Best Protein Foods to Build Muscle….Today’s Post….Thursday, 5-3-2018

Last week we began this 3 part series with Best Protein Foods to Build Muscle and Burn Fat. 

We included some information on each and then featured a woman who lost 61 pounds by changing the protein foods she ate.

Last week, we covered the foods that work best to burn and lose fat.

Many of the people who have used the three styles we have here have lost fat and kept it off.

Most of them became healthier and some began to look noticeably younger.

This week, in the third part of this series we’ll cover the best protein foods to build muscle.

Medical News Today had a story, I think they have had before, that lists: “What foods are high in protein.”

They include both foods that help build muscle and bone and those that help you keep muscle and bone when you are minimizing carbs and even doing some partial or intermittent fasting.

To lose fat and keeping it off, building healthy muscle and bone and preventing its loss, adds to the calories you burn that do not feed fat.

Building healthy muscle and bone and preventing its loss also avoids the situation where you eat what you are used to or hungry for but have less and less muscle and bone than you did have means so you feed growing amounts of fat with the food that used to feed muscle and bone.

Eating both the health OK proteins that build muscle and bone best and effective strength training and vigorous but brief cardio and some walking each week can do both.

1.  Eating to build muscle and bone does work best with some protein foods:

a) Fifty years ago a study was done that found that most of your muscles and bones and other lean tissues is made up of protein with a specific ratio of amino acids notably high in the amino acid leucine.

These researchers were able to make a mix of amino acids in exactly that ratio.  Then they tested two groups of people doing strength training.  One got this mix.  (The article I read was too brief to say how they made this palatable enough to be doable.)

The other group got the same total daily grams of  protein by eating a mix of eggs and meat and dairy.

The people taking the balanced amino acid mix that mimicked their bodies own protein gained significantly more muscle.

This was interesting but not doable for most of us!

But then I read that whey from the milk of cows fed only grass, which after all feed growing calves, has that EXACT profile of amino acids!

b)  Whole milk that is not homogenized from the milk of cows fed only grass contains a gram of protein per fluid ounce. 

This makes it a fast to fix and consume source of protein, particularly at breakfast.

Studies show that milk drinkers who drink whole milk are leaner than people who drink reduced fat milk. 

The combination of protein and health OK saturated and monosaturated fat in whole milk turns off hunger better and is lower glycemic than reduced fat milk. 

(In fact, reduced fat milk isn’t milk that has had its fat reduced, it is made from dried milk from cows fed grains and water or with some butterfat from cows fed grains.  So not only does it have a higher percentage of its calories from lactose and is higher glycemic, it is also quite pro-inflammatory.  So, it supports muscle growth less. It reduces hunger less.  It boosts blood sugar more.  And, it boosts chronic inflammation too.  So while fat reduced milk as currently sold has some muscle building ability, it helps you gain fat and get sick if you use it.

So to gain muscle, stay healthy, and minimize fat gain, use whole milk and full fat cheese and yogurt from cows fed only grass.  Mercifully, Whole Foods sells those now, or at least they do in the part of California where I live.)

Dr Mark Hyman points out that milk contains something like 12 separate boosters of insulin to cause growth in the calves who normally drink it.

It is true that some people lose more fat if they avoid milk and some are allergic to milk or don’t digest lactose.

BUT, for building muscle, drinking some whole milk from cows fed only grass after your workouts, particularly your strength training workouts uses these insulin fractions to build bone and muscle!

AND, unlike sugars and artificial sweeteners, this does NOT increase your blood sugar or later in the day levels of insulin that tends to lock down fat research has found.

So, for people who can use it, a combination of powdered grass fed whey and 16 ounces of milk after your strength training workouts will help build muscle and healthy bone.

I use Jarrow unflavored grass fed whey from grass fed cows.  I’ve worked out how many scoops is a seventh of the container and has about 34 grams of protein per day.

By mixing this with 16 ounces of whole milk from grass fed cows before the rest of my breakfast, I begin with 50 grams of the two best kinds of protein foods to build muscle!

2.   Eating enough protein to build bone and muscle and keep what you have takes more protein than many health oriented people eat now.

a) The founder of The Perfect Workout, the effective strength building program with a tutoring style coach at a quiet gym twice a week for 20 minutes each, found research that explained why their clients who failed to get stronger and gain bone and muscle.  They were eating too little protein!

The research he found said that to gain strength and build muscle even with effective strength training you needed to eat at least a total of three fourths of an ounce of protein per pound of lean body weight.  In the case of the woman willing to be an example that he used, she wanted to gain muscle and bone to a lean weight of 120 pounds and lose fat.  She was eating only about 30 grams of protein a day. But when she boosted that to 90 grams of protein a day, she promptly began to get stronger and looked leaner as she lost fat and gained muscle and bone.

b) Bodybuilders have known for years that the ideal number of grams of protein to eat a day is about equal to the bodyweight you want to have when you succeed in building the muscle you want.

So a 150 pound man who is now lean who wants to gain 50 pounds of muscle would eat 200 grams of protein a day.

This either suggests the 50 grams of protein a day I get once a day twice a day plus 100 grams of protein and in practice is often daily servings of beef or lamb from animals fed only grass.

It’s also wise to eat a variety of proteins from health OK sources and other than whey and whole milk from grass fed cows, many of the best foods for fat loss without loss of bone and muscle work well because they have other health benefits and do NOT tend to add fat.

The five foods that do this best are eggs from pastured chickens, and organ meats from naturally fed animals, and the proteins in broth made from both the bones and marrow of grass fed cows,  and organic, non-starchy vegetables – mostly cruciferous – and the low inflammation and heart and brain protecting wild caught fish such as Alaskan salmon and wild caught small fish.

These foods have many health benefits AND contain the nutrients your body needs to build healthy muscle and bone.  The DHA in the wild caught fish helps your body increase BDNF to help you increase your nerves and brain cells and keep those you already have.  Since gaining muscle and bone requires you get stronger and your brain and nerves control how strongly you can exert force with your muscles, this is particularly valuable!

(I split the difference and try to eat a gram of protein for each pound of muscle and other lean weight I’ll have when I add the muscle I wish to add that will help me lost 20 pounds of fat.)

3.  Mike Matthews who has successfully helped both men and women gain muscle and lose fat, found research showing that in addition to enough protein, to gain more bone and muscle it is important to eat enough carbohydrates to enable your body to burn those and to use all the protein you eat to build muscle and bone.

There are two tricks to this.

First, this does add fat, so only eat enough more carbs to enable muscle growth.  Eating more carbs than that adds no more muscle but DOES add fat you’d rather keep off.

The other trick or strategy is to use zero glycemic and lower glycemic carbs that have health benefits for most of these carbs!

Nuts for those not allergic other than cashews with their high lections provides protein and multiple nutrients and fiber AND some carbs yet are zero glycemic.

In fact, research confirms because of this people who eat nuts take in more carbs and calories yet weigh less and are leaner than people who do not.

The other source of carbs that has fiber and multiple, even hundreds, of nutrient are organge and yellow organic vegetables such as carrots and pumpkin and squash and sweet potatoes and red garnet yams.

Dark chocolate in small amounts per day also works!