Cryoboy
6.6K posts





"Your body can only use 25-30g of protein per meal. Anything above that gets wasted." This claim has been repeated in fitness nutrition for over a decade, and it was built on studies that measured the right thing over the wrong timescale. Moore 2009 gave six young men 0, 5, 10, 20, or 40g of egg protein after leg-only resistance exercise and tracked muscle protein synthesis for four hours. MPS plateaued at 20g. Witard 2014 repeated a similar dose-response with whey protein after unilateral leg exercise in 48 resistance-trained men and found MPS rose 49% at 20g and 56% at 40g over four hours, with the authors concluding 20g was sufficient for maximal stimulation. Case closed, or so it seemed. The problem wasn't the dose. It was that a 4-hour window captures the peak response to 20g but only the opening chapter of what 40g is doing. Think of digestion as a funnel with a fixed flow rate. Pour a cup of water through it and it drains in minutes. Pour a gallon and it doesn't overflow. The funnel just drains at the same rate over a longer period. Protein behaves the same way. A smaller dose gets absorbed and used quickly. A larger dose digests over a longer window because the stomach slows gastric emptying and the intestine releases amino acids gradually. Muscle tissue keeps incorporating them wave after wave. The "ceiling" in those early studies wasn't a biological saturation point. It was what you see when you stop watching before the larger dose finishes working. Trommelen et al. (2023, Cell Reports Medicine) tested this directly. They randomized 36 recreationally active young men to 0g, 25g, or 100g of milk protein after a 60-minute whole-body resistance session and tracked muscle protein synthesis for twelve hours using a quadruple isotope tracer. In the first four hours, myofibrillar protein synthesis was only about 20% higher after 100g than after 25g. In the four-to-twelve-hour window, that gap widened to roughly 40%. That later window is where the bigger dose actually separates from the smaller one, and it's exactly where every prior dose-response study stopped measuring. The authors also reanalyzed the oxidation data from Moore and Witard and concluded that postprandial amino acid oxidation represents less than 15% of the increment in ingested protein. The paper states it plainly: "Protein ingestion has a negligible impact on whole-body protein breakdown rates or amino acid oxidation rates." Caveats belong in the read. This was young recreationally active men following a single bout of resistance exercise. Not trained athletes, not women, not older adults, not a longitudinal hypertrophy trial. A 2024 Witard commentary in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism flagged that the finding may not translate to resistance-trained young women with different anabolic kinetics. Practically: you don't need to portion exactly 25-30g of protein every three hours to avoid "wasting" it. Larger meals extend the anabolic window rather than capping it. Distribution across the day still matters for satiety, blood sugar, and hitting your daily target. But the rigid per-meal rule has weaker biology behind it than previously believed. Sources: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19056590/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24257722/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27511985/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38118410/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38991545/


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it's rly funny how in your early 20s you just kind of assume things will work out for you and fall into place eventually and then you slowly realize they aren't going to


2. 🦵 Squats helped… briefly When I saw the steep fruit spike I did 50 squats. As soon as I stopped, it resumed spiking. A 20-min easy walk is better. Surprising because I thought short high intensity activity is better. What I'll do differently - allocate 20 mins of movement after meals













