Are protein and vitamin supplements simply a necessity?

What about minerals? For example magnesium?

The same - food first, supplementation if needed. You find magnesium in nuts, seeds, mineral water, different types of porridge, leguminous vegetables and wholegrain food in general.

We, as an athletes, have this tend to supplement too many things we really don’t need and we can provide it from food easly. If there are some shorteges in your body this is totally different story. But test yourself, eat healthy food (not processed, full of nutient, different colors, textures etc., dont stick to one type of food/one food schema every day) and use supplements if you need it.

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Nope… supplements are like the the drizzle on the cheesecake. Or at least that’s how they should be used.
So you should be striving to hit most of your nutritional requirements with real foods (whole foods even better) and the supps should help you get there… But it shouldnt be the other way around.

No.

Lots of people, myself included routinely do >150g protein per day with no supps. I like skim milk. I eat an animal-based protein source at every meal, accounting for 20-30g per meal. Then… bread has 3-6g protein per slice,

https://efficiencyiseverything.com/ (no affiliation) has a great protein per unit time page and protein per dollar page. Pro tip: bread and milk go a long way.

Avoid fat-laden “protein” sources like nut butters.

@BT-7274 is right. Only way to drop 10kg of fat is to have a kcal deficit unless he’s one heck of an outlier with low muscle mass and high fat mass, and is in the infancy of his weight training history. Weight loss will be at least partially necessary for the 10kg of fat to come off.

No. Useful and handy though.

Yes to both.

Then do just that. There is no harm in consuming 75g of protein from whey daily. FYI: Whey and casein are the two protein components of milk. Whey is the fast digesting portion and casein is the slow digesting portion.

Whey protein products are the fastest digested protein manufactured. That means that it becomes readily available to your working muscles during and immediately after your workout. This is important for signaling pathways involved in muscle building and growth, which is a process that subsequently uses fat stores as its primary fuel. If you don’t have a whey allergy, it is the ideal protein to use during or immediately after training, and is generally quite gentle on the GI tract because that’s what it was designed for as a supplement.

On the opposite end of the spectrum of proteins, casein protein products are the slowest digested of all proteins. That means that it can provide amino acids to the bloodstream and thereby to your recovering muscles almost all night while sleeping. This results in less (if any) muscle catabolism overnight. A faster digesting protein might only provide amino acids to the bloodstream for the first 1/3 or 1/4 of the night. On the flip side, casein would be pretty rough on the stomach during training because it just sits there and takes up space for a while!

Might be worth looking into a casein for nighttime.

Skim milk, enriched wheat products, lean meat, tons of veggies, maybe some small amount of healthy fats. Seeds are great for fiber and healthy fats. I put ground flax and chia seeds in my nutribullet daily. I just FEEL healthy doing it. No evidence that I am healthy because of it, but it really hits me in my moral superiority complex.

I would caution against setting firm or aggressive weight targets given the substantial weight loss you’ve already achieved. There are many many tradeoffs of overpushing for weight loss, even if you’re still not anywhere near the bottom of the BMI scale or “very lean” category for BF%.

Yes and no. Huge role acutely, yes. Overall though, they play a very very small role in governing metabolic rate and total kcal expenditure. Very small in comparison to:

  1. Body mass
  2. Lean body mass
  3. Training expenditure
  4. Non-training activity level

Agree.

Agree but not for the reasons you think. Agree because psychology is powerful and while cutting kcal might work now, it may not last. Likewise with using exercise to create kcal deficit.

Disagree. If kcal are maintained and food composition is changed, there will be no change in body tissue weight. There may be changes in the weight of gut contents and water shifts. There may be changes in psychology that then lead to lower kcal consumption or higher kcal expenditure, but if those things are held equal, there will be no change in weight. Not discounting food composition and choosing high satiety, nutrient dense foods, and maybe even lower-palatability foods, OR discounting that nutrient timing might encourage higher intensity training, better sleep quality etc etc… but … CICO is what changes weight.

Sleep loss does the following:

  1. Increase appetite/desire to eat.
  2. Increase storage of fat on trunk.
  3. Increase storage of fat all over
  4. Cause muscle loss
  5. Decrease training quality, intensity, or decision-making related to volume, which can compound #2, 3, & 4.
  6. Does NOT inherently cause weight loss to slow down or stop, but can definitely affect it through #1 & 5.

You don’t need to consume collagen.

Agreed!

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I keep protein powder in, but I rarely use it as I get sick of it REALLY quickly.

Plus, for some reason they give me a headache from time to time. Have never really worked that out.

They talked about it on the podcast here:

Especially:
The benefits of collagen for endurance athletes

I’m no expert on this, but I thought there were differences in the way various foods were processed by the body. For example; simple sugars are easily absorbed but proteins take more energy to digest and process such that ~25% of the energy contained in them is used just to absorb them. Or something like that.

For what it’s worth, I changed to a high protein diet a couple of years ago and feel a lot better for it. I’ve dropped weight (fat), recover quicker, get hungry less often, and I think I get sick less often. I supplement with whey after workouts and casein before bed. I think the high satiety of protein is probably the biggest factor, less snacking because of less appetite.

Related story: a couple of years ago my wife cooked an enormous pork roast which was absolutely delicious. It sat in the fridge for over a week and we both ate it whenever we were hungry. Once it was done we both noticed we had lost weight. Pork may not be the lowest calorie meal, but it is filling, so overall we ate less calories than we normally would. Eating pork and loosing weight = good times.

“easy as a vegan”.

If you are on a calorie deficit, then it can be difficult to get enough protein on a vegan diet. I made this mistake shortly after I cut out practically all meat and dairy and I lost quite a bit of power over 2 months while losing weight, and I think I was getting 60-70 grams per day, which is above the RDA, but below the recommended protein for endurance athletes. While I’m not sure that my power loss was because of protein, I have done another cut while supplementing with 1 or 2 scoops of vegan protein and my power increased as expected according to my training. At one point I think I was aiming for 1800 calories per day, and to get enough protein I calculated that I would need to get something like 80% of my calories from lentils or other high protein vegan foods.

However, endurance athletes typically eat so much that they usually get plenty of protein.

Can you be clearer on how you disagree with my post?

Is that collagen thing backed up by any more studies, or is it just the one (which only seems relevant if you have joint pain)? I read the blog page on it but it reads like an advertisement rather than science.

Sounds to me like your change led to a decrease in calorie consumption though :man_shrugging:t3:. Protein was more satiating so you snacked less. If you tracked all of your calories and ate the same amount then the difference would be negligible. Certain types of food can definitely change the way you feel which can lead to intuitively eating less.

Might also be short term loss of water when shifting balance from carbs to protein/fat.

Some forum messages linked to these:

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Cheers.

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There are. But…

  1. The thermic effect of food is tiny by comparison to all other energy expenditure.
  2. The satiety effects and muscle growth effects of increasing protein vastly outweigh benefits of thermic effect of food.

Bingo!

Pre-prepped protein in the fridge is powerful for body composition improvement and weight maintenance / loss :slight_smile:

Truth! My wife was in a high volume phase of training and we were experimenting on her to see how low she could get her protein and how her muscle mass and training would respond. She comes from a strength/power background so muscle was not in short supply for triathlon.

Results:

  1. Lost fat tissue.
  2. Minimal muscle loss.
  3. Improved performance.
  4. Hungry!
  5. Craved meat constantly.
  6. Couldn’t get protein below 40-45g per day unless she intentionally avoided protein.
  7. Fasting blood glucose increased from 70’s to 90. (100 = prediabetic and 90 is very high for her).

[quote=“JoeX, post:31, topic:56557, full:true”]

Weight loss requires kcal deficit. I took your writing to mean that a kcal deficit was not required.

Yes, that was exactly my point. This is one of the biggest positives to increasing protein consumption IMO.

The point in question was whether all calories are equal, which I don’t think they are. For example:

Re: Collagen and above-cited studies:

Mechanism, therefore application is faulty thinking. It has led to many of the worst and counterproductive recommendations in exercise and sport science.

Spelled out a bit more: there are always things that happen internally in response to a dose of something, whether a supplement, food, or exercise. Those immediately post-dose effects are often entirely meaningless and 100% completely erased by what happens in the body over the next 12-96 hrs. Evermore, they are completely erased when tracked longitudinally over the course of 6-8 weeks of use of a supplement or an approach.

Examples include:

  • Ratios of carbs to protein post-workout being meaningful. Hogwash.
  • Low inter-set rest in lifting boosting post-exercise testosterone & GH increase, and those hormone bumps being strongly augmentative of hypertrophy response and critical to and strongly predictive of muscle growth magnitude over time.

What are the specific claims that the podcast mentioned? I listened for a few minutes but it just was a long intro of “what is collagen.”

Here’s my current blurb I send to clients:
Collagen probably doesn’t have an ideal amino acid profile to support body composition as well as whey protein or even soy protein. Definitely not ideal for meal replacement or use during a workout. As far as it’s benefits for other purposes (hair, nails… etc.), my jury is still out. If you’re going to use it, just count it toward your protein macros for the nearest meal, and maybe only do half your protein from any given meal as collagen.

From the article linked:

However, eating whole food took 46.8% more energy to digest on average than processed food!

Yes… but… that 46.8% more kcal burned from burning your food… is not a meaningful or useful thing to focus on when trying to create a kcal deficit because it’s a TINY percentage of total daily kcal expenditure.

I agree with you on the positive aspects of increasing protein and the effects it can have in satiety. This can be huge in the long term for sticking with and creating healthy habits. I also can’t argue with the benefits of eating mostly whole food. :+1:

Also quoted from the article linked:

On average, a person uses about 10% of their daily energy expenditure digesting and absorbing food, but this percentage changes depending on the type of food you eat.

Protein takes the most energy to digest (20-30% of total calories in protein eaten go to digesting it). Next is carbohydrates (5-10%) and then fats (0-3%).

So if I eat 200g of protein a day (which is not unusual for me, I’m heavy), that’s 800 kcal from protein, of which ~200 will be burned just digesting it. Someone on a low protein diet might eat 50g of protein, for a calorie content of 200 kcal, of which they would burn 50kcal in digestion. So a net difference of 150kcal burned in digestion compared to ingesting the calorie difference in fat (as an extreme example). So maybe a 5% difference in calories burned in digestion is a realistic difference between a high and low protein diet?