How Much Protein Can You Absorb?

As long as I can remember, people in the fitness biz have believed that you could only absorb 30 grams of protein in one sitting. No one ever bothered to explain what would happen if you ate 31 grams, but the thinking must be that the small intestine would act like a power forward in the NBA and reject that shit, its thousands of villi shaking like so many fingers to say, "Not in our house."

This 30-gram barrier was considered an immutable fact, and no one knows for sure where it originated, but we can safely say that it's totally wrong.

The truth is, the only limits to the amount of protein you can absorb in one sitting is the size of your stomach.

PROTEIN SYNTHESIS: ONLY PART OF THE EQUATION

Things start to make a little more sense when you start examining the different ways your body uses protein. If you ingest 30 grams of protein after a workout, it'll increase muscle protein synthesis by about 50%, but that's where it gets stuck.

You could triple your protein intake to 90 grams in that one sitting, but it wouldn't do much of anything to increase muscle protein synthesis. That might not be true for steroid users, but we're talking about people who are not chemically enhanced

That's not proof that the 30-gram-per-sitting people were right. They're forgetting that protein is needed for a whole lot of other stuff and the body gives priority to that other stuff.

Protein, as you know, is an essential nutrient. It's broken down into amino acids and the body can't get them from fat or carbs, no matter how tasty they are. These amino acids are used to make hormones, enzymes, immune factors, and other non-muscle tissues. Once the protein requirements for all that stuff is met, the body can use the surplus to increase muscle protein synthesis.

In other words, you can't rob Peter's hormone and enzyme requirements to pay Paul's muscle protein synthesis wants.

So my recommendations is not to worry about per serving and to eat 1g per lb of lean body weight to start and fill in the rest of your caloric needs with fats and carbohydrates. Those aminos will float throughout your system in your central amino acid pool ready to be used for any factors the body needs. If you have more than you need your body can create glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis to help with energy production.