The 1 gram per pound protein rule

Philip Pape 0:00

If you've been told you need one gram of protein per pound of body weight, this episode is for you. Today I'm evaluating the protein target that we are always arguing about. And you're gonna learn why a new trial in women over 40 found no difference, surprisingly, between low, moderate, and high protein. But what did they find? That is going to point to a mistake that many of us make that costs us more lean mass and muscle in the long term, and what to do instead. Welcome to Wits & Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and I guess we can't talk enough about protein, but I know you're sick of it in one respect, but you're always looking for new data and evidence in another. So I'm gonna satisfy that uh curiosity today. This one came from a listener question, probably the most often asked question from those of us who lift weights, especially, which is how much protein do I need to meld muscle? Or how much protein do I need X in X scenario, you know, fat loss, or all sorts of different situations. And I almost didn't make this episode because we've covered protein so much. We even back on episode 466 covered why high protein isn't a fad, even though there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the supermarket shelves with high protein, to the point where there was a funny meme, a woman shopping in the store and she she saw, you know, high protein this, high protein that, high protein bra, and she was like super excited and wanted to grab that one too. But I like to put episodes out on what seem like tried and true topics like protein, especially when new data comes out or new studies come out. Well, there's a new trial that came out in middle-aged and older women, and I would say that the experts still don't agree, let's say, or they're still arguing about what it means when these studies come out and how we interpret them. So I went ahead and dug into them and I realized that there's other interesting things to share on the show that is beyond just here's how much protein you need. Because I mean, look, if you eat a gram per pound, if you eat 0.7 grams per pound, if you eat 1.5 grams per pound, you're actually not the person that I'm most concerned about. You know, you're you're doing a pretty decent job, even though we're gonna cover some of those interesting corner cases. The interesting part is this optimization, this need to optimize that last 10% when most people are missing the first, you know, 50% of what moves the needle. So wouldn't you feel more confident and less stressed if you knew, hey, if I could do this, I'm gonna get the vast majority of the results. Beyond that, it is really truly just optimization. And it might surprise you, like it might be more relaxed than you think. Then at the end of the episode, after we cover all that, I'm gonna give you a quick check that you can do with your food log. You just need like three days of your food log, and then a change that you can make to add more strength, more muscle mass in the context of your protein. All right. So for

Where the 1.6 and 2.2 kg targets came from

Philip Pape 3:01

this episode, we're gonna look at where all the famous talked-about targets for protein came from. Two of them actually came from the same paper. We're gonna cover that. Then the new research trial that came out and the disagreement among experts on what it means, and then what I would do in grams per pound, including which body weight do you use? Is it your total body weight? Is it your you know, ideal body weight, to use lean mass? What's the easiest way to do this? Because I think it trips a lot of people up. So let's start with always the popular advice, right? There's popular advice. Um, and I'm gonna split this into three different buckets, three different versions of what I hear on social media, okay? Especially now that everyone's spitting stuff out using AI. Version one is this, the classic rule, the rule of thumb, eat a gram of protein per pound of body weight. Version two is the more sciencey one, which is okay, 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram. And I say it in kilograms because that's how the studies show it, but that's where my you know 0.7 grams per pound comes typically comes from. And then version three, which is aimed aimed at a lot of you in marketing, says, oh, women in perimenopause and menopause need at the top of that range or more because estrogen drops, muscle gets less responsive to protein, you know, anabolic resistance, and you know, just get at least a gram per pound of your body weight, of your current body weight, and just move on, right? So, where did these numbers come from, especially the 1.6 and the 2.2? That's the grams per kilograms. Well, they mostly trace back to a big analysis that pooled together 49 trials of people lifting weights with different amounts of protein. And the research found researchers found that the extra muscle from more protein seemed to flatten out. So we call this the dose response curve, right? It tends to go up quickly and then start to flatten out. The curve flattens out around 1.6 grams per kilogram, which is about 0.7 grams per pound. Now, they weren't totally certain about where it flattened out. They didn't necessarily have uh measurements at every single data point along the way, but around between around one and two point two grams per kilogram is where it started to flatten out. So they said, look, if you want to be safe, aim for the top of the range, aim for the 2.2, which is that one gram per pound. And why this matters, if you if you really tease this apart, don't just skip past this. When you tease it apart, when you design something, like let's say you're gonna make a little bridge in your in your yard and you have a creek and you want to, you know, walk over the creek without the bridge breaking. Well, you're gonna overdesign it. You're gonna get the thicker wood and you're going to get, you know, better fasteners. Maybe you're gonna use some synthetic decking or something like that, right? Just like when we built our house, you know, I want to make sure I'm not gonna fall through my second floor porch. So you add a safety factor. Now, for protein, the 2.2 number, keep this in mind, is like the safety factor. Okay. So the one gram per pound or the 2.2 is a safety factor. It's overdesigned. And I think a lot of people think of that as a minimum. And then, you know, they round it to the gram per pound. It's easy to remember. I totally get it. Okay, and I've said this for years because if you just, if you just need a target to shoot for that's a stretched target, it's great. But it also leads to a lot of you getting so stressed out and saying, Oh, Philip, I can't get a gram per pound. I'm constantly missing that. And I say, look, just dial it back. 0.7 is all you need. And it may be less, it may be a little more. Also, are you doing fat loss? Like, what's going on? So, oh, okay, back to the protein science. One thing about the big analysis I mentioned in that is that the people in it were mostly young. And when they looked at older people and untrained people, the extra protein seemed to do less, not more. Hmm. So the data that says, hey, you need more because you're older, anabolic resistant, anabolic resistance doesn't necessarily come from that research. It actually comes from a different kind of study we're gonna get to in a second. So

New protein trial in women 40 to 77

Philip Pape 6:56

here is the new trial that I mentioned that I teased about. Researchers took a little over a hundred untrained women between 40 and 77. They had them all lift weights with, they were supervised by the researchers or trainers for 12 weeks, and they assigned them to three protein targets. The low target, which was the government minimum of 0.8 grams per kilogram. So it's at like a third of a gram per pound, moderate protein, which is 1.6, and high protein, which is 2.2. So that's basically one gram per pound. So you go from a third to in the middle, around 0.7, all the way to the one. And in the study, the women mostly hit their targets based on their food logs. So we're gonna make the assumption that they hit their protein targets. What they found, and this is gonna shock you, I think, there was no detectable difference in muscle between any of the groups, not just between moderate and high, even the low group at the bare minimum gained about the same as the high group. Now, I would say, hey, isn't that crazy? Isn't that wild? Except for the fact you've heard me talk a lot about how the training stimulus is by far, far more important. The fact that you're lifting weights is far more important than the protein itself. And if you're one of those gram per pound people or coaches listening, you're thinking, okay, have I been over consuming protein? Have I been wasting time trying to get all this protein? And if you're kind of in the middle at the point seven, like, yeah, I listen to Eric Helms and I subscribe to research reviews and see, I told you like that is where you need to be. Hold on, hold on, okay.

Trial limits and the expert disagreement

Philip Pape 8:28

We have to read research with a proper nuance. So if we look at this study, the first thing is the study was, I'll say sized to catch a fairly large effect. The difference we'd expect between 1.6 and 2.2 grams per kilogram based on all the earlier research is actually small because of that dose response curve. Maybe a few hundred grams of muscle over several months, over three months, 12 weeks of the trial. A trial that has around 14 women per group is, you know, maybe not going to detect that, even if it's real. The second thing is they didn't measure muscle directly. They use bioelectrical impedance, which I'm always a little bit skeptical of. That's the scale where you stand on the metal plates, you hold the handles, just like an in-body, and it's estimating your muscle from your water, meaning it's not directly measuring your muscle mass, right? So there's always these issues with like lean mass, right? Lean mass versus body fat, and lean mass is comprised of water, muscle, and other tissue. And then the third thing is they never recorded who was, say, in menopause, who was on hormone therapy. So if anybody's saying, no, that's a menopause trial, this and this really irks me just based on women's age. We, if you're not studying the population specifically and calling out that variable, don't say it's like on that population. That that's just an annoying pet people mine. Now, to the credit of the authors, they said all this in the research. If you look at the the discussion, limitations, things like that. They wrote basically that that finding no difference doesn't mean the doses are the same, and it doesn't prove the minimum is enough protein. So again, I'm I'm like on one hand being like shocker, and on the other hand, hold on, don't read too much into it. Now, the I guess public disagreement between experts that I wanted to address here, you know, you have on one side guys like Greg Knuckles over at Stronger by Science, love his stuff. He was on a podcast, he's behind MacroFactor, all that great stuff. He's a numbers guy like me. And he went back and reanalyzed the big protein data sets. And he argued that that the benefit does probably continue past 1.6 grams per kilogram, you know, not by a lot. It shrinks the higher you go. It's the law of diminishing returns, dose response curve. But it doesn't just like fall off a cliff. And so there is an optimization element to that. And he generally suggests a lower protein level for women than for men on average at about 1.75 grams per kilogram. So that's about 0.8 grams per pound or 0.93 grams per pound if you want to be safe. So anyway, you're in that like again, 0.7 to 1 gram per pound. Like, let's not overthink it. Now, on the other side, you've got the camp that says that most head-to-head trials that compare higher and lower protein and lifters just don't find a difference. So the 1.6 is enough for almost everybody. Now, I would say, okay, what whether you consider that a distinction without a difference is up to you, but I think both sides agree, and this is the most important thing. Listen up, this is the most important thing. In the the meta-analysis where they pool the research stuff together, the findings together, every study done only in women tested intakes at or below about 1.5 grams per kilogram. So nobody's actually run a woman-only study big enough to show whether going from 1.6 to 2.2 adds more benefit. So when a Fitfluencer tells you that women in menopause need more, they need 2.2 or more, whatever, it didn't come from actual research or trials on women in menopause. I just like to point that out. That's all. As far as I can tell, it's studies that measure short-term muscle building signals, mostly older men, and they kind of round it up to be safe. And that's not crazy, but it's a guess. It's a guess. So if the in other words, if if if all the arguments about the studies and the data at this point are narrowed in scope to this small slice at the top, oh, is it 0.7, is it 0.8, is it one? Where does it actually make the biggest difference? And this is where this is the important part. Okay.

A year of protein without lifting

Philip Pape 12:32

If we look at the reason, again, the research, not just me pulling it out of my butt. There is a year-long trial from Denmark in healthy adults over 65. Some of them got a protein supplement every day, twice a day for a full year without lifting weights. Some got the protein plus light training, and some got protein plus heavy lifting. Really cool, right? The no-lifting group, light training and heavy lifting. So a whole year of extra protein without lifting weights, what do you think happened? It didn't do anything. It didn't do anything measurable for their muscle restraint. They measured um thigh muscle, nice big muscle to measure, or their strength. That is a year of taking a ton of protein and getting zero benefit, which I'm not surprised at all. Again, going back to my earlier comment about how lifting weights itself is the most important signal. Only the heavy lifting group both kept their muscle and got stronger. The protein is not the thing building the muscle, it's the lifting weights, and the protein helps it along. The protein is the building block, right? It's the supply of the material that you need. Right? It'd be like if you had all the materials around to build a house and you kept delivering it to the job site, but nobody was there actually building the house. Of course, the house wouldn't get built, right? So that's I'll say the first mistake is overthinking protein and yet you're not lifting weights consistently. People get really precise about it, and then they train at an inc in an inconsistent way or at a low level of effort, or they go through the motions and they just show up at the gym. Yeah, maybe it's three, four days a week, but it's the same weight and you're not progressing. Like that is where you should be spending your energy, not on the protein. And I know we always go to the easy stuff. Like it's easy to just jack up protein compared to going in and doing the hard thing by lifting weights. Now, the protein message is everywhere. I get it. It's easy to buy protein now more than ever before, which I think is amazing. I think it's awesome. I think that's great because that is less friction when you need it to support your lifting, but it's definitely harder to add weight to the bar or to the dumb bouncer than the sheet. So if you're choosing where to spend your energy, I would put it into training first and protein second. Now, the the the other mistake is on the opposite end. When researchers grouped older women by how much protein they already ate and then put them all through six months of lifting weights, the women eating the least protein gained less muscle than the others. And the women in the moderate group and the high group gained about the same. So there is a penalty for getting insufficient protein when you're under the floor, let's say. Whereas the difference between good and great is negligible, if not, you know, best case, it optimizes a little bit, and it's perfectly fine to do if you want more protein, if you need, you know, but it's not, you shouldn't go out of your way to get a ton more protein in that context. Now, we haven't talked about specific scenarios, like, for example, a very aggressive deficit or when you're on a GOP one or something like that, which is we we gotta have more studies on that. You know, we had Lyle McDonald on the show talking about intermittent modified fasting. And I would definitely bias toward higher protein in those groups, but we're talking about a short-term, very specific goal, right? We're not talking about just in general, like what is your baseline. A lot of us, a lot of people over 40, over 50, especially if you've been dieting for a long time, you are just not eating what you think. Okay. I see this all the time. Even if someone tells you, oh no, I eat a lot of protein, either they misunderstand where protein comes from, or, you know, I don't want to say it's like, oh, peanut butter, and they think of it as protein. Yes, there is that mistake, but it does take some effort to get beyond that like 0.3 to 0.5 grams of protein that most people top out at naturally to get into the 0.701, right? And, you know, there is no shame in trying to get that protein via a combination of food and supplementation. Because protein supplements are really just derived from Whole Foods anyway, minimally processed derived from Whole Foods. And, you know, I have to get 180 grams a day of protein. So I couldn't do it without supplementing. And

Closing your daily protein gap

Philip Pape 16:35

so, speaking of that, just as a quick aside, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, True Nutrition, because they are my favorite protein powder supplier at the moment, just because I could customize the protein and it tastes great. You pick protein, you pick the flavor, the sweetener, all of it, and you could save it. So I have a couple different mixes. I actually have one with cookies and cream, and I have one with chocolate fudge. And I'm not sure which one I like more. They have a little bit of a taste and texture. But because I personally eat on the higher end, the way it looks for me is in the mornings I work out, I'll have a true nutrition shake, like probably what amounts to 40 grams, just like a scoop and a half, along with a banana in the morning. So it digests really quickly. I can pop into the gym half hour later. I don't feel too heavy. You know, it really gets things going and it makes it easier to hit my protein for the day. Days I'm not training, I might do that anyway, just at any point during the day. I like how full protein keeps me, regardless. You don't need as much as I do necessarily. You might want to have, you know, one shake a day, or some people go with two or three. If you're busy like I am, it's hard to get all your protein with food alone sometimes. So it's okay to have a whey, egg, casein, or if you're vegetarian or vegan, pea and rice blend type shake that tastes great to you, that you'll enjoy, that you look forward to. And look, if it substitutes something else that would have been a snack that maybe has less nutrition for you, all the better. So if you go to truenutrition.com/witsandweights, use my code Wits and Waights, you can get 20% off your first order. You can also add things like psyllium husk, fiber, probiotics, vitamins when you make your custom blend true nutrition. And it does taste great. I promise you, it is smooth, even with just water, but you can throw some almond milk or milk in there, and it just takes a couple minutes to build. They have a lot of other options that are pre-built for you if you just want a quick option. Everything's third party lab tested, first party verified. They make it in their own facility and they ship to over 150 countries now. So go to true nutrition.com/slash wits and weights. Use the code WITSANDWEIGHTS for 20% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. So now that we've talked about where this all came from, what the floor is, whether the research shows you do need to be above a certain amount, and the fact that lifting weights is the most important signal, what do you do?

5 practical protein targets

Philip Pape 18:52

Okay, I'm gonna give you five tips now. Tip number one is set a floor of 0.7 grams per pound of your goal body weight. Now, sometimes I simplify this and just say your current body weight. But if you're gonna lose, you know, if you need to lose a lot of weight, I don't want you to overshoot on your protein now and make it more difficult on yourself when you just don't need to. Your body will actually be in a very good position to drop fat regardless and hold on to the muscle. But if you're kind of more of an average leanness or you're not gonna change your weight a lot, like you might change it by 10 or 15 pounds, you could just simplify the math and say your current weight. But again, that's what that's 0.7 grams per pound of your goal body weight. So if you weigh up if your goal weight is 150 pounds, that's like 105 grams a day. So for a lot of women listening, you're looking at a minimum of 100 grams in general, in general. And for a lot of men, you're looking at maybe, you know, between 130 and 150 minimum. Depends on how heavy you are. Obviously, you're 250 pounds, 300 pounds, you know, that number goes up. And that gets you the vast majority of what you need. Now, number two, if you want to account for the higher end of the curve, for lean mass, you know, supporting more lean mass, for different phases like fat loss, then set a you can go ahead with the one gram per pound as what I'll call a stretch goal. Now, for those of you who track, who log in food in something like MacroFactor, like I do, you may have two different ways to think about hitting targets. Some people like to overshoot and some people like to undershoot. So, what I mean by that is on protein, protein is kind of a minimum. So if you set your target to one gram per pound, but it's just kind of hard for you to read it meet re meet on a regular basis and you fall short, that might be psychologically demoralizing to you. If, however, and and so you would set it a little bit less to the 0.7.8, which connects to my first tip. But if you like the idea of pushing yourself, even if you fall a little bit short, that's where I think the gram per pound can actually come in handy because it slowly shifts you toward uh where you want to be. And then when you go into something like a hard fat loss phase, now I go to tip three. So tip one is a floor of 0.7. Tip two is you can use one if you want a stretch goal. Tip three is if you're gonna diet really hard, especially if you're already lean or you're just trying to lose that quote unquote fast five to 10 pounds. You know, we had Lyle McDonald on the show last week, and you know, the intermittent modified fasting. We've talked about rapid fat loss. Well, pro if you're going to have like those fasting style days, protein modified fast or protein-sparing modified fast, then it's more correlated to how lean you are and whether you're lifting that day. And it's usually pegged to pounds of lean mass. I don't want to overcomplicate it. You can go listen to that episode and we got we kind of broke it down, but it tends to be even higher. So, like a lean woman who lifts three days a week might end up at around 1.2 grams per pound of body weight on those days, right? Actually, you keep the protein generally the same, you do keep it the same, whether it's a deficit day or a maintenance day. But if you have a little more body fat, you don't need to be as high, right? Protein seems to matter more when you're the most lean. And the deficit is larger. So, in a very hard cut, that gram per pound is a nice cheap insurance policy, and it could even become your floor during a fat loss phase. Not a total requirement, but if you're gonna diet really, really hard and you're worried about lean mass loss, you might as well get the most out of it and really jack that up. Now, just really quick, I kind of glossed over the current body weight versus goal body weight. If you weigh 220 pounds and your goal is 170 pounds, a gram per pound of your current weight is 220 grams of protein. And that's a lot based on your goal weight, which is close to what Lyle's lean mass math does. You know, I kind of have a the calculating based on lean mass is a little bit more challenging because you have to know what your body fat is, but it's not that hard to do. But a lot of you don't want to do the math, so that's why these rubrics, these proxies are fine. But if you are, again, 220 pounds, your goal is 170, then being down around 120 to 170 grams of protein, totally achievable, should still keep you in good shape. That's my point. All right. Tip number four is okay, when do you eat this protein? Because people always ask. Well, just spread it across your meals. So if you spread it across your meals, you might get a little extra benefit of that bigger dose at each sitting, which we've seen in mainly short-term studies. But more importantly, it's practical. Like having a huge, you know, 60, 70, 80, 100 gram protein meal in one meal, and then the next snack is like pure carb snack. It's just inconsistent. And for most people, it's gonna mess a little bit with your blood sugar and your energy and be less practical. So, of course, just distribute it. That's my uh practical advice. You don't have to, but you might find it's the most, I'll say optimal and practical. And then tip number five this is the one I want you to just stick with forever. You gotta lift consistently and hard enough that the protein can do its job. What we call progressive overload, where you're training close enough to failure that the last few reps are difficult and that you are able to increase the weight or the reps each time you go into the gym and do that exercise, and you should be doing those on a consistent basis. This is not pink dumbbells or yoga or Pilates or P90X or CrossFit. No, it's just straight up lifting. Now, now the implements you lift with, there's flexibility there. Barbells, dumbbells, machines. There's even some band type lifting that could work. But from an objective tracking perspective, traditional straight line lifting is generally what's gonna work for most people. You know, you go to the gym or you have a home gym. Without that, the protein isn't gonna do lick a lick of good for you. That's it. Now, if your appetite is small, this is just a last tangent, little footnote. All right. I know a lot of you are actually in that boat. Either you're a hard gainer and you can't eat a lot or you need to eat a lot, or you're on GLP1s. Okay. Or you're older, you just don't aren't as hungry as you used to be. Don't chase the higher level of like a gram per pound if it's not practical. Hitting the 0.7 is gonna get you there. Liquid calories can help get you there, right? Just be creative about it. If you're still not sure, reach out. Go to wince of weight.com slash question, shoot me a question. Now, one last thing is I'm not saying that protein, more protein is bad. That's definitely not the case. You could pretty much eat as much protein as you want. I've known folks that eat tons and tons of protein. What it's gonna do is gonna take away from your fats and carbs. It might take away from the variety or practicality or even the nutrients in your food if you're too skewed in one direction. That's all. What matters more is the floor. The floor matters a lot more than any ceiling because there not isn't really a ceiling. All right, before we wrap up, I mentioned that I'm gonna give you a three-day check from your food log and then a small change that can add more uh strength and muscle to your results. But first, this episode, remember, came from a listener question. I love answering listener questions. Even if it's on a topic we've covered before, there's always nuance, like today with some of these studies that you hadn't heard of before. If you have something that you're stuck on, training, nutrition, protein, fat loss, it doesn't matter how small it seems or if you think it's been answered before, go to wits and weights.com slash question and send it to me. Witsandweights.com slash question. I will reply to your email, and then you can choose if I give you a shout out, if I use it on the show. That is witsandweights.com/ question. All right, so if you lift weights,

Bonus: 3-day food log protein check

Philip Pape 26:13

which you're lifting weights, right? And you're not sure you eat enough protein, I want you to be law, I want you to log three normal days of food and then just divide your average daily protein by your body weight in pounds. Yes, you heard right. Divide your average daily protein by your body weight in pounds. That's it, just like we've been talking about. If you are under 0.55, then increasing your protein is gonna make a massive difference. That's kind of the threshold. In a recent trial of almost 300 frail older adults who were lifting twice a week, the ones starting below that level who then added protein gained about 14 pounds more in the leg press in 12 weeks than people who only trained and didn't add the protein. So that's the threshold. That's I want to reiterate that there is a floor. And then the ones who started even lower, they actually gained 24 pounds more. Their change was roughly a 20 gram serving a day, plus they had help in planning their meals. So if you're under that threshold, that 0.55, one extra protein serving a day is gonna make a massive difference in getting stronger and building muscle from your training, especially if you feel stuck. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, set a protein floor that you can hit every single day, base it on your goal weight, and lift hard enough to give that protein a job to do. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits & Weights podcast.