You’d never have survived.
The body can process and absorb vast amounts of protein, but it does depend on body mass, activity patterns and age — as we get older, we produce less stomach acid and digestive enzymes.
We must recognize that a lot of research, particularly research from the 70s and ’80s, was undertaken in hospital settings with patients who were very ill? Protocols that we use in sports still come from hospital research.
In those situations, when a patient is bedridden and not eating correctly, the patient…
