Gorillas are 99.9% vegetarian: Its all about catabolism

[Tronald]

Adult male gorillas stand between 6ft and 7ft tall and weigh between 400 and 600 pounds. Their diet is 99.9% plant matter, with just .1% being insects and worms-- but they may eat 75lbs of plant matter per day.

Gorillas build freakin' huge muscles on what any human would call a zero-protein, high carb diet.

Scientists have only one really good explanation for the vast difference between the size and muscle that Gorillas pack on with a vegetable diet versus how humans struggle to get big and lean on diets with vastly more protein: Humans burn/metabolize protein and muscle, Gorillas don't.

Its all the fault of myostatin--the hormone that tells the body to burn its muscle. We also know that humans without myostatin are natural muscle freaks.

Rather than eating more protein (that's just going to get "burned up") why arent we more focused on stopping catabolism?

Right now, our answer is to eat so much protein that our body can't burn it all in order that we can keep some. But all we're really doing is feeding/encouraging our body's habit of burning protein.

I think the backers of Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA..a fat) are on to something: if we eat more fat, we teach our bodies to burn fat, and can both lose fat and gain muscle. We gain the muscle not because of the protein we eat, but because of the protein we save from burning.

I have cut back on protein and boosted my CLA intake and I think it is working, both burning fat (which is hard on all high calorie diets, whether high protein or high carb) and adding muscle (which is hard in all diets;-)

Just as it isn't the fat you eat that makes you fat (its the simple carbs), it isn't the protein you eat that makes you muscular (it might be the CLA).

[theunknown]

This is interesting. How are you increasing CLA intake? what foods or supplements have CLAs?

[mewletter]

Eggs, meat & dairy products of course! But make sure your milk & beef (and mutton) are from grass-fed cattle. Which already are high in protein too. As for the gorillas, it all comes down to genetics. Still, it's no harm experimenting the diet once in a while and see the results.