Agilespo. Welcome back to the You Project. How are you, sir?
Yeah, good, good to be here.
There's no Tiff today. You're probably going to struggle.
Yeah, I am. I'm struggling already.
Well, she will be listening to this tonight because she's going to edit it. Lately, she's got allegedly influenza A and in bed and crook.
Allegedly Tiff, she's got really got flato.
Right, feels like a day off.
No, I think she's actually crook. So shout out to Tiff. Get better.
Now, I'm prepared to have one conversation. And you said to me, I.
Thought, well, to the extent that you prepare at all, let's be honest.
Well that is true, absolutely true.
So when I said prepared, I looked in LinkedIn and saw the title of an article that you'd written.
No, that's not true. I've actually got qus questions.
But we can do that one too. We got time.
Let's see how we go, because I'm I think I've spoken about a lot over the years and get asked a lot about, especially working with athletes and bodybuilders and the general public who are fascinated with, if not obsessed with protein consumption and recovery and micros and macros and how much of our deis and what we need and don't need, and all the myriad of variables around nutrition. But you wrote an article on protein. Firstly, what made
you write that? What was the genesis for you writing an article on protein?
Noticing the advertising, I guess, and I honestly don't pay a lot of attention to processed food advertising because I barely eat processed food. But I've noticed now everything seems to have protein as a selling feature. You know, you got your up and go proteins and your nutro grain protein,
and your protein enhanced to ice cream. I don't think they can actually call it up screwm if it doesn't have certain levels of things in it, but they call it a frozen dessert, you know, your protein enhanced to food bars, your protein enhanced Milo breakfast cereal, you name it.
There's barely anything that now doesn't have a whacking great protein thing on the label, and they're usually shouting numbers at you, you know, contains fifteen grams or ten grams or seven grams or seventeen grams, you know, so that people can go ooh and ah and oh, that's got seventeen grams in it.
So it occurred to me to ask, is this just like fiber? Is this the.
Fiber of the you know, the current decade where you've just got to put it on the label, you know, and doesn't matter, doesn't make any difference at all. And we've talked about fiber before, and in fact, probably fiber makes the problem it purports to solve much worse in that it's likely to cause constipation rather and cure it. But protein, I wondered, is there anything to all this
protein stuff? I mean, I've known for a long time because I used to hang out in gyms that you know, people flog protein powders and people who do weights and someone you know subsist on them, and so there must be something to it.
I thought, But.
Does everyone who's knocking back a bowl of chocolate cereal need extra protein? Do people eating ice cream need extra protein? That was the question I was asking myself. So I thought I'd start finding out and when digging and write an article about what I discovered. So, you know, I like to go into the history of things a bit, So I wondered. The first question I wanted is how much protein are we supposed to be having and where on Earth did that come from?
And how do we know?
I think what did you find? Is it zero point eight grams for kilo body.
Point eight or in Australia point eight four? I think it is for some bizarre reason. So, and that came out of some studies that were done in during the Second World War where the US military was trying to figure out what's the least we can give a human to keep them alive? Essentially, you know, what's what's the least we can at what's the level below which we
no longer have an effective fighting machine? And they commissioned some scientists or redirected their efforts from finding out cures to diseases and things, and said, listen, we really need to know this stuff. We need to know you know, what's our minimum? How much can we get away with giving people? And the answer came back with a resounding well, we're not really sure, because the science at the time
and probably honestly now, was a bit unsciency. It consisted mostly of rat studies and not many of them, and a few tiny little human trials of two or three patients in a hospital and things like that, and most of them were people who were suffering from severe protein deficiency anyway, and so we're running into issues with amino acid building and all that sort of thing. So the answer was, we don't know, but cobbling together what they did have, they came up with a number and doubled it.
So they came up with a number around the point for and said, that's probably below that. Probably we're not sure, but just guessing below that, you might be in trouble.
But they weren't.
Happy having that as the recommendation because who knows, it could be really wrong. So they built in a margin of eera if you like, and bumped it too point eight and said, day, that'll do. We'll say that it's point eight per kilo. Now people might be wondering, who aren't jim junkies, what that means in terms a normal
person can understand. So point eight of a kilo for an average adult is for a male, that's around sixty four ish kilo grams of protein a day, and for a female it's around forty six grams of protein a day.
Yeah, so the equation is point eight, yeah, point.
Per point eight of a gram, you know, per kilo body weight.
If you get your body weight times up by point eight. So if you're yeah, yeah, times point eight gives you fifty six, if you're one hundred gives you eighty yeah.
So obviously it's those numbers that I just gave you just an average, right, you know, if you look at the average body weight, then that's what it's going to be. And you might be thinking, you know, what does that translate to in terms of I could eat? Well, a
chicken breast is fifty grams of protein. So if you ate a chicken breast, had a chicken sand which or whatever, and assumed you ate nothing else that contained protein all day, which would be impossible since significant amount of protein comes from grains.
But we'll talk about that in sec you fifty. If you just ate a chicken breast, you're at fifty grams. So if you're a woman, you're already there.
You're done, You've already hit the minimum requirements. If you're
a man, you're almost there. The average Australian, it turns out, is not at risk of any kind of protein deficiency because the average Australian is already at almost twice that level that the er point eighty four grams per day thing is, so sixty four grams, the average stran's actually eating about ninety five grams of protein a day, So none of us are at any risk of being deficient in protein, and most of us are well over the one and a.
Half times the recommended minimum.
And people might be saying, oh, that's all well and good for you cow munches, but I'm a vegetarian or a vegan, so I'm not getting anywhere near that, And that's not true either. You know, significant amounts of protein are found in things like legumes and grains, like breads, breakfast cereals, things like that. In fact, about a quarter of all Australia's protein comes from cereals alone, so it's
not just eating meat. And all Australians are well and truly north of or the vast majority of us well and truly north of it, probably in the range one and a half times to two times the minimum recommendation, which remember in itself was padded.
So there's no risk of protein deficiency.
So then why is all of our food labeled and even in many cases supplemented with extra protein? And that was the question I was asking, which is, what are the benefits are there benefits from there. What do you think the benefits are, Craig Jim hangaroud r.
Yeah, So, I mean the interesting thing about microme macro nutrients. So with some proteins like rice, wheat, beans, lentils, peanuts, corn, they have a fair bit of protein, but they're not complete proteins, so they exactly they lack some of the nine essential amino acids. Right, So not all, not all, just like not all calories are equal, not all grams of protein are equal.
But I'm with you. I think there's a real marketing thing that's that's kind of bullshit.
I think, you know, the thing is just like you know, you give old mate five almonds and they're great for him, and you give old mate over their five almonds and he has an anaphylactic reaction and dies. Right. So the thing is that these different things interact differently with different people's physiology, because while everyone's physiology is similar, it's not identical.
And so one of the other things too, is that like our dieyes operate on the assumption that people need about the same amount of everything every day, which with some people is true, with some people is wildly untrue.
Like I reckon.
Some days I need two thousand calories, maybe fifteen hundred because I sit on my arse all day and writes, and other days I would need four thousand to break even. So it's a variable, not a constant.
And I think also.
There's another thing that people don't factor in.
You, I don't know.
Have you heard of thermogenesis in relation to food? Anyway, I'll just explain it. So the thermogenic effect of food means this. So one hundred calories of protein versus one hundred calories of fat versus one hundred calories of carbohydrate, there's a different energy costs for each of those macro nutrients breaking them down to be utilizable in the body. So, for example, the thermic effect or the thermic cost of protein from one hundred calories is about thirty calories, So.
The net result of calories with that is about seventy.
But with fat one hundred calories of fat, you're only losing about three calories in that process, in that metabolic process. So it is really interesting, and I think a lot of the thinking now is that point eight of a grand pekilo body bah bah blah blah. Is for the general public. Probably some are in the ballpark, but for people who.
Well and for the general public significantly less than they're consuming anyway.
And so.
We relieve there is some actual science on this answering the question of.
You know, is it is is it possible to have too much protein?
Is there is there a downside to having too much protein?
Is there is there a problem with is there a limit by beyond which there's no point adding protein? And the answer is yes, we we've done some science on this stuff. And one of the bits of science split people into groups where they weren't protein supplementing, where they were protein supplementing and by one and a half times the RDA, and another group where they were protein supplementing by two times the idea. And what they found is that there were benefits to building muscles. So they had
both of them. They had all three groups working out weightlifting, et cetera, building muscle over a period of time, and what they found was that the people who were on one and a half times the RDA, which is basically the average person in the Australian population, right, so the person the people who were in that group did get benefits. They were able to put on more muscle mass than the group who were not being supplemented at all. But the interesting bit was that once they looked at the
two times RDA, it didn't make any difference. So the people with the two times we're doing just as they also put on muscle mass compared to the people who weren't being supplemented, but it was the same as the people who one and a half times, So.
There was clearly a plateau.
You know, there is a benefit if weightlifting you're lifting is your thing, and you're trying to build muscle mass, then there is a benefit to increasing the amount of protein too, about what the average as train is consuming anyway, so you wouldn't need to do anything to do that. You just continue eating as normal. But going any further than that doesn't seem to have any particular benefit at all.
So do you reckon? Do you reckon that number?
If you're talking about one and a half times point eight, so we're talking then one point two per is that the number, give or take?
Do you reckon? No?
One point five?
So one point five one point five if you if you're wanting to build muscle mass, one point five so oh sorry, yeah, that would be one point two grams per I misunderstood you. Sorry, one point two grams per per kiler seems to be about the mark and going beyond that, really, you know, getting up to say one point six or one point seven one point eight doesn't
make any difference. The interesting thing is that we've also had the question, okay, but what if you just go crazy and really pump it, you know, put as much protein as you can. Fine, in can you have too much?
And the answer is.
No, but.
No, if your kidneys are healthy. Yes, if your kidneys are healthy, you'll be fine.
They will deal with that and they'll be fine.
They can adapt and the butt there is almost none of us in our modern Australian society have healthy kidneys because most of us are consuming a diet full of sugar and sugar via the uric acid pathway REX kidneys. There's a reason that we are in the middle of an epidemic of kidney disease in this country. It's because we're in the middle of an epidemic of consuming too
much sugar. Sugar consumption REX kidneys. The bad thing about wrecking kidneys is that your kidneys are actually really resilient and can function even if they're ninety five percent impaired. So most people whose kidneys are wrecked don't know it. But believe me, if you're on a high sugar diet, you have done damage to your kidneys. So coming back to the original question we asked, which is is it
a thing to consume too much protein? Well, yeah, it is if your kidneys aren't tickety boo, And for a lot of Australians the answer is maybe they're not. Yeah, And then that brought me full circle to Okay, but most of the food that is proudly proclaiming that it is full of extra protein is actually very very high sugar food. You know, we've got sugar sugary ice creams or frozen desserts that are protein enhanced, chocolate cereals that
are protein enhanced, muslely bars that are protein enhanced. So sure they're protein enhanced, but you're a consuming protein you probably don't need, and b also consuming the sugar that would damage your ability to deal with the protein you probably don't need.
Yeah, dred percent. And that's the thing. It's like.
So let's say you've got a musli bar that's thirty percent sugar, and you know it might have five grams of protein per bar and.
Thirty grams of sugar.
But five grams of protein and a musli bar is probably double the average.
Museley Bart, you know what I mean.
You know, contextually it's high, but in real terms it's it's six times the sugar as the protein. But that nobody's going to buy that.
So yeah, so where does this all take you?
Is my?
You know what does this mean? It means you probably don't need extra protein. If you do want extra protein, because there was clearly a benefit to muscle gain by having protein of about one point two grams for kilo per day. If you want that, get it from meat so that it's complete, and don't get it from sugary food that claims to have extra protein.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's funny because I'm I get asked a lot about how much protein do I need? And look, protein matters, and but and I think, actually, people who train very hard, and I'm talking about people who are athletes somewhere closer to the elite end right, I'm not talking about the general population, but I reckon they need more maybe too.
Well, they probably do. There's under there are other studies. Sorry I was talking about a study of average people.
Yeah, okay, that's you.
There are other studies on weightlifters who show that there are benefits. If weightlifting lifting is your gig and you are going for mister Universe or whatever it is, then there are significant benefits. I mean, muscles at the end of the day are made from protein, so there are clear benefits if that is what you are doing to increasing protein, as long as once again, you're carefully managing
it and your kidneys aren't screwed. But it's it's what I'm talking about, is the man in the street who's walking past shelf after shelf protein enhanced food that it's also heavily sugar enhanced. And the answer there is you don't need the extra protein, and if you feel you do, get it from meat or dairy, both excellent sources of protein, giving you complete proteins and without all the sugar.
Yeah.
I get asked a lot about you know, not that I'm the high watermark for anything, but because I train all the time and I've been all that, and people are always not everyone, not always, but but a lot of people are regularly surprised by how little I eat and how little I use supplements or promote anything. And I'm sponsored. I'm sponsored by a company. I'll say they're know Maxes, and they give me all the shit that
I want, right, and they're great. But when somebody goes to me, do I need Should I take a protein supplement? I say no, not if you get enough protein, Like if you've got enough protein in your diet, which you probably have, then you don't need to supplement with protein obviously, just like if your cars full of petrol, you don't want to keep trying to pour petrol in the tank because it's fucking full.
It doesn't need.
It, so you know it's it's you can only and at that point that one point two grams you know for the average punts or a little bit higher for the athlete in training or the strength athlete or the power athlete.
You know that's going to go up.
But there is a point, like there's a threshold where you know, let's say your cutoff is one point too well, you can have ten, you're going to get You're only going to get, you know, more disadvantages than benefits, right, because your body can only use utilize what it can utilize.
You know, it can utilize up to about two, So up to about two then it's flushing the rest and and the way it's doing that is through your kidneys, which is fine if your kidneys are okay.
Yeah, yeah, I remember I don't know if you remember this, but years ago at the Australian Open, I think it was the Australian Open. It was about a million degrees in Melbourne and Pat do you remember you remember the tennis player Pat.
Rafter, Yeah, you're a boy.
Yeah, yeah.
So he had this physiological it's not a condition, but challenge.
That he could.
He used to sweat like ridiculously, like more than the other athletes, and so one of the challenges that he had was trying to stay hydrated, and he would typically sweat more than he could hydrate because your body can only you can only put in like your body can only absorb so much. And so when you take too much water in a short period of time.
What's it called.
I think it's called hyperneutremia or something where you dilute your blood, like you lower everything, you know, to the point where you can almost kill yourself. But yeah, your body you can you can't, just.
I think you can. I think they have been death recorded from that.
Yeah, so all tastic and all of that gets diluted and then people have died through that. But yeah, but the bottom line is your body can only absorb what it can absorb.
Yeah, and that's okay as long as the body's in good working order. But if you've been chowing down on sugar filled snacks to get your protein, there's a good chance it isn't.
And so for what are your thoughts around people who are listening to this, who are you know, vegans and vegetarians and so you know, they might be consuming like a fair bit of protein, but yeah, not necessarily complete proteins. And by that we mean everyone that proteins built essentially of these things called amino acids, and not all protein contains all of the there's nine essential amino acids that we need, I.
Think, like with everything.
I mean, you know, at the risk of offending half your audience, vegan and vegetarian is not a natural way for a human, which is an omnivore, to eat. So our entire metabolism is designed by evolution to be an omnivore, which means our body makes assumptions about the fuel we're going to be giving it, and one of those assumptions
is going to contain some meat. So the advice about this is the same as the advice about many things for vegetarians and vegans, which is you have to be aware of the things you're not getting and make sure you are appropriately supplementing to cover those gaps, because there are gaps, and this is one of them.
I just did a quick little search before.
While you're talking about the vast amount of sugar that people consume, I don't know how accurate this is. I would have thought it was more than this, but it says the average as he consumes fourd and tea spoons of kind of additional sugar per day.
Have you been reading the sugar industry's website? Have you let me tell you the real data. The real data is it's about forty tea spoons. Yeah, right, yeah, it's about forty tea spoons. And you'll find there's some interesting definitions and assumptions in whenever they throw those kinds of numbers around. So, but the reality is the ABS.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, well it.
Is the ABS, but it'll be additional sugar and it'll be so they're saying, we're going to exclude all the other sugar in the diet. And the ABS, by the way, stopped collecting data on sugar consumption in nineteen ninety eight when they discontinued that series. So this is a you know, back when Sweet Poison came out, we had the whole Sugar Wars and went through all this stuff. The reality is the sugar industry makes very it makes it very very hard to find any accurate data on how much
sugar we're consuming. The best guess is it's about forty t spoons per person per day.
Hell, and what's it is? A teaspoon four or.
Four grands four?
But that's all.
Oh now, yeah, But as I said to you before, that's easy to get to. Like a lot of people say to me, there's no way, I'm not forget it, I'm not eating forty teaspoons of sugar. But when they realize there's sixteen teaspoons in a canna coke or that you can push back from a heart foundation indoors to breakfast, you know, like like nutrient group well, you know, like sultana bran and a glass of orange juice, and you're already at twenty teaspoons of sugar.
You know, it's very very easy to get there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's so.
I don't know if I told you this some shed a couple of times, but I remember when my dad had his first heart attack. I went into hospital is that two? And they so he's diabetic, like an insulin dependent diabetic. And I just happened to arrive when they were bringing his more tea. And his morning tea was orange juice and scones and jam and cream. Yeah, this is for the guy that's a diabetic. This is what they fed him in hospital.
Yeah, but that cream was low fat. Oh god, it was probably sweetened, but low fat.
Yeah. Yeah, anyway, they.
Probably also gave him an hour glass of low fat milk to go with it.
Are you particularly particular about your diet or are you a bit freestyle? Like do you do you have a do you have a protocol or do you just eat when you're hungry and eat what you want and stop when you're not hungry?
Yeah?
That I in particular about. One thing is I don't consume anything that contains sugar. Yeah, and I don't, so you know, I'll have a pie and chips, but I won't have any sauce on the pie, and the chips have to not be cooked in seed oil.
People don't understand that regular old white Crow tomato sauce or Heinz tomato sauce is about is mostly sugar fifty sugar and barb sauces. Barbecue sauce is worse. Right.
Barbecue sauce is about fifty five percent sugar, depending on the brand. The average tomato sauce is about a quarter to a third.
Sugar, right, Okay, I thought it was higher.
Yeah. So so every time you give a decent sized squirt of sauce on your on your sausage and bread, you're probably adding a couple of teaspoons of sugar to it.
So when you go to Bunnings and you get a bangerah which is made from god knows what and white bread with half a let.
What saws canola in it, yeah yeah.
And canola oil, it's probably not your ideal nutritional snack, is it.
Yeah? But there are worse things you could eat, and people do eat all the time. You know.
It's like when people say, oh, would you eat at McDonald's, I would if they you know, if it was three two thousand and four, McDonald's because then they cooked in animal fat, but now they cook in teat oil.
So no, sorry, I can't.
Remember I sent you something, and then I think subsequently you wrote a little piece about it. One of them was it Burger King or one of them as reverted to using beef tallow in their court.
Ah. No, that's a mob in the United States. And they had a great logo. Actually they said you had me at Tellow. That's right, and they're a pretty big chain in the United States. But yeah, they've switched over. They've said, stuff this, We're just going to cook it in animal fat. And you know, everyone loves their chips, of course, because chips cooked animal fat are a lot nicer than cook's chips cooked in seed oil, and they're
also much healthier for them. I wish there was a chain here that did that, you know, prior to twenty twelve there was, so McDonald switched over in two thousand and four twenty twelve, KFC hung on until and then they switched over then. But I almost earned myself a divorce one day because I heard on the radio that they were doing that, and this was the last day
are going to be cooking in animal fat. So I stopped in at the local kfceing got you know, a celebratory last packet of fries, but I didn't bring some home for my wife and yeah, that didn't go down.
Well wow, that could have been the marital camels back. But it's always fun chatting to you. Oh, I had one last question I've asked you this current Remember do you drink booze? Yeah?
Yeah, absolutely, not a lot, but I'll you know, if someone's having a drink, I'll have a drink with them.
So what are your thoughts about that?
So? I mean, I guess it moderation, like what do you have a glass of wine here and there or something.
I really hate the word moderation because its definition is to most people, whatever I'm currently consuming is in moderation. So I think it's a weasel word invented by the food industry so that people can feel okay about whatever they're consuming. There's a really hard limit on alcohol. We can talk about alcohol another da actually becau. There's a
really interesting science on this. We have an evolutionary limit of the equivalent of about two drinks worth in a day because and the evolutionary limit comes from we evolve the ability to deal with alcohol at all because we'd occasionally scoff down over ripe fruit which has got fermented sugars in it, which is where alcohol comes from. So we can't be an animal that can't deal with alcohol. Alcohol is a poison, right, so if you can't deal
with it, it kills you. So so we have evolved an ability to deal with alcohol in small quantities, just like we have a deal we'll deal with alcohol before it's fermented, which is when it's a sugar. We can deal with that in small quantity too when we write fruit. So we have an ability to deal with it. What we can't do is we can't adapt that ability, So as we drink more and more alcohol, we overwhelm the circuitry
or bio chemical circuitry that deals with diffusing alcohol. And the interesting part about this, and we'll talk about it in detail on another day, but the interesting part about this is that same circuitry is used to deal with the dangerous byproducts of consuming seed oils. So we've talked before about old hides. Alcohol produces alder hides, seed oils produce alder hides. Unfortunately, it all goes down the same pipe.
And if we've.
Overwhelmed our ability to deal with those older hides by drinking alcohol, we're even less able to deal with the seed oil ones and vice versa. So it's extremely dangerous. There are very good reasons not to drink large corantities of it, but it's also by the same token, something that you can have the occasional drink and it's not going to hurt you.
Yeah, people freak out when I tell them I go. You know, alcohol's poisonous.
You know, your body recognizes it as poison, and it's got to metabolize that before it. So if you have five pizzas and a beer and five beers, it's got to deal with the beer before the pizza.
Yeah. Well, it is a poison.
You're right, it is a poison, and thankfully we've got the ability to diffuse it. But it's a limited a blit of it.
Yeah, and what a glorious poison it is. Some people, Mate, I appreciate. We'll say goodbye off here, but thanks again, buddy.
Yeah, pleasure