Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha

discovered one other interesting fact. In his research, he determined that 30 grams of protein creates the same amount of maximum muscle protein synthesis as you’d receive from a 90-gram dosage. The simple conclusion—your body can’t handle more than 30 grams of protein.
    This was widely accepted and embraced. And suddenly a nation of men stopped eating large steaks and went back to only one scoop of protein powder in their post-workout shake. Sure, maybe it’s a little more economical—but is it better for your body?
    Using the same logic as the protein study, if you had sex just once in an hour and your level of arousal was the same as having sex ten times in an hour, then one bout of sex would be the same experience, right?
    If you said yes, well, we don’t know what to say to you.
    The point we’re making is this: while we have some evidence—and that evidence is not completely foolproof—that protein synthesis tops out at 30 grams, that doesn’t mean you don’t receive other benefits from eating more. Or that there is any harm in eating more. In fact, we know that eating a high-protein diet helps you build more muscle, stay fuller longer, and even burn more fat because protein is more metabolically active in your body (meaning it takes more calories to break down protein in your digestive system and use it as energy).
    There’s also a lot to be said about the pure enjoyment of things, which in this case means eating. Even if we accept Paddon-Jones’s conclusions that “the body” can only utilize 30 grams of protein in “a sitting,” does that mean that we shouldn’t eat a porterhouse that has 60 grams of protein? Absolutely not. Porterhouse steaks are delicious. And the calories in the steak—if not the protein—will still be used in the muscle-building process.
    Secondly, you’ll notice that we put “the body” in quotes. Paddon-Jones’s experiment was conducted with a relatively small sample size, just thirty-four people, which is important because people react to protein in different ways. So while 30 grams is a good jumping-off point, it’s not the complete picture. We know that testosterone can increase protein synthesis and nitrogen retention. Meaning, if you increase testosterone—as we’ll teach you throughout this book—then you can increase protein synthesis and make even better use of the protein you eat.
    You’ll also notice that we put “a sitting” in quotes. What constitutes a sitting? Is it thirty minutes? Sixty minutes? Obviously, we need to take into account the rate of digestion. You see, 30 grams of protein coming from the porterhouse would be broken down much more slowly than 30 grams of protein from whey hydrolysate—the fastest-digesting form for protein. So even if we could define a sitting, the type of protein would obviously factor in to the digesting.
    For our purposes, it is better to look at the total amount of protein consumed in a day rather than a sitting. If you assume you can only eat 30 grams of protein at one meal and you’re expected to eat 250 grams of protein in a day, you’d have no choice but to eat all of that protein in multiple meals.
    But there’s enough research, as we shared above, to prove that the multiple-meal hypothesis is false. And there’s a mountain of evidence suggesting that your body can, in fact, digest much more than 30 grams of protein. In a study published in the Journal of Nutrition, scientists found no difference between eating roughly 80 percent of your protein in one meal versus four meals spread throughout the day. And by no difference, we mean that muscle gain and fat loss, as well as protein absorption, were even. And in that study, that meant that subjects were eating 54 grams of protein in one serving—or nearly double what you’ve been told your body can handle.
    But that’s not even the entire story. In that same study, only females were tested. So why should you care? As we already mentioned, the amount of muscle you have has a direct relationship to how much protein you can handle, as does the amount of testosterone in your body. And since men have more muscle and testosterone than women do, the scientists speculated that men could take in even more protein than what was discovered in the study.
    Not to bore you with more science, but in another study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers found that body composition improved (less fat and more muscle) when men ate just one