4 ms·

It depends on your protein needs and goals. Survival is different from optimal performance.

nate_meurer 8y ago
Not sure what you mean by "optimal performance". Your body needs a finite daily amount of each essential amino acid for tissue growth and repair. If you're an athlete you might need more at times, and some health problems can cause usage of particular aminos to spike, but the requirement is always finite. Consuming more than those amounts has no proven benefit (unless that protein is meant to displace calories from carbs or fat, which is a completely different topic). Optimal daily intake of all essential amino acids is easy to achieve with any sensible dietary habit, even for very active adults. If you're consuming adequate protein each day, given your activity level and health, then the amino profile of your protein intake is completely irrelevant unless your diet is really goofy. I'd encourage you to read that Forks over Knives article.
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  I’ve seen a lot of results regarding net protein synthesis with respect to amino acid profiles, and in general, higher concentrations of specific amino acids were tied to greater synthesis. (Especially Leucine through mTOR.) Is this misleading somehow?
  - nate_meurer 8y ago
    Yeah, leucine is a bit of a hot topic among the intermittent fasting crowd because of its apparent ability to arrest fasting-induced autophagy. Some amount is clearly critical for anabolic signaling, but the evidence I've seen indicates that extra dietary leucine (in excess of typical consumption) has no effect on actual muscle synthesis [1]. There is compelling evidence supporting supplementation of some conditionally essential amino acids such as carnosine (perhaps vis-a-vis beta-alanine) and glutamine. There's also increasing interest in restriction of specific amino acids, namely methionine, for anti-aging and cancer treatment. But all this talk of supplementation and restriction, outside of what occurs naturally in foods, stands in opposition to the dietary notion of protein completeness. My hope is that it will eventually lead to more appropriate and flexible measures of dietary protein quality. 1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20844186 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20844186

Not sure what you mean by "optimal performance". Your body needs a finite daily amount of each essential amino acid for tissue growth and repair. If you're an athlete you might need more at times, and some health problems can cause usage of particular aminos to spike, but the requirement is always finite. Consuming more than those amounts has no proven benefit (unless that protein is meant to displace calories from carbs or fat, which is a completely different topic). Optimal daily intake of all essential amino acids is easy to achieve with any sensible dietary habit, even for very active adults. If you're consuming adequate protein each day, given your activity level and health, then the amino profile of your protein intake is completely irrelevant unless your diet is really goofy. I'd encourage you to read that Forks over Knives article.

stochastic_monk 8y ago
I’ve seen a lot of results regarding net protein synthesis with respect to amino acid profiles, and in general, higher concentrations of specific amino acids were tied to greater synthesis. (Especially Leucine through mTOR.) Is this misleading somehow?
- nate_meurer 8y ago
  Yeah, leucine is a bit of a hot topic among the intermittent fasting crowd because of its apparent ability to arrest fasting-induced autophagy. Some amount is clearly critical for anabolic signaling, but the evidence I've seen indicates that extra dietary leucine (in excess of typical consumption) has no effect on actual muscle synthesis [1]. There is compelling evidence supporting supplementation of some conditionally essential amino acids such as carnosine (perhaps vis-a-vis beta-alanine) and glutamine. There's also increasing interest in restriction of specific amino acids, namely methionine, for anti-aging and cancer treatment. But all this talk of supplementation and restriction, outside of what occurs naturally in foods, stands in opposition to the dietary notion of protein completeness. My hope is that it will eventually lead to more appropriate and flexible measures of dietary protein quality. 1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20844186 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20844186