Feeding Your Body to Gain Mass by Anthony Ellis - HTML preview

Eat Plenty of High Quality Protein

Protein provides your body with the necessary amino acids to build and repair muscle tissue. A diet that is low in good quality protein will not enable your body to build large amounts of muscle.

Which proteins are best?

The best proteins for muscle building are those that provide the largest amounts of the 8 essential amino acids. Below I have listed a few protein sources. Notice that the best proteins for muscle building almost all come from animal sources.

Best for Muscle Building Whey Protein Isolate
Eggs/egg whites
Cottage Cheese (casein) Lean Beef
Chicken
Fish
Soy Protein Isolate

Worst for Muscle Building Rice
Bread
Oats
Vegetables
Fruit

Note that I’m not saying that rice, oats and vegetables are bad, they are just bad sources of protein if you want to build muscle. Rice is an excellent source of carbohydrates as well as oats. In addition, vegetables are excellent sources of fiber and other nutrients – I’m simply reviewing protein sources based solely on their ability to build muscle by providing large amounts of the eight essential amino acids.

All protein sources provide some amounts of these amino acids, but a good muscle building protein like whey protein, or lean meat will provide a large amount of the amino acids, while the same quantity of a less efficient muscle building protein like broccoli will have much fewer of these necessary amino acids.

8 Essential Amino Acid Content of Different Protein Sources

Isoleucine
Leucine
Lysine
Methionine
Phenylalanine Threonine
Tryptophan Valine

5.79% 1.64% 0.22% 0.12% 15.26% 2.33% 0.06% 0.14% 12.24% 2.64% 0.16% 0.15%

2.44% 0.86% 0.25% 0.04%
5.82% 1.23% 0.52% 0.09%
5.49% 1.31% 0.12% 0.10%
2.80% 0.36% 0.13% 0.03%
5.90% 1.54% 0.14% 0.14%

This is why some refer to vegetable protein as an incomplete protein. Although “incomplete” is not the correct term as all proteins have all 20 amino acids, vegetable protein sources provide far less of the 8 essential amino acids per quantity than animal protein sources. Based on this fact, vegetable protein sources should not make up the largest part of your protein intake.