Best Muscle Building Foods

When it comes to building muscle, not all foods are made equal. Here are some of the best time-tested foods that help you build muscle.

Fruits and veggies: you might be surprised by this one, since fruits and veggies do not contain a lot of protein. But the purpose of fruits and veggies is not to help you build muscle directly, but rather to keep your body in good health, so that it can repair muscle more effectively.

Fruits and veggies contain antioxidants, phytochemicals, fiber, and other substances that slow down the aging process, keep your digestive system functional and clean, and provide you with innumerable benefits that would take  pages to list.

Also, a specific type of vegetable, crucifeous vegetables, reduce estrogen levels in the body, thereby increasing the level of free testosterone in your body that will help you to build more muscle.

Thus, never understimate the anabolic power of salad or a piece of fruit: there’s more to it than meets the eye!

Meats: meats have been a staple of bodybuilding since its inception. There are usually two kinds of meats: “white” meat which tends to be low in saturated fat such as chicken or turkey, and “red” meat such as steak or beef which tends to be high in saturated fat.

Nowadays, many bodybuilders opt for the low-fat options such as chicken and turkey because they are afraid of gaining fat while building muscle, and they are also concerned about the possible health risks of eating foods with high levels of saturated fat.

But there’s nothing better sometimes than eating a good piece of T-bone with your buddies. Red meat may be higher in saturated fat, but it also tends to have a lot of high quality protein along with creatine. Bodybuilders of the Golden Era ate red meat in good amounts, including Arnold.

The ideal would be to combine both white and red meat, while keeping the latter to moderate amounts that way you won’t be putting your health at risk while obtaining high-quality animal protein.

Eggs: eggs have sometimes been called the “perfect” food. This has been debated by others because some health authorities are concerned that the high levels of cholesterol in eggs might lead to health problems down the road. Other health authorities, however, question whether there is a link between dietary cholesterol and the cholesterol produced by the body.

Regardless of the debate, eggs are a time-tested muscle-building food. According to the Iron Guru, Vince Gironda, eggs are the best food for building muscle, pure and simple. In far, he went as far as to say that eating tons of raw eggs was like taking steroids!

One can certainly take issue with such a statement, but there’s no doubt that eggs contain some of the highest-quality proteins out there, and that if taken in moderation, you can build muscle by eating eggs without dangerously increasing your cholesterol levels.

It is your choice, of course, whether you just want to eat the egg whites or eat the entire egg. Many professional bodybuilders just take the egg whites in order to keep calories and cholesterol down, but some modern strength coaches, like Charles Poliquin, argue that by discarding the yolk, we are throwing out something of great nutritional value.

At the end of the day, just remember that eggs are here to stay as a bodybuilding food: there’s no way around them!

Dairy (milk, cheese, sour cream): this is by far my favorite food group of them all. Long before the introduction of steroids to the sports world in general, strongmen of the past used to drink milk in gallons in order to “bulk” up, or build muscle.

Arnold was also very fond of milk. Just go to any regular supplement store and take a look at the protein powders. You will see that many of them say “whey” protein, “casein”, and other such names. Well, all of these proteins have been obtained from milk!

Dairy is great precisely because of this: it contains whey, which is a fast-releasing protein, and casein, a slow-releasing protein. In other words, if you drink milk after a workout, amino acids are going to be released into the bloodstream immediately, and for hours to come as the casein begins to be broken down by your stomach acid. Thus, your body will be in an anabolic state for many hours without having to eat very much in-between meals.

Dairy is also great because apart from providing the best types of proteins out there, it also provides your body with much-neeed carbohydrates and fat. For this very reason, an authority on body recomposition like Lyle McDonald has been recommending that people take milk as a post-workout drink!

To conclude, these foods are some of the best sources of protein you can get, and should therefore always be taken into account when planning a muscle-building diet.

If you are concerned about some of the health risks involved with these foods, always remember to consult your doctor first, and to eat everything in moderation.