Transcript for:
Protein Quality and Intake

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 gram 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 gram 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 gram 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 at 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 gram of protein and I only ate 200 lb 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 gram 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 lb 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 one 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 gram 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 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 shit 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 shit 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 a 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 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 lowquality 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 the 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 shit for other stuff but usually it's going to be milk egg or meatbased 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 is this for how are you insulting me with this bullshit 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 was 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 skinincare 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 shit 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 nazy 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 TLDDR of all time so for those of you who are preient 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