Adventures in Nutrition
There’s a funny relationship that I’ve discovered within the past few months. You see, awhile back(about six months ago) I had a personal trainer for awhile. As you might know or realize, one of the most important things about building muscle in general is nutrition. You simply have to eat enough, and not be missing anything out of your diet, in order to modify your body to gain muscle mass, because..well…it has to build it out of something.
There are a few main things to focus on in order to achieve that. A) You have to have a caloric surplus, you have to eat more than you burn, or you’ll lose mass. It’s easy, it’s obvious, know it; More calories == gain weight, Fewer calories == lose weight. Exercise provides the vital impetus for whether those calories become metabolically active muscle, or just stored energy as fat. Because if you’re not exercising, your currently designed form is clearly ideal for your needs.
Another thing is making sure you get all of your nutrition, easiest way to do that is to eat vegetables. Lots of vegetables, have a few servings with every meal. The way it was described to me, it is like magic. Synergistic effects, helps your digestion, primes your metabolism, gives you the little minerals and vitamins you need to turn your body into a powerhouse. Eat your vegetables!!! I like vegetables, so honestly all I really need is an excuse, and an easy way to do it. Frozen vegetables are good, they’re picked riper, and you can buy a whole bunch and pick out more whenever you need them. The main problem with this is that there seems to be a somewhat limited selection of vegetables that you can buy frozen. This saddens me to no end.
Then you have another major component of muscle, Protein. This one I’m mildly suspicious of, as it’s obvious that bodybuilders in general, and my trainer being no exception, recommend massive amounts of protein. Levels that outside of the physically active community don’t seem to be widely espoused. And on the other hand, you have vegetarian and vegan communities saying you hardly need any protein, and the RDA is too high as it is.
I’m an experimenter by heart though, and so I’ll try out any idea so long as it’s not likely to kill me or do any permanent damage. I was told I needed 40 grams of protein per meal. One meal per 3 hours. Protein supplements were used to fulfill this quota for at least two out of three meals.
I managed this for about a week before inertia snapped me back. The tenets stayed with me though, and every month or so I’d try something that would allow me to fulfill at least one of them, hoping to serendipitously stumble upon a synergistic solution that would allow me to combine everything I know into one genuinely healthy, satisfying, and easy to habituate plan for eating.
About a month ago I tried what I called eternal soup. A giant pot full of vegetables, constantly cooking on very low heat, which..on my stove, amounts to about 160 degrees fahrenheit(71C). Plenty hot enough to keep it from going bad. Unfortunately still hot enough to horrendously overcook it. It was still quite delicious by the end of the day, and so long as vegetables continued to be added there weren’t any major flaws to implementing it. The main reason I had for giving it up was because, while theoretically any nutrients lost due to boiling should be able to be recouped by drinking the broth(which was absolutely delicious, basically pure vegetable stock), I couldn’t find any hard scientific evidence of that. What I did find was that there are many nutrients that are in fact damaged by heat, and the prospect of trying to figure out just what I’d have to do to correct that kept me from wanting to bother, as 160F was the lowest I could get anything to keep it warm at, and the alternative of cold uncooked soup didn’t appeal to me nearly as much.
Another plan I engaged in for about a week was the “Everything is a salad” plan. Buy massive amounts of vegetables, slice and dice, add them to a gigantic bowl. Every meal, grab some salad from the bowl, add your requisite amount of protein and any other calories you need(re: ranch, mmm) And eat. A gigantic bowl of salad can last at least a full day, and when you run out, you make more. The reason I didn’t keep this up was because buying, cutting, and preparing all those vegetables took me at least an hour, and I am a lazy individual at heart.
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Most recently, I decided to tackle one of the main things that I’d always been suspicious of about having so much protein. Being that it would be almost impossible to do it without having a ridiculous caloric surplus, unless you get all your protein from lean meat. Or so I thought.
Here’s the thing. In my family, the main source of meat found in the fridge is hot dogs. Hot dogs are..well, let’s say nutritionally sparse. Even as a source of protein, a single hot dog has 6 grams of protein, yet almost 200 calories, all but the 24 from the protein coming from fat. If you were mad enough to try to get the protein my trainer recommended from hot dogs, you would be eating at least 26 hot dogs. By the end of the week you’d have gained 5 pounds from that alone(which brings me to another point that’s somewhat off topic, a cupcake is not going to make you gain a significant amount of weight, you’re imagining things. Get over it. Habits make your body, not the occasional delicious cake)
Clearly you can’t use hot dogs for protein, unless for some reason you have the desperate need for their taste or a calorie additive, they’re kind of useless. But what about other foods? And do you REALLY have to eat a pound of meat a day if you want to gain any muscle? Something tells me that’s probably somewhat unhealthy, and why I never fully committed to the plan.
So, I thought about it, and figured, in order to get the amount of protein you need, and enough calories, not more or less than what you need for your goals, the easiest way to accomplish both would be to establish a ratio. If I want 100 grams of protein a day, and 1800 calories, I need to have 18 calories per gram of protein. Simple, right?
Actually yeah, it is. Amusingly enough, most natural foods have ratios that are very easily combined to make that ratio, even without taking meat into account at all. Vegetables for instance, from reading their serving sizes, would seem to have relatively low amounts of protein, only a couple grams per serving. But they also have a similarly low amount of calories you can pull from them. Take spinach, a serving has 30 calories, and 2 grabs of protein, giving it a 15 calorie/protein ratio. That’s more protein than whole milk(18c/g), and just about the same as cheese. Broccoli has 10 calories/gram(between eggs and cottage cheese) Here is a whole bunch of different foods with their various calorie per protein ratios. Much of it gathered from Wolfram Alpha – Computational Knowledge Engine, a thoroughly awesome system that gathers together the world’s knowledge and lets you pull and perform calculations on it. See a video on it’s capabilities and prepare to knowledgasm Introducing Wolfram Alpha The search used for this chart is just “Protein / Calories in <Food>”
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Turkey 5.56 Lean Ham 7.49 Spinach 8.00 Lentils 8.00 Steak 8.20 Chicken 8.30 Cottage cheese 9.23 Lamb 9.60 Egg 11.88 Lettuce 12.20 Dry Pinto Beans 12.86 Lean Bacon 14.00 Peas 14.10 Black beans 14.90 Kale 15.20 Kale 15.20 Extra sharp cheddar cheese 15.71 Pinto beans 16.00 Pepperjack Cheese 18.00 Milk 18.75 Cabbage 19.71 Hamburger 20.00 Whole grain bread 20.00 Radish 25.00 Corn 26.50 potato 30.00 Sausage 30.00 Turnips 31.00 Carrots 48.00 Brown rice 50.00
As you can see, while meat clearly tops the chart in efficiency, almost anything you eat will give you plenty of protein. If you’re just going to go for the RDA, any value below 35 will give you all you need and more. With fruit the numbers do get significantly higher though, from around 50 calories per gram in an orange to 100 calories per gram in a banana. The beautiful thing about wolfram alpha is it will actually show you values of protein less than a gram, so you can actually GET useful calculations from this sort of thing. (oh, yeah, bananas? They’re about 1, maybe 0 per serving)
Some various takes on protein requirements
Indoor Rock Climbing – Daily Protein Requirements
Become Healthy Now – Protein Requirements in Humans
Reexamination of Protein Requirements in Adult Male Humans – In case you don’t read Science(tm), it basically says that while protein levels basically stay the same regardless, after you get to about .8 grams per kg(1.7g per pound) of protein into a person, they start breaking it down rather than actually using it. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Nuts & Sprouts – Protein requirements for humans – Asserting that apparently we hardly need any at all, which is obviously not at all required if you get most of your calories from vegetables instead of grains. Although useful if you want to be a fruitarian. You thief of baby plant nutrients.
Protein Myths – (Requirements, Absorption, Expenditure, Digestibility) – A very awesome and very detailed paper involving protein and how humans use and process it. It even has references.
