Whey Protein

Baseline protein intake was not consistently controlled across the trials, so some of these people may already have been eating enough for a supplement to add nothing. The handgrip analysis was highly inconsistent between studies. Appendicular muscle mass did improve, but on two trials that disagreed sharply with each other. Older adults only, so this says nothing about young trained people.

A position stand grades existing literature and computes no pooled estimate of its own, so these ranges are considered judgements rather than measurements. The society receives industry support and several authors declare commercial ties to supplement companies, which is worth weighing against recommendations that favour supplementing. It was published in 2017, before the large-bolus work and before trials that compared timings head to head.

Twelve men per group is not enough to rule out a modest real difference between the two proteins; the comparisons came out at p = 0.69 and p = 0.44. One night, no training outcome, no women. The exercise was endurance rather than resistance training, so the mitochondrial finding does not carry straight over to lifting. Both proteins were measured against a non-caloric placebo, so part of what is captured is protein against nothing.

All four are acute tracer studies in young trained men, measuring a building rate over hours rather than muscle held onto over months, and the two do not always track. The original plateau rests on telling a 20 g response apart from a 40 g one in six people. The 100 g result comes from a four-tracer method used by very few laboratories. Nobody tested whether the same protein split across the day would do as well.

A 20 g per-meal ceiling shows up four hours after a one-leg session and not twelve hours after whole-body work, so it belongs to the measurement. No trial has fed large doses for months and weighed the muscle kept.

These measure a building rate across one night, not muscle retained across a training block. The forty-gram result in older men reached p = 0.02, and its supporting tracer analysis only p = 0.08. The founding study's clearly significant effects were whole-body, which includes gut and liver protein, not muscle specifically. Young men in two of the three trials, older men in the other, no women anywhere.

The trials for and against bedtime protein came from one laboratory, so dose likely explains the split: the effect appears somewhere between 30 and 40 g. Where exactly, and whether any muscle is kept, is untested.

Both trials used people who were not training beforehand, who gain readily from the training alone and so make group differences hard to see. In the nine-month trial everyone ate 1.1 to 1.4 g per kg a day, below the level where gains flatten, so it may be measuring a shortfall corrected. Leucine-matching meant unequal grams, 26 g of soy against 19 g of whey. Whey-industry funding is common across this literature.

Whey beat soy matched on grams, tied matched on leucine, pointing at leucine. That stays open because in the grams trial soy gained less lean mass than a carbohydrate control, an unlikely result, so its gaps may be noisier than they look.