Protein Timing, Not Just Protein

Two days can carry an identical 150g of protein and be nothing alike. Eaten as one large dinner, most of it arrives in a single sitting past the point where more protein keeps driving muscle protein synthesis any harder. Eaten as four servings of around 37g, each one clears the threshold and the response is triggered four separate times. Daily totals, the number nearly every tracker reports and then stops at, cannot tell these two days apart. The dose that maximally stimulates synthesis in one sitting works out at roughly 0.24g per kg of bodyweight for young adults and around 0.40g per kg for older ones, which is why the practical recommendation is about 0.4g/kg per meal across at least four meals.

Kriterion uses the higher figure for everyone rather than branching on age: for a younger user it is a slightly conservative target rather than a wrong one, and splitting a threshold this soft by age would imply a precision the studies do not support. One deliberate limit: on a genuinely low-protein day the app says so instead of scoring the distribution, because the useful advice there is to eat more, not to rearrange what little there was.