Why you shouldn’t eat Too Much Protein: Longevity, Intermittent Fasting, Protein Restriction and more
- How Protein works inside your body and why you shouldn’t Overload
- How to balance mTOR, promote autophagy and keep your protein intake within the healthy boundaries
- Protein powders aren’t everything: Other types of Supplements for Muscle Building
- Conclusion
Considering protein supplementation has the potential to make you build more muscle in less time, you may be tempted to load up on heaps of protein at each and every meal. This may seem unharmful, especially as many fitness enthusiasts and blogs claim that there is no downside to overeating protein, but is this really true?
The problem is that these individuals only look at what consuming high quantities of protein does to your muscles and general organ functioning, and not at what too much protein does to the functioning of your cells and metabolic pathways, something much more complex and widespread in terms of health consequences.
In this blog post, we’re going to debunk this myth and find out why you don’t want to be chronically overloading on protein. We’re going to cover how protein works inside your body, how this affects the processes of aging and what you can do to keep your protein consumption within the healthy boundaries.
How protein works inside your body and why you shouldn’t overload
How protein works in your body
When protein is digested in your body, it is broken down into its component parts called amino acids. These are then circulated to the liver, where they are used for repairing and rebuilding cellular proteins. The initial function of these amino acids is not for use as energy, but rather for the building of proteins for blood cells, bone, connective tissue, muscle, skin, etc.
Contrary to common belief, only 10% of the protein your body absorbs goes to your muscles, a much larger proportion goes to other body tissues for their proper maintenance.
When you’re eating more protein than your body needs for the maintenance of its tissues and organs (including muscle), you’re essentially overeating protein, or eating excessive protein. When you overeat protein, the body has no way to store these extra amino acids. Instead, these are converted into glucose by the liver. Next, the liver transforms the excess glucose into fat and transports it to the adipocytes (fat cells) for long-term storage, promoting an increase in fat mass.
What’s key here, is to realize that you can take control of your body’s use of protein. Crucially, if you eat extra protein, your body needs an incentive to use this extra protein for it not to be turned into fat. When you exercise, you’re essentially telling your body you need to use the protein you ingest to build muscle. This is why it’s important to eat enough protein when you’re exercising: the protein you eat is majorly used for basic cellular maintenance, meaning that only a small part of it is reserved for your muscles. If you eat more protein and your muscles demand this extra protein because you’re exercising, then the extra protein will be distributed to the muscles. If you don’t exercise, it won’t be needed and will likely be turned into fat. So if you eat more protein it is essential you exercise more. The most effective type of exercise – when it comes to using protein to build muscle – is resistance training.
So by now it may seem that as long as you’re recruiting the extra protein that you eat for muscle building via exercise, it doesn’t matter how much protein you eat. Disappointing as it may be, this isn’t true. Overeating protein – even while exercising enough – affects other processes in your body that impede the healthy aging of your body.
Overeating protein and toxicity
If you are chronically eating too much protein, you can put yourself at risk of protein toxicity. The way this works is that when you break down protein from food like meat or egg, your kidneys need to remove a nitrogen atom from the constituent amino acids of these proteins in a process called deamination. When this happens, you get a toxic byproduct called ammonia which your liver then has to convert into urea which then is removed from your body through urine. This means that eating too much protein puts unnecessary stress on your liver and kidneys.
Also, processing ammonia requires adequate amounts of carbohydrates and fats, so if you’re overloading protein by taking in only protein without the other two macronutrients (like with a lot of lean protein shakes), you’re going to increase even further the amount of work you put on your liver and kidneys.
Overeating protein and longevity
Constantly eating high levels of protein also has a non-negligible effect on key cellular processes within the body, one of the most important being autophagy.
‘Autophagy’ is a cellular process which represents the body’s way of cleaning out damaged cells, in order to regenerate newer, healthier cells. One of the cellular pathways which controls the taking place of autophagy, is the mTOR signaling pathway. mTOR is a central regulator of cell metabolism, growth and survival, which when dysregulated, can lead to diseases like cancer.
The activation of mTOR needs to be in balance in order for it to function correctly: it follows an inverted u-curve shape. When mTOR receives too little activation, it promotes muscle breakdown, while too much activation doesn’t allow for autophagy to occur thereby promoting the formation of cancer cells and aging. When in the middle – the ‘sweet spot’ – mTOR brings about muscle building and a myriad of other health benefits like the protection against chronic diseases and the promotion of longevity.
Protein intake increases mTOR pathway activation, and so does resistance training exercise. This is a positive influence, as long as mTOR activation is kept within its healthy boundaries. If too much protein is eaten or you exercise too much, mTOR activation will be chronic, eventually leading to an increased risk of cancer together with quicker aging.
So what you don’t want is the chronic activation of mTOR, meaning you also want mTOR to be suppressed from time to time. This is where fasting comes in. Fasting – which is essentially any time that you’re not eating – allows for the suppression of the mTOR pathway.
Thus, the perfect combination for muscle building and longevity is alternating periods of mTOR activation and suppression, which can be attained by alternating states of being fasted on the one hand, and being fed with adequate amounts of protein combined with resistance training on the other.
How to balance mTOR, promote autophagy and keep your protein intake within the healthy boundaries
Fasting refers to any time that you’re not eating, so even a night of sleep is considered a fast. If you want to combine fasting with training for longevity, you can choose from two scientifically sound and robust methods: intermittent fasting, or protein restriction cures. Both are detailed below.
Intermittent fasting
What is intermittent fasting?
The most common form of intermittent fasting consists of fasting for a period of 16 hours (including the night) and eating within a window of 8 hours. The fasting window allows for the suppression of mTOR while the eating and training allows for its activation. The fact that periods of autophagy (when fasted) and mTOR activation (when eating and exercising) are constantly cycling, promotes longevity.
Intermittent fasting and longevity
Intermittent fasting affects specific pathways in the brain, stimulating the production of protein chaperones, neurotrophic factors and antioxidant enzymes, all of which help cells cope with stress and resist neurodegenerative diseases. In turn, the activation of these adaptive stress response pathways enhances mitochondrial health, DNA repair and autophagy, all processes involved in cellular aging.
Moreover, intermittent fasting not only protects the brain but also the cardiovascular system, as it seems to improve heart rate variability and decrease blood pressure and the risk of stroke as well as other heart diseases.
These are key examples of how intermittent fasting allows for the protection of our brain, heart and general metabolic health, thus fighting the processes involved in aging and thereby promoting longevity.
What if I don’t stick to it 100%?
If you think not eating for 16 consecutive hours is too hard to consistently implement in your everyday life, don’t worry: you can make exceptions from time to time and tailor the windows to your specific needs. The essence is to have a relatively regular but liveable routine of basically skipping breakfast and eating a couple of meals within an 8-hour timeframe. The more you get into this way of eating, the more you realize that you don’t need breakfast and any cravings you may have had will tend to gradually disappear.
Interested in knowing more about intermittent fasting? Let me know in the comments! If there is interest, I’ll look into writing a special blog post dedicated to the topic!
Protein restriction cure
Maybe following through an everyday intermittent fasting diet isn’t for you, or you just can’t stand the idea of skipping your favorite meal of the day. Or maybe you like to do heavy workouts in the morning and you don’t want to risk a daily hypoglycemia (which I definitely don’t encourage). If this is you, choosing to routinely undertake a few mTOR suppression cures a year might be your perfect catch.
What is a protein restriction cure?
A protein restriction or mTOR suppression cure consists in restricting your overall calorie intake while specifically reducing your protein intake. Ben Greenfield – a very knowledgeable fitness and longevity expert – recommends eating about 40% of your normal calorie amount while specifically restricting protein, and this 5 days in a row, 4 times a year (or once per season).
Protein restriction cures and longevity
Protein restriction cures are important to do because they lead to the downregulation of the mTOR pathway allowing for autophagy to take place, thereby promoting health and longevity. Epidemiological studies indicate that low protein diets are associated with a lower risk of chronic and age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer.
Nevertheless, you don’t want to do such a cure too often as it does pose a stress on your body, but doing it once in a while (roughly every 3 months) gives your body the opportunity to ‘detox’ so to say, to work on cleaning itself up on the cellular level.
How to stick to such a low-calorie and specific diet?
Being hungry is often a matter of mindset. Of course, many different types of hormones are produced by your body to either signal satiation or hunger, but these feelings can largely be controlled by the mind. For instance, when feeling an initial urge to eat, you can suppress this urge until it passes away and you’ve forgotten about your hunger. This is partly because surges of hunger appear in cycles, according to the time of day (more specifically, your biological clock). Depending on the times at which you normally eat meals, your main hunger hormone ghrelin will peak every few hours around 8am, noon, 4-6pm and maybe again around 8 or 10pm. So if you wait a little for a hunger surge to pass, chances are big you’ll delay your hunger by a few hours, making it very doable to reach your low-calorie goals.
TIP: a great way to track your overall calorie and protein intake is to use the app myfitnesspal, which also gives you a great overview of the micronutrients involved.
Interested in knowing more about protein and/or caloric restriction? Let me know in the comments! If there is interest, I’ll look into writing a special blog post dedicated to the topic!
Protein powders aren’t everything: Other types of Supplements for Muscle Building
If your goal is to maximize the building rate of your muscles, protein isn’t the only way to go and there are other great supplements out there that can help you out.
Supplements used for muscle building either directly affect the rate of muscle building or breakdown – like protein powders – or indirectly influence exercise performance by altering the amount of resistance training that you’re able to do.
Exercise performance can be influenced by a change in energy production and usage, or a lessening of the fatiguing effects of exercise. Different supplements will affect these different properties of muscle building.
Examples of other supplements are:
- Caffeine: stimulatory effect
- Creatine: increases the availability of ATP (energy), also great for your brain
- Nitrate: reduces the need for oxygen and increases vasodilation
Conclusion
The key to being fit and living a healthy life is achieving a state of balance in your body. Constantly eating too much protein works against this balance and can lead to fat gain, protein toxicity, and an increased risk of developing chronic disease and accelerating aging.
To achieve a healthy balance in your protein intake, the best you can do is alternate periods of adequate protein intake and resistance exercise, with periods of fasting or caloric and protein restriction. The mechanism underlying this is the mTOR pathway and its effect on autophagy – the body’s way of cleaning itself up on the cellular level.
Both intermittent fasting and a protein / mTOR restriction cure are very effective ways to downregulate your protein levels and allow the healthy cleaning of your body to counter the processes of aging and promote longevity.
Want to know more about the health risks of protein powders and which protein powder – plant or animal-based – is more effective?
Read Plant v.s. Animal protein powders: protein quality, risks and which one YOU should be supplementing
Next week’s blog post: Fresh v.s. Frozen Foods: What you should buy to Preserve the most Nutrients Possible in your Fruits and Vegetables: DEBUNKED
