Transcription
If you've done the thing with like apps like My Fitness Pal, for example, you log all your food for the day, it's going to count the protein from your Subway sandwich wheat bread, as well as the protein from the tomatoes and the onions in there, as well as the protein from the chicken and the cheese and all these other foods where you're like, "Okay, I know that bread has protein in it, but isn't it better to get protein from like meats and milk products and eggs? Don't those like grow muscle better? Am I really eating a gram per pound of the right kind of protein? How much of this protein actually works to get me a good shot?"
Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for RP Strength, and today's video is going to be about protein quality. We know roughly how much protein folks need in order to get their most lean and most jacked and most healthy and all that stuff. We'll talk about that in a minute. But there's another question we're going to try to answer in the context of that discussion. It is, what kind of protein should that be? And are you getting the right kind of protein to make it so that you get all the good results? Are you getting some of the wrong kinds of protein such that you're eating enough? Sure. But it's poor quality protein, and then you're not getting the results that you should be. Let's dive in.
So, first thing is, how much protein do you need? And for maximizing your chances of the best muscle growth outcomes and retaining muscle, we at RP seem to think about a gram per pound per day is good. So if you weigh 150 lbs, then you need something like 150 grams of protein per day. Now that's a little bit more than most literature reviews say is a good idea to take. And some of them, if you read the literature reviews on protein, all the studies combined, in a certain slant, you could actually conclude that you need substantially less than a gram per pound to get all the good stuff that you need. In most cases, maybe even as low as 7 g per pound. So, this is one of these situations where if you weigh 150 lbs, it could be quite true to say that even 110 to 120 grams of protein per day is absolutely sufficient.
On the other hand, a pretty decent body of new literature has come out, and literature examining people who are training a ton and specifically people in fat loss diets. This literature shows that maybe a little bit more than a gram per pound is a good idea in some cases, 1.3 or 1.25 g per pound per day. So that for someone who is 150 lbs, then maybe for them even 175 grams of protein per day, a little more than that, is going to check those boxes. For us, we really like the gram per pound per day, but with nuance. So our best recommendation, RP, is as follows: Aim for roughly a gram per pound per day of protein. Again, if you weigh 150 lbs, 150 grams, and with less or more depending on some circumstances, to use two extremes. If you're lifting weights only a few times a week, you're doing lots of other activities, you're maintaining your body weight and muscularity, you're not currently trying to improve, but you don't want to reduce it, and you're eating a maintenance diet where you're not losing weight, you can eat definitely on the low end; if you weigh 150, 120 grams of protein is going to be almost certainly good enough to keep all that muscle, keep you healthy, keep you fit, keep you functioning; it's going to be great.
On the high end though, if you're training a ton, like five or six times a week, an hour and a half at a time, very high volume hypertrophy training for the whole body, and you're also potentially in a caloric deficit, so you're trying to lose some fat, and you're really pushing to the extremes, then yeah, maybe something like 1.25 or 1.3 grams per pound is a good insurance policy to make sure that if anything is wrong with your diet, it's not you not getting enough protein. And that's kind of one of the big things for this video is to put a little bit of a buffer. If you eat a few too many grams of protein, worst case, they just get burned up for fuel. They're not toxic, not bad for your kidneys. Worst case, on the other hand, is if you undereat protein, you just don't gain as much muscle or you lose more muscle than you're supposed to. So that's no bueno. So we have kind of those two extremes. A gram per pound is just almost never going to steer you wrong. But a gram per pound of what? Because if you've done the thing with like apps like My Fitness Pal, for example, you log all your food for the day and you're like, "Oh my god, like I'm eating like 300 grams of protein and I only ate 200 lbs. This is incredible." But when you look at the foods it's taking the protein from, it's foods like rice. It's food like beans, like whole grain bread, like regular white bread, and all these other foods where you're like, "Okay, I know that bread has protein in it, but like something I think called like protein quality, and isn't it better to get protein from like meats and milk products and eggs? Don't those like grow muscle better?" And then the question is like, well, how many of those do I have to get? And am I really eating a gram per pound of the right kind of protein, or am I off by one way or another? Should I be eating more? Or am I eating more than enough? Let's dig into that.
So the first question we have to answer is what protein quality is. And there are a few ways to go about this. All of them are very good. All of them have slight downsides and upsides. My preferred way to this day is to use the PDC AAS, the protein digestibility corrected amino acid score. What that basically does is it approaches protein quality from two perspectives. One is, protein is composed of amino acids, and amino acids are the building blocks of protein. And when your body builds proteins, it doesn't do it from whole proteins that you eat. It breaks those down into amino acids. And then when it builds your own proteins, it needs a decent amount of each amino acid in order to build something. Let's give an example. If you have a house and you take it apart and you keep all the copper wiring, you keep all the glass, you keep the steel, you keep the microcircuitry, you keep the wood, and you take it apart in such a meticulous way that you have everything roughly like as it's supposed to be, almost clean and untouched, what can you make from that house? If I told you that you have to make another house or something like it, you kind of have all the components. But if I told you you have to make like um a a a server farm, like a a very small room that is able to house like computer servers, you'd be like, "Okay, well, we just don't have enough electric wiring because like a house typically isn't wired like a server room. So, we're missing a component. Even though we have the same amount of house stuff, we don't have enough of the specific components we need. And honestly, we have like way too much wood. And so for protein quality, if you have a similar distribution of amino acids that the human body makes its stuff out of, which isn't super complex or exotic, it's really straightforward, you're good to go. Then you can take the protein that has those, break them down into individual amino acids, and feed those amino acids into all the body processes that build proteins from there. But if you have another situation where you have a a bunch of some types of amino acids and almost none or very little of a couple of types, even when you go try to build your house, so to speak, you run out of electric wiring and you can't do the job. So some kinds of protein, even though there's lots of amino acids, there's not enough of the right types, and I was going to say too many of some types; too many is not a problem because you can just use them for energy. It's just the fact that you don't have enough of certain types. So part one of protein quality is to be like, do we have the kind of distribution of amino acids that we typically see in the human body? It's not a zero or one answer. It's between zero and one, various gradations of like this protein has kind of so many wacky amino acids we don't need a ton of and so few of the ones we really need that like it's just really bad source of protein, and eating even almost infinite amounts of it still doesn't get get you to build all the protein structure and the muscle that you need, all the way to like, damn dude, this protein source is almost perfect and has enough amino acids in enough ratios to where the human body is just like using almost all that protein for the kind of stuff we want, like repairing cell structures and making you jacked, which is definitely the most important thing of what we want. So that's part one of quality is amino acid distribution.
Part two is the degree to which it gets digested and absorbed. There's some pretty good protein sources that the way they come packaged in the foods that they exist in. Um, they just go almost through the digestive tract mostly and just get pooped out the other way. And then even though they're pretty good and your body could use them, their digestion and absorption is such crap that like you actually don't get almost all of what you eat, or some fraction of it goes down the drain. And so if you think you're eating 50 g of protein in a meal, but it has like, let's say 10 g of that is such poor quality protein it basically doesn't count. Now you're really eating 40, and let's say only half of it in some strange way digests and absorbs. Functionally, your body receives only 20 grams of high-quality muscle-building protein from a 50 g protein meal. So, if you multiply that meal out by five, you say you're eating 250 grams of protein, but really you're eating 100 grams, and less than like 100 grams of protein for someone who weighs 200 lbs. That's just not enough by almost any cataloging to try to get really good muscle. It's good enough for health, but nothing outside of that. And then, you know, if you're eating 250 grams of protein, that's great. 200 is great. Even 150 works, but 100 is not enough. So, in such an extreme illustration, which can happen if you do some wacky stuff, we'll talk about in a bit, then you're not getting enough of the amino acids you need and you're not getting enough of the proteins digested and absorbed. And thus, in the scoring system for the PDCAS, you are going to score very, very low. So, the scoring system combines amino acid profile and how much of these amino acids you're digesting and absorbing and actually utilizing into one score. And that score at the bottom end is zero and at the top end is one. It's the same as scale roughly. So divide 100% by 100 and you get this scale. So the way I like to imagine it is like percentages. You don't have to do that. 0 and 1 is totally fine. A score of zero means that let's say we have like um a handful of protein snacks and we've designed them to have a a PDCAS score of zero. You eat it and we measure all the stuff in your blood and your muscles to see how much protein was delivered and it turns out it was none, like literally none. That sucks. And uh that is like the worst possible case. And even if some of the amino acids got in, it's like insanely high levels of one amino acid or two and the other ones are just missing. So your body's like, "I can't build anything out of this." It's like you're like, "Hey, all right, build me a house." And the builder's like, "Great." The whole team's there. Construction workers like, "What we got?" They're like, "We have a pile of sand." And you're like, "Okay, we can't build much out of that." Okay, fine. Get rid of the sand. No, no, I'll add. You get sand plus a shitload of wood. All the wood you can use. Like, okay, so we're not building a log cabin. We're building a modern home. So, we need like steel. We need like glass. We need all kinds of different ceramic mixtures and everything. Where's that? Like, we just just didn't buy it. Okay. So, functionally, you might have like enough wood to build a house and even more than you need, but you're not getting the right stuff. So, that's a score of zero. A score of one means from everything that you eat, you a protein snack designed with a PDCA SF of one, if it's 20 grams of protein you just ate, that is 20 grams of protein or damn close to it that is in your bloodstream. It goes to your muscles and it does all the good things that we want. Full send. It's exactly what you get. And we call scores of closer to one high quality. And we call scores significantly below one lower quality. Typically high quality is 0.9 and above. It's a very similar to the grading system in most schools where like an A or an A minus is 90% and above.
Scott, what was an A minus in your schools growing up? Percentage wise.
Yeah. 92.
Noing way. 92 is an A, right?
I think it was. I think I think 94 and up was an A and 90 to 94 was a A minus.
That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Sound right?
Yes. And also it depends on if you have A+es. I actually like the plus system a lot. So my is 90 to 92.99999 is an A minus. 93 to like 96 or depending on how you like to do it, 97 or 96.99 is an A. And then either 96 or 97 plus to 100 is an A+. But in any case, I do remember different school districts. It was separate. It was like all over the place.
Yes, totally, totally, totally.
So, at the end of the day, it's kind of like in grading where like if you want to be a quote straight A student, uh let's say A starts at 90, like you don't do the plus minus system. Anything above an A is really good and is so interchangeable. It just doesn't really make sense to overindex on the specifics. Anything above 0.9 is awesome and we're we're there for it. It's called high quality. And low lower quality is actually anything under 0.9. Now, the lower you go, the worse, but anything under 0.9 is we're going to try to see if we can get some higher quality stuff in there. And to that extent, there are a few other concerns. One, a high PDCAS score is good, but another thing you want is enough leucine. Leucine is a specific kind of amino acid that if you have a little bit of, muscle growth doesn't get triggered a ton, but if you have enough of, muscle growth gets triggered. If you have more than enough, nothing magical happens. It's kind of like leucine seems to be one of your muscle's best detectors for like if we have enough leucine we're getting growth started. If we don't, even if we have lots of other amino acids, we might not grow as much. And so we're also looking for high lucine sources which are almost always integrated in the PDCA score. So real quick, let's go through a couple of sample foods and look up what their scores are. And there are various technical reasons why they have these scores. I'm going to spare you guys, but if you want to look this up, you just ask Chad GPT and it'll tell you all about it. So gelatin, which is a hydrayed form of collagen protein. So they have roughly the same score, has a score of 0.08. So like if we did percentages, zero was the worst, 100 was the best, it has an 8%. So like when something has collagen protein in it and it's the majority of the protein is collagen, it is the one of the lowest quality protein source. So, if you you happen to be Caucasian, no offense Caucasians, all jokes, love and respect, and you go to super expensive grocery stores in your LA neighborhood to buy a collagen protein shake cuz like fitness influencer girl on TV told you like, "Oh my god, that collagen like supports your bones and it builds your mouths." It turns out collagen is like a dog protein. Sorry, it just is on literal technical grounds. And even though the gelatin is really fun to eat and you can bounce it off walls, not a high quality protein source. So, gelatin very low point uh 08. Actually, you know what? I'm just going to go on percents. Nutritionists that are formally trained, my apologies. Easier heristic for us to use here to teach. So remember the PCA score actually 100 uh is this divided by 100, but we'll go on percents because it's easy. 100% great protein, 0% shitty protein. 8% for gelatin. Wheat protein such as gluten has a 25%. Part of that is because it's just not very easy to digest and it's also incomplete. It doesn't have all the amino acids. 47% for rice, 54% for corn, 57% for oats, 58% for lentils. So lentils are often described as high protein, and they are, but there's just not enough methane, one of the amino acids, and so they're not just going to get you jacked by themselves. Kidney beans are 60, chickpeas are 65, peanut butter is 70. Remember, 70 still too low. Like it's like trying to say you're a really good student and saying, "I get straight 70s." M not a thing. Soy protein isolate 0.9. Boom. So, is soy protein okay? And will it get you jacked? Absolutely. It's a complete protein and it's awesome. A very rare complete plant protein is quinoa. And quinoa, which I used to think uh was kona, and I just assumed that was a black woman's name. Is that cool to say? Uh it's a 0.92 or uh 92%, which is really really good. So, quinoa, um, as they say colloquially, tofu is a 93. So, here's the thing. Everything I see from this list, from soy protein as a 90 to uh quinoa at a 92 and on, is officially a high quality protein source that you can eat tons of in your diet and get amazing results. And you don't need to worry about adjusting for anything. Fish, for example, salmon has a 95, chicken breast a 95, beef a 96, pork a 97, the other white meat, casein protein powder and eggs both have a 100, that eggs are actually the gold standard and what the PDCAS score was derived from. Later they tested whey and whey isolate whey hydrop protein and a derivative of whey called BLG has a 1.04 raw score or 104%. Whey is actually more anabolic, grows more muscle by teeny teeny tiny fractions. Nothing to take home, but just kind of cool to know than even the reference standard egg that they base this off of. So that's all the protein scores just have kind of lay of the land of what's going on. And we see that most plant sources are just not up to standard. Just a few of them are, which is why a lot of people say stick to animal sources for your protein unless it's the plant sources that work.
So, the next question and the big question of our chat today is what fraction of our daily protein, because here's the thing. When you do your tabulation in any of the nutritional tracking apps, they're usually just going to use raw scores on how many grams of protein you have for any food. And so, if you go into My Fitness Pal, it's going to count the protein from your Subway sandwich wheat bread, as well as the protein from the tomatoes and the onions in there, as well as the protein from the chicken and the cheese. And you got to be like, how much of this protein actually works to get me a good shot? And for optimal muscle growth and muscle retention, it seems like getting about 75% of your daily protein from high quality sources, 0.9 PDCA or above, 90% or above, is a really good best practice. Any more than that's not really required or has a huge benefit. Any less than that and you'll marginally pay the cost of not getting as jacked. And the rest 25% or so can come from low quality protein sources, no problem. So if you are counting the Subway bread in with your protein, as long as your diet's not like 50% bread protein and the rest regular protein, you're golden. As long as your diet is like 75% of your protein that you eat comes mostly from the meat and then the cheese and only 25% or less comes from the bread and other stuff, then you're good to go. That's a big deal. Now, that doesn't mean you need to only eat animal proteins. You can mix rice and
Beans together. They form a complimentary source cuz rice has a bunch of uh, certain kinds of amino acids and some deficits in others. Beans have the opposite, where they clip together and then actually make a complete protein source that's of decent quality. You can do that. There's tons of great vegan sources, but high-quality protein sources should be the core. However, you can eat low-quality ones and even count them in as long as they're just not roughly more than like a quarter of your protein intake. That's a big deal.
I have to say a few other things though, before we close out that are very important. Your body does treat protein on a daily situation. So, if you undereat protein earlier in the day, you overeat it later; there is some compensatory adjustment. However, it treats it much more fine-tuned meal by meal by meal. So, what I would tell you is, in most cases, it's a really good idea for you to treat every meal as an opportunity to get that 75 to 25 or better ratio of high-quality to low-quality proteins, which, to me, I can actually distill for you guys into a really super simple practical recommendation.
If you're doing full send, real good effort at trying to get jacked and get lean and all that stuff, being handsome and look like Scott the video guy, then what you want to do is make sure pretty much every single one of your meals—you know, of the three to five times a day that you eat roughly evenly spaced—you want to make sure that every single one of those meals pretty much is built around a core of high-quality protein.
So, whenever I'm making a meal or whenever I watch someone—I watch people all the time. Sometimes they don't know about it. Sometimes I'm in a non-mark van across the street with a telescope in the window. Would that work, Scott? Is that how light works? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Oh, yeah. I like see like one of their skin cells like as big as this. And that and that's what really gets me going. Like, you know, my huge fetish is violating people's privacy with them not knowing it. And if I can see a whole skin cell of yours, my god. I mean, that's Jesus. That's that's so intimate. You don't even know it looks like that. I got to a level of privacy better than you could do in your own home. In any case, the hell am I saying? I watch how people make meals in cafeterias and blah blah blah what they order. I watch how I do it. And what I'm looking for, to just green check mark ability to say this is a good meal for muscle growth, is I start building every meal around a core of high-quality protein.
It can be a high-quality vegan product. It can be a soy protein shake. It can be a giant ass bowl of quinoa that has enough protein in it and some cheese and some other stuff. But usually, it's going to be milk, egg, or meat-based products of some kind. Chicken breast, fish, all that stuff, beef, eggs, egg whites, egg protein powder, milk, cheese, whey protein powder, casein protein powder. That's going to form the core of my meal. And from that protein, I want to get damn close to my daily total. Let's say I've calculated that I have five meals a day. Just as an example, I need 200 grams of protein. And I am calculating that like, okay, that's 40 grams per meal. So that every meal needs about 40 grams of protein. What I like to do is make sure that when I'm ordering at Subway or Chipotle or making a meal at home that I take my protein that I have and that core of high-quality protein, good animal products, good vegan products is like 35 grams at least. And if I can get to 35 grams of like protein from chicken breast, and the other five grams are like the the wheat bread that it's on and some of the sauce has some protein in it, hey, listen, I'm good to go. But if I only have like bread and potato chips as a meal or I have like a little teeny Scott, you ever get like a sandwich somewhere and there's like one slice of turkey and you're like, who the hell is this for? How are you insulting me with this? Is this for a child? Is it are we in poverty times? And so, yes, it might have some meat in it, but 10 grams of high-quality protein in a meal that needs 40, it doesn't kind of matter what else is in it, it's not going to be enough.
So, the easiest, most simple way you can just not have to worry about protein quality ever again is that every time you reach for a muscle-building meal, your meal starts with a core of milk or eggs or soy or quinoa or a high-quality vegan blend or chicken or steak or fish or something with goddamn protein in it that's high quality. And no, peanut butter does not count as that. Scott, you ever seen them women's magazines and videos for females? Ladies, no offense. The three and a half of you that watch this channel, no offense. Um, it's like it's just a classic like almost like kit at this point reused thing of like a super healthy-looking young woman with a very excellent skincare routine dipping a perfectly cut green crisp apple slice into an adorable little cup of peanut butter and then the text is like peanut butter can boost your protein intake and it's good to have as a snack. How many times have you seen that? Yeah. Infinity. Yeah. They put the butters in there big for protein, dude. And the thing is is that yes, peanut butter has protein, but it's very low-quality protein. It does not come anywhere close to our 90% cutoff. So, it's it's kind of like when your teacher when you're running to class and you're late, your teacher's a crazy nazi person and they close and lock the door at the very this guy. You ever had teachers like that? That close lock the door and like anyone who doesn't get in on time just yeah thing. That's kind of how protein quality works here in our little understanding. So peanut butter like just gets the door slammed in its face because it's at point it's at 70 and not at 90 or above and then it just doesn't really meaningfully contribute to protein unless you start combining with other stuff. Then the other stuff has to be high quality and protein from peanut butter doesn't even get digested all that well and the whole thing down the line. So that's important to remember because not all proteins are created equal. And so if that girl instead of having like this beautiful plate of apples, which have almost no protein in them whatsoever, and peanut butter, which is not the kind of protein we want for the most part, and also mostly fat and not protein, if she was just to take that meal, change nothing about it, and put a big old glass of skim milk or 2% or even whole milk next to that mouth, then now we rolling. Now we have a protein core.
So the protein core for every meal is the best possible thing that I can tell you and is the biggest TL;DR of all time. So, for those of you who are precient and psychic, you scroll to just this part of the video and need nothing else. Now, if you're trying to put all this together in a big diet plan and it's all painful because what the hell is dieting so complicated, the RP Diet Coach app exists. I help make it myself and it's just a super straightforward app that keeps track of all of your meals. You can tell it your goals. It'll make a meal plan for you. You can enter any food that you want in it. It can even give you suggestions. And all of a sudden, boom, it's got a diet coach in your pocket. It updates all the time. It reminds you about meals. It keeps you on track for fat loss, for maintenance, or muscle gain. That's also linked in the description. Give it some thought.
In any case, I've been ranting for enough. Go out there and get a goddamn protein core whole food meal and make yourself more jacked. And if you see someone around you at a restaurant not ordering it, make sure to snub at them. Oh my word. How are you ever going to grow any muscle with that? Your butlers must be furious with you. Grab your gold purse and your gold chain and saunter out. And I'll see you guys next time. [Music] Oh, darling.