Alan Aragon: Most Replayed Moment: The Truth About Protein Intake and The Simplest Way To Lose Fat

Steven Bartlett opens by naming the conflicting advice he grew up with: eat protein right after a meal, before a meal, in particular amounts, or that timing doesn't matter at all. He asks his guest which protein myths people currently believe. The guest says the biggest one is that people have the order of priorities wrong. They worry about how much protein to eat per meal, and about timing protein around training, waking or sleeping. In the guest's view, the daily total is what they should focus on.

The main thing they need to be focused on is how much protein do they need to eat by the end of the day.

The guest argues that reaching the daily total means you have "basically won the whole game." Placement, distribution, dose size and timing "rarely matters" beyond eating protein in a way that is comfortable, convenient and sustainable over the long term. The guest presents eating style as a personal preference, not a performance factor.

Some people are more like grazers, some people are more like gorgers. They're both fine as long as you hit the total by the end of the day.

The guest sets out three tiers. First is the total daily intake. Second is how that total is split into doses through the day. Third is timing protein specifically around the training session. The guest's image for this is that the daily total is the cake, and distribution is the icing.

That's the icing on the cake and it's a very thin layer of icing.

Asked how this is known, the guest cites "a couple of lines of evidence" and describes two studies. The first is by Yasuda and colleagues, who compared a two-meal model with a three-meal model and found the three-meal model better for muscle gain. That result seems to favour distribution. The guest's reply is that every participant ate 1.3 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. The guest calls that total suboptimal for pushing muscle growth.

For maximising muscular adaptations to resistance training, such as size and strength gains, the guest's benchmark is 1.6 grams per kilogram per day. That is about 0.7 grams per pound. The second study, which the guest says was published "within the last month" but does not name, compared three protein feedings a day with five. Both groups ate around a gram per pound, roughly 2.2 grams per kilogram. Participants did progressive resistance training, and the guest stresses that they were already resistance-trained.

There were no significant differences in muscle size and strength gain between the three protein feedings a day versus five protein feedings a day. And this is the best design study to date on the topic.