The Environmental Costs of Building Human Muscle - a Comparison of Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Water Use and Land Use Between Plant-Based and Omnivorous Diets Following Sports Nutrition Protein Recommendations for Muscle Mass Accrual

The development of skeletal muscle mass is associated with improved athletic performance and cardiometabolic health. Resistance exercise training (RET) and dietary protein ingestion are two key anabolic stimuli that, when repeated consistently over time, promote the accrual of skeletal muscle mass. High protein diets, considerably above the United States RDA of 0.8g·kg bm-1·d-1, are therefore often recommended to support RET adaptations, with meta-analyses highlighting protein intakes of ~1.6g·kg bm-1·d-1 for optimal stimulation of skeletal muscle hypertrophy and strength gains. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics suggest that intakes beyond this may be optimal under certain circumstances such as short periods of intensified training or when significantly reducing energy intake.

It has been demonstrated that, in the context of a high-protein diet as a whole, both animal and plant-based protein sources lead to similar RET-induced gains in muscle size and strength. However, the difference in environmental impacts of plant and animal-based protein sources has been shown to be substantial. Both the direct processes related to livestock management (for example, methane production by ruminants) and indirect processes through the inefficiency of using crops for animal feed rather than directly for human consumption contribute to substantially higher environmental impacts for animal-based foods relative to plant-based foods.

Such differences have been highlighted by modeling the environmental impact of replacing population-level food intake with plant-based diets. For instance, a systematic review of 34 studies using environmental life cycle assessments found that, compared to omnivorous diets that followed the same dietary guidelines and caloric content, plant-based diets achieved median reductions of 59% for land use, 45% for water use, and 50% for GHG emissions. Other research has found that high income countries shifting towards a plant-based diet would reduce their annual agricultural production emissions by 61%.

However, established sports nutrition recommendations for protein intake to support RET-induced muscular adaptations differ from general population-level intakes. Therefore the difference in environmental impact between omnivorous and plant-based diets for adults following such recommendations is as yet unknown.

The present study therefore aims to compare the environmental impacts of RET-induced gains in lean mass through consumption of a high protein omnivorous diet with a protein-matched plant-based diet. A previously published study assessed the effects of dietary protein source during a 10-week high volume resistance training program, and found a high protein (~2.0g·kg bm-1·d-1), exclusively plant-based diet and a protein-matched mixed diet led to similar increases in lean mass and strength accrual.