# Weight gain from eating more protein: more lean body mass, not more fat



## Arnold (Feb 10, 2012)

*Weight gain from eating more protein: more lean body mass, not more fat*

People who don't exercise and who eat more calories than they burn get fatter. In the short term, the amount of body fat they build up won't go down if they start getting more of their energy from protein, but a protein-rich diet will help them build up more muscle mass, write researchers from Pennington Biomedical Research Center in JAMA.

George Bray's study is causing a commotion in the web world. Will Brink [brinkzone.com] and Colin Champ [cavemandoctor.com] have blogged about it, and the abstract of the study has shown up on just about all forums on fitness, bodybuilding, strength training, weight loss and the paleodiet.

The researchers took 25 women aged between 18 and 35, with a BMI between 19 and 30, and determined how many calories a day they needed to keep their weight stable. Then they gave the women 954 calories a day more than they burned for eight weeks, so the women gained weight.

The researchers divided the women into three groups. The low protein diet group were given 5 percent protein; the normal protein diet group got 15 percent protein in their diet; and the high protein group 25 percent.

At the end of the eight weeks it looked as though the low protein diet group had done best. They had 'only' put on 3.6 kg. The normal protein diet subjects had put on 6.1 kg and the high protein diet subjects had put on 6.5 kg. But when the researchers looked at the changes in body composition, the picture changed.

The women in all three groups had gained 3.5 kg body fat. But when it came to lean body mass, the women in the low-protein diet group had lost 0.7 kg; the women in the normal protein diet group had gained 3.2 kg and the women in the high protein diet group had gained 4.0 kg. 












The amount of energy that the women in the low protein diet group burned remained stable; in the other two groups the amount rose.

The study shows that the motto 'a calorie is a calorie' is not the case. Of course the total number of calories determined how much fat the subjects gained. But if you look at the protein intake you don't see this relationship. A higher protein intake resulted in more lean body mass build up, and did not correlate with the growth in fat mass. 






The subjects in the experiment did no exercise. If they had done weight training, the results may have been even better. And if the study had gone on for longer the researchers may have seen that the fat mass of the high protein diet group actually decreased.

This is the first time that researchers have looked at subjects who have put on weight and looked at the effect of different concentrations of protein.

Source:
JAMA. 2012;307(1):47-55.


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## troubador (Feb 10, 2012)

Time for a steak.


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## sassy69 (Feb 10, 2012)

You really do need to look at what you are consuming and what you are consuming it for. Excess calories of carbs, for example, that you don't use for energy (e.g. a distance runner), its just going to sit there. Protein goes towards building lean mass. To a degree you need to the carbs to fuel the muscle building, but protein at least is being used for something.


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## harmanrainu (Aug 12, 2012)

awesomely explained


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## andyrodgers (Aug 15, 2012)

very informative and well explained article, thanks for sharing


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## patricio (Aug 15, 2012)

Great article. Thanks for posting


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## Ainanalu (Sep 22, 2012)

sassy69 said:


> You really do need to look at what you are consuming and what you are consuming it for. Excess calories of carbs, for example, that you don't use for energy (e.g. a distance runner), its just going to sit there. Protein goes towards building lean mass. To a degree you need to the carbs to fuel the muscle building, but protein at least is being used for something.


Agreed, especially when eating fats and carbs together. Then u end up using the carbs for energy and storing the fat. Nutrition information is place on food for a reason


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## docdoom77 (Sep 29, 2012)

I enjoyed this article as well.  Thanks.


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## BP2000 (Sep 29, 2012)

Nice Article


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## Ironman2001 (Sep 29, 2012)

Great read.


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## Ichigo (Sep 30, 2012)

Nice, now to eat more steak!


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## bjg (Oct 4, 2012)

be careful excess of anything can get you fat , sure protein get you less fat than carbs  this does not mean you have to go wolfing 10000 calories of protein!
another important point is that in natural foods, most of the time protein comes with fat: example nuts,milk, soy milk, red meat, eggs unless you take the white alone etc..
so consuming too much steak will get you fat after all..


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## chocolatemalt (Oct 4, 2012)

[h=1]Here's an interesting criticism of that study...

In Dieting, Magic Isn?t a Substitute for Science[/h] [h=6]By   GINA KOLATA[/h]  [h=6]Published: July 9, 2012[/h]                        Is a calorie really just a calorie? Do calories from a soda have the same effect on your waistline as an equivalent number from an apple or a piece of chicken?        


           Enlarge This Image





 [h=6]Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times[/h] NO TRICKS Dr. Jules Hirsch has been researching obesity for nearly 60 years.                            


    For decades the question has percolated among researchers ? not to  mention dieters. It gained new momentum with a study published last  month in The Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that  after losing weight, people on a high-fat, high-protein diet burned more calories than those eating more carbohydrates.        
 We asked Dr. Jules Hirsch, emeritus professor and emeritus physician in  chief at Rockefeller University, who has been researching obesity  for nearly 60 years, about the state of the research. Dr. Hirsch, who  receives no money from pharmaceutical companies or the diet industry,  wrote some of the classic papers describing why it is so hard to lose  weight and why it usually comes back.        
*The JAMA study has gotten a lot of attention. Should people stay  on diets that are high in fat and protein if they want to keep the  weight off?* 
 What they did in that study is they took 21 people and fed them a diet  that made them lose about 10 to 20 percent of their weight. Then, after  their weight had leveled off, they put the subjects on one of three  different maintenance diets. One is very, very low in carbohydrates and  high in fat, essentially the Atkins diet. Another is the opposite ? high  in carbohydrates, low in fat. The third is in between. Then they  measured total energy expenditure ? in calories burned ? and resting  energy expenditure.        
 They report that people on the Atkins diet were burning off more  calories. Ergo, the diet is a good thing. Such low-carbohydrate diets  usually give a more rapid initial weight loss than diets with the same  amount of calories but with more carbohydrates. But when carbohydrate  levels are low in a diet and fat content is high, people lose water.  That can confuse attempts to measure energy output. The usual  measurement is calories per unit of lean body mass ? the part of the  body that is not made up of fat. When water is lost, lean body mass goes  down, and so calories per unit of lean body mass go up. It?s just  arithmetic. There is no hocus-pocus, no advantage to the dieters. Only  water, no fat, has been lost.        
 The paper did not provide information to know how the calculations were  done, but this is a likely explanation for the result.        
*So the whole thing might have been an illusion? All that  happened was the people temporarily lost water on the high-protein  diets? * 
 Perhaps the most important illusion is the belief that a calorie is not a  calorie but depends on how much carbohydrates a person eats. There is  an inflexible law of physics ? energy taken in must exactly equal the  number of calories leaving the system when fat storage is unchanged.  Calories leave the system when food is used to fuel the body. To lower  fat content ? reduce obesity ? one must reduce calories taken in, or  increase the output by increasing activity, or both. This is true  whether calories come from pumpkins or peanuts or p?t? de foie gras.         
 To believe otherwise is to believe we can find a really good perpetual  motion machine to solve our energy problems. It won?t work, and neither  will changing the source of calories permit us to disobey the laws of  science.        
*Did you ever ask whether people respond differently to diets of different compositions?* 
 Dr. Rudolph Leibel, now an obesity researcher at Columbia University,  and I took people who were of normal weight and had them live in the  hospital, where we diddled with the number of calories we fed them so we  could keep their weights absolutely constant, which is no easy thing.  This was done with liquid diets of exactly known calorie content.         
 We kept the number of calories constant, always giving them the amount  that should keep them at precisely the same weight. But we wildly  changed the proportions of fats and carbohydrates. Some had practically  no carbohydrates, and some had practically no fat.        
*What happened? Did people unexpectedly gain or lose weight when  they had the same amount of calories but in a diet of a different  composition?* 
 No. There was zero difference between high-fat and low-fat diets.        
*Why is it so hard for people to lose weight?* 
 What your body does is to sense the amount of energy it has available  for emergencies and for daily use. The stored energy is the total amount  of adipose tissue in your body. We now know that there are jillions of  hormones that are always measuring the amount of fat you have. Your body  guides you to eat more or less because of this sensing mechanism.         
*But if we have such a sensing mechanism, why are people fatter now than they used to be?* 
 This wonderful sensing mechanism involves genetics  and environmental factors, and it gets set early in life. It is not  clear how much of the setting is done before birth and how much is done  by food or other influences early in life. There are many possibilities,  but we just don?t know.        
*So for many people, something happened early in life to set their sensing mechanism to demand more fat on their bodies?* 
 Yes.        
*What would you tell someone who wanted to lose weight?* 
 I would have them eat a lower-calorie diet. They should eat whatever  they normally eat, but eat less. You must carefully measure this. Eat as  little as you can get away with, and try to exercise more.        
*There is no magic diet, or even a moderately preferred diet?* 
 No. Some diets are better or worse for medical reasons, but not for  weight control. People come up with new diets all the time ? like, why  not eat pistachios at midnight when the moon is full? We have gone  through so many of these diet possibilities. And yet people are always  coming up to me with another one.


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## chrisholman (Oct 11, 2012)

Good read. I don't understand why it's causing such a "commotion in the web world," though.


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