Aidan:
Hello and welcome to episode 173 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. My name is Aidan Muir and I’m here with my co-host, Leah Higl and today we’re gonna be talking about the highest protein intake ever studied. Feel free to give me feedback on this. Send me a DM with your thoughts. I’m going a little bit rogue here and just like, just following an interest here. This is an interesting study that I think is worth talking about. So figure that out, it, give me feedback if you like it or don’t like it.
So, this is the study that we’re largely talking about here is titled the effects of consuming a high protein diet, 4.4 grams per kilogram per day on body composition in resistance trained individuals. And it’s from 2014. And I just want to talk about it, go through a bunch of points worth analysing.
Leah:
Let’s talk study details. So the intervention group of the study was given 4.4 grams of protein per kilo body weight per day.
So comparing that to I guess the general recommendation for building muscle athletic populations, we’re thinking like 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilo body weight. And that’s like already at that kind of baseline is considered relatively high protein intake. So going 4.4 grams per kilo body weight, I just want to highlight how insane that is. So for someone with an average body weight of 73 kilos, that would equate to around 320 grams of protein.
Aidan:
And being clear, like the 73 kilos, that’s like the average body weight that was in this study.
Leah:
Sorry. Yeah. Within this study. Yeah. So that’s just an insane amount of protein for like the average person with that was a participant consuming over 300 grams of protein daily. There were 30 resistance trained individuals within the study itself, and it went for eight weeks. The control group was instructed to keep their training and diet the same.
And then the high protein group was of course instructed to have that 4.4 grams of protein per kilo body weight per day without changing their carb or fat intake. And that was going to be tracked using MyFitnessPal.
Aidan:
So that was the plan. In practice, the protein intake that was reported came out as 307 grams on average. So just under the plan, but still pretty good effort, like it’s pretty high. Large amounts of protein powder were reportedly used and also just encouraged in general to achieve this because it would be very difficult without doing that.
And the total calorie intake was reported as 800 calories higher than what they were previously consuming. And the big thing that happened, the big takeaway was that there was no change in body composition in either group. Although in this high protein group, the calorie intake was reportedly 800 calories higher.
Leah:
The conclusion from the authors is pretty interesting. So I’m just gonna kind of read word for word what the authors kind of concluded at the end of this study. And it was, consuming 5.5 times the recommended daily allowance of protein has no effect on body composition in resistance trained individuals who otherwise maintain the same training regimen. So this is the first interventional study to demonstrate that consuming a hypercaloric high protein diet does not result in an increase in body fat.
So hell of a lot to unpack there.
Aidan:
Yeah. Like I’m really simple. Like first it’s just interesting to say that like it also didn’t increase muscle further. like even this one thing that I think is worth touching on here is that body composition didn’t change in terms of although they didn’t gain any body fat, they also didn’t gain muscle at 4.4 grams per kilo of protein. Like that’s such a high protein intake.
It kind of does add a little bit more to that kind of body of evidence about being like, once you go above a certain amount, it doesn’t necessarily contribute to more muscle growth. But let’s go into some more odd stuff. So one thing to highlight that this study was in 2014 and it was the first, their words, the first interventional study to have this finding. That obviously makes some stuff questionable because obviously we have heaps of research looking at high protein diets, not this high, but heaps of research looking at high protein diets before 2014.
So let’s look at it through the lens of what are some explanations for why this might occur? And one of them is partly related to the thermic effect of food. So protein has a higher thermic effect of food than both carbs and fats. So that’s one thing, but really that can’t possibly explain it. If 800 calories was added and nothing else has changed, it’s not like the thermic effect of food would increase by exactly the amount that was added.
I’ve talked about this previously, but how the thermic effect of food is typically around 10% of the calories you add. Obviously protein being high, it’s going to be higher than that 10% number, but it’s never going to be that 100% number. That’s just a bit absurd, to be honest.
Leah:
And then there’s also issues with things like self-reported data, which we’ve kind of touched on, but we constantly talk about how self-reported data has its issues. We see why people use it in research, but obviously like unpacking the issues is pretty important.
Like these participants just tracked using MyFitnessPal.
And as someone who has done a fair bit of work with clients and even myself using MyFitnessPal, let’s just say people are not the most accurate often, like when utilising a tool like this. So that could definitely play a role in, you know, maybe their intakes just weren’t what they were meant to be. And there was kind of self issues with self-reported data.
Secondly, it would be incredibly hard to eat this really, really high amount of protein. Just the satiety factor alone would be insane. And the fact that the participants were also told to not change their fat and carb intakes and just kind of drastically increase that protein intake. I’d say that would have been probably a struggle for quite a lot of the participants. And that is reflected in the dropout rate. So a few people did drop out due to gastrointestinal issues, which is unsurprising.
And then another six dropped out without any explanation. But I’d say it’s probably, you know, at least for some of them, how hard it was actually to comply with that high level of protein intake. The authors even said that they encourage protein powder because it would have been virtually impossible, highly unlikely that someone could consume 4.4 grams of protein per kilo body weight per day through food alone.
But even still, like with protein powder, this would have been quite a difficult thing to do. At a minimum, there is reason to speculate whether people added stuff into MyFitnessPal that they actually didn’t end up consuming. I mean, the way a lot of people use MyFitnessPal is they might go through, track everything at the start of the day that they plan on eating, but maybe there’s a discrepancy in what they’ve tracked versus what they actually end up doing.
And I’d say that’s probably what happened in a lot of cases or like similar explanations to that anyway. Another relevant thing is that the high protein group also reportedly increased their carb intake by around 17% on average despite being told not to. And then like, I guess thinking about how does that fit into the thermic effect of food explanation of no weight gain, but also it’s just a weird thing to have happened because I wouldn’t have thought that that would have increased as well, you know, like it just seems like a weird thing to have happened.
Aidan:
Yeah, it is a little bit odd that carb intake increased. We could question so many aspects of this, but since like we have our own thoughts, I have my own biases as well. Like I don’t want to turn this episode so into that. So one thing I did do is I turned to chat GPT and I asked about its thoughts on the study and the outcome. I didn’t prompt anything more than that. Like I just kind of like put it in, just being like, here’s the study, here’s the conclusion. What are your thoughts? And
I’m gonna read word for word the response. “It’s highly unlikely that the participants in Jose Antonio study reported their intake accurately. The idea that participants could increase their calorie intake by 800 calories per day, specifically through protein and not gain weight is biologically implausible under normal circumstances. While protein has a higher thermic effect of food, TEF, compared to carbohydrates and fat, meaning more calories are burned during its digestion and metabolism, this wouldn’t fully account for the lack of weight gain giving such a significant calorie increase”
Complete agreeance from me there. It then went to talk on about like the prevalence of reporting issues, kind of what Leah has touched on and also the fact that all of the research looking at reporting issues is pretty clear that reporting issues is very common. Interesting. Is there anything else we can take away from this study though?
Leah:
Yeah, I suppose one key point that we could take away is that it’s obvious that that pursuit of a super, super high protein intake doesn’t often lead to a calorie surplus. Like if we are pursuing just an insane amount of protein, the satiety factor alone, like it’s probably going to lead to you being at maintenance calories or even potentially in a deficit. Like it’s unlikely to lead to a calorie surplus. And I think just that in itself is a cool thing to know.
Aidan:
Yeah, that’s honestly one of the biggest takeaways from the study for me when I first read it like 10 plus years ago or whatever. Just being like, if you look around the world, you will notice that there’s a lot of people who massively prioritise protein. Maybe they also prioritise fruits and vegetables as well. And quite and quite naturally seem leaner year round in many, many cases, partly because they get full slash bored of eating before they consume too many calories. An interesting thing with this study is that they were trying to get as much as they could in and they maintained their weight.
What if somebody wasn’t necessarily trying to get as much as they could, but still prioritising these things? Safe assumption they’d probably end up in a calorie deficit in many cases. But however you interpret this, it’s a huge outlier of a study. Given the rest of the research, I wouldn’t say adding 800 calories above your maintenance largely through protein wouldn’t lead to weight gain, but it is an interesting study regardless.
Leah:
This has been episode 173 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. If you haven’t yet left a rating or a review, it would be so greatly appreciated for you to do so. Otherwise, thanks for tuning in.