I have a new article on Return of Kings, about protein in your diet and how much you need to build muscle.

You want to build muscle, right? Of course you do, everybody wants to build muscle, whether it be for purposes of actually having functional strength or just having big aesthetic muscles to show off to the girls. Anthropologists will tell you that the desire of pretty much all men to have more muscle is universal amongst all cultures and ethnicities, regardless of what the liberals that control anthropology will tell you about “muh Western false body images” or whatever.

So if you want to build muscle, what do you have to do? Obviously, you’re going to have to do resistance training and plenty of it—that’s the simple part of it, but then there’s the dietary component.

“Well, that’s simple, Larsen!” you’re probably saying right now—“you just have to eat lots of protein!” Indeed, that is a major part of it—protein is the sole building block of muscle tissue, after all. But is it really so simple?

Eating a diet low in complex carbohydrates like fiber for long periods of time has been linked to numerous medical issues, not the least of which is constipation, as well as hypertension, heart disease, and atherosclerosis, as well as increased risk of kidney stones due to the process described in the next paragraph.

More to the point, if you were to eat a 100% protein diet, you would not be utilizing all of that protein to build your muscles. For the body to function it needs some glucose, the currency of cellular energy.

Indeed, there are some tribes that exist today, and undoubtedly many more in the past, that ate a hypercarnivorous—which is to say almost entirely meat-based—diet, hence why the body evolved the ability to do the process known as ketogenesis, in which proteins will be denatured and converted into a protein-based sugar known as a ketone (ammonia and urea are produced as byproducts of this, which means the kidneys have to work harder and thus the kidney stones mentioned beforehand).

Read it here