Are you aiming to build muscle with a high-protein diet, but worried it might be lowering your testosterone levels? In this video, we ...

boosting-muscles-but-lowering-testosterone-here39s-what-you-need-to-know-about-high-protein-diets

Boosting Muscles but Lowering Testosterone? Here&#39;s What You Need to Know About High-Protein Diets!

does a high protein diet reduce your testosterone I'm Dr Reena Malik urologist and pelvic surgeon and today we're going to talk about does a high protein diet actually result in a meaningful reduction in testosterone do you need to change how you're eating before we get into the video I wanted to let you guys know that I have a podcast called the Reena Malik MD podcast if you're not aware I've been posting videos on Fridays which are podcast videos that are also available on all major podcast platforms if you haven't checked it out right now is a great time because we're doing a giveaway with over thousands of dollars in prizes and all you have to do is subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on Apple podcast and I want an honest review tell me what's good tell me what's not good so I can improve this helps us reach more and more people each and every week to get highquality evidence-based content in their ears on their podcast so check it out at ralik md.com giveaway again that's ralik md.com giveaway so there has been a lot of conversation about what kind of diet is best for testosterone this started because of a meta analysis published in 2022 and this meta analysis was looking at how low carbohydrate diets specifically carbohydrates of less than 35% of the entire daily intake affect total testosterone and essentially there's a few reasons that this comes up one is you're taking in less calories and maybe in the short term you might increase some stressors on your body and both of those things increase stress and decreased caloric intake can cause a decrease in testosterone now it's not that straightforward because if you are overweight there's an abundance of data that says actually reducing your caloric intake and reducing your overall body weight can improve your testosterone so what is the actual truth about that well you want to have a healthy body weight and a minimum 10% but ideally 15% body weight is probably sufficient to allow for good testosterone production and the reason for this is that testosterone is a product a byproduct of the cholesterol synthesis pathway so you need cholesterol or healthy fats in order to make testosterone and if you get too low you will obviously reduce your fat intake as well and that will have a detrimental effect on your testosterone production and if your calorie intake gets too low your body then thinks it's starving right so it then goes on to prioritize functions that may be useful for survival rather than just reproduction which is the primary purposes of testosterone testosterone is not only important for sperm production but it's also important for things like sex drive brain health cognition bone health muscle mass mood so a whole host of factors are associated with testosterone basically to find out if carbohydrates affect testosterone they did what's called a metaanalysis so they Incorporated a whole bunch of studies that were looking at low carbohydrate diets and specifically they found 27 study with a total of 300 participants so this is not a huge number of people if you were taking a moderate protein intake with your low carbohydrates it didn't really impact your testosterone it didn't affect your testosterone at resting or after exercise but if you were taking high protein diet and low carbohydrate you did see a drop in your testosterone and so this finding really took off people in the mainstream media were talking about it people on social media were talking about it and people were saying hey we got to avoid high protein diets because it's going to tank your testosterone but in reality these studies were two studies looking at high protein it was 26 and nine men so really small studies for short duration and in response to this the authors actually issued an addendum saying that high protein in this case was actually very high protein so I delved a little deeper and it actually was higher than the Baseline was 3.4 G per kilogram of body weight so what is that in American units that's about 1 and a half grams of protein per pound of body weight so as I mentioned they called this a very high protein diet so let me give you an example of how much the average person would be taking in to be falling into this very high category you can see in the paper they describe very high as greater than 238 gram of protein intake per day which is literally an insane amount of protein and there's probably no population that's really reaching that much protein in fact fact in one study where they tried to give over 4 gram per kilogram per day the large majority of participants couldn't tolerate the diet they had too much GI upset and they couldn't do it so that brings us to the next one which is high high protein diet is probably somewhere between 1.9 to 3.4 G per kilogram per day which ends up being somewhere around 130 to 230 g of protein per day for a 70 kilogram individual so you're going to see people who are on the carnivore diet the paleo diet body body builders athletes who are probably in this range so we want to know are these people really at risk or if you ever get to that amount of protein are you at risk so as I mentioned the first three studies that looked at protein intake that were involved in that initial meta analysis found that there was a decrease in testosterone but they were all taking 3.5 to 3.9 grams per kilogram of body weight per day of protein again way higher than what most people can tolerate so when you look at the remain meaning studies that have looked at using high protein diets which is basically from8 to 1.5 G per pound per day you're not seeing a consistent decrease in total testosterone moreover these studies included a variety of different amounts of carbohydrates taken in with that amount of protein and again saw no difference why would a high level of protein even affect testosterone well the reason being is protein is made up of amino acids amino acids are the building blocks of protein now your body usually uses these amino acids for the activities of daily living right doing all the things you need to do they're the building blocks particularly if you're healing or you're bodybuilding or your weightlifting you need those building blocks to actually recover from illness or from bodybuilding now what happens is your body converts those amino acids to nitrogen if that nitrogen is not used up by the body it's converted into Ura which is then excreted through the urine and so the theory is that if you reach a certain threes hold which is called the maximum rate of Ura synthesis your body can no longer make any more Ura and then that nitrogen builds up and luckily that then diverts your body to dealing with that nitrogen rather than making more testosterone either way I think it's safe to say that you can eat protein and not worry about your testosterone if you want to learn more make sure to subscribe to this Channel and as always we going to take care of yourself because you're worth it

Dr.

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