Layne Norton has beaten this topic to death with research AND as a natural bodybuilder and athlete.
Instead of writing out a long ass post with sources, Layne has done it for us. Go read this and watch his video:
Recently a study that was discussed on Jackson Peos’ Instagram was brought to my attention regarding protein intake at a single meal. Let's get into it.
biolayne.com
Now to be clear- if you’re a 200 pound bodybuilder eating 400g of protein per day. I would still suggest eating 6 meals of roughly 65g protein per meal instead of 4 meals of 100g protein.
What’s easier on our GI and mental state? 8oz of chicken or 16oz chicken per sitting… this is where real life application comes in as a bodybuilder.
Now if you’re trying to be healthy or an athlete eating 1g per pound of bodyweight (example only) then eat it all in four meals.
I tell people all the time- if I was not a competitive bodybuilder trying to push as many calories as possible at the amount of protein that I am then I’d only eat 4 times a day because it’s all the body would need.
It’s that simple, nothing more, nothing less.
But there is no threshold where someone eats over a set amount of protein per meal and it just gets “wasted”.
Worse case scenario if you’re in caloric surplus then some could be stored as fat, which extremely rare and unlikely given the process it would have to go through.
People worry about eating “too much protein” on here commonly, but it’s rare in “real life” I see someone remotely come near that issue… carbs and fats, sure. But show me someone who doesn’t know when to put down the lean dry ass chicken breast. Let’s use some common sense.