RawVgn

It really doesn't say anything very useful except that THEORETICALLY eating tons of dairy, eggs, and meat MIGHT build muscle mass. Plenty of studies have shown that it doesn't. Looks like just another PHd on the agribusiness payroll toeing the research funding line. There are trillions of dollars at stake in these debates. The livestock industry has deep pockets and they will fund anyone who has a story that protects their business. A useful study would be a neutral party, not financed by agribusiness, feeding a group of athletes these elevated leucine levels at the supposedly ideal times and seeing how they fare against a control group all done double blind. I wonder why they didn't do the real study instead of all this theoretical debating? Maybe they're worried about the skyrocketing cholesterol, fat, bone disease, and cancer that would result from eating so many animal products. Everything I've read says that it has never been demonstrated in a controlled study that eating large amounts of protein increases muscle synthesis. If someone is aware of some studies that actually fed people high protein levels against a normal level control group and produced meaningfully larger amounts of muscle, and was reproduced by other qualified and independent scientists, I'd sure like to see it? As beautiful as you are Johan, your living proof that protein loading doesn't work. I say we do our own experiment: you drop the protein and start doing super high intensity lifting an hour a week. I bet we can change you from fashion model to bodybuilder in no time! I say muscle is built in the gym and not the kitchen. This is all potentially useless though considering the large body of evidence that indicates eating large amounts of protein is unhealthy. We know steroids build muscle, but what fitness enthusiast would ever use them?

Read "Grain Damage" sometime, or any of the other books about the detrimental effects of grains; there are nutritional schools that completely avoid grains. You might want to check them out.

Muscle is built in the gym, not the kitchen. Go for intensity on the weights; make your muscles work past their current capacity consistently so they grow and make sure to let them fully recover before doing it again. Read "The New High Intensity Training" by Ellington Darden. If your competing as a martial artist you also need to be lean to make your weight class, which means keeping your fat consumption way down like 10% max. Stay away from protein supplements and protein loading: it promotes cancer, arthritis, kidney stones, etc and has never been proven to grow muscle. One of my martial arts instructors had a promising competitive career cut short due to kidney stones; to this day she continues protein loading. You can easily have a BJ Penn fitness level on 30 grams of protein a day. Any more just acidifies your body and undermines your health.

If it doesn't taste good, that's your body telling you it's not food. Trust your senses-they're there for a reason. And high blood sugar is not caused by sugar; it's caused by fat in the blood coating the insulin receptors which slows down the transport of sugar to fuel the cells causing sugar to backup in the blood stream. If you have problems with high blood sugar, the solution is to reduce your fat consumption so you can transport and burn fuel (sugar) efficiently. Eating fats like peanut butter is the last thing you want to do.

Yeh, best thing you can do-quit the coffin nails. After 3 weeks the urge is usually almost completely gone for most of us. I quit 26 years ago; smoked some 420 a few times a couple years ago and noticed harder breathing and a cough within a few days. Smoking will chew up your lungs and aerobic capacity. Both my parents are lifetime smokers and now both of them sit in chairs all day watching TV because they can barely walk outside because they have emphysema and COPD. Most of us take a few tries to make it stick, but quitting is very doable.

For starters, your not skinny. At 5-10 and 130 lbs your body mass index is just in the healthy range. Remember that overweight and obese people are a substantial majority in the US (60% plus) so healthy weight people look odd. 2 to 3 half hour sessions a week in the weight room, consistently, would probably give you a very solid physique. Ellington Darden Phd (exercise physiology and Mr Texas 1969) has a book out called "The New High Intensity Training." He's actually written over 20 body building books in his long career. Read it and you'll learn a fast easy way to slab some muscle on your promising body. And BTW, Dr Darden specifically states in his book that there is no evidence showing that protein contributes to building muscle and he does not recommend taking supplemental protein. There is a lot of evidence protein causes long term health problems like osteoporosis, arthritis, cancer, and so on. You can build a very solid physique eating well below 10% of your calories a day from protein-I'm 160 lbs and eat only about 25 grams of protein a day. I'm attaching my pic so you can see that protein is irrelevant. Work heavy in the weight room with as much intensity as you can muster-but always excellent form for safety.

Been vegan 3 yrs, raw 17 mons. I've found that lifting with a lot of intensity builds good strong solid muscles; I'm slowly gaining muscle lifting only an hour a week-half hour twice weekly but doing it all out for that whole half hour to complete failure. I'll be 50 next year and have never been stronger or fitter in my life. Forget the protein myth. Plenty of expert body builders like Ellington Darden will tell you protein has never been proven to build muscle, and there is plenty of evidence it may cause cancer , osteoporosis, etc. Muscle is built in the gym, not the kitchen! Keep your frequency and duration down, and your intensity way up. And check out Darden's book, "The New High Intensity Training." It's a real eye opener that builds lots of muscle with a minimum time commitment and no protein emphasis. Welcome to the site, but keep in mind us raw and low protein folks are a minority. I think you'll find most vegans in here are still in the high protein school; they just substitute plant protein sources for so called "animal proteins." (all "animal protein" is plant based since only plants synthesize amino acids.) Have fun.

Logical fallacy: argumentum ad populem. Judging the value of an argument by its popularity is not wise. If we did it consistently, women wouldn't be able to vote, children would be working 60 hour work weeks, blacks would be slaves, and the sun would orbit the earth: ALL prevailing widespread beliefs in their time which small groups of radicals eventually undermined creating greater joy and well being for millions.

I used to have a really bad elbow/wrist that prevented me from lifting real hard. Doctors couldn't figure is out; they MRId it, Xrays, everything. They could see the swelling but said they had no idea what was causing it. I lived with it for two years including several trips to the hospital for cortisone/pain killer injections. At 47, I figured that's just the way it was gonna be. Very unexpectedly, a week or 2 after switching to a low protein raw diet the pain started subsiding. Within 6 weeks it was gone (along with several other chronic problems I had suffered from for decades.) If you ever get a chance to try a low-fat raw diet, you may be amazed at how your body regains its fuller health. If you hang out in a raw forum sometime (vegsource.com Dr Graham), you'll hear many first hand accounts similiar to mine. You just might be amazed at what is really slowin you down (hey got everything to gain and little to lose if it turns out not to work). I was...would never have imagined my vegan/omni diet was the cause of my pain. Yeh, I agree some cardio's a good thing, but it's a lowsy way to control weight or get lean; way to much work when you can get 90% of the leaness with 10% of the effort from nutrition; I love gettin bang for the buck, though I know my style won't quite produce pro results-it will produce A LOT from very little effort though. I actually went runnin the other day for the first time in months; I guess wind sprints qualify; efficiency enthusiast at work. I can run like crazy; I guess that's why I rarely bother with it. I basically never get tired doing routine activities like walkin or workin, so I tend to just blow it off. It does feel good occasionally though, and I'm sure its good for my heart.

Guess I'm kind of skeptical of people talking about nutrition and fitness and not bein able to see em. I wanna see what somebody's philosophy is producin, preferably very long term since most serious disease takes decades to develop. To me, postin a pic shows what you've accomplished with your point of view and shows your weaknesses (granted luck or misfortune is in the equation too: I have a movement disorder which is why my posture is tilted a bit.)

Hmm, The website says "...Bodybuilding and Fitness." To me, fitness suggests not doing things like consuming excessive protein which are known from the theory and experience to create health problems like arthritis, osteoporosis, and kidney and liver problems. If you read the China Study. the largest nutritional epidemiological study ever conducted (funded for more than 20 years by the National Institute of Health and the Chinese government, you will see that it contains nearly a thousand references. Most of them are primary research published in peer reviewed journals, and many of them (over 30) deal with the well known link between protein consumption and cancer;this extensive body of published research has been ongoing for more than 2 decades (there are of course very powerful agrobusiness interests who do not want it known.) Right, 10% like I said. And any vegan knows how upwardly politicized these figures are. So if they say 10% that includes margin of error so the actual number is 10% or less. Protein is not normally taken as energy. Only if insufficient carbs and fats are consumed is protein converted to carbs for burning. Protein's purpose is to build and replace damaged tissue; a very, very small requirement when compared to energy needs. In fact, digesting protein into carbs for energy is a net energy loss which is why Atkins Diets work and high protein diets cause fatigue. Assuming that more is better, particularly considering the large body of evidence to the contrary, is very dangerous. More is not better when it comes to protein. You obviously have never read one word of the China Study; it was conducted over decades involving thousands of people and millions of data points. It is the largest nutritional epidemiological study ever done. And it was funded by the NIH because they understood just how unique the opportunity was. Instead of reading some blurb on a website, you should take an evening or two, and actually read it. It's an extremely influential vegan health book, and no vegan should not have read it. People who consume large amounts of protein, in order to MAYBE gain some additional mass (expert bodybuilders like Dr Ellington Darden-exercise physiology- state protein loading is useless), are gambling with their health.

Forget the cardio man (why beat up your knees cause your gonna need em for a long long time). I don't do any. If your fat content is kept under 10%, you won't need any cardio to get way leaner than you are. Of course eating that low of fat content can seem pretty odd when your not used to it.

Interesting that you only think raw veganism needs to be backed up with research. I geuss if something is popular, its fine to accept it at face value. Hmmm, logical fallacies 101- argumentum ad populem...sigh.

There are no separate BMI charts for men and women which means we should weigh the same for a given height-though a women would have a slightly higher fat percentage. And my strength and endurance have significantly increased since going raw. I'm 7 lbs heavier now than last year and lifting quite a bit more than when I was plain vegan. Of course the huge improvement in my joints (after going raw), which allows me to always lift heavy, probably has a lot to do with it. My sex drive is always good and strong (probably better than when I was a teenager), so I think my testosterone is just fine. It's pretty easy to monitor the effects for high protein consumption: just observe your urine. Healthy urine should be almost clear indicating few waste products being processed and removed by the body. Its ph should be above 7 (practically matching healthy blood 7.3-7.5) indicating that excess acid forming minerals(like sulphur often bound into proteinaceous molecules) are not being buffered by leaching calcium from the bones-and leaving residue that accumulates over time in joint and muscle tissue, and over loading the kidneys and liver. I think if you read through the Arthritis section of The Physicians Comm for Responsible Medicine you'll see a fair amount on the protein/acidification/bone loss issue. And if you actually read The China Study, you'll see its conclusions are based on dozens of studies done over decades in many different countries. It also cites dozens of studies that link protein to cancer. Protein loading is probably a lot like taking steroids: a short term muscle enhancer (though far less effective) with potentially dire long term consequences. I've been weight lifting for 38 years-off and on. I'm curious if anyone else in here, whose been lifting as long as me, still has nearly flawless joints that never impede my lifting-I've never taken protein supplements. Have any lifters in here been eating lots of protein (as in powders and such) for 30 plus years and still have good joints head to toe? All the guys I know who are my age and still lift baby at least one joint-back, elbow, knee, or something.

I agree I'm not huge. Obviously not a priority since I lift only an hour a week. I was at our community swimming pool yesterday with about 350 people. Out of that group, I'd say not one person had my combination of muscle and leaness. For many of us who do not want to be competition level body builders excellent strength and fitness is enough. I also have no interest in compromising my health (consuming protein or other supplements), which I assure you, becomes increasingly precious as you age. The average size of the five most recent men's world record marathoners was 127 lbs: I'm more than 30% heavier than a world class runner. Pro distance runners shoot for BMI of about 18.5; I'm 22; a full 20 lbs heavier than a pro runner my height. That's a lot of extra muscle on versus a 144 pounder. Leading Health Organizations advising no more than 10% protein: World Health Organization "Diet,Nutrition, and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases..." Report No. 912 section 5.1 US National Academies Institute of Medicine "Report offers New Eating..." press release dated Sept 5, 2002 National Research Council "Recommended Dietary Allowances: 10th Edition" Dr Colin Campbell "The China Study" "About 9-10% protein has been recommended for the past fifty years to be assured that most people get at least get their 5-6% requirement." Institute of Medicine Food and Nutrition Board "There is little evidence that muscular activity increases the need for protein, except for the small amount required for the development of muscles during physical conditioning." The Physicians Comm for Responsible Medicine also has numerous articles about the health riskd of excess protein consumption. I could go on, but I think you get the point. Protein content of: spinach 30%, asparagus 27%, lettuce 22%....whole milk 23%. See The China Study for the effects of high protein diets causing acidification of the body leaching calcium from the bones leading to osteoporosis. Also The China Study for the strong link between protein consumption and cancer. There are additional reports of proteins' link with arthritis, autoimmune dysfunction, impaired liver function, and kidney failure. Look at veggiePrincess: as beautiful as she is, I bet her BMI is below mine and I believe she's a pretty big protein advocate who also exercises far more than me-not to mention being probably half my age. There are real health risks associated with high protein consumption and the benefits are spotty at best. Why risk your health when you can be otherwise very strong and vigorous?

Yeh, I was wondering too Ruz. C'mon Doc, give it up?

Hey 4x4 The man is asking for suggestions to get lean. I told him the fastest simplest way I know to do it. He looks old enough to make up his own mind to me.

I bet you knock your fat calories down to about 10% and you'll be big ripped fast. One way to do it is just eat all raw fruit and green leafy veggies-its what I do. Those big muscles will be burstin at the seams in no time. Here's me doin High Intensity lifting about ONE HOUR a week one year shy of fifty. In my experience, diet is key to gettin ripped especially for someone like you who is already carrying plenty of muscle.

Sorry Shawn Wasn't sure what you were getting at; should of given you the benefit of a doubt. Written communication leaves something to be desired. And no. I'm not suggesting dental problems won't develop with low-fat raw vegans. I have never seen a complaint about carries or cavities in the user group I belong to for this diet. One member has been on it for 25 plus years. Guess I'm sensitive about comparing fruit sugar packed in naturally filtered water and gentle soluble fiber, loaded with vitamins and antioxidants and phytochemicals, to "sugar" like in candy bars or bags of cane sugar. They're night and day different. Not to mention, only sugar can be oxidized for energy by humans. Anything we eat that eventually gets burned is converted to sugar by the body. Also, dehydrated foods like raisins are widely considered to be the worst for your teeth because they're so sticky (and cooking is a type of dehydration usually.). Truly raw food still has its water and is not sticky. Sugar has a bad rap in some ways, maybe because its often associated with junk food. Many people are surprised to learn that this high "sugar" diet is very effective at treating and reversing T2 diabetes. So the sugar issue is actually pretty nuanced, like many things.

Teeth for older people are largely a matter of their child hood. Middle class kids go to dentists regularly and get braces. Working class kids often don't get dental care. I have the money now to get braces, but really, I'm not that vain. Never had any trouble with my teeth on this diet. In fact, this diet is great for ALL aspects of hygiene. So Shawn, why don't you post your pic up here and tell us about how many hours a week you bust your butt in the gym and doing aerobics. And about your mystery diet. And even if you are half way fit, we can stick around for the next 30 years (your obviously young) and see what you look like at my age. Yeh right.

Super simple: bananas, cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon, oranges, grapefruit, grapes, papaya, cucumbers, tomatoes, bell pepper, greens, and half an avacado. That's it. No supplements except an occasional B12. Orangutan diet. Covers all the bases: high energy, easy on the digestion, minimal preparation, easy cleanup, super hygienic, massive antioxidants and phytochemicals and vitamins and minerals. Haven't had so much as a cold since I started it 18 months ago. Keeps me at perfect weight for my height. Don't have to do any aerobics and eat whenever I like. We are naturally healthy. Just keep the fuel, our food, super clean-which means ONLY eat raw fruit and greens-and most people will thrive. Our bodies are miracles of nature as long as we don't pollute them with our cultural nonsense. Read Dr Douglas Graham's book The 80/10/10 Diet. I can not say enough about this incredibly simple and effective diet.

A diet based on raw fruit and greens already has the right balance of fats. If you eat right, you won't need any supplements except maybe some occasional B12. As long as you eat grains and starches, your going to have micronutrient uptake problems. Our intestines are very sensitive and are not designed to eat insoluble fiber (like in whole grains.) These fibers have microscopically sharp ends and edges that literally scrape your intestines-which is why "fiber" causes a bowel movement...its the body's gag response trying to expel the offending substance. To protect itself from the scraping, the body generates mucus along the intestines which shield the sharp fibers but also reduce your ability to absorb nutrients.

Owh...sweet Guns! Wanna wrestle? Hehehe.

Protein is nonsense. I eat ONLY 5-7% of total calories as protein; ALL I eat is raw fruit and green leafy veggies. I lift twice a week for 30 minutes and do no other exercise. As you can see in the photo, I'm as muscular as half the guys in here who lift hours and hours a week and eat protein like candy. Protein is linked to many long term health problems like arthritis and cancer. If your eating enough calories of just about anything (short of soda pop), your getting all the protein you need. Most doctors never see a case of protein deficiency in their entire careers-even in the third world simply increasing starving peoples calories to adequate levels will eliminate any protein deficiency. Anyone can look healthy in their 20s; come back and see how these youngsters are doin when their 50 like me.

Good luck with it. I'm into BJJ too, though I only compete in my school. Gotta keep those youngsters in line! Post a pic sometime so we can see how its comin?