[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
[quote]audiogarden1 wrote:
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
An unfortunate fact, with regard to ease of fat loss or ease of avoiding fat gain, is that the body has only two ways of disposing of absorbed calories: burning them, or storing them as fat, of which fat is the principal means.
…
The glucogenic amino acids absolutely convert to fat when not burned, via glucose.
All the amino acids are glucogenic, except leucine and lysine, but they are never a really major portion of calories consumed.
What does happen is that very large protein intakes are incompletely absorbed. The unabsorbed part of course need not be burned and cannot be stored.
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Im a little confused, isnt the last part of this post the opposite of what you are saying in the rest of your post? Unless i read it wrong.
I understand that caloric surplus will be stored as fat, but is it not true that the body preferentially chooses to store fat as fat, and de novo lipogenesis only gets up-regulated in pretty extreme circumstances? Protein also has to be converted to glucose before being turned into fat, which i was under the impression is another very unlikely occurrence under normal circumstances.
If this is the case, it would take a pretty ridiculous amount of protein and little to no fats in order for your protein to be stored as fat, seeing as its damn hard to eat enough pure protein to be above maintenance. Essentially, if you are eating above maintenance but your diet includes fats, which is the usual case, it is the fats that will be stored as fat, not the protein. [/quote]
It probably was written unclearly. Once absorbed, a protein calories is either burned or stored, and generally stored as fat (the amount of energy the body stores as glycogen is rather limited). And so there is no issue of the body absorbing it and then if unneeded, excreting it. Unfortutely for fat loss and for avoiding fat gain, that mechanism isn’t there.
But it is true that there is difference in absorption between protein and fats. Let’s say for an individual a maintenance diet is 300 calories, and presently the dietary intake is 200 g of a good quality protein fairly evenly divided over 6 meals with the balance being fat and carbs. Here, the protein will
If the person goes to say 400 g protein daily (as illustration not advice), which on the plate or in the blender is 800 fewer calories, and takes out 800 calories of fat and carbs, his calories as figured prior to eating are the same.
But the calories actually absorbed into the body will be considerably less. I don’t know a figure and it would absolutely be very variable according to the type of protein, the relative amounts consumed, and the individual, but perhaps only half of the added protein might be absorbed. If so, then in terms of what goes into the body, there’s 400 calories per day less, just as illustration, not as a specific actual figure.
On eating pure protein, this doesn’t work. It actually has been tried in ordinary life, by those unfamiliar with northern regions and trying to live only on lean game. Over time they starved, not because of difficulty in transforming protein into fat, but because of inability to absorb anywhere near as many calories as needed.
It would be possible for a person to trace, by means of isotopically labeled nutrients (some of the molecules having a different isotope of carbon or other atom than commonly found in nature) what percentage of protein ends up as bodyfat for a given diet. But it wouldnt’ be very useful information: if let’s say your maintenance calories are 3000 with say a 40/30/30 diet, and you add 400 or 800 calories a day all of which is protein and with time you get quite fat from the caloric excess, it’s really not a help to be able to say “But the molecules of fat in my body came from the molecules in the fat in my diet.”
I fell into a similar line of thinking very early in my lifting career, when a certain then-well-known trainer argued similarly to this protein argument, but with the variant that it would be fat that the body stored as fat, not carbs, so if you had a low fat diet, you could eat 10,000 calories a day and not get fat. I got fat very rapidly on that diet, at 6000 cal/day. Later, on learning some biochemistry and physiology, I learned that this was totally predictable.[/quote]
Makes sense. Kind of figured as much but you put it into words nicely and made it easy to understand.
But, going back to the point that OP believes powerlifters get their big fat bellies (those who have them) from excess protein intake, basically you couldnt blame protein any more than carbs or fats, because at the end of the day if they are gaining fat it is because they are eating well in excess of their maintenance calories, not because they eat a lot of protein. Correct?
