Leah:

Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. I’m Leah Higl and I’m here with my co-host Aiden Muir and on today’s episode, we will be discussing macro ratios and why we don’t often tend to use them. So a little bit of background here. Macro ratios are basically percentages of your total calorie intake. So macronutrients being protein, fats and carbs contain calories and you’ve probably seen things like macro targets or tracking macros before and one way that you could provide someone with macro targets or you could use macro targets is by having them as percentages of your overall calorie intake.

So for example, having 30 % of your calories coming from protein, 50 % from carbs and 20 % from fat to make up 100 % of your calorie needs or calorie target I still think like I think macro targets generally are super appropriate as part of a well -designed nutrition plan but there are several reasons why we didn’t wouldn’t necessarily use ratios over specific number targets and we’re gonna go through the reasons why we think that.

Aidan:

So the easiest one is if we know the number target. Why don’t we just use the number target? Yeah. Like that’s quite simple just being like, for example, if the research shows that 1.6 to 2.2 grams to kilogram body weight protein per day is optimal for muscle growth.

We could just go 1.6 times somebody’s body weight and 2 .2 and be like, this is your range or whatever. Where in that example, we know that 1 .6 is probably enough to optimize things, but anything above that is just like, in case they’re an outlier or it allows you to go a bit over about going so high that it cuts into everything else. But we could give a number. We could be like, this person should target 180 grams of protein. It makes sense to use that range instead of percentage, because there’s a lot of other things that could be skewed if you used a percentage.

Leah:

Yeah. The big thing skewing your, like when you’re, percentages the big thing that skews it is your overall energy needs which can be skewed by level of activity. So a great example to kind of highlight this is we take two people we’ve got one person that is lifting three to four times per week they’re doing kind of an average of five thousand steps per day and no cardio so they’re just mainly doing their resistance training and then doing maybe an office desk job for the rest of the and then compare that to person two. So maybe they’re training five to six times per week. So a little bit more, they’re doing 12 000 steps per day because they work in retail or construction or something like that and then they’ve also added in some cardio sessions for conditioning.

In that example, those two people are going to have very different caloric needs, but they’re going to have very similar protein needs so they’re still both wanting to kind of get between that 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilo body weight protein target but if you use percentages Let’s say one person has a needs of 2,000 calories and one person has a need of 3200 calories and we used 20% of their calories coming from protein or 30 % of their calories coming from protein that would work out to be very different numbers as opposed to if we used like a specific number target based on that range.

Aidan:

So if instead of doing percentages, what would we do instead? As I said, we do specific numbers. How do we find those specific numbers? The starting point is we’d figure out calorie needs, then we can fit everything else into there. So many ways to figure out calorie needs, you could do a calorie calculator as a starting point. But I’m really big onadjusting based on what happens. For example, if somebody wanted to maintain their weight, we’d use a calorie calculator to get a starting point and then we see what happens. We give them their amount of calories and we see if they maintain their weight. If it goes up, we can reduce calorie intake. If it goes down, we can increase calorie intake.

That’s how we figure it out, assuming all variables remain equal, which they never will. I just want to keep it simple, right? So we’d figure out calorie needs, then we’d figure out protein needs. There’s different ranges for that. Like that 1.6 to 2.2 number is what we’d use for somebody who’s like relatively lean, looking to go into a muscle gain phase.

If somebody was looking to be in a calorie deficit but they had more body fat, we’d probably use fat -free mass as an indicator and go like 2.3 to 3.1 grams per kilogram of fat -free mass. There’s a bunch of different ranges, right? But we would use some form of formula for figuring out protein needs. Then we would figure out an appropriate range for fat. If somebody wasn’t specifically trying to be on a low-carb diet or anything like that, I would use a range of say 0.5 to 1 gram per kilogram of body weight fat just because going below the bottom end of that could have impacts on hormones, for example, male testosterone might decrease.

Going above one just leaves less room for either carbohydrates and protein, that’s probably the main thing. And there’s no real additional benefit from a hormonal perspective or anything like that. So we’d figure out a protein target, we’d figure out a fat target. Then we’d fill out the rest of the calories with carbohydrates. This might seem confusing if you aren’t deep down the macro rabbit hole, but the reason why can just fill out the rest with carbohydrates is because calories are made of macros. Protein has four calories per gram, carbs has four calories per gram, fat has nine calories per gram.

So by definition, if you have a calorie target, you have a protein target, and you have a fat target, there’s only so many calories left over, you fill out with carbohydrates. Taking this approach means that things scale well with activity. For example, if there’s two people who are lifting weights, but one is significantly more active than the other one outside of the weight room, their calorie needs will be different, as you said, and they have relatively similar protein needs. We figure out their protein needs, we have a range for fat, and then we fill up the rest of carbohydrates. If we wanted to fill up some more of the calories with fat, we could just go higher up that range. If we wanted to fill up less, we can go lower down that range and then the carbohydrates are the ones that really swing the most, where it’s like if somebody’s significantly more active than the other person they get more carbohydrates than the other.

In both cases, unless somebody’s particularly low calorie, they won’t end up in a low carb state or anything like that, because most people have a decent kind of calorie and carbohydrate kind of budget. But if somebody’s way more active, they’ll end up with significantly more carbohydrates. This just works out way more accurately in a lot of cases than if you were using percentages, because if you’re using percentages, often you have to justify why you’re using percentages in some ways. Like you see people be this is a percentage you use if you’re a hard gainer, this is a percentage you use if you’re like, and if we know the exact numbers, we can just use the exact numbers.

Leah:

Yeah, and in a lot of circumstances outside of maybe athletes where you want to pay more attention to fat and carb ratio, sometimes just looking at overall calorie needs and then having a protein target is like enough for most people to nail things. And then you can kind of let fats and carbs fall where they may.

So overall it is much more effective to use macro targets or those specific kind of range numbers such as like X grams of protein per kilo body weight, X grams of fat per kilo body weight plus rest from carbs like Aidan was saying. That seems way more effective than using a percentage of protein, fats and carbs based on overall calorie consumption since that can kind of swing in all different ways depending on overall calorie intake.

Aidan:

This has been episode 126 of the Ideal Nutrition podcast. As always, if you could please leave a rating and review, that would be greatly appreciated.