Eat Whole Eggs And Not Just Whites For Muscle Building Says Research

A research team has recently published a report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, saying that people consuming whole eggs instead of egg whites post their workouts build and repair muscles better. The researchers observed that consumption of whole eggs increases the post-workout muscle-building response by 40 percent as compared to consumption of only egg whites.

The Whole Egg Story

The research was led by Nicholas Burd, a University of Illinois professor of kinesiology and community health who told Science Daily that egg yolks also had proteins along with important nutrients which cannot be found in the whites. Plus, the yolks boost the body ability to absorb the proteins, he added. “This study suggests that eating protein within its most natural food matrix tends to be more beneficial to our muscles as opposed to getting one’s protein from isolated protein sources,” he told the publication.

Talking about the research conducted Burd said, “We saw that if you ate the whole egg or the egg whites, the same amount of dietary amino acids became available in your blood,” Burd said. “In each case, about 60 to 70 percent of the amino acids were available in the blood to build new muscle protein. That would suggest that getting one’s protein from whole eggs or just from the whites makes no difference, as the amount of dietary amino acids in the blood after eating generally gives us an indication of how potent a food source is for the muscle-building response.”

“We saw that the ingestion of whole eggs immediately after resistance exercise resulted in greater muscle-protein synthesis than the ingestion of egg whites,” Burd explained. “There’s a lot of stress on protein nutrition in modern society, and research is showing that we need more protein in the diet than we once thought to maintain health. As world population grows, we need cost-effective and sustainable strategies for improving the use of protein in the diet. This work is showing that consuming egg protein in its natural matrix has a much greater benefit than getting isolated protein from the same source.”