How Much Protein Do You Need?

Welcome, everyone, to the RP-Shrink Podcast. I'm Nick Shaw joined by Dr. Mike wearing a known can see this, but a super heavy smash, bros. Oh, Lord, they coming. Jujitsu shirt from Angie and Josh Vogel at the Jujitsu Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Awesome. What's up, man? How are you? Happy holidays.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, why don't you say me or Christmas? You're Jewish. Am I though? Is that offensive? I don't know. Fuck. Actually, my wife and I need to go get a tree. I grew up celebrating how people hear this story before, sorry, but real quick. In the Soviet Union where I grew up, until I was seven, under the many wonderful moments of my childhood, the religion was functionally illegal. Being Jewish was for sure illegal.

We didn't even know what Hanukkah was. We had no Jewish traditions. We just knew we were ethnically Jewish.

Christmas was illegal, but since you can't take Christmas away from the Russian people, because they're almost all Christian Orthodox, they would like rebel en masse. The communists put all the traditions of Christmas minus everything supernatural into, well, sorry, minus anything Christianity related onto New Year's. So Santa Claus would come on New Year's Eve. And there was a tree, there were Christmas presents, kids loved them. Also, there's just one tiny advantage.

to the Soviet rendition of Christmas. Santa had, I think, I believe his niece was with him to deliver presents. Her name is Tugurochka, which means snowflake. And she could fucking get it, Nick. She had the it factor. And so you feel me? It's not just one like fat white dude sliding down your chimney, although Soviets typically did not own private homes. So I actually don't know how he was able to access our apartment. It's magic.

magic. And one time, not one time, every year, because our grandma lived with us, my sister and I would be like, Grandma, when Santa comes, can you please wake us up? And she's like, of course. And the next morning, presents are under the tree. And we were like, Grandma, what are you doing? And she was like, you were sleeping so sweetly, I couldn't bear to wake you up. And like, I remember Sonya and I, my sister, we legitimately discussed among ourselves how our grandma simply could not be trusted as a functional human being.

Like, we were upset that, like, what are you doing, Grammy? He had one job and you can't do it. It was disastrous.

Uh, that's very interesting. The most interesting part of everything you said there was, um, as of recording this, it is 1220. You don't have a fucking Christmas tree up. It's fucking Nick. Nick, uh, crystalline. I've just been working our asses into the bone for the company corporation. In a guy was, I want to get a Christmas class with your payments company. I promise. That's a direct quote from Nick Shaw from the 2013 onwards to me.

Gee whiz, if I just keep working hard, eventually I'll have millions. Oh boy. It's coming, I promise, someday. As you crash your fifth Rolls Royce. Yeah, I did appreciate the intro to the Hormosie video today. That was funny. Oh, the rich guy. That's all. That's all Max, right? Max the editor, boy. Yeah, he had the top hat, he had the monocle on there. The whole thing is good. I love the trillionaire meme. I can't get enough of that meme. Yeah.

Um, it's funny, man, because there's a bunch of like Christmas tree lots around, uh, if we drive around, we see them. And Laurie and I always kind of joke. We're always like, why are they still open as, you know, like a week before Christmas? Like who's getting a Christmas tree a week before? Like what degenerates like crystal and I, but we're going to go to Meyer, which is our Michigan equivalent of Walmart. And we are 100% going to get a plastic tree. Like we always do.

You get a fake tree every year. Fake tree every year. Fake and small. You don't reuse it? The product is not designed to last. So after like a few weeks of being up, many of the lights no longer function. So I'd love to reuse it, but it's just like these are just, Nick, they cost $25. Okay. Yeah.

I don't know how much the one that Laurie—I mean, we've had it for a while. It doesn't fully work. Is yours fake or is it real? It's fake. In Russia, we did not have private industries, so there were no fake trees, nor the supply chains to manufacture them, nor the creativity to innovate and make them.

However, we lived in Russia, so every year had a real pine tree in the house. And I remember smelling the pikons and it smelled amazing and the, what's it called, the, the, the fuck, they're not leave the spikes or whatever. It was just like a really, really cool experience. And I remember you couldn't touch a lot of the tree because it had sap and it would like be hard to wash off. It was just magical times, man.

Growing up, we typically would always go, and it's an experience in America growing up, we would drive, that's probably a 15 minutes way, we would drive to a lot. We would go out, I think we would actually, shit, I want to say my dad would cut it down himself, right? You kind of get cut it down, you drag it, you know, they usually have like donuts and cider, maybe hot chocolate, like it's a thing, but probably some candy canes, they would give the kids all that. No idea how much that costs or anything, but

Yeah, we tried it for a couple years. And we're just like, man, this is a big pain because you got to drag it in and it gets messy and dirty everywhere. So we switched to a fake tree. And it's so impractical. And it's so great, but so impractical. I think like,

If the whole bullshit I keep talking about happens in like five or 10 years, we all have like robots helping us around. I think like real trees might make a resurgence because you just get the robot to go cut it down. But when you're like a busy person and it's like, do I go to the store to get a fake tree and have none of the fucking sap like washed out of my carpet? And is the fucking what are they called the needles, the pine needles? Like you'll stop on them forever afterwards. And all the shit, if you can get someone to clean that up for you, it's dope. But.

You know, yeah, plastic trees, man. But there's something missing, Nick. There's something missing. There's no magic in a plastic tree. Do you have a bunch of ornaments you put on it? No decorates. It is crystal dough. I'm going to say you don't decorate it. Correct. We don't have a bunch of ornaments. We. So in Russia, we had all these ornaments and stuff like that. And they were really beautiful and all like crystalline and stuff. But no, we just get the tree that comes with like some ornaments on it. Like.

Christmas in a box. It's really pathetic, but at the same time, Christmas is about like family and love and warm wishes of the holidays, just the symbolism of the tree. So like our little tiny tree, because it's like, if I go out to the kitchen or something in the middle of the night, like the tree's always on. And so it's a little warm glow and it really is quite nice. So that's really what we get out of it.

Do you exchange Christmas presents with Crystal on Christmas morning? We haven't done presents in a really long time. Crystal and I never done any kind of presents. We do sometimes birthday presents, but.

Like, present giving culture is so amazing, and I've just been so out of touch. For two reasons, one is just complacency and laziness. The other, and this is going to sound like a stupid rich guy thing, and it really is. I have no excuse for it whatsoever, but beyond a certain level of income, and especially because Crystal and I just don't have like,

Consumption habits that reflect our income remotely. When you don't have any need for anything physical in your life and anything you need, you just order for Amazon the same day. Presence, like, just don't mean as much. You know what I mean? Like in Russia, we had nothing. So presence was like, holy shit, this is a big deal. Nowadays, man, I don't fucking know the point. You know what I mean? It's fucked up. I know you mean a little bit.

I have different kids. It is 100% different with kids. Now my kids are a little bit older, they're 12 and 10. Christmas is a magical thing when your kids are in the like three to eight or nine age range.

They still believe in Santa. It is absolutely magical. It's fun. Boy, I'm going to sound probably sexist here, but the maybe again, maybe I'm just lazy on some of the stuff. I'm sure Lori would say that's absolutely the case.

I don't put a whole lot of effort into it. It's almost always comes from like the wife slash mom of the kids that seemingly has to go above and beyond and like try to match up with like every other mom's doing to like one up people. It's like looking at my best Christmas and adds like a bunch of, you know, I needed stress around the holidays and he got family coming in and all that stuff. And I'm always like,

Nick the the frustrated Caucasian CEO character is one of my favorite caricatures ever like you show up you're like what the fuck is this Christmas shit honey you spent $15,000 and Christmas what the hell is going on it's like shut up this is how childhood is

Yeah. I like that you're trying to tabulate numbers and you're like, how off is that? I was kidding. I hope it's not 50,000. Holy shit. No, that would be all. I mean, that's outrageous, in my opinion. I mean, you don't even know what you'd get. I mean, you'd have to be buying like a big family vacation for like,

Yeah. Everyone. Yeah. That'd be pretty. You know, because an iPad's like a thousand bucks, right? An iPhone's a thousand bucks, right? Like, oh, you have three or four kids. You feel me? They get the three or four toys each, and some of those are high-tech toys. You're into thousands automatically. Yeah. I would, yeah, I would cap that at one. But you know what else is? Yeah. You know what else is good for Christmas? Protein. You like that transition? That was a great transition. But how much protein are we supposed to be eating? Because there's so much controversy lately. I don't even know how much protein to buy my kids.

Yeah, so you did a video with Dr. Milo Wolf, not too long ago. There's a little bit of controversy generated from it. And you and I chatted on the phone a little bit about it, but let's break it down a little bit, because people were asking the RP clients group, you know, are picking to change all the recommendations and whatnot. So can you maybe give the highlights of the video sort of what Dr. Milo was talking about? And then I actually would love to talk about some

instances of what our current recommendations are if those are going to change and then some maybe use cases as to how and when you can go over or under that recommendation because you know there's always a little bit of nuance involved in all this.

Yeah, great questions. So Milo was on our channel and we had him talk about what the literature looks like for protein recommendation. And it turns out that the vast fraction of recommendations today are based on a slightly older lit review from the mid teens. And that slightly older lit review did an interesting thing. 20 teens, right? Yeah, 20 teens. So a decade ago.

Yeah, and it was a great review. And it basically did this thing where it plotted all of those studies and all of the protein recommendations from the studies. And it got the situation where past, I'll keep this in imperial units, passed about like 0.8 grams per pound of bodyweight per day. Anything below that as you scale up gets you more muscle, dependably in a really close to linear fashion.

And then after 0.8 grams per pound per day, north of that, there was kind of like a two-factor thing going on in that analysis. Factor one was that the slope of the line seemed to not be as positive, potentially neutral.

potentially zero. So it looked like it capped off and it was like maybe more than 0.8 grams per pound per body weight per day. Just doesn't grow any more muscle, maybe, but it still was a positive slope, but much, much shallower positive. So like it could help, but maybe not as much. The other problem with that review. Sorry, quick clarifying question here.

So up to 0.8. So let's say you were someone that was eating 0.6 grams per pound body weight, 200 pound person, you're eating 120 grams of protein a day. Yeah. So you start eating more like 160, you will start growing more muscle. Like on average, it's dependable thing to say to people, correct? Okay. Yeah. Like you can expect for this thing to be given you when you want. Um, then what that review said was like, look, if you go from a hundred to 60 to 200 grams per day,

You might not gain much more muscle, but the other part was they had so few studies that tested protein levels at those higher levels that it was a combination of first of all, the slope of the line seems much less steep, potentially at zero, but we can't tell. And the reason we can't tell is they're just not that many studies testing that. So the implication there is like it's some combination of it might not help as much, but we just don't know. And so people interpret that review in a variety of ways. We had our P interpreter that review in a variety of ways.

And since then, there have been at least two reviews that were noteworthy. And both of these reviews seem to come to a conclusion that aligns with everything that the other reviews said, but have a few more data points in the higher protein recommendation range above 0.8 grams per pound per day.

And what they seem to show that was, yes, you get less of a marginal benefit eating that much more protein. So like you make a big difference taking your protein from 100 grams of data 150. But from 150 to 200, it's definitely going to be a smaller difference, but still a difference that makes sense. And there are at least a few studies suggest that even if you go in some cases from 200 to like 225 grams, like more than a gram per pound, about 1.25 grams per pound or so,

that you could still still see incremental small benefits. And so that's different. And why was it a big controversy? Because some people, many of whom I respect greatly, interpreted that early literature as saying they look, anything past 0.8 is just like you're wasting your money. And sure, you can eat more protein, but it's not going to have an effect.

And the recent data definitely clash with that interpretation because they say, look, actually you do get more benefits up to even higher than a grand per pound potentially. They're not crazy benefits, but they still exist. And that's where the real controversy lies. I got a couple of clarifying questions then. So when we're talking about point eight, this is total body weight or lean body mass? Total body weight. So 200 pounds, that's 160 protein a day. Okay. Yep.

So question is, I mean, because I think is I'm hearing you say this, a lot of people that have read the RP book spent in the RP community for a while, they're like, Oh, it seems maybe slightly lower than what RP would say. Cause typically a lot of times we just say, Hey, about one gram per pound, by the way. Yeah. So why then was your best interpretation of it in the past from, let's say that 20 teens of those reviews, more of, Hey, let's, let's just kind of stick with about one gram per pound of body weight.

Yeah. One is because I saw the original review and I noticed both elements at the time, data posity at the upper end and a slight trend line deposited in the upper end. No thing is the vast majority of the studies are not conducted on people remotely as jacked or hard training are highly active as average. So for example, much of the protein intake data is collected on people who train recreationally, people who are not overly jacked and for people who aren't training super, super hard like multiple

five or six sessions a week each and hour at a time and so on and so forth. And also because our precision of instrument measurement doesn't allow us to detect very finely tuned alterations of muscle mass. And so that was one thing. Another thing is protein quality concerns. So proteins are usually measured in many studies, especially acute studies, they just supplement you with like way isolate.

Essentially one of the best possible protein sources you can get. And so when people like use my fitness pal and it says you're eating 230 grams protein a day, but like half of that is from wheat bread, then you have to take a decrement on how much muscle you're gaining from that. And roughly good heuristic here and we do have a video on our pee coming out soon about this is that.

If you get about 75% of your protein from very high quality sources, the other 25% can come from shittier ones and you still match the recommendations like you would always. But not everyone does that all the time. Can we just clarify on what the shittier types are just so people listen in can almost any plant sources that are not so your quinoa.

And so for example, a really common one is pasta, bread, rice, beans, peanut butter. When you look at it, you're like, oh my god, there's high protein. Yeah, but that protein sucks. Its quality's very low. There doesn't mean it's bad for anything like that. It's just not going to grow you tons of muscle. Incomplete sources of protein. Correct. Incomplete sources of protein with a low PDCAS score. Protein digestibility correction amino acid score, which means that if you eat protein, there are two ways it can not get to where it's supposed to go.

One is it just doesn't digest it absorbed very well and you shut it out which happens a lot with like gluten. And another one is that the amino acid profile, the building blocks of that protein are not what you need. I made an algae in the video we're going to release soon. That's the same analogy, so I'll make it here. If you disassemble a house like in a suburban neighborhood in a very finely tuned way that usually don't break anything,

The glass, the steel, the ceramic, the everything, you could rebuild a whole house with those things that's differently shaped. So you have all the materials and the right combinations. But if I simply deliver to you the exact same weight of that material, but it's all red bricks and nothing else, you actually can't build hardly shit from it because you're like, dude, I'm fucking supposed to make a bathtub out of bricks. Are you out of your fucking mind?

I sure can't make the lights out of bricks and the electrical equipment. And so all of a sudden, if we see proteins, amino acids as different building blocks, each one is a different building block. Like one of the amino acids is like glass, one is like steel, one is like electrical cable. So you need all those in roughly the same proportions as they occur in the human body in order to maximize the anabolism.

with a lot of plant proteins that are of low quality, you'll get like one entire amino acid is like a tenth of where it's supposed to be. So if your body tries to use that to build muscle, it hits a limiting factor on that one tenth amino acid. And it's like, dude, you thought you were going to build up 10 grams of muscle from this. You're going to build one gram. And the rest is going fucking nowhere because you have too much of one thing and not enough of the other. It's like, if you're building lighting in a house, but you don't have the switch implements, you're just not going to be able to turn the lights on and off. And so all you have everything else, but it doesn't matter. So that's a thing that runs into protein. And so

to adjust for protein quality and always being great, it's probably intelligent to increase the protein recommendation slightly to adjust for that because you really have a downside. There's almost no downside. Almost everyone's wealthy now to afford almost all the protein that they want and protein is not bad for you. It's not excessively bad. Yeah, it displaces some carbohydrates, but we're talking about 25 grams here. It's going to make almost no difference and is a really, really good insurance policy.

So for the other thing, and there's a few others that go unmentioned, but one of the other reasons is we do that insurance boss situation. If someone says there's no meaningful detectable difference after point eight, they could be correct. That doesn't mean a difference doesn't exist. And based on my reading literature, like the difference probably existed but was smaller. And so we don't know how high that difference goes, and especially if you just for harder training populations and lower protein quality on average, you could say, okay, okay, okay,

What do we need out of a protein? What kind of variable is protein? And to me, protein intake, it can be seen as a variable on how to choose the armor thickness on a tank. If you know that the enemy's best rocket against tanks, anti-tank rocket can penetrate, like, let's say, oh, I don't know, eight centimeters of armor, do you want just eight centimeters of armor? Because eight centimeters on average. The rocket hits you in the exactly the right spot. It's going to blow through your armor, and everyone's going to get shredded a bit inside the tank.

Let's go for 10. 10 means we can take a couple bullet holes and take a shell with a face and still survive. That margin is useful. What is the benefit of getting just exactly the right amount of protein you need? None. What is the cost of getting a little bit less than you need?

Substantially, you don't make as much muscle gains. Remember, we're suffering in the fucking gym. We're cramming food on our faces five times a day. We're working out here. And the last thing we want is to have the situation where we're like somehow not gaining enough. And so if you say, OK, if I just adjust my protein intake upwards by a marginal amount, like 20 extra grams a day, I just instantly don't have to care about any of these problems. And I know that 99 problems I have making gains.

not getting enough protein will not be one of them. And so that's roughly how we got to a gram per pound. Now we do say in our more advanced lectures that it's a range and anywhere between 0.7 and 1.3 grams per pound, situationally dependent can be a good thing. 1.3 is if you're at the end of it.

Hypocaloric diet, very long calories, tons of cardio, tons of training, six times a day training, you're getting ready for a bodybuilding show and you're drug free. There's already literature to say that 1.3 grams per pound, it might be superior to measurable weight of a gram per pound. And so when we say a gram per pound, we almost never say a gram per pound, almost say about a gram per pound per day.

Yeah. And for almost everyone, a grand per pound is like that insurance policy that literally gets you really awesome gains. But if you want extra insurance policy, I would say 1.25 or 1.3 grams per pound was always good advice and still is. But if you're one of these people that, you know, does CrossFit two times a week and they train with weights three times a week and they're mostly maintaining

Like you can eat 0.8 grams per pound or even 0.7 and be totally great if you're gaining in that situation and you're really constrained on your food, you know, a grand per pound is awesome. So not many, many people need much more than that, but there are absolutely people who need more than a grand per pound. We have very good reason to believe that. So that's why I always thought a grand per pound and a nuanced conversation around it was a best bet.

And these new studies have been agglomerated by Milo, and he basically said, look, it could be higher. And I got a lot of love for that because here's how like we sort of scused our way through the industry, Nick. A lot of people say it's less than a grandpa pound. A few people say it's more. We write in the middle, baby, trust, just get the fuck out of that controversy and be like, shoot for the middle and open up the room for nuance. So that's where we are. And really, really good news.

Mr. Grog Knuckles, highly esteemed individual who everyone should be following, who is a part of stronger by science. He, in an article for stronger by science, just a day or two ago, and now for you guys listening just a few weeks ago, wrote an insane 15 trillion word article on all this data, all these research summaries as he likes to do.

He really summed it up super, super well, but the conclusion he's come to is that, yeah, look, if you read these new studies properly, there is an argument to be made for like 1.2, 1.3 grams per pound per day to have that extra assurance that in 99.99% of all cases, you are definitely getting enough protein.

And yes, there are situations in which 0.7 is totally fine. But telling fitness-minded people who are like, how much protein is it to me, Nick? When you ask me, how much protein should I eat? My best answer to you has to bake in the assumption that you give a shit about muscle.

If you don't care about muscle, I fucking even ask me, right? And so I will bake in at least the moderate amount and maybe the high amount. So I'll say, you know, the grandpa pound is good in some situations, maybe a little bit more. I'm unlikely to tell you point seven, but if you say, hey, look, I'm having trouble getting in protein. I'm maintaining right now. Can I eat like point seven? I'm like, yeah, totally 100%. Okay.

I got a few things I wrote down. So we go back in time five years ago, right? So those teen to lit reviews were more common. What part of your thought process was? All right, I see this. I see these studies, it's saying.

0.8 is probably good. We're going to trend a little bit higher because I like the point about factoring in the quality and sort of just saying that's an insurance policy because not everyone's eating the highest quality protein. So that immediately makes sense to me. Go a little bit above your, you have buffer, like you said. But what part of that thought process goes? You know what? It's interesting to look at all this research here. That's, that's awesome.

But I also know a thing or two about real world actual bodybuilders, hardcore bodybuilders in the gym, what they do. And they tend to be on that higher end of the range. And so if we blend these two things together, well, gee whiz, it seems like we probably still want to trend towards that higher end. Was that part of it? I totally part of it. The way I see it, Nick, is the empirical research has its limitations, but they're very well understood, very known limitations. And so you can estimate the margin of error on them pretty well.

The practice in bodybuilding has much less understood limitations because bodybuilders didn't reason or science their way into high-protein intakes. They vibe their way into them and a lot of the guys overdo it like crazy with no reason whatsoever. Like many competitive bodybuilders have consumed like two grams per pound. Our dear friend Marcos Rodriguez, the greatest personal trainer to ever live in New York City,

He, like himself, when he was in college, did like the two grams per pound per day protein diet. He was like, yeah, I was eating like 450 grams of protein per day. And I was like, how was it? He was like, it's fucking awful. And I was like, how are your results? He was like, bought the same as when I ate a gram per pound. And so knowing that there's the discount there, if people are going to like, you know, bodybuilders do everything in the extreme. And so that discount means to me, like, okay, if the average bodybuilder is doing like a gram and a half to two grams, the average science nerd guy says 0.7 grams.

then I'm gonna take the average science nerd guy and be like, okay, based on my reading the literature, they're underdoing it a little bit. But based on my reading of literature and knowledge and experience, the bodybuilders are overdoing it by a lot. And so if we take the bodybuilder thing and we multiply their over enthusiasm by like 0.2, like divide by five or whatever, then they're still above a gram per pound. And we say, okay, so like what's the value between 0.7 and something just above a gram per pound? Well, it's a gram per day. And there's actually another reason

I'd like to mention for why we do the about a grandpa pound thing and it's straight up. First of all, because it aligns well on all of the theory in the, in the insight. We wouldn't have done this thing. I'm about to say, unless that was true, but because that's roughly true. I think I know what you're going to say. And there's actually no material. So people might say, Hey, I oversimplify things too much. Maybe that could be a valid critique, but like,

You fucking kidding me, it's the easiest thing in the world to calculate. You weigh 200 pounds to eat 200 grams of protein. Like if you want, Mike, I know a thing or two, right? I've been around the block here. You want to make things as simple as possible for people because a lot of times the nuance is going to get lost. People are like, I just want to get in shape. I just want better results. Like just tell me what to do, right? I'm like, great.

Because how many times have I given a talk at a gym somewhere and it's like nutritional priorities and it comes up, hey, macronutrient intake, I'm like, cool. Here's the easiest way I can explain it to you. Protein, one gram per pound of body weight. Can you go up or down? Is there a lot more nuance? Yeah, if we want to spend 30 minutes talking about it, which is why I wanted to do this podcast because we can talk about some of those nuances. It's like, you weigh 200, it's 200 pounds or 200 grams of protein because that's how much you weigh. Holy shit, that's easy to do.

Yes, and it's a built-in. It's built-in already with a buffer. So it's really, really good. That's exactly correct, Nick. I love that you were able to just read my mind. And that's exactly it. Simplicity. Because look, let's weigh the flag a little bit. I went into a theoretical math to a very huge extent. Like I was a gifted math student, like the best in high school, two years back, two years front, math prize champion, all this other bullshit. And I'm not as good at this kind of...

Just kidding. Zero. Zero the janitors ever around me. And then Nick actually is like a savant and Nick can calculate averages, multipliers, dividers, and addition in a way that like with all of my math brilliance, it just baffles me every time he does. I can't do complex stuff though. I can't do like.

Oh, 100%. So I can do complex tree cow cow. Just like that. That's where I thrive the most is like when it's no more numbers, just just variables. That's where my new brain takes off. And you've got the backend covered. And neither one of us is fucking smart enough to do what the fuck is 1.25 times 213 pounds that I weigh today. Like a fuck, fuck that. It's not that we can't do it. It's like, why?

I round. So to me, it's like, if I'm going for a gram per pound and I weigh 200, I'm eating 200. If it's like, okay, I'm dieting and protein quality might be low, I'm eating 250 or 225. That's it, bro. That's it. I deal in 25 RAM increments. And I'll also say another thing, if you're not dealing in roughly 20 to 25 RAM increments and every macronutrient.

You are misusing your intellectual is should be working harder work or having more intricate free time to play world of work after more detail level thinking about the shit any fine grained tooling is bad another thing i learned from a great grand knuckles a long time ago and it's been resubstantiated over and over.

is that even calorie labels and macronutrient estimates on all the packaged foods, and even the non-packaged foods you have, have a margin of error that's up to 20% in size. So anytime someone's like, oh, I eat 197 grams of protein per day, I honestly believe in a well-genuine, meaning fashion, you are mentally ill, like you need treatment, you need OCD medication.

I myself, you know, struggle with OCD tendencies. My dad's probably diagnosably OCD. It's a real thing. Get treated. I'm kidding for the most part, but seriously, it's like the, you know, in chemistry, there's this thing called significant figures. Nick, do you remember significant figures for chemistry? If you had to. My chemistry history would not be impressive.

So if you are mixing two things together, and one of them was measured to the third decimal place, and the other was measured to one decimal place. When you mix them together and you do the calculation of how many total things that we have in here now, you actually cannot yield that calculation to the third decimal place.

Because since one of your ingredients was the first decimal place, that's as far as you are certain about things. Like if you say, okay, two people are arriving to the party. Tom is going to arrive at exactly 359.57 p.m. and Rob gets here like plus or minus roughly five minutes. And then someone's like, when did Rob and Tom get here? You're like about 4 p.m.

anything more than that is actually wrong in scientific terms. So when you realize that first of all, it's not practical to deal in specific protein amounts, second of all, you have to do with protein quality, protein adjustability, the food labels could be off. Did you really get all the fucking spoon of peanut butter or did some of that stay and you wash it off in the sink? Anything other than maybe 10 gram increments of protein.

probably 20 to 25 gram increments on daily macros per day is just like that's where the discussion ends and begins to engage in insanity. So for me, a gram per pound is a great thing there. And everything else to deal was 0.75 or 0.8. It's a gram.

And then it's one point two or one point two five or some shit that multiplies easily. And then I know my body weight and go with that number. And when people like well as you lose weight in a diet, do you adjust down? No, fuck no, because it all gets swallowed up in that margin of error. So that's how I like to get best, encourage people to think about protein and listen, there's nothing that's on the science side and it makes sense.

on the side of practice of experience and pro bodybuilding. You guys, most pro bodybuilders, they use macros. They use ounce weights of fish and chicken and beef. They wait out however many ounces it is. They just put that on the fucking scale. So the best bodybuilders in the world give less of a shit about the specifics than you do. Jared Feather doesn't even use a scale. He eyeballs all of his macros and he comes in with his glutes looking like the

You know like they were etched in stone that's how that works folks and so any amount of like well yeah the science guys say it's okay to be general but no there's no but there's nobody else saying you need to be ultra specific. Short of people on forums that are probably diagnosable i'm kidding sort of all of all respect.

I mean, that's like, I remember for the longest time straight up when, even on the templates, we go back in time to templates. It was like five years into us selling templates that you and I realized that we were talking like you were like, oh, that's raw weight. And I was like, oh, I always just cooked.

Yeah. I was like, oh, it turns out I was getting a little bit more protein because I still got great results because it's fucking simple. To me, I'm like, I'm not measuring out raw stuff. I got to deal with raw gross chicken, like I'm not putting that on the scale. I got to clean it. I'm like, no, I'm going to set the container on the scale if I was measuring it. Typically, I only really measure like that in a diet phase. Otherwise, that's probably eyeballing it most of the time. Yeah, 100%.

But there is just, I love how people get so in the weeds about it. They're going, oh my God, I got to increase this and I got to do this. And it's like, your labels are fucking wrong. You can't even be right. So look, why are you worrying about it? Like just, just skew up a little bit, have that insurance policy. Um, I want to, I want to cover one other thing. So as we're talking about this, so you kind of started at point eight. Now, let's assume you don't really care because you did qualify that earlier. This is assuming you give a shit about body comp.

Yeah. What if you don't? What about just for general health? What's kind of the recommendation is like, you need this amount of protein per day. Anything about that? 0.5. 0.5. So if you're 200 pounds, 100 grams a day. 100 grams, you'll be healthy as a fucking, healthy as a whistle. How did the FDA come up like, well, wasn't it like 50 grams would be on food labels? So 50 grams is for a 120 pound woman on whom all reference ranges are based.

Yeah, so that's how they get a 2,000 calorie diet. Yeah, correct. Yeah. It's protein. That's 200. I think 60 is usually the reference value, but yeah, something like that. I remember seeing food labels that they would like base. If I did the math, I mean, yeah, again, margin of error there, but I thought it was 50. Yeah, 50 makes sense. Yeah. 2,000 calories a day. Yeah. So for 120 pound woman, 50 and for a 200 pound man, like roughly 100. Yeah, there you go.

It's not much. So here's why that's the case. 1,800 calories a day coming from fats and carbs per the FDA guidelines. Correct. Oh, man. So the FDA, remember, the FDA is an ancestral institution designed when nutritional education was accessible from the FDA and no one else. There was no internet. There's nothing to read. 50, 60, something like that. Shit like that. And so,

I think the FDA has probably started, I assume it was started like in the New Deal era with 30s, almost all government institutions have started around then, which hopefully Elon Musk is going to unwind for us and thank fucking God. But that FDA at the time and still largely to this day is concerned with giving people the basic information on a minimum value so that they don't fucking croak while they're working in factories and in the farms and at the office.

really we're talking about minimum levels to keep you healthy. That does not mean you're going to be very muscular. That does not mean you're going to be living your best life. But that means like if you are a soldier on the field or you're in the hospital, we feed you this much protein per day when you're fucking unconscious or you're shooting other people, you're at least going to be like roughly normally of health. And that really is like very small amount. It is really, first of all, it's cool because protein is like a very expensive back in the day. So it was good that we didn't need a ton of it. And also,

The body is unbelievably efficient at extracting what it needs from food. You know, back when the carnivore diet started about 10, 15 years ago, a lot of professional nutritionists were like, dude, we're going to see like all these people get fucking sick and all this other stuff. And it pretty much never happened.

Because it turns out like when you feed the human body very limited amount of nutrients, but you hit all the core basics, it just keeps fucking plugging along. The human body is designed literally in the type of revolution where we had like we ate whatever the fuck was around and we were not guaranteed this cornucopia of bullshit. And it's quite the human body thrives in environments of where it just gets all the minimum stuff, what it needs and the rest is good. Very different question from optimization. But nonetheless,

I think a lot of people get the two conflated. And so they're like, well, point eight, that's the lowest amount and anything less than that. Like they watch the relatives eat and they eat like one chicken breast a day and they're like, Oh my God, like you're under eating protein. Like no, no, they're just fine. Here's another thing really quick. Sorry, Nick, did you want to say something? No, I just was going to ask about. So that's the low end. I'm just curious as to what the high end might be, but finish your thought first. Yes. Yes. Yes. So another thing about the low end of protein is that the body is insanely sensitive to amino acid levels and that protein balance.

These are ancestral mechanisms that are roughly the same in like insects and fucking mice as they are in us. And so when you don't get enough protein consistently, you will develop what's called meat hunger, which leads to you just fetishizing, biting a fucking steak. You know when you just need some fucking meat like that kind of craving, goes through the roof and in the extremes, this is super fucked up. So if you're listening to this and you're a bit squeamish or you have children turn this off now,

During periods of mass starvation, especially by genocidal regimes like Mao's China, people would start to engage in cannibalism when they got low enough on protein. And like at that point, if you're willing to eat another human being because you need protein so much, if you're living in the United States or Western Europe or modern free Asia, and you think you're under eating protein, if you don't have radical protein hunger and you're not like so, not muscular, you can't walk up the stairs, you're fine. And if you really do go below that health protein, you will want to eat protein.

And you'll get it, you'll be totally fine. It's like people who are worried about dehydration. How many people in the United States just on sheer misunderstanding of how much water you have to drink per day die of dehydration? The answer is zero. The answer is zero because you're going to get thirsty. And so protein hunger is

It's very powerful. It's almost as powerful of a mechanism as thirst because if you don't get enough amino acids as an animal, then you will die. And so there are zero extant animals today that have a broken version of that mechanism because it's incredibly well preserved for the evolution and fine-tuned because it gets the core of your hunger response. And so when people are like, oh, I hope I'm not unhealthily under eating protein, trust me, you'll get it. Here's the thing, a lot of young people, especially a few years back that tried the vegan thing.

And this is still true in many parts of the world. They'll be vegan for ideological reasons, very, very laudable. And then when they get drunk or they get high, they'll eat like hot dogs and steaks and all those other crazy shit, because their body's like, you are fucking idiot and you need protein now. And they'll go for the worst nasties kinds of red bloody meat because that's just instinctually where the human body will take you.

And so that's a thing. So when people are like, oh, my aunt's under eating protein, like it's highly unlikely she's under eating protein in any medical context, because if she was, she'd almost certainly develop protein hunger and fix that problem out. You go to 1930s Appalachia, where people are actually starving and have swollen bellies, they're not getting enough protein.

but they sure should want to they just not around so the usda basically made those guidelines of the people could really really know, if i eat this amount i'm not going to run into protein hunger in the future and also for a budgeting and things like that because if you're a housewife in the nineteen forties don't have infinite money and if you get just enough protein to make sure families fed they never have to run into protein hunger run into you know,

problems with growth and development because you're under eating protein, but you can get just enough protein for everyone to be hunky dory and develop into the strong, beautiful people, but not anymore than that, because any more than that cost a fuckload of money. Now, and it sounds crazy, but in modern America, actually zero people struggle with protein intake. The average American consumes what people in the modern nutrition call too much protein. There's nothing wrong with too much protein, which you'd get to in just a sec, but almost all Americans consume more than the required amount of protein, which is a good thing.

Yeah. Especially when you talk about obesity, it's like, you're eating excess calories. You're probably not hurting on protein. Yeah, if he had five pieces of fried chicken from KFC, motherfucker, that's 120 grams of protein right there. Like, you're good. Yeah. So let's talk about the upper end, because he and I talk about bodybuilders eating up to two grams and, you know, just picturing Marcos. How fucked do you eat 400 grams of protein a day? Like you're eating a lot of protein powders. It's the only way. Protein powders and a fuckload like Nick, imagine like 12 to 14 ounces of chicken or steak or fish.

Like, yeah, like bro, like six times a day, like that's what the guys, you know, like a lot of the animal pack ads you and I used to fetishize back in the day because they were fucking sweet. It's that whole bullshit of like, remember the guy like he was like eating oatmeal and he's like chew bite, chew water, suck down, repeat. It's like, dude, you could just like enhance the food palatability of that and stop having so much stress in your food. They didn't know that back in the day.

So that's our core exactly. So when Marcus was eating two grams of pretty about a body weight, he no doubt, at least for the first time, like all of us were thinking like, dude, this is what it takes. It's fucking raw. You feel me like this guy green in his kitchen, making 10 pounds of fish that row. First bodybuilding show I ever did a egg whites every single night. Yeah. Do you know what I can't stand more than anything now? I still don't eat them or boiled eggs. Do not eat them.

Fucking hate him. Why? Hard-boiled eggs are a great diet food because there's only so many you're going to eat until you're like, fuck that. Dude, I mean, I literally had the animal pack poster in my college bedroom. Yes. And then there I was every night and I fucking hated eating hard-boiled egg whites. Not the yolks, folks, just the egg whites. I'm talking like six or eight at a time. Brutal. Brutal. It tasted so awful when I was like... It fills you up so quick too. You get to the vomit response real quick.

That's the only way I could eat them is I had to like switch around with water in my mouth and I just would, that's what I would do. And I'm just like, this is what it takes to be a bodybuilder. I'm like, I'm the man. Yeah. And then I was terribly chocolate, Casey putting and you're like, Oh, this is actually quite good. And I can eat a lot of this. I want to know some real first world problems. Like when I'm dieting, totally, I'll do some casein. But I actually remember, you know, shimmy, right? Of course. Yeah. He came up and trained with me one time and he's like,

Sometimes you just reach a point where you're just so fucking lazy where it's like you don't even want to mix up like protein powders just like it's all RTDs. Yeah, so like I do a lot of fair life's actually have like a fair life on 42 grams. It's like my last meal of the day now and I'm like, oh my god, the strawberry 42 gram fair life.

They must be milking angels for that, Nick. Like, we need to protest in front of Coca-Cola headquarters. Free the angels. Free the angels. People are like, what are you talking about? Like, they've got angels in there that they're milking out for protein. There's no way it's that good. And then people get, they pick up a protest board and they go with us because they know what's that. We need to get free.

Yeah, no, Fairlife's good, man. Fairlife. The fuck, man, I've tried. I literally can't get ahold of anyone at Fairlife. You're too big for us, man. Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola. Yeah, we're like a rat and Coca-Cola's like Godzilla. Like he's too big to even step on us. Like we'll like fit through the cracks of his toes. Yeah, it's weird, man. They're like core power, Instagram page has like bunch of like influencer types that I've never heard of. And I'm just like, what?

No one's ever heard of them. Yeah, obviously, it's a very non-organic campaign. Also, I'm sure they have very few followers on social media. A lot of the big companies have a ton of traction problems on social media. It's like, why would you follow PepsiCo? You know, like, what are they going to tell you that you don't already know by going to a fucking store and getting Pepsi? So listen, hey, big corporate media. We love you guys or big corporate food agro business. We love you. We preach all your shit all the time. If you want to reach out to us, you feel we will sell all that shit. We were already sold out, so we're not going to

We're not going to embarrass ourselves with our clientele. They already know we're shills. I wish I was a fair life show. I had literally, I was trying to, I just can't. I'm also trying to be a shill for like the modern obesity drugs. Like I was epic and trizapatized and stuff like that. I'm trying to like every time I'm on a podcast. I got like, I started talking about him. I got to be like, hey, like Novonortisk, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, we exist and we are ready to go around the world.

praising your drugs, please contact us. But you know, giant steroid hat is not a good look for them. So we're gonna say no to that.

I don't know unless we get more popular than them. Maybe like, oh, fuck this guy's in. Yeah. So much protein. Yeah. Yeah. Let's give the TLDR here because we have a run and you're in a couple of minutes on what's what's what theoretically what's the upper end limit? Theoretically, there are two upper end limits. One is you have diagnosed kidney disease and most people don't. And the other one is you have eaten so much protein that you're under eating carbs and fats relative to your optimal performance and hormonal metrics.

Short of those two, there is no upper limit for protein intake, which is why we're willing to be so liberal and say, look, fuck it, eat 1.25 grams, eat 1.5, who gives a shit, unless it's displacing so many carbs that your pumps suck, or unless it's displacing so many fats that your nuts don't work anymore, you're good to go. And so unless you have like,

Diagnose kiddies function where the doctors like cannot eat xyz amount of protein that definitely this new doctor, but short of that it's not a big deal these one of these missing thankfully i think is receding, but Nick you know you and i are from kind of a different generation than the one now for good and for bad mostly for bad.

But you and I came up at the time where if you talk to your school nurse, you were convinced that excessive protein was just going to kill you. And then if you somehow weren't dead, like, you know, like the zombie you keep shooting doesn't die, just give them creatine and they're creatine will for sure kill them. And so we luckily we hear less of that now. Creation is all mythical. Creation protein together is like basically, I knew people who were taking creatine protein in high school and I thought like spirit energy wise that they were like the on the equivalent of steroids, like they were immoral people who were also reckless with their health.

I was accused of taking steroids, and I'm like, the only thing I'm taking is creatine and protein. I was 16 years old. And they were like, yes, that's what we meant. Mike, I know I've shared this story before, but who knows how long ago it was. I'll share it real quick. Dude, the first time I ever took a masking or shake or like, I think it was maybe even just like protein powder from GNC. I thought I was on steroids.

Yes, the effect i walked into the gym and i was like i'm the fucking man i'm eating protein powder like this instant muscle added to my back i fucking got my parents got me some protein just from a grocery store and i didn't have a shaker i didn't know shakers existed i read the instructions that you can mix it with cold water in a glass which is i don't even know why they write that on there.

And so I took a spoon and a glass and mixed it, and it was chalky, and it was pseudo chocolate. It was terrible. And I ate it with a couple of loaves of white bread or something after workout. And Nick, I felt exactly like you did. I was like, stop me. Try to stop me, motherfuckers. I have a science experiment now.

100% and the chalk is helped because you're like, I'm doing something regular people don't. Yeah, it's like when I was eating those egg whites, like, this is so fucking terrible that no one in the right mind could do it. It has to be working like this has to be the answer. Yes. That's why you have to tell yourself. Otherwise, you're like, why would you be doing it? So moral story, end of the day, still cool to just roll with one gram per pound of body weight is a pretty good recommendation for like someone trying to be more muscular or less fat.

And you'll get almost the same results in many cases, especially if you're maintaining your weight with 0.8 and E and 1.2. There's some kind of argument for it. If you want to really, really check all the boxes for sure, for sure. And if you're dieting and training really, really hard, doing lots of cardio, then 1.2 might be a good idea, but around a grand per pound or the nuances is really still probably best practice. And look, that doesn't mean we're attached to it. There's more and more and more studies come out and it realized that it was actually substantially lower and especially higher. We will

Revisar position and it will come out and say something useful like, you know, you want to get a little bit over a grand per pound or will say, we want to get a little bit under a grand per pound. Anything more is probably too much. We'll definitely say that. But for now, round of grand per pound is damn good advice for almost everybody. Yeah. Cool. All right. Thanks for helping clarify that. Yeah, it'd be interesting. I think you're going to have some folks on the talk a little bit more about what Milo was talking about, right?

Absolutely. We've got more folks coming on the channel talk about that and shout out to Greg Knuckle strong by science. They're fucking great. And if you want to read an article that's perversely long, but highly technical, comprehensive understanding stronger by science. And if you go on Greg Knuckles Instagram or strong by science Instagram, he's got a link right to the article. It's one of the most recent posts that he has. So just just get on there and educate yourself.

It's one of those things where you thought you wanted to know about it and you start reading, or you're going to record all this article, and it really separates the week from the chat if you really thought you wanted to know about it or not. There's a lot of people like, this is the best thing I've ever seen. And some people are like, yeah, I could give a flying fuck. Luckily, go read the article anyway, because in the first three paragraphs, Greg summarizes the TLDR. Actually, I don't know if you just don't have to keep going. That's the only thing that I would read. Yeah, go get some clicks going on that.

Awesome. All right, guys. Happy holidays. Happy New Year, everyone. Thanks for supporting the RP community, podcasts, etc. We will catch you on the next episode. Peace, homies.