Had a talk today with a guy who was sort of offended for some reason about me not eating animal products and lifting weight. He said I’d never get enough protein (never heard that one before!!!). Because lentils aren’t a thing in a world of steaks.
Anyway he said that you need at least 200 grams of protein each day when you lift but that’s of course nonsense. Not saying you shouldn’t do it, but you don’t need to either.
I’m averaging around 110-140 grams a day and I’m doing fine at ±80kg body weight.
You cannot estimate protein this way, this is an incorrect method. The bioavailability of protein in each type of food determines how much protein is actually digested by your body.
Refer to DIAAS (if not available, relative PDCAAS) of foods, and their amino acid breakdown to determine your protein intake using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_quality and calculate how much protein you need depending on physical work you do. 1-1.5 gram per pound of body weight is the recommendation for athletes and gym people.
Lentils and plant foods actually are inferior and in general you need to eat double the plant foods compared to eggs, meat and milk, in order to get equivalent amount of bioavailable protein for your body. There is only pea and potato protein that is high DIAAS value, soya is also high but is detrimental to testosterone levels of males (limited research).
Is soya detrimental to test? Or is that the scare story because it contains phyto(?) oestrogen? (The kind that looks like oestrogen but isn’t the same thing.)
No, soy is not detrimental in healthy moderation. The amount of soy you would need to eat to effect your test would have to number in the tens of thousands of calories.
It’s a byproduct of the scare campaigns related to phytoestrogen in soy which has absolutely no effect on the human body whatsoever.
It’s a fad that people have against soy. Some people say it makes you more feminine or even go as far as to say you will grow boobs as a guy. But after years of consuming soy on a regular basis, I am yet to grow boobies.
People with no understand of science saw the word “Estrogen” and the far-right went buck wild with it. If photoestrogens made you grow boobies, the entire male population would be transfem. It is impossible to avoid soy in the modern world, and our ancestors have been eating it for thousands of years without a problem.
Far-right broscientists definitely went wild with the manboobs and feminine claims, however it is fair enough that these studies be read and understood. These are peer reviewed and researched studies.
https://www.cdc.gov/nutritionreport/pdf/Isoflavones.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6057888/
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/soy/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/13697137.2014.966241
also even if you ate actual estrogen, loads of it would be filtered out by a first pass through the liver. it’s not bioavailable by the oral route because it’s something the body can recognize as something that it shouldn’t get from food.
and soy phytoestrogens are more likely to act as estrogen blockers than estrogens, though the effect is very weak.
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In lower amounts it may be okay to have. There is no need to outlaw soya out of your life perse, but there is limited research that might be helpful to keep in mind.
Most experts I have seen actually say around only 0.8g/lbs (assuming animal based) is necessary to gain muscle mass. The more important factor once you have above 0.8 is total calories. There also isn’t particularly any dangerous about 1-1.5 g/ lbs either. 1.0 is definitely a nice safe target though for sure.
None of this controls for type of athlete nor what stage of training.
The most common thought is to increase protein when you are cutting calories to maintain muscle mass in a cut. A recomp diet would be similar.
Type of protein does matter but if you have increased your protein intake when plant based above 0.8 or 1.0 or whatever, it ends up not mattering very much. This is key because there are people who cannot because of their genes maintain cholesterol levels healthily eating much animal based products. I.e. there isn’t anything necessarily “inferior” about plant based protein sources.
You need to control how much calories go in, and it can become an issue if you want to keep diet trimmed. The more particularly important issue is how do you get your 20-30 grams of high bioavailable protein post workout. Whey isolate cannot be an answer for everyone, as it has lactose, and long term usage of it creates kidney stones.
There is also an issue with plant foods not just having less bioavailability, but also incomplete in terms of 9 amino acids that make the full protein. So you need to do some protein mixing to proportionately balance deficient amino acids of whatever different plant foods you consume.
The inferior part is most plant sources have protein bioavailability well below 60%, which gives you less room for diet adjustment, and denser protein meals.
All this can just be accounted for with a bit of extra effort to read about where to get the best plant based sources of protein. It’s not particularly hard. Most vegan body builders end up getting pretty interested in the different sources and combinations of proteins. It’s all great knowledge to have in general.
Protein mixing is the technique used for this, to account for pairing up foods to create complete protein meals. Its not hard, but from how much nutrition and diet stuff I have learnt, it becomes an issue if you want to have denser post workout protein. As an example, it is common practice to pair up peas or lentils or beans with rice, for a good carb-protein meal. Whole wheat works excellently in India and wherever it is eaten daily. Vegans (and myself) use whey isolate-peanut butter mixtures with milk as another example.
For those with no problems against lactose, whey isolate becomes very easy to use. But for those with lactose intolerance or vegans that avoid dairy, it becomes an issue. Even though I am not vegan, I do cater to helping build diets for friends and family (my dad as doctor rarely has suggestions, and corrections are unneeded), and I like to have this knowledge.