Recap: Do you need to eat meat to build muscle? | Simon Hill & Will Bulsiewicz
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Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're diving into protein. It's the nutrient at the center of some of the biggest debates in nutrition, especially when it comes to building muscle. And as more people adopt plant-based diets, one question keeps coming up: can non-meat proteins really support strength and overall health? So what does the science say? Is it better to get our protein from animals or plants?

I'm joined by nutrition expert Simon Hill and Dr. Will Bolsiewicz to break down the benefits of both and to explore how we can build muscle in the healthiest and most sustainable way. Protein is a building block, an important part of our body. And so we classically think about it as the building block of muscle or of bone, but it also is involved in signaling within the body and different biochemical reactions that are occurring throughout our entire body.

It's also not just muscle and bone. There's other organs where protein is an essential part of building those organs. You think about the heart, the liver, the kidneys. We need protein in order to build those. And so protein is also part of our diet. And it's an essential part of our diet. And when we use the word essential in nutrition, what we mean is that you have to get this.

You have to get this. And so protein can be found in many different sources within our diet. The classic is animal based foods. So eating red meat, so pork or beef, eating fish, poultry. With these, what we're doing is we're literally eating the muscle of the animal.

Right. And so naturally, that's a high protein source. But there's also eggs. There's also dairy products that contain protein. But, you know, the thing that we're here to discuss is the role of plant based protein. And what's interesting is that plants contain protein. All plants contain protein. All plants contain amino acids. There's 20 amino acids and all plants contain the nine essential amino acids.

So plants absolutely can be our source for protein. In fact, among omnivores, even people who consume animal products, they also get a huge percentage of their protein from plants on a daily basis.

And Will, you mentioned just within this, and I think it's come up in some of our previous podcasts, this idea that sort of these 20 amino acid sort of building blocks that could be turned into proteins. But you mentioned that nine of them were essential. What's the difference between the nine essential and the 11, which therefore sound they're not essential, which is, you know, feels like the less important one's been invited to the party.

Yeah, so I mean, you can think of these almost like Lego bricks. And the 11 non-essential Lego bricks or amino acids your body is able to produce for you. So you're not required to actually get that from your diet. Your body has the ability, the capacity to prepare that. Whereas the nine essential amino acids, again, this word essential means that we have to get it from our diet, that our body is not capable of producing it.

And so those nine Legos, it's like we have to source somewhere else to be able to those nine Lego pieces. We have to source somewhere else to get them when we're building muscle, when we're building different things within the body. These 20 amino acids become important players because basically if one of them is not at an adequate level, that's where protein production stops. So in essence, we can only build in terms of what are the Lego pieces that we have available to us.

Our goal is to have adequacy of all 20 Lego pieces. But in order to accomplish that, we have to basically outsource these nine in our diet, make sure that we get an adequate amount of them. So Simon, let me paint this picture and I'd love to hear what you would say. So my son is 16, right? So he's sort of going, he's shot up, you know, a year ago, he was shorter than me. Now he's much taller than me. He started to get interested in the gym, you know, in the last year.

nine months or something. It's incredibly depressing because he goes to the gym, he lifts some weights, and the following day, his muscles have literally grown. And you were discussing this before, I'm laughing because at this point, I can't put any muscle on at all. It's not happening. But for him, it feels like it's sort of magical. And he's got really interested. He's really excited by this, which I think is very understandable that he's starting to get stronger. He wants to be stronger than me, all the rest of it. And he...

absolutely believes like he needs to eat red meat because he wants to maximize this sort of growth that's going on. And we eat a very good diet at home, very much driven by myself and my wife in terms of what sort of our Zoe app is telling us to eat. So he eats quite a lot of that. And then he's like, but I need to add like steak around the side of it. I guess my question is what

What's your message to him? And how would you be trying to take him on a pathway that reduces the red meat, which tends to come packaged in like a burger with fries, right? So it's like there's a whole package with this generally. And I'm thinking maybe he might listen to you because he certainly doesn't listen to me. Well, first of all, I was him. So I'm kind of speaking to myself here. Okay. And society has taught us if you eat muscle,

you build muscle. Intuitively, it makes sense. We can see that. You take the muscle off an animal, you eat that, and all of a sudden, you're going to be Popeye, these big bulging biceps. But what I would explain to him is that when you eat food that has protein in it, whether it is meat, whether it is a legume or tempeh, the body doesn't just absorb that protein. First, it breaks it down into amino acids, and then they get absorbed into the bloodstream. So

By the time those essential amino acids are floating around in the blood, Jonathan, they're not tagged. Oh, that Lucene came from pork and that Lucene came from beef and that Lucene came from tempeh.

At that stage, they're just amino acids. It doesn't matter where that came from. What's important is that you're getting enough of those nine essential amino acids into circulation. It doesn't matter where you're getting them from. If we're talking about a hypertrophy, growing muscle point of view, I believe it matters a lot in terms of chronic disease because of all the other things that come in the protein package that influence chronic disease risk. But providing you're consuming enough total protein

you will be supplying enough of those nine essential amino acids into circulation to support the work that you're doing in the gym. And if he said to me, well, how do you know that? I would point to these clinical studies where they take healthy adults like in Brazil, they took males in their 20s and got them on a resistance training program, had one group consuming all protein from plants. And this was a high protein diet, 1.6 grams per kilogram.

And the other group, an omnivorous diet, 1.6 grams per kilogram. And they followed these people for eight to 12 weeks. So they're eight or 12 weeks. And along the way, they're doing the resistance training and they're measuring changes in muscle size and strength.

And throughout that study, there was no significant differences between those young men who were eating an omnivorous diet. So they were getting protein from red meat, as you just mentioned there, and from white meat, fish, versus the group who was getting all their protein from foods like tempeh, tofu, lentils, et cetera. And so that's just further evidence for us that if you're consuming enough total protein,

You don't need to be worried that somehow if that protein is coming from plants, it's inferior. A legume like an edamame bean isn't going to build muscle as good as a piece of steak. That's a myth. It's a story that we've kind of told ourselves. And I understand how, you know,

you know it kind of feels intuitive and i was there once but when you understand the physiology you realize that that's not a fear that we need to hold

All right. Well, I will see whether I can convince him on this. I think when I do, he will immediately say then, well, all right, then I really do need to know though, which of the plants that I need to eat that are going to those high levels of protein. Because in his case, I think he is in that rare group of people who, you know, is putting on a lot of muscle and is doing quite a lot of exercise, not just in the gym, which I know you've talked about, but also, you know, he's like

going off to school, carrying all his heavy books. He's physically just a lot more active than I suspect most of us are in our adult lives. So that brings us back to that main food group is going to be legumes. Tofu and tempeh are really protein-dense plant-based foods. Then we can kind of move further along the spectrum to chickpeas and lentils and all the different varieties of beans.

There are some other foods like seitan, if someone is not sensitive to gluten or celiac that contains gluten, that's very protein dense. A lot of plant based bodybuilders will consume seitan. It's not for everyone, but if you can tolerate gluten, then that might be one that you want to include as well.

the plant-based milks and yogurts that are high in protein you're going to be getting protein from all your fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds as well and then you know typically bodybuilders are having a protein supplement for convenience or also from a society point of view it can be difficult to eat enough protein people often feel

too full to eat another meal. So in this instance, you'd be swapping out a dairy whey protein concentrate or whey protein isolate for some type of plant-based protein like a pea protein isolate or a rice protein isolate or a blend of the two. By focusing on those foods I mentioned plus the addition of a protein shake,

he should comfortably be able to get to 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body mass as his protein intake per day, which is, you know, the evidence suggests is more than enough to actually help support that muscle remodeling that we were talking about. So to support the training that he's doing and get the adaptations that he's looking for. But at the same time,

All that protein is coming with the fiber, with polyphenols. It's low in saturated fat, doesn't contain dietary cholesterol, doesn't contain heme ion. And it's all of these things that coalesce to provide a more favorable environment or a shift in biomarkers that predict risk of cardiometabolic disease.

He's going to be in the gym competing with his friends, setting records, building muscle, but he's also protecting his future. I can't help but think about the fact that all of these foods that Simon is mentioning, legumes, specifically tofu and tempeh, seitan, which by the way, thank you for mentioning that most people don't realize that gluten is actually a protein. This gluten-rich food is actually protein-based.

Or plant-based milks like organic soy milk, nuts and seeds, all these different things. These are the same foods that are prioritized in a Zoe-oriented diet. And I do think that there is this value where Zoe is not necessarily designed specifically to talk to people who desire to be a bodybuilder.

but it helps to give you the nutritional foundation that you're looking for, that you can build from in terms of understanding why you would be eating more plants and that motivation that comes from that or understanding how eating more plants impacts your gut microbiome. We know that the gut microbiome, and we've seen this in our work at Zoe, is connected to cardiometabolic disease. We have our method study that shows that by

basically changing. I mean, it's a whole package. It's not just the gut microbiome, but we show that we can basically improve these cardio metabolic risk factors. But there's also an entire body of literature that's completely separate that connects the gut microbiome to our muscle, where we could go so far as to say that there's a gut microbiome muscle access where they're in communication with one another. And what we see is that like, whether it be mouse models or human studies, a healthier gut is present when people

exercise also a healthier gut is associated with muscle mass and that if you were to deprive for example a mouse where it's easier to do these studies if you deprive a mouse of a healthy gut by giving it antibiotics it loses muscle mass and so i think that there's like there's this broader picture that needs to be seen that you've been mentioning that like we get into a

tunnel view. And yet we have to zoom out and see this bigger picture of we can accomplish all these goals. That's it for this week's recap. If you're hearing this, you're ready on your way to eating mindfully for better health. Speaking of eating mindfully, we've just launched a new free app that helps you understand what's really in your food, despite Big Food's efforts to mislead us.

The Zoe Health app lets you snap a meal and know if it's healthy instantly. And that's down to our brand new processed food risk scale in the app, a new way to cut through big foods misleading marketing and see how healthy your food really is. Just search for Zoe Health in your app store or click the link in this episode's description to download a nutrition app that's actually based on science for free. Search for Zoe in your app store today.