Do You Need To Eat Loads Of Meat To Get Muscular?
If you hop on the average fitness site, you’ll read a lot of stories about the importance of eating meat to pack on muscle. After all, meat is muscle, so eating it will help you build your own, right?
Not so fast. The science of muscle building is actually a lot more complicated and less well understood than people realize. Sure, bodybuilders ate loads of meat in the past, but it is the best strategy? Or are there other options?
There are all sorts of reasons you might not want to eat meat for three to six meals per day. For one, it’s expensive. And second, once you’ve munched your way through your third chicken breast of the day (skin-free), you’d probably rather eat just about anything else than another tasteless lump of protein. However, you keep gulping down the meat because you’ve been taught that it’s the only way to build muscle over the long term. You’ve just got to accept it.
Or do you?
There is an increasing number of fitness enthusiasts who are saying “goodbye” to meat and embracing different products which not only cost less but taste better too.
Nutrition Science And Muscularity
Nutrition Science has failed us in many ways. Even though we have clear answers from the science on what we SHOULD eat, people in the field have generally done a lousy job of communicating their core discoveries. What’s interesting about nutrition science is that it seems to have a different culture from other sciences. Climate scientists, for instance, aren’t afraid to go on record claiming that the world is going to enter into a firey catastrophe in the second half of the twenty-first century, but nutrition scientists are, in general, unwilling to tell people that they will get sick if they don’t change their diets today.
Because of the failure of nutrition science to communicate effectively, most people throw their hands up in the air: if scientists themselves can’t agree on what people should eat, what hope does a random member of the public have?
The problem is that we know what people need to do to get muscular: it’s just not communicated effectively.
Vegans Have Higher Testosterone Than Meat Eaters, But Lower Muscularity
So here’s an interesting fact. Did you know that your average vegan – somebody who eats no meat, dairy or eggs – has higher testosterone levels than your average meat eater? But did you know that he or she also has a lower muscle mass for the same amount of protein consumed?
Bodybuilders have been told for years that testosterone is essential for building muscle. It’s why men have more muscle mass than women, in general – or so we’re told. But vegans, thanks to their diet, seem to have less muscle per calorie they consume compared to their omnivorous counterparts, creating a puzzling dilemma. What’s causing their lack of muscularity if they have more testosterone?
The answer might be that vegans tend to have lower levels of other hormones that are important for building muscle. Take IGF-1, for instance – the cancer-promoting hormone that signals to the body that it’s time to “grow, grow, grow.” Vegans tend to have a lower level of IGF-1 than the rest of the population because they don’t consume foods that boost the hormone. Meat and dairy signal to the body that protein is abundant and calories are in surplus, putting it into growth mode, stimulating hormones like IGF-1 — by increasing IGF-1 levels, eating meat primes the body to go into growth mode, packing on muscle quickly. But vegans, because of what they eat, have less of this anabolic hormone.
The Problem With Eating Lots Of Meat
Okay, so eating meat is good, right? Well, not so fast. While eating meat might be useful for piling on muscle in the short-term, you’ll likely pay for it later, just as if you start exercising with DOMS. Meat consumption is linked to a whole host of ills that put you at an increased risk of chronic disease. Cross country studies show that populations that live the longest and healthiest only use meat as a condiment and derive fewer than five percent of their calories from animal products. Meat and processed meat are linked to the onset of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke, potentially putting you at risk of early death. And intervention trials show that when you cut meat out of the diet, many people recover from debilitating illnesses.
Surely, there’s a way you can get the best of both worlds: build muscle without experiencing the adverse effects of high meat consumption in the future?
Evolution Works Against Us
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer. Our biology works against us in this instance. If you eat meat today, you’ll grow bigger muscles and outwardly appear athletic and, possibly, attractive. But when you eat meat, you signal to your cells to go into growth mode, and they stop doing all their internal housekeeping to ensure that they remain healthy. Over time, cells lose their ability to read the genome accurately, and you get the onset of the diseases of aging. Avoiding meat and other foods like processed sugar keep cells healthy for longer, but it makes it more difficult to grow muscle. The body stays in “repair mode,” focusing on using the energy it has to sustain itself until the next time of abundance, but this comes at the cost of muscle growth.
Evolution screws us over here. There doesn’t seem to be a way that we can have our cake and eat it too. Of course, if you want to look muscular, you still can, even if you avoid meat. It’s just that you won’t be able to achieve the same size, all things equal, as a meat-eater. But you can still look ripped and gain some muscle mass. It just won’t be freaky.
So, do you need to eat loads of meat to get muscular? Probably. But that doesn’t mean you should. You might want to rein in your size ambitions or focus on another aspect of fitness, like stamina or aerobic capacity.
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