I agree that 0.7 is actually quite a lot. It’s just not close to anything that the marketing people claim.

But just because it increased 0.7 kg in x weeks, doesn’t necessarily mean that it will do the same in the next x weeks. Unfortunately, most things have diminishing returns.

Hey Joseph,

Yes, you would expect similar results with amino acid supplementation. Amino acids can indeed be seen as pre-digested protein. Keep in mind that amino acids are more expensive than protein. In addition, food may contain other nutrients that are useful. So it’s not always ideal to strip nutrition down to the most basic building block. But yeah, fundamentally it’s the essential amino acids you need.

One consideration when supplementing amino acids is what composition you use. You need all the essential amino acids in appropriate amount to get a robust stimulation of protein synthesis. If you only consume BCAA’s for example, you miss some of the other essential amino acids and only get a small response. You don’t need to consume the non-essential amino acids, although when you don’t, you probably need more of the essentials to compensate.

Where the ingested protein or amino acids go is indeed determined by metabolic demands. For example, following exercise, more of the ingested protein ends up in muscle tissue. But it’s not black/white, all tissues will take up and ultilize ingested amino acids. The relative proportion will just depend on the condition.

You would have to specifically design a study to see if there’s a placebo effect and how big it is. It seems very likely there’s some placebo effect if you tell people the protein supplement will help them a lot.