RE-RUN - Flexible Dieting with Alan Aragon - The Ultimate Guide to Nutrition for Women

31:10Alan Aragon:I call it protein hyperfeeds. There we go. i love it yeah it's sort of taking the concept of um carb carbs or carb refeeds and just making it protein and i did this on just sort of an experimental basis with one of my one of my clients this was back in 2009 uh she was she was a marine at one point and she was actually a semi pro football player. So she's just a really athletic person who wanted to gain muscle and wanted to lose fat and was open to trying some crazy stuff. So back in 2009, we didn't have the wonderful research by Jose Antonio and his colleagues looking at very high protein intakes and what happens there.

32:08Alan Aragon:So I kind of, I off the record did some, some experiments with, with my client. Her name was Carla Fisher and some really interesting stuff happened because what I did was I had her eat about two to three times her, her body weight in pounds in protein grams. Wow. Yeah. And this is kind of what, what you, what you would do with, with a carbohydrate except you would carb up a little bit more um if it were carbohydrate but it's protein so in any case she would consume about two to three times her body weight in pounds in protein grams and we would do this two to three times a week and just see what happens and kind of miraculously what happened was she recomped in other words she gained lean mass while losing fat mass and none of us really yeah she got the holy grail and none of us really knew how or why it happened but um 15 years later in the research joey antonio and his colleagues are protein hyper feeding folks not not really in the cyclical way that i did but on a linear daily way and they're seeing the exact same thing they're seeing body fat loss with lean mass gain.

33:34Alan Aragon:And, uh, even if they, and technically some of those studies don't show major differences in, in body fat loss and lean gain. They basically show that the extra protein you're throwing at people kind of disappears somewhere. And there, there's a number of mechanisms, a number of speculations we can make as to where that extra protein is going. But the bottom line is, it seems to be a good tactic for dieters who don't necessarily want to continually restrict. So it can be a tactic for adding food to the diet without any adverse consequences to the goal of fat loss. And so that's been an interesting thing to see across the literature and then many years ago with clients.

34:28Alan Aragon:And so I think that it's one of the tools that you can use for people who are just tired of restricting. You just give them a protein day or two in the week and just say, yeah, go for it. Well, and you were so ahead of the time. I'm like, you called this out 15 years, 13, whatever it was, however many years ago. So do Do you prescribe protein on ideal body weight, lean mass, or just body, like one gram per pound since we're, we're American. Everyone else does kilograms. Yeah. Yeah. We don't need those kilograms. Where's the freedom in kilograms?

35:09Alan Aragon:I typically do goal body weight or if you want, there's ways to calculate ideal body weight, but all this stuff is really just a proxy for lean body mass. It's just hard to accurately estimate lean body mass. So I tend to use goal body weight or ideal body weight. And And this is congruent with what's done in the literature because most of the protein research in the literature is on people who are of a normal body weight. So yeah, that's sort of the easy way to do it. Yeah. Well, then you get too high when you look at someone that might be obese and you give them the number. If you're doing one gram per pound, you're like, here, go have your, you know, 800 grams or calories in whatever it is.

36:06I mean, a super high number, but then they're, they're, the carbs and fats are like, well, something takes a hit. But so we obviously, we know the protein. Okay. We go off of that, but does the carbs and fats change the body composition all that much? depending on if you're high carb, high fat, or vice versa?

36:27Alan Aragon:The disappointing answer, which I'm sure you're familiar with, is no. And we know that through a couple dozen well-controlled studies at minimum, and even within the past couple of years, There was this great study involving Jeff Volek that looked at a ketogenic diet versus a high-carb, low-fat diet. And the high-carb, low-fat diet was the carbohydrates in the diet were 50 % of them were from sugar. and they since they equated the protein intakes between the groups and they equated total calories between the groups there were no significant difference in fat loss between the groups at the end of the diet which is pretty extraordinary from number one because jeff jeff volick was a part of that and he's been touting ketogenic diets for the last 20 years and secondly you know you at least theoretically you think oh sugar is bad or whatever but half of the carbs coming from sugar did not negatively impact fat loss so that tells us that car the carb fat proportion of the diet should be individualized according to the person's personal preference or according to their athletic goals if it calls for a certain amount of carbohydrate in order for them to perform in an endurance or performance type capacity.

38:09Alan Aragon:And so, yeah, it's actually a good thing that the carb fat proportion can be individualized since we as practitioners can tailor programs better. So there is no, I mean, cause again, I'm just using my, my experience, but But I guess it's just the fixation on Haley, tell me exactly what macros to eat. And I'm like, it doesn't work that way. I can give you a guide. But like, do you have food sensitivities? What do you prefer to eat? And not get so dialed in on a specific, I mean, there's ranges, absolutely. But not a 232 grams for this or whatever it is. It's really the whole flexible dieting approach is just giving people permission to be like, you get to tailor this to your life.

39:05You get ownership instead of just being told exactly what's going to work or what's going to, you know, what's this going to do for you and you get to figure it out. Yeah. So, Laura, what was the alcohol question? Let's get to the good stuff. I know all of our questions. how do you feel about alcohol and how do you track it okay so alcohol how i feel about it oh man it's a it's something that people have to take really seriously um mainly because of its addictive

39:41Alan Aragon:potential um and that's probably that's probably the most important aspect of alcohol because you never know whether you're somebody who can develop an addiction to it and people really downplay that negative potential of it and um among the general public about one in ten one in ten individuals develops some sort of addiction some level of addiction to alcohol so one in ten people have some degree of alcohol use disorder in the general public and that's kind of an alarming statistic I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When I read that statistic, I was like, oh, man, that's pretty gnarly knowing that one in 10 people in a given room has a problem with alcohol.

40:25Alan Aragon:And certainly the pandemic did not help that with people self-medicating and people trying to drink away the stresses of life. And it's become a growing problem. But if you're one of the nine out of 10 people who do not have an addiction to alcohol and you're able to consume it on a responsible and moderate basis, then the literature converges on a one to two a day being not harmful. and in some cases possibly helpful depending on the source of alcohol with red wine having the richest body of data on on its benefits so um if you start going beyond one to two drinks a day let's say two to three drinks a day then you better be a larger person who can metabolize that that kind of dose if you start going above two to three drinks a day four plus most people are going to experience negative impacts on both their training as well as their appetite and both of these negative effects are typically going to be rooted in the way that alcohol or excessive alcohol negatively impacts sleep quality And so a lot of times what we see in the literature with alcohol intake is that people spontaneously eat more when they lack sleep.

42:03Alan Aragon:They just eat a significant amount more calories just because the body is sensing some sort of crisis, some sort of energy crisis that is governed by this lack of sleep, lack of good sleep. And alcohol can do that. Not to mention if you drink enough and you have a hangover the next day, then there goes your training session. Yeah, good point. Yeah, alcohol is something to be highly cautious about and highly respected. Yeah. No, I agree with that. Okay, my next question is about intermittent fasting. What are your thoughts on intermittent fasting? It is a viable tool for some individuals. And the main thing it's good for is controlling energy intake over the course of a day or over the course of a week.

43:02Alan Aragon:So if we look at the umbrella of intermittent fasting, then there's three main subtypes of intermittent fasting. There's time-restricted eating where you squish your intake into a narrowed feeding window within the course of a day, typically eight hours or less. And then there's another model of fasting called the 5-2 method or twice-weekly fasting where two days out of the week you're not eating anything or you're only eating very little, just a few hundred calories, and you're netting a net caloric deficit by the end of the week. and then the other main model would be alternate day fasting which can be either zero calorie alternate day fasting or it can be a modified alternate day fasting where on the fasting days you're having about 500 calories so it's not technically a full-blown fast so with those three subtypes in mind and of course there are the dangerous type of fasts that people do you know and and recorded on youtube where they're going to be like i'm going to go on a 40-day water fast and I'm going to film myself passing out.

44:10It's like, oh man.

44:13Alan Aragon:Oh boy. Yeah. There's always that, but the viable models of fasting are out there. And the interesting thing about these models of fasting are that they can be done, the feeding phases of the fasting and feeding cycles, they can be done on an unrestricted basis. So you can restrict somebody to, let's say a six to eight hour eating window in a day and they don't have to restrict. And what ends up happening is they end up netting a, either eucaloric balance or, um, hypo caloric balance. So in other words, they end up either maintaining or they end up losing body weight. So that would probably be the biggest pro of intermittent fasting is that it allows the feeding phases to be unrestricted and this frees people up if they don't like to be meticulous about tracking.

45:12Alan Aragon:It kind of absolves people from having to track, which is kind of a cool thing for some people. So, you know, something that I don't like about intermittent fasting is there's a lot of mythology around it a lot of people who have become emotionally attached to their special if through their pet if protocol will claim that this is the way everybody needs to diet because it's the best way for whatever reasons they give when that is simply not true when you look at the literature on on intermittent fasting versus daily caloric restriction you look at the body of research as a whole. They're both on par with each other in terms of their effectiveness for weight loss and fat loss.

46:05And, you know, there's even caveats to be said about alternate day

46:11Alan Aragon:fasting. There was a study done looking at lean subjects and putting them through either daily caloric restriction or alternate day fasting this was lean men and they actually lost more lean body mass on the alternate day fasting regimen than they did on the daily caloric restriction regimen even though the net caloric deficit by the end of the week was was equated so um there is a point of diminishing returns for people who think that they can just fast you know indiscriminately and And the other bit of mythology that really kind of bugs me with fasting is when people read these speculations by these gurus who will either insinuate or explicitly say that we have to put ourselves through periods of fasting in order to regenerate or rejuvenate our immune system and avoid cancer and promote longevity.

47:11Alan Aragon:None of that has been demonstrated. None of that has been, in quotes, proven. frankly i i doubt any of it is true it's like yeah um yeah and what the body of research on this area looking at changes in clinical parameters between intermittent fasting models and daily caloric restriction models the magic really happens because the person lost weight because the subjects lost body weight because the subjects were able to control energy intake. And so it's impossible to disentangle the clinical benefits of intermittent fasting or fasting period, time-restricted feeding included. It's almost impossible to separate the clinical benefits from the weight loss that happens, from the fat loss that happens.

48:06Alan Aragon:And now just kind of getting into the weeds a little bit here, there are a handful of studies that show superior glucose control benefits with moving the feeding window to the earlier part of the day instead of having this conventional pattern of intake where you eat from morning to night. okay and there is some literature showing that if you were to compare two time restricted feeding models an early time restricted feeding and a delayed time restricted feeding so in other words either skipping breakfast versus skipping dinner yeah then the skipping dinner model tends to show better glucose control but this is all short-term research so there's a particular study that stands out by lou liu and colleagues where they looked at the 12-month effect when they compared a conventional eating pattern of 8 a.m to 8 p.m with an early time restricted feeding pattern of 8 a.m to 4 p.m no significant differences in body composition improvements and improvements in clinical parameters like blood lipids and blood glucose and so once again that tells us oh it's this really unsexy null effect at the end of the rainbow but hey this is great in the sense that you can tell people that, hey, we can do this according to your personal preference.

49:32Alan Aragon:If you like to restrict your feeding window and you find that helpful, great. If you don't, great. Let's go with what you can sustain because there's no meaningful difference in health improvements, body weight and body fat loss improvements between these two models. So that's sort of uh the long winding story no that's good information what about if you pick one of these intermittent fasting models and you make sure to have your correct protein intake is there effect on building muscle as long as you get the correct protein intake see this is a damn good question And we can really only look at Grant Tinsley's work.

50:25Alan Aragon:He's done most of the work on time-restricted feeding combined with resistance training. And he's largely seen positive, favorable effects with the time-restricted feeding plus resistance training. Because restricting the feeding window tends to corner people into eating less overall. and has been pretty effective at that. And the resistance training enables people to keep their lean body mass while they're doing that. But just kind of panning backward and looking at the big picture, if somebody's main goal is to gain muscle and not necessarily just retain it during a diet, then all of the intermittent fasting models are suboptimal for that goal.

51:17Alan Aragon:Because when you think of how muscle is built, it's just net gains in muscle protein synthesis over time. So the synthesis side of muscle protein turnover has to outpace the muscle protein breakdown side of that cycle over a period of weeks and months. And of course, throughout the day, too, that counts. And so when people are going through fasting periods, they're simply compromising the amount of muscle protein synthesis that can occur on a short, mid and long term basis. And so they're ultimately compromising their rate and potential of muscle growth. If you're going to engage in any of these fasting regimes.

52:03Is there a certain how much protein do you need to get to turn on muscle protein synthesis? Somebody eats five grams in the morning. Is it the same as 40 grams?

52:12Alan Aragon:Yeah, yeah. Muscle protein synthesis related to protein dosing is more of a dimmer switch than it is an on-off switch. So you can see measurable degrees of muscle protein synthesis with as little as 10 grams of protein, but it just happens to be higher with higher doses. and there happens to be a ceiling of muscle protein synthesis at about 40 to 50-ish grams of protein. So that, yeah, yeah. Fantastic. No. MPS is an interesting story. It's an interesting story with MPS and it varies with the population, varies with what's going on in the protocol too. Mm hmm. OK, so I have a series of questions here about number one.

53:03Is there what do you think? And I know this this there's not a specific answer here, but what is like the because I get asked this all the time to you? What's the ideal body fat percentage for someone that's just like, I don't want to live like I'm getting on a physique stage, but I also want to be fairly lean year round and feel good. You know, is there an average percentage? Because everyone wants to know the exact percentage of what is ideal. Okay.

53:35Alan Aragon:So there's some interesting recent research that looked at body fat percentage and mortality. mortality so how does okay body fat percent relate to when you're going to die and in the general population these percentages are pretty high in women it averaged about 35 percent that was like the lowest mortality was seen at about 35 percent body fat and with men it was high as well. So it was about 22 % body fat for men with the lowest mortality. So, but you know, this, this research is, is observational and there's a lot of other factors going on with, with this. And you also have to look at other bits of literature as well.

54:21Alan Aragon:And so I kind of weigh this against previous literature showing that normal, healthy populations, men, the body fat percentage range from about 10 to about 20. And then in women, it was about 20 to about 30. So, you know, just because this new research rolled out showing that mortality is lowest at 35 % men, 22 % women, you kind of have to look at it a little bit skeptically, a little bit critically. And there's other literature that's been repeated showing that roughly 10 to 20 % in men, roughly 20 to 30 % in women, hedges your bets towards living a long, healthy life. Just generally speaking at the population level, certainly there are people above 30%, women above 30 % who will live right long, vigorous lives.

55:21Alan Aragon:And there are women below 20 % who are going to be very healthy as well. But just speaking in general terms, it is a 20-ish to 30-ish thing for women and a 10-ish to 20-ish thing for men. And this can vary throughout the lifestyle and what athletic pursuits people are involved in as well. I mean, I'm looking at Haley, she's probably in the high teens, maybe mid-teens, body fat percent and doing just fine. and but that's that's her as an individual um and people just people differ in that so it's important to keep those ranges in mind and it's important to emphasize that i'm talking in general not at the individual level yeah so is there because this is the second question is there a specific amount of lean body mass now obviously this this is going to change based on height and weight and age, but like a good number should, should someone in the hundred and I don't know, 50 ish range, maybe 140 to 180.

56:32Is that how much lean mass would you say by pounds someone should have? Obviously the higher, the better for a lot of reasons. Yeah.

56:44Alan Aragon:It's like the, that whole question relates to fat-free mass index and fat-free mass index is sort of like body mass index but you're looking at a fat-free mass to height ratio instead of a total body weight to height ratio and frankly I mean there's not a lot of good data telling us how high should our fat-free mass index be in order to maximize health and maximize health span and lifespan? Because it's going to vary with the individual's goals. There's going to be, let's take one extreme end, competitive bodybuilders. Let's look at the drug-free competitive bodybuilders whose fat-free mass index can be anywhere from 23 to 25.

57:38Okay.

57:38Alan Aragon:So the way that you would calculate fat-free mass indexes you would take. Well, you'd probably want to find a calculator online and run the numbers through there instead of doing it by hand. But their fat-free mass index is about 23 to 25. The average untrained male, their fat-free mass index is about 19. So you kind of get to pick across that range if you're totally untrained adult male ffmi of 19 you probably that's probably not ideal uh you don't have to get all the way up to 24 or 25 because then you'd be a competitive bodybuilder but um yeah the answer to this question is a little bit more philosophical than anything you know how functional do you want to be how strong do you want to be what kind of activities do you want to be able to execute at a given age you know as people hit their uh golden years um most people are happy to be able to get up and sit down and do some gardening and not not fall and break their hip uh whereas earlier in the life cycle when people are like 20 to let's say 20 to 40 to 50 years old they still want to push some weights around they still want to do some sports and you know it's you know it it really kind of depends on the life cycle.

59:06Alan Aragon:I personally, when I hit 60 and 70 stuff, I want to be throwing some weights around. I want to be able to do the same stuff I'm doing now. And so therefore there's always going to be, in my case, there's always going to be a push for an above average amount of muscle that I want to carry. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not sure how helpful that answer was, but yeah, I mean, it's really hard. Cause that's why I'm always like, there's not a, and they're like, well, so-and-so sat on the podcast. I'm like, well, it's not as black and white as just like throwing out a number. But I love when Dr. Gabrielle Lyon says, we're not over fat, we're under muscled.

59:44And that usually falls into a lot of the, the women later on in life that just didn't get the memo to strength train. And so they just carry a higher percentage. But if we're talking about, this is the last part of my series, muscle. So if we're talking about someone new to strength training, maybe around age 40, what is realistic that somebody, how much muscle a female best case, because in your book, you talk about best case scenario and then more realistic case scenario that a female can gain that's new to strength training in a calendar year. Okay.

1:00:25Alan Aragon:Okay. And I just looked up the average fat-free mass of an untrained woman. And it ranges from 16.7 to 19. Well, I'm sorry, 14.6 to 16.8 that's the average ffmi in untrained women and in men it was about 19 ish it's like no like yeah about 19 okay so you're asking a really good question um because if you consider let's so we're going to start kind of at the top and then work our way down yeah most women from from the being adult and from an untrained state they have they have the potential to put on as much as 20 to 25 pounds of muscle on the high end on the high end we're talking if you do everything right here or and over the course of a lifetime okay the course of a lifetime of course of a lifetime yeah let's let's say uh let's say over the course of a five to ten year training career that they can focus on that goal they have 20 to 25 pounds of muscle available to them if they have great genetics and great focus and every all the factors in their their life converge towards allowing them to pursue this goal yeah so when you think about that when you think let's take the the upper end let's take 25 pounds of meat that you can put above and beyond your untrained state if you're looking at a five-year period you're looking at five a gain of five pounds of muscle a year on average and so i mean that's really pretty minuscule especially when you consider that it'll happen more quickly at the beginning and then it'll start diminishing as you reach that, that potential.

1:02:33So the first year, who knows,

1:02:37Alan Aragon:maybe you can actually put on eight, eight pounds, maybe even 10 pounds of lean mass if everything goes right. But then it just starts decreasing with the consecutive years to where at the fourth and fifth year, you're lucky to put on one to two, two to three pounds in those final years. And it is kind of, I mean, it is kind of depressing, but when you think about it this way,

1:03:09Alan Aragon:it's like, gaining 10 pounds of muscle as a woman is spectacular. It's fricking spectacular. Okay. So gaining those 20 pounds is just stratospherically incredible of muscle above and beyond the average untrained person. So it's a slow grind and people have to understand that there's no gaining muscle too fast phenomenon. There's no, oh my gosh, muscle is just flying on my body. Exactly. I mean, we've been talking about this all week on the podcast. yeah yes yeah and with men it's about double like men can expect a ultimate muscular potential drug-free anyway i mean when we talk about you know um anabolic androgenic steroids and stuff that just blows the whole um that's a whole different conversation but a drug-free man can put on at max from compared to an untrained male, untrained adult male, about 40 to 45 pounds of muscle in the course of a training career.

1:04:21Alan Aragon:So you're looking about double the amount of muscle that women can put on. And some women can come, you know, not necessarily close to that, but there there might be, there's more like a, you know, a 30, 30 % difference between women, women who have good genetics and men, as far as the muscle gain potential goes. But, um, but yeah, even with men, when you think about a, a, like a five to 10 year training career, you're looking at, um, very small amounts of muscle on average per year. And, and yeah, and, and there are special cases, we're talking about like like phil heath he's been in the in the media a lot so he's at the top of my mind he he took about two years to turn pro when he started bodybuilding after his college college basketball career he took like two to three years to win the nationals so he would represent the upper end of genetic gifts to be able to put on muscle mass with enhancement going on so i mean in theory if you have great genetics then you can fulfill your muscular potential and he even went to put on even more muscle than that but let's talk about like the the regular mere mortals in theory you can reach your potential for muscle mass in a lot less than five to 10 years if everything in your life goes well and you have great genetics but most people will not be able to do that so you're not going to be able to see these gains of what you know consistent gains across the years of one to two pounds of muscle a month type of thing it just doesn't happen like that yeah well and it just gets really hard for women once they're post-menopausal and they don't have that estrogen.

1:06:22I think that the overall theme that you said, you nailed it when you said it is a slow grind. Weight loss done the right way is a slow grind. Muscle building is a slow grind. And living in the, I want this now life that we have access to really anything we want, most things that we want fairly quickly, it's hard to step back and just be like, patience, longevity, play the long game, like no secret sauce here. Like that's hard work, consistency, and staying in the game than just like, oh, this doesn't work.

1:07:05Alan Aragon:It's years. It's years of consistency. It's hard for people to hear that. They want weeks of consistency to work but it's not you know it is a years of consistency thing because even if you're able to hit a certain goal within a matter of weeks or a matter of months who cares if you can't sustain that for the next decade or or two or three depending on you know how much time you have left on the planet um yeah really who who cares so it is a matter of the long game i totally agree it's like committing to your health for your lifetime like i'm in it forever yeah you never stop you don't like get to be to a point where you're like okay well now i can chill i'm just gonna chill in life it's gonna stay with me okay wait you wish that wait i'm gonna ask the only way you can hold the clock back is just by you know making sure your body is trying to adapt Yeah.

1:08:07Yes. Okay. I'm going to ask you one last quick question and you can give a quick answer. It's for, um, it's not for Haley. What do you think? Actually, that was a joke. What do you think? What are your thoughts on diet soda? And is it a death sentence or not? Am I screwed?

1:08:30Alan Aragon:Oh, man. Well, just, just. You can say it. I know. We just don't know if you'll change or not. Whoever has, you know, Haley's physique can just appeal to their own authority. Basically, that's what I would recommend. That is a good answer. yeah okay so well with a question like this the only thing you can appeal to is the weight of the research evidence and diet sodas the only caveat to them is is not their artificial sweetener content because across the majority of experimental studies, it shows that they actually help with body weight control, weight loss, actually help with sustaining a caloric deficit.

1:09:26Alan Aragon:All of these fear-mongering threats about diet soda leading to, you know, either weight gain or diabetes or heart disease or cancer, all that stuff, that's all speculative and it's all based on very weak in quotes evidence um so we can pretty much toss out the idea that that diet sodas are a threat to health if anything they're kind of like a they're a cheat code to making your your your health i know health good and sustaining the health i mean that you would have to drink literal gallons upon gallons of the stuff to even theoretically incur the dangers that that that people wave around in the media.

1:10:10So, um, that now with all of that said, there are some, um,

1:10:17Alan Aragon:some energy drinks or diet, diet drinks that contain like one to two to 300 milligrams of caffeine per can. And so people have to be mindful of that, that they're not drinking, you know three four cans of those things a day if they contain caffeine because at the general population level the upper end of caffeine intake that is still healthy or still not harmful is right around 400 milligrams a day if we look at if we just look at population averages and what the threshold of risk is in non-pregnant individuals with pregnant individuals it's a little bit lower But for non-pregnant adults, we're looking at 400 milligrams on average is the most that you really should kind of start thinking of cutting things off at.

1:11:11Alan Aragon:Yeah, that's my take. Okay, I'm nowhere near close to that. I know. We're in the clear over here. Good, good. Oh, my gosh. Okay, well, last question, then we're going to let you get off. What is – this has been such a fantastic hour, Alan. What is something that as a scientist that you or just you in general that have been on all of like tons of these research papers and all of that? What have you changed your mind on that was shocking or surprising to you that you were like hard, fast rule? This is what is true. And then all of a sudden later, you know, years down, months down, whatever. You're like, oh, well, now I'm changing my tune because the research has changed.

1:11:52Alan Aragon:Okay, so there's three things that immediately come to mind. Starting from the most recent, not epiphany, but like, okay, I might change my opinion on this, is the concept that plant-based proteins suck compared to animal-based proteins. we've always believed that we've always wanted to believe that because we all love our we all love our yeah yeah um recent research and just sort of a um a mounting kind of pile of evidence short-term evidence and then now two studies comparing vegan uh completely vegan group with uh against an omnivore group both groups consuming sufficient protein like 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight or 0.7 grams per pound of body weight in both groups who are resistance training.

1:12:51Alan Aragon:No significant difference in muscle size and strength gains between the vegan group and the omnivore group. And the vegan group in this one particular study I'm thinking about, they used soy protein powder to boost the protein intake of the vegan group to allow them to hit that 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. um and that was surprising i mean uh well maybe not too surprising but the reason that it is surprising is because there was a lower amount of essential amino acid intake in the uh the vegan group compared to the omnivore group even though they used a high quality plant-based protein to boost the total daily intake in the vegan group um now there's there's still i i'm still skeptical about things you can still look at things critically and say okay well they used untrained subjects for that study and so pretty much anything is going to work as far as gains go for untrained subjects okay but you also have to face the the possibility that okay well differences in protein type might not matter nearly as much as the fact that there is a progressive resistance training program in place.

1:14:04Alan Aragon:And so, um, vegans still, I mean, they're, they're not necessarily doomed to these major compromises and being able to gain muscle size and strength that we kind of assumed that they were, you know, traditionally. Um, that was one, one thing, that was a recent thing. And then another thing I changed my mind on was the fact that intermittent and fasting is going to really mess up your, your gains. And it's going to make you lose a bunch of lean body mass and nobody should go more than four or five hours without eating something. So, you know, having kind of come up during the fitness era of the eighties and nineties, everybody was eating every like three hours with their Tupperware, you know, they're like bringing their damn Tupperware around to not only keep, keep muscle from falling off your body, but keep your metabolism stoked right stoke the metabolic fire with small frequent meals that act as kindling on this raging metabolic fire this was sort of the you know the metaphors that we were taught that happens to be not true um the human body is perfectly adept at apparently not eating all day still hanging on to muscle tissue as long as the resistance training program is in place um and then another thing that i've changed my mind on i used to really believe in the post-exercise anabolic window this was about 20 years ago when a bunch of media was put out and a book was put out by john ivy and robert portman a book called nutrient timing where they hypothesized actually they claimed that if you don't take advantage of this magic 30 to 60 minutes post-exercise where you have to consume a quickly absorbed protein and carbohydrate, then you're going to compromise your gains.

1:15:58Alan Aragon:You're kind of like you're not doing all you can to optimize recovery and growth. And they focused on the post-exercise anabolic window. And over the subsequent, I want to say 15 years or so, there was a pileup of studies that showed that, hey, as long as total daily protein is sufficient, then exactly where we place those protein doses relative to the training bout timing wise doesn't seem to matter. Wow. And so, you know, you don't have to have this whey protein shake waiting for you in the locker room, this whey and dextrose protein shake waiting for you in the locker room in order to make the same amount of gains as the guy who just drives home in traffic and has his, you know, steak and potatoes when he gets home.

1:16:53Alan Aragon:And then my colleagues and I, we did a meta-analysis and that, you know, confirmed this suspicion. A meta-analysis for the listeners is a pooled analysis of multiple studies and sort of seeing what, where the evidence leans on that. And then we, we did a primary study, a randomized control trial comparing immediate pre-exercise protein dosing with immediate post-exercise protein dosing. And there was no significant difference between those two protocols in lifters. So that was the third thing that comes to mind that I've sort of let go of this whole post-exercise anabolic window. uh now this isn't to say that there is some benefit and some merit to eating some protein and or protein and carbs after training it's an opportunity to feed it's never going to hurt um but i think that for the goal of muscle growth people need to focus a little bit more on well number one total daily protein intake that's going to take care of most of your most of your goal and if you want to nitpick at the icing on the cake then make sure that you are eating protein and at least at least three points spread through the day um that's pretty much everything we know that can maximize muscle growth and if you really want to get technical and nitpicky brad and i brad schoenfeld and i we reviewed the literature and came to the conclusion that if you want to maximize muscle growth then the distribution of protein intake through the day should be at least four feedings dosed at about 0.4 to 0.6 grams per kilogram of body weight.

1:18:38Alan Aragon:And that would, you know, that would amount to this sort of, uh, golden total of, uh, 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight for the total. So yeah, I just kind of threw that little thing in there. So that was lovely. This is the perfect way to end. First of all, Alan, you're just incredible. And you're so easy to talk to and have the general population, which is what our audience is, be able to understand so many of these issues that can be so complex and overwhelming for someone to just kind of start and not, you know, want to just quit after day one because there's so much information.

1:19:23So I love your book and Flexible Dieting, which is the name again, for anyone listening, you can get that at any bookstore, Amazon. I think I got mine on Amazon. Anywhere that you can buy books, correct? Yep.

1:19:38Alan Aragon:It's all over. It's all over the place. It was even in, was it Walmart at one point? I don't know oh then you made it big time alan exactly well perfect and you have your website which is is alanaragon.com alanaragon.com and um i i'm really proud of my baby which is my research review which i've been doing every month since uh 2008 and so i would encourage people who are in really into the details of stuff and the science of this stuff and that would be a good resource. And yeah, I want to thank you both. I want to see you both again. Yes, we would love that. It was great meeting you and you guys are both really great.

1:20:28And

1:20:28Alan Aragon:I'm just happy to know that such good folks like yourselves are doing such good things for the industry. So thank you so much. Well, thanks, Alan. We look forward to talking to you again. Oh, yeah. We'll do it again for sure. Thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a five-star rating and sharing the BodyPod with your friends. Until next time.