[Angela Foster] (0:00 - 0:42)
Protein. I have heard multiple different things around protein recently. One is you don't need any more than 1.6 grammes per kilo of body weight in order to gain muscle. Then there's the nuance of actually if you are in a caloric deficit, then in order to hold onto muscle or you're trying to do a body recomposition where you're trying to gain muscle, lose fat at the same time, then you should think about going higher. The other one is menopausal or peri or postmenopausal women both need to have at least 30 to 50 grammes of protein in a single serving in order to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. Can you tell us which of these are factually correct?

[Eric Helms] (0:43 - 8:08)
Yeah, they're all kind of sort of based on some kernel of truth. So taking a big step back, and this is my area, this is actually my entrance in the peer-reviewed literature and what I do my master's on and what I still research now. Much like the dose of exercise, the dose of protein that you get within a day if you're exercising and trying to produce changes to the amount of muscle mass you're carrying has a bit of a diminishing returns effect.

So it's really important instead of thinking about just what is the optimal dose in the literature that we will sometimes give to practitioners to report or to dieticians, is where are you currently starting? And one of the most powerful things you can do is actually just, even if it's not with an intention to change it, actually go through the process of tracking your nutrition, looking at nutrition labels, get a little bit of education, and then see where am I currently at. Many people are sitting around say like the 1 to 1.3 grammes per kilogramme range habitually in the west. If you are, let's say, more vegetarian or you don't like meat as much or you come from certain cultural backgrounds, it might be lower. If you're someone who is not that way, it might be higher. And going from say a low quote-unquote category, let's say under 1.2 grammes per kilogramme of protein, to something in the more quote-unquote moderate range, not even yet at the 1.6 gramme per kilogramme mark you mentioned, you will see a positive benefit that is larger from going from that moderate range to 1.6 or higher, right? It's very difficult to say there's a specific gramme per kilogramme protein intake range where after that you'll get no more benefits without also talking about who are you and what are your goals and how much of a small change are you interested in. So when I'm talking to a competitive bodybuilder versus someone who's interested in lifting weights and eating more protein and adapting and doing it maybe, you know, like in the constraints we talked about, I'm going to start lifting weights two or three times per week, you know, I'm in my 40s and I think I really need to start thinking about this seriously, I would be happy to tell them that they never need to worry about going over 1.6 because they're not looking to gain every ounce of muscle that their body could possibly hold, you know, over time, right? So the differences in the magnitude of benefit you get from going to high, high, high protein intakes or to moderately high protein intakes is very diminished and unclear. So I think for people listening to this unless you are considering doing like a master's, you know, figure or women's bodybuilding competition, 1.6 is a very, very reasonable target that you don't need to go above but there's no downside to going over if you're aiming to build muscle. Now if you're in an energy deficit, especially a pronounced one and you're trying to lose a substantial amount of body fat, the leaner and leaner you get, the more your body will rely on amino acids which we get from protein for fuel and the more there's a risk of not maintaining as much muscle mass as you get leaner and leaner and stay in this prolonged energy deficit. So it's not a bad idea to make sure that you're at least at that 1.6 range or maybe getting closer to two grammes per kilogramme if you are dieting. Now if you're someone who is reasonably high in body fat and you're also therefore relatively high in body mass, that gramme per kilogramme conversion can give you probably more protein than you would necessarily benefit from and make your diet harder to follow and you can essentially just bump these figures up by about 0.4. So we're looking at like say 2 and 2.5-ish or somewhere in there as you're kind of not dieting and dieting kind of target intakes, but that would be for every kilogramme of lean mass that you have. And if you don't know how to calculate your lean mass, you could, you know, look to get a like a DEXA scan if you wanted to get a decent amount or a decent precision measurement or if you're unsure there, a decent proxy for this that doesn't work for everyone but works for a lot of people is you can take your height in centimetres as a decent target for grammes per day of protein and that almost always falls in a decent range and that's if you're pretty high in body fat and you're pretty high in body mass. Ultimately the reason why we're consuming protein is to have an impact on our fat-free mass, our lean mass component of our body and if you are high in body weight it can kind of inflate that number more than it needs to be.

So you can certainly benefit from higher protein intakes but it is diminishing and I think a decent target or range is somewhere around, you know, 1.5, 1.6 or higher if you're in an energy surplus and then a little closer to like say two grammes per kilogramme if you're, you know, trying to diet and preserve as much muscle as possible. But then again just to go back to my initial point, if you're currently around one gramme per kilogramme it is an improvement and you will get better outcome even to get up to 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 regardless deficit or surplus and especially when you are early stages in your lifting career, if you are pushing hard progressively and training with intensity then that is going to be a much more important component to building and maintaining muscle mass than maxing out the potential benefits you can get from protein. We're talking about, you know, 80% of what's going to produce that growth versus the kind of 20% at best on the nutrition side of things in protein. So the final piece to that question was that if you need 30 to 50 grammes in a given sitting to max out that dose, this is based upon studies that last hours and I think it's important to put that into context.

You can actually label amino acids with certain techniques which is a fancy way of saying we'd be able to trace where it goes through your body in a lab and either looking at a biopsy later or some other techniques we could figure out at what point did we get the highest rates of new muscle proteins being built in your body based upon where they're going and how many were incorporated. But those four or eight maybe at best 12-hour studies have almost no relationship to actual long-term muscle growth. They're essentially looking at a metabolic snapshot of what's going on.

They're useful for us to generate hypotheses but they probably shouldn't be used to inform applied practise. When we look at studies in various age groups and also when we look at epidemiological data on different trends and ways that people eat, you'll see that if you're consuming a sufficient amount of daily protein, so your grammes per kilogramme per day, so long as you're distributing it it's across at least say three meals in a relatively even fashion, you've probably done everything you need to do to max out the benefits of a per meal dosing strategy. That means let's say that you are consuming say 1.6 grammes per kilogramme of protein and that puts you at say let's say 120 grammes of protein in a given day. If you were to split that between say three meals that's getting 30 to 40 grammes per meal, that's totally fine and the data would bear that out.

How much protein do you really need to build muscle — and do women in perimenopause or menopause need more? In this conversation, Eric Helms breaks down the evidence behind some of the most common protein recommendations, including the widely quoted 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight, when higher intakes may be useful, and why your starting point matters more than obsessing over a supposedly perfect number.

Eric also explains how protein needs change when you’re dieting and trying to preserve lean mass, why resistance training matters far more than squeezing out the last few percentage points from protein intake, and whether women really need 30–50 grams of protein at every meal to stimulate muscle protein synthesis.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1.6 g/kg Is a Strong Target — For most people trying to build muscle, around 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight is a very reasonable daily target.
More Isn’t Always Better — Benefits continue to diminish as protein intake gets higher.
Dieting Changes Your Needs — When in a calorie deficit, moving closer to 2 g/kg may help preserve muscle mass.
Your Starting Point Matters — Moving from a low protein intake to a moderate one may produce a bigger benefit than pushing an already high intake even higher.
Training Comes First — Progressive, intense resistance training is more important for building muscle than maximising protein intake.
Per-Meal Protein Is Often Overcomplicated — Daily protein intake and distributing it across at least three meals matters more than chasing an exact dose at every sitting.
30–40 g Per Meal Can Work Well — If your daily protein target is around 120 grams,