In G N Booklet he references a study where a test group were consuming 3.4g protein per kg of bod weight. I generally work off 1g per kg, works out at 100 or so a day. That’s pretty manageable to do across 3 meals and using protein powder etc. Has anyone used a higher proportion closer to 3g?
My diet is pretty free of carbohydrate, and the last time I calculated my protein intake it was around 2.5 grams/kilo of protein. My macros are essentially just a balance between fat and protein, and an increase in one tends to displace the other. If I increase my protein intake significantly, I tend to drop my fat intake, and over the course of a day or two I start to crave fat.
I guess what I'm saying is, for me, eating 2.5 grams/kilo of protein is easy for me, on a carnivore diet. However, eating 3 grams/kilo or more would require a certain amount of willpower and determination, because I would be eating well past satiation, and limiting the fat that I would be craving.
Leangains method asks for 50% to 60% calories from protein. This is 3-4 grams per kilogram or it can be even more.
In my experience, once you get past 40-50% calories from protein (I'm probably around 40/60 protein:fat), protein just doesn't seem very appetizing anymore.
Even on a diet free of carbs, I would have to eat fairly lean meat in order to get to 60% of my calories from protein.
It's worth noting that I maintain very normal blood glucose levels, indicating that a decent chunk of the protein that I eat gets converted to glucose. The difference between eating glucose vs. getting glucose from protein (amino acids, technically) is that there's little to no insulin response from the protein-derived glucose.
Body Composition
I suspect (meaning an educated guess) is that the decrease in fat mass with the High Protein Group was in part due to the limitation of carbohydrate intake, which triggers insulin release, which blocks "Fat Burning".
I agree with this. At some point, you would have to start swapping carbs with meat, which is generally going to promote fat loss due to the effects on insulin.
Based on my experience, I believe that around 1.6 to 1.8 g/kg/d is effective for most under the following conditions.
1) 3 - 4 Meals Per Day with at least 4 hours between meals.
2) 30 Gram Per Meal Minimum, with possibly up to 50 gram per meal. 50 gram of meats or dairy would provide you with around 4.0 gram of Leucine per meal.
I agree that this makes a lot of sense for most folks.
It's interesting that the high protein group lost more weight even if they were consuming more calories. They behaved as if they were in a calorie deficit. This would support the idea that protein is inefficient as energy source.
There has been talk in some circles for a while of dropping the calories per gram of protein down, from 4 to 3.4, since that better reflects the actual usable energy in a gram of protein.
I was listening to an interview with a protein researcher (it may have been Anthony Jay, but don’t quote me on that), and he mentioned that one of the main reasons people dropped out of high protein studies is that they would get too hot. It’s not clear if this is due to an up-regulation of metabolism, or just the metabolic effect of having to process that much protein (since many chemical reaction generate heat). In the study we're discussing, the dropout rate between NP and HP groups was the same, and most people didn't cite a reason for dropping out, so I don't know how relevant it is to this discussion. Point being, protein is an inefficient fuel, which may or may not be a useful thing, depending on goals.