Originally Posted by
LimieJosh
I think the OP is referring to implications of the research that has come out of Don Layman's lab at U of Illinois Urbana-Champagne. That might seem like a reach, but there are people from Layman's lab who have a pretty big Social Media presence and so its been brought to a wider audience than most pubmed entries reach.
The work shows pretty convincing evidence that the pathways that produce MPS in skeletal muscle can become decoupled from amino acid availability - 1) activation of the pathway can reach a max amplitude even in the face of further increasing Leucine availability, and 2) the signalling pathway goes through a refractory period in which intracellular EAA concentration has to fall to critical levels before the pathway can be restimulated.
If you take it in isolation, you might interpret this to mean that IF the pathway is maxed out at 30g of quality protein (in the ball park with their figures), then a meal of 40g of said protein will not result in any greater benefit. Furthermore, eating a second meal before the pathway is ready to be turned on again will not only waste the protein from that meal but delay the start of the next bout of MPS thus robbing you of gains. The problem is you cannot look at these things in isolation as we don't know what counterbalancing is happening with other pathways. The fact there are plenty of Bros who go big eating more than 30g of protein more frequently than every 3 hours suggests the fact that the pathways controlling MPS become refractory dont practically impeed muscle growth over the long term.