How Many Calories Does It Take to Build a Kilogram of Muscle?

Now we're moving on to the topic of the day with the new article.

So what these dudes and dudettes, I don't remember which sex they were, what they wanted to do was to make an estimate of how much energy is required to build a kilo of muscle.

So no new original research, but rather synthesizing different existing sources.

And I don't think anyone has really tried to do this, at least not in the way these guys did.

There are some other numbers which we're gonna throw up in there, but yeah, kind of the newest, most modern estimate, I suppose.

But to begin with, let's look at what does one kilogram of muscle actually consist of.

And like, yeah...

It's mostly water.

More than two-thirds, almost three-quarters of a muscle is water.

72% in this estimate.

Out of that, we have like 18% of protein.

And I mean, if you were to chop up a steak from a human muscle, let it dry a little bit, you would land at those 20-25% grams of protein that you see in the meat you buy at the store.

quite lean meat if we're looking at a healthy well-used muscle here only three percent of fat which i suppose is reasonable but depending on which muscle you pick and from which person you you take it but this this is like in the vicinity of what's the term in english you know wild meat um game yeah not meat from an animal that has been you know sedentary and overfed

And also bred for its meat, meaning you do some selection.

Breeding on the cows, for instance, that have tastier meat than the other cows.

Why did we get into the whole cannibal? mood here anyways moving on down the list two percent of glycogen on average in a muscle i i wonder if that depletes shortly after you like remove it but we're not removing any meat here we're talking about living muscle tissue And we also have roughly half a percentage of creatine in the muscle.

So 80% protein, 2% or 3% of glycogen and fat, respectively, and less than a percent of creatine, but mostly water in the muscle.

Yeah.

So what does it cost to construct this? And they like divide the cost into different parts, so to say.

So the first one is just the stored tissue energy.

Like what is the energy that is stored in these tissues? And they get that, the calculator estimates that number at around 1,400 kilocalories per kilo of muscle.

And there are a couple of different sources like samming in and putting it around this number.

yeah then they have like the biochemical cost of synthesizing this tissue like when you put things together to create the protein and so on you need some energy to drive that synthesis and they put that at at a measly 160 kilocalories per kilo so That seems really, really effective to me.

But then they have a third, much bigger part, which they had a much fancier term, but I kind of call it inefficiencies or extra costs or redundancies because the human body isn't perfect and it isn't perfectly using all that energy.

So when you build this roughly 1,400 kilocalories per kilo of stored energy, you waste almost as much in the production of it.