As far as I can tell all fitness blogs say you have to eat lots of protein to build muscle (with exercise). But why protein specifically? If excess calories from any macro can be converted to fat by the body, why do we need protein to build muscle? Couldn’t the body just use excess from any macro combined with weight lifting exercises to build muscle ?
In: Biology
Muscles are mostly protein. But your body can not make all the different amino acids that make up muscle proteins, and of those the body can make it can not make all of them as fast as your muscles can grow. This means that if you do not have enough protein in your diet the muscles may not have enough to build as much as they would have after exercise. Too much protein does not matter as excess protein is metabolized in the body and used as energy. So the fitness blogs say you should make sure to eat enough protein, and since it is hard to know how much is enough and it is hard to hit the upper limit of the amount of protein in your diet you should just eat as much protein as possible.
Latest Answers