Best Protein Foods to Build Muscle and more ….Today’s Post….Thursday, 5-10-2018

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.

The next 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.

Last week, in the third part of this series we posted on the best protein foods to build muscle.

Our post this time is to add some amino acids and other things that enable you to build muscle and bone well in addition to the protein foods we listed.  For readers who did not see last week’s post we include that post from last week. 

But if you did already see that just scan past it to:

Amino acids and other things that enable you to build muscle and bone well in addition to the protein foods we list:

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 lose 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. 

(We posted recently on the finding that walnuts have a probiotic effect that can help you burn more calories and keep out the gut bacteria that make or keep you fat!  So raw unprocessed walnuts are a GREAT way to add these carbs if you aren’t allergic.)

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 orange 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! 

Amino acids and other things that enable you to build muscle and bone well in addition to the protein foods we list:

In addition to the protein foods I eat, I get another 14 grams of protein as amino acid supplements.

Because...."better workouts aimed to build muscle and burn fat…because as you know, the #1 way to burn fat is to build muscle!"   (Ben Pakulski) ...doing an unusually effective kind of strength training while eating foods that best build bone and muscle and no bad foods or drinks BOTH builds bone and muscle and removes excess fat and keeps it off.

Here are some other foods and supplements that best build bone and muscle while doing that kind of strength training:

a) I read that people who take one or two grams of l-carnitine a day gain more muscle than those who don’t.  L-carnitine also works well with the ubiquinol form of CoQ10 to keep all your mitochondria healthy.  That effect both slows aging and helps build muscle and bone.

I take a gram of L-carnitine and 100 mg or 200 mg a day of the ubiquinol form of CoQ10.  Most of the time I take 200 mg a day of Jarrow Ubiquinol.  Now Foods also sells 500 mg capsules of l-carnitine.  I take two a day of those.

b) Two grams a day of L-taurine has tested to keep blood pressure low and boost heart beat pumping effectiveness if taken with L-Carnitine and Hawthorn and NOT taken with stimulants!

Since that can boost performance and protect your heart I take two grams a day of L-taurine.

c) The amino acid in whey that best causes muscle growth by itself and has been tested to do so is L-leucine.  I take two grams a day of L-leucine as four capsules a day of 500 mg each.

(L-Leucine is a branched chain amino acid.  There are branched chain amino acid supplements.  But they are quite expensive.  Taking L-leucine and getting L-leucine and the other branched chain amino acids in whey likely works better than taking the branched chain amino acid supplements for building muscle.  And  taking L-leucine and eating whey definitely costs less too!)

d) Growth hormone helps build and repair the muscles and bones the exercises you do in effective strength training initially break down.  Causing your body to release its own growth hormone is more effective and much safer and dramatically less expensive than getting growth hormone shots.

Exercises that cause you to be out of breath when you finish each set cause your body to release growth hormone.  Effective strength training of your large muscles with weight that is heavy enough to challenge you does this! 

Relatively brief but fast, high effort cardio exercise done properly and built up to gradually and interspersed with pauses or easier cardio also does this.

Getting deep sleep of enough duration each night releases growth hormone.

And, taking the supplements L-arginine  and/or L-citrulline just before going to bed and just after exercise is thought to cause your body to release growth hormone.  My normal intake of L-Arginine is 2500 mg or two and a half grams a day. 

This is also said to help release Nitric Oxide in tiny amounts to lower your blood pressure and make your blood vessels more resilient.  Drinking beet juice likely does that better.  But this is a valuable enough effect, even some is worth having.

e)  Lysine taken with l-arginine released more growth hormone.  So I take a gram and a half as three 500 mg capsules with my l-arginine.

AND, lysine plus proline plus vitamin C helps keep the insides of your arteries healthy to prevent heart and brain circulatory disease.  So I take another gram of lysine with 500 mg of l-proline.  Proline also helps build your stomach lining and your joints and tendons to help keep them pain free and health and keep them as lean bodyweight.

Lysine taken with TMG trimethyl glycine helps to add lean bodyweight.  So I take another 500 mg of lysine with 750 mg of TMG.  (That also contains about 250 mg of glycine.)

Glycine, like proline, also helps build your stomach lining and your joints and tendons to help keep them pain free and health and keep them as lean bodyweight.

f) In addition to weight bearing exercise and NOT ever drinking soft drinks the best way to build your bones and keep strong and metabolically active bones is to add magnesium and vitamin D3 and vitamin K2 and boron to the supplements you take.

Getting at least 400 mg of magnesium and not depleting it with sugary foods or artificial sweetners helps keep strong and metabolically active bones.

Taking 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 and at least 90 mcg of the MK7 form of vitamin K2 causes your body to add magnesium and calcium to build your bones AND removes it from your blood vessel walls.

Boron taken as 3 mg a day, makes your bones even stronger and heavier with healthy bone growth.  Interestingly it is also has powerful anti-cancer effects.

Keeping your bones and joints and tendons healthy by doing these things both help prevent injuries that could prevent you from doing strength training AND increases the calories you burn to help lose excess fat you keep off.

Doing effective strength training for your larger muscles is essential and walking is known to help in keeping or adding to lean bodyweight as muscle and bone and other lean tissue.

Adding these supplements and amino acids to the best foods for building muscle can really help!