Protein Quality: Which Sources Actually Build Muscle

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Are you eating the right protein for your goals? Recently, I was asked about protein quality in regards to the various protein sources that are available to us. How do we know which ones are best? This is an interesting question because the person who asked me this, they brought up the different methods in which protein can be tested, and they were hyper-analyzing as to which method of testing best accurately represents the protein quality for the various proteins that they were eating. Now, this is— it's interesting because 99.99999% of the time, this is completely useless information.

Now, why in the world am I making a podcast? Because I think it's actually helpful to express maybe why this isn't something that I'm overly concerned with. I have worked with professional athletes, Olympic-level athletes, IFBB Pro card, natural pro cards, world record holders in powerlifting, high school athletes getting D1 scholarships in multiple sports, people who've done body transformations that have been like absolutely amazing. So I've, I've gotten a chance to work with the highest of the high in terms of athletes and people in a an aesthetic and/or performance, kind of the way our body performs, the way we look, feel. And in all of those cases, this has really never come up.

And it's interesting because it has come up every once in a while very indirectly in situations in which somebody might have a digestive issue, a condition, disease, something like that, or somebody who is vegan or vegetarian, especially vegans, because their protein sources can be quite limited And then you are being more mindful of, you know, what sources can we get that will equate to a complete protein. So it's interesting in the sense that most often I get asked the question of protein quality by people wanting to get stronger, bigger muscles, or lose body fat, but they're rarely the ones who ever need to know it. It's actually the people with digestive conditions, diseases, and issues that most often are going to be the people that, if we ever touch on this topic, they're the ones that we do. So the ways in which protein can be tested— there's, there's various ways that you would look at protein quality. One is just like an amino acid score.

So you're going to be looking at, okay, out of this protein source, what's the presence of the essential amino acids within that protein? And essential amino acids means they're the amino acids that our body can't make itself. We need to consume these from outside sources. So we would look at protein sources that have those in it, and we would deem okay, you know, the more it has of essential amino acids, it might be considered a better quality protein source for us. So that's one way of looking at it.

That's the most generic. The downside to that is it doesn't have anything to do with kind of the absorption or digestibility. Just because it's in the food, does that mean we actually can utilize that? So then the next 2 things I'm going to talk about are ways in which we would test amino acid quality— I mean, protein quality— and we are now actually factoring factoring in digestibility. So the one is called Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score.

So that's PDCAAS. Now that one does have— it looks at essentially the amino acids presence in fecal matter. So you ate the food, your body processed the food, what comes out at the end, and did it get what we needed from that food? That's a very basic way of looking at that. Now the downside of that is it can actually overestimate absorption because the way in which proteins are changed or modified as they go through our large intestine.

Now, they found that to be the case, is that it does overestimate the protein quality. So then they made another version of the quality testing called Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score, so DIAAS. Now that one, it looks at the protein, basically the amino acid profile of the food as it would be in the case of the small intestine. So before it gets into the large intestine, and that would be considered kind of the best quality that we have. It's, it's not easy to do that.

So they've done the test, and they found that there are sources of protein that would be highest in this score, the DIAAS. So now this again is looking at the amino acids presence in the food. As we ate it, our body processed it. What does it look like in the small intestine? Does it look like it's providing what our body needs?

Now, what foods are highest in this score? We're going to be looking at actually like cow's milk products, and you can look at like, like milk powdered or like milk itself. You're going to look at animal meats and dairy. That's that's common actually in the advice that you will often hear is even if somebody doesn't understand or ever never heard of these types of protein quality tests, when you ask most people, dietitians or people in the fitness industry, you know, which protein sources are best, they're almost always going to refer to animal protein sources being better than non-animal.

So, you know, fruit, vegetable, that kind of stuff. So animal protein sources are the best because they do have more complete amino acid profiles. They're going to have the essential amino acids in them. Now, what does this mean for you? Does this mean that you need to consume dairy, animal meats, and, uh, like eggs— like milk, eggs, and meat?

No, you do not. Is it, is it helpful if you have no aversion to those foods? Sure. However, those foods can be really detrimental if they're not managed properly. This is a crazy example.

However, it's fun to just kind of highlight some crazy examples. When I first started, I, in my own fitness and health journey, I was skinny fat, 165 pounds, and you could grab fat rolls around my waist. I was the definition of skinny fat. No visible muscle, no veins, but I was somehow still fat. Yeah, sad.

Now, I went a year and a half without eating. I was anorexic. I don't, I don't, I doubt With the knowledge that I have now, I doubt I ever crossed over 1,000 calories for a year and a half, and it was probably significantly less than that. I would only eat once a day, and I would only eat if I got extremely nauseous and was going to pass out. And I tried to wait all day until I would eat dinner with my parents so they would see me eat something and then hopefully leave me alone.

And they still had their suspicion that I was having an eating disorder So you can't fool your mom. Your mom just knows. Now, I did a year and a half of that, and I grew somehow— good Lord, somehow— I grew from 5'8 to 6 foot tall. So if I would have actually eaten, oh, I might have been like 6'2, 6'3, 6'4. That'd be amazing.

I'm only 6 foot tall, but I didn't gain any weight. So I went from 5'8, 165 to 6 foot tall, 165, and still skinny fat. No visible muscles, no abs. You could grab a fat roll around my waist. I was really bummed.

Now, at that time, I started reading magazines and I read an article by Lee Priest, who is a bodybuilder from Australia. And they asked him, you know, what's your diet look like? And he said that his advice is to eat a whole chicken, a loaf of bread, and drink a gallon of milk. And he's like, you know, if you do that, you're going to get big muscles and lift weights. Well, I lived in the middle of nowhere, and although there were chickens around, it was not feasible for me to buy a whole chicken every day.

I thought carbs were going to make me fat, so even though he said it, I wasn't going to eat a loaf of bread. But I was like, you know what, I can get milk and I can get that for myself. We already bought it as a family. My mom had a daycare out of our house, that was her business, and we always had milk available for the daycare kids. So I just stole it and drank it all and would buy more when I was out and about with friends or driving to work or whatnot.

So I started drinking a gallon of milk a day. Oh, there's a lot of sugar in milk. So although that came with a high quality of protein, it came with more sugar than protein. So I did gain weight, but I was just— got myself more fat. It was a bummer.

I drank a gallon of milk every day for 2 years. I didn't miss a single day for 2 years drinking a gallon of milk. That's pretty insane. That means I drank milk on every situation you could possibly think of: fever, sick, vacation, holidays, you name it. Gallon of milk every day for 2 years.

Another example is I'll often have clients who will follow a keto diet and— oh, I'm sorry, no, yeah, like keto diet or carnivore, where they're mostly just meat products, like animal products. So they're trying to keep carbohydrates really low. They're focusing on animal proteins. But paired with those animal proteins come a lot of fats, a lot of dietary fats, saturated, unsaturated. At the volume they're consuming, it wouldn't matter what the balance was, it was unhealthy.

We do need some saturated fats for hormone health. Roughly, we should say about out of our total fat intake, they estimate about a third should be saturated, two-thirds unsaturated. However, if somebody's doing a carnivore diet or a pure keto and they're really like big, like big muscles, they're very active, they're going to get a lot of calories. If you're looking at, say, 2,500+ calories a day and you're trying to go zero carb or near zero carb, That's going to be a lot of fat, and they'll run into, you know, cholesterol issues, maybe even some blood value issues like HDL and LDL and stuff like that. It's just— it's unfortunate because there's a difference between low carb and no carb, and especially when you're consuming that high of calories, it's better to actually switch over to a low carb rather than a no carb, so that way you can control the dietary fats to not have the negative health impact.

So those are 2 examples where if you're pursuing just protein quality alone and you drink a gallon of milk a day, you're going to get fat just because there's just enormous amounts of carbohydrates in there. So to get to the protein total you need, you're probably going to overshoot your carbohydrates. Whereas if you focus on a lot of animal products and a lot of fat-containing animal products to get to your protein need, you're going to overshoot dietary fats. So when we look at protein quality, it's important that we consume proteins that still allow us to control our blood health and still allow us to control our overall caloric intake. Caloric intake is extremely important.

If you're eating healthy foods, quote unquote, and I'll let you define that however you want, but you overeat your calories, you will gain unwanted body fat over time. So if your goal is fat loss and you don't pay attention to calories and you just eat healthy food, well, if you overconsume the healthy food, your calories are higher than your maintenance and activity demand, then you're going to not lose any fat and you might actually gain weight. So we do need to pay attention to calories. If I'm performance and strength based, you might say, who cares? You know, I just want to be big and strong.

Well, you still don't want to gain a bunch of unnecessary body weight that's going to take away from your ability to be athletic. Or if you're looking at like a sport where your strength-to-weight ratio is considered, you want to like maybe make sure you control your weight. So then you have also blood, like blood marker issues and stuff too. So overall, calories are extremely important. We need to control those.

The situations that we might look for where someone says, okay, if, if milk, eggs, and animal meats are best, I'm going to focus mostly on those— you can, that's okay. You're going to want to still track total calories though, so that way you control your carbs, your fats. You're going to want to likely include some fruits and vegetables for more roughage so you feel fuller and like more satiated per meal. And it helps you with bowel movements. We do want to have some type of material that our body can process and excrete to help.

So that way we just don't have all this meat and other things just sitting in us feeling bloated, feeling backed up, feeling constipated. So having some amount of fibrous foods is helpful for bowel movement regularity and digestibility. That way you're just feeling better. And most people are going to perform better with some type of carbohydrates. There are athletes who are pure keto or really high fat content.

That's, that's, that's less common than athletes who perform better and feel better based off carbohydrates. So although you maybe can control calories and protein, with a very animal-based, very fat and protein-based diet, you might be performing okay, but are you performing optimally? And that's where we might want to start to play with adding some percentage of carbohydrates into your meals so that way you can see, oh, okay, you know, I was making some progress in my training, but man, I didn't realize how low of energy I was. I didn't realize that I could be making even better progress if I were to add those carbohydrates. Now what about people if they don't want to focus on those protein sources?

Maybe they're vegan, vegetarian, or they just don't like eating that much animal meat. That's totally fine. You can have other sources. If you do more plant-based protein sources, you're going to need a wide variety so that way you can have complementary protein sources, meaning that a lot of plant— like plant proteins in general are going to be incomplete proteins. They're not going to have the full amino acid profile that you need.

So they talk a lot about protein pairing. You'll look at like rice and black beans as a protein pairing, spinach and almonds as a protein pairing. There's a bunch of other ones. You can just type in plant-based protein pairings for complete protein into like Google or ChatGPT, and it'll give you a nice long list. So if somebody doesn't want to consume their daily need of protein through milk, animal meats, and eggs, that's totally okay.

You would want to diversify your proteins. You'd want to make you have protein pairing happening. And then likely for that crowd, we might actually end up kind of having a higher overall consumption of protein. So we might find that for a crowd who's having the milk, the animal meats, and the eggs, they might grow well, recover well at 1 gram per pound of body weight for protein, whereas somebody, if they're blending in more plant-based proteins, we might have to go to 1.2 And we might find that that might be more recovery for them. Now I have some clients, they're at 0.6, some are at point— like, well, basically anywhere between 0.6 to 1.5.

So, you know, like when I said 1 and 1.2, those are just kind of example numbers. I have clients who are extremely successful, very happy, great body composition, great performance, as low as 0.6 grams per pound of body weight. They're usually really lean and maybe more so endurance-based athletes, not so much like weight training-based athletes. And then as we go higher in that range, up to like 1.5, you're gonna run into larger human beings, more muscular human beings, and more muscular demanding activities such as like competitive bodybuilding. So that would be an example of the crowd where we might be at like 1.2 to 1.5 grams per pound of lean body weight.

Now with that said, you're gonna need to, as we said, also control carbs and fats. Now, there is a leeway when it comes to the way individuals utilize their fats, carbs, and protein. So you might find that— and again, I'm just giving a number of examples, so don't beat me up over this, just giving you some examples and something to think through— is I might have an athlete who's mostly plant-based and we're consuming 2,000 calories a day and they're at 1 gram per pound of body weight in protein. We might find like, you know, they're recovering well and they're okay, but their elbow bugs them a little bit here and there this month. Maybe their knee's bugging them a little bit here and there the next month.

And we're like, yeah, you know, 1 gram per pound of body weight is— it sounds correct. And maybe for 2,000 calories, that seems to be correct for you for maintaining body weight and good energy, daily energy and whatnot. So you might find, hey, you know what, let's bump the protein up a little bit, and we might go to 1.2 grams per pound of body weight. And if we do that with almost pure protein, like trying to find the leanest, the leanest in terms of fat and calorie— carb calorie— fat and carb-containing calorie protein sources. So it's basically just protein.

Let's just say it's, you know, whey protein powder or casein protein powder where there's, there's nothing really else in it. We might find that going from 1 to 1.2 grams per pound of body weight and just letting the additional calories happen Knowing that the additional calories are just protein. So maybe they go from 2,000 calories up to 2,100 calories, and body weight's not going to change. Their recovery is going to be a little better, body composition is looking good, maybe even have less water retention because their body's not stressed because it has better recovery. And that might be great.

So it might be a case in which some of these calories bump up a little bit because they were purely protein-based calories, and that's okay. That might end up being a great alternative However, let's say somebody thinks they need to bump their protein up and they're going to bump their protein up, say, 40 grams. Well, that can be— that's quite a bit. It's like it's only 160 calories. But what if within those 40 grams they choose like 90% lean ground beef?

Well, now there's a little bit of fat that's coming with that protein. Or maybe they do a protein bar or protein powder, and now all of a sudden there's carbohydrates. They're coming with that protein. So now their calories, instead of only going up 160, maybe they end up going up 300 because we're really getting 160 calories of protein but now 140 calories of extra carbs and fats that are coming with that protein. We might find their weight goes up a little bit, recovery is a little bit better, but maybe they blurred out a little bit across their abs.

Maybe they're just holding a little extra something that we don't like the look of. Looks like a little bit extra water, a little bit of something happening in the, in the love handles or the lower back. And we're like, geez whiz, you know, what's going on? We just bumped up 40 grams of protein. How is protein making them fat?

Well, it's not the protein that's making it fat. It's the, it's the fat and carbs that came with the protein that's likely causing some of those issues. So you might need to, in those cases where you bump your protein up, but you might need to reduce your other sources of carbs and fats in order to account for the fats and carbs that came with that additional protein. So in some cases, you might be able to add really lean protein sources and not have any concern about the calorie total increase. In other cases, if somebody's not paying attention to the carbs and fats that come with their protein sources, they might increase their protein and then wonder why they lost overall, like, body composition, or they seem to have blurred out their lines or gained a little bit of wanted body fat.

So you do need to be careful with additional proteins, and especially if you're doing proteins that come with carbs and fats, and that's going to be more likely to be the case with vegans and vegetarians. You might find that in those cases you need to be very strict with your total calories as you manipulate protein, where in other cases you might not. Okay, so to me this is a simplistic way of looking at— well, it can get pretty complex. I know that this is actually pretty probably does sound actually complex, but what we're looking to do is we're looking to say, okay, what's the total calorie count that matches our goal? If we want to be in fat loss, I want a little bit of a, you know, across the week I want to be in a little bit of a deficit.

If I'm looking for kind of performance and I don't really want my body weight to change, I'm going to be around maintenance. If I'm looking to build a little bit of muscle, maybe build a little bit of strength, I'm okay a little bit of it, then I'm going to maybe go into a little bit of a surplus. So we want to set our calorie parameters where we want our goal to be, and then we're going to set our protein. And it depends on your activity, depends on what you do. You might be, like I said, anywhere between, say, 0.6 to 1.5 grams per pound of body weight, depending on situations and individual cases and already how lean you are, what type of activities, what your sport is, blah blah blah.

But you're gonna be somewhere in that range. And then you're just gonna say, okay, how's this feel? What does it look like? And then out of the protein sources you choose, if you are okay with having milk, animal meats, and eggs, sure. Go for it.

You might find that you don't need as much total protein because those are quote-unquote higher quality sources. Whereas if you don't like milk, if you don't like animal protein like meat, if you don't like eggs, that's okay too. Start with some type of protein goal, see how your recovery is, see how your performance and adaptations is, and then if that's lacking a little bit, just increase the protein. But also be mindful of what that does to your calories. If it takes you out of a little bit of a deficit up to maintenance, but your goal is fat loss, then you're going to need to manipulate your other carb and fat sources, the non-protein related sources, to make sure your total calories still stay within your, your target outcome range.

Cool. Okay, so does protein quality matter? Sure, uh, it— but it's easily manipulated. So you don't have to eat certain protein sources just because, you know, milk, animal meats, and dairy or eggs or whatever is considered the highest protein quality, it does not mean that you have to consume those. If you have digestive issues with those, you just don't like them, that's totally fine.

There's a million and one ways to, to get around that. Cool. Okay, so thank you to the listener and supporter who brought up this topic. Hopefully this answered it. I do want to give acknowledgement to the question and say, okay, you know, if you're worried about protein quality, here's the measurements and the ways people look at it.

But here's how we manipulate that. Like I said, really protein quality doesn't matter much. It really only matters in nutritional diseases or special conditions. It really doesn't make much of a difference for strength, muscle growth, performance-based athletes, or even body composition changes. Cool.

Okay, if you have any questions, if you want any help setting up your nutrition, of course I can do that for you. That is what we do. We do one-on-one coaching, and that includes nutrition, training, weekly communication, video reviews, anything and everything you might need. Whatever you need to be your best, that's what we're here to help with. You can learn more about us on our website at c3method.com.

The 3 is spelled out T-H-R-E-E, so it's c3method.com. Cool. Okay, well, I appreciate your time. Hopefully this was helpful, and thank you for listening, and thank you for watching.