Past roughly 1.6g/kg/day of protein (~0.7g/lb), training — not extra grams — is what actually drives muscle gain.

noli's read

Jeremy Ethier offers a useful ceiling: somewhere around 0.6-0.7g per pound (1.3-1.6g/kg) of bodyweight, you've captured most of protein's contribution to muscle growth, and eating more barely moves the needle further. That number lines up well with the landmark dose-response meta-analysis on the topic (Morton et al., 2018, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 1,863 participants), which places the breakpoint at 1.62g/kg/day — but the citation he actually gives (Nunes et al., 2022, Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, PMID 35187864) is a different meta-analysis that doesn't find quite as clean a plateau: it shows a positive effect that keeps going, albeit modestly, past 1.6g/kg, without pinning down a hard ceiling. A more recent, detailed re-analysis of the Morton data (Nuckols, 2024, Stronger by Science) argues the 1.62g/kg 'breakpoint' rests on a fragile statistical method, and that the real ceiling for maximizing muscle gain sits closer to 2.0-2.35g/kg. The core message — training matters far more than the last gram of protein, and most people already eat enough — holds up and does real good by de-dramatizing the protein-counting obsession, but the specific number is a bit conservative and attached to a citation that isn't quite the one that established it. Verdict: mixed.

the sources

1. 1Morton RW, Murphy KT, McKellar SR, et al. 2018
2. 2Leidy HJ, Clifton PM, Astrup A, et al. 2015