How to Stay Young, Smart and Fit Forever | Gabrielle Lyon on Health Theory

animal protein and plant protein are totally different and if you have a diet of plant protein it is very hard to sustain and calorically devastating because you need between 25 and 40 percent more so it's like six cups of quinoa for one small chicken breast hey everyone this episode is brought to you by our sponsor better help an online counseling company with the mission to make professional counseling accessible affordable and convenient i hope you enjoy everybody welcome to health theory today's guest is dr gabrielle lyon she's a functional medicine doctor who completed her fellowship in nutrition and geriatrics from washington university one of the best medical schools in the world she's board certified in family medicine has a doctor in osteopathy has her own clinical practice and has made a name for herself by taking an integrative muscle-centric approach to health and wellness welcome to the show thank you for having me yeah for sure i'm super fascinated by your muscle-centric approach and that was sort of the very beginning of my journey was realizing if i wanted to get the body composition that i wanted to get that i needed to put on some muscle um and you're the first person i've heard talk specifically about taking a muscle-centric approach so i'd love if you um just quickly give like a rapid description of what it means to be sort of muscle-centric that'd be amazing so i practiced this concept of muscle-centric medicine and it's really this idea that muscle is the organ of longevity right now everybody focuses on adiposity being over fat there's the constant struggle against the bulge but that's the wrong way of thinking it's not about being over fat that is just the byproduct of being under muscle so the true way to fix everything is optimizing muscle tissue and really changing the paradigm of thinking it's not about being over fat which is why it hasn't worked it truly is from a metabolic perspective about being under-muscled so talk to me a little bit about um when we look at what it means to be optimized for muscle mass i get why being obese is wildly problematic fat itself is an organ it's a sign it signals to the rest of the body it's pro-inflammatory um it can hurt joints just in terms of being too much weight one why hasn't focusing on that worked and then two why is muscle the answer um to the problem yeah certainly well it's kind of like what you focus on you get more of and by constantly focusing on the pathology of adipose tissue it's the wrong perspective and i think that that's largely what's wrong with the western medicine approach it's constantly chasing the outside pathology as opposed to a symptom yeah it's a and when you do that you're constantly chasing your tail but really it's truly an issue of muscle tissue so defects and issues with the muscle actually happen first adiposity is secondary and how i really like to think about it is it's like a suitcase stuffing you know a whole bunch of stuff into a suitcase which would be carbohydrates or glycogen and really over packing it and then having things spill back out and that's exactly and then when it spills back out that's when you get fat right so i had an employee who used to be an olympic level swimmer and when he detailed what he ate i was like bro you are going to die so soon this is crazy how are you not morbidly obese he was like eating french fries and chicken nuggets from mcdonald's and eating something like 12 000 calories i could be a little off but it was so absurdly high that i was like this is insane and he was quite lean so is the hypothesis the reason that he was lean that he's using his muscles so much and he's in a state of burning the carbohydrates at such a ridiculously high level that he's sort of unable to put on the fat because the muscles are essentially taking care of it and that's a really good framework to think about it there that would be multifactorial certainly the amount of output that he has with all that activity he's utilizing a ton of carbohydrates because he's a carbohydrate adapted athlete as opposed to say someone who eats less carbohydrates and more fat so the reason he didn't get fat was probably number one he was young his hormones were good right high testosterone and he was putting in so many hours that he was utilizing everything so people have i think a high level understanding of there are three macronutrients and they probably have heard things like carbohydrates cause you to store fat and water um that the muscles burn glucose like at that level um but my question is where it begins to get fuzzy for people is like what's happening when you use your muscle like muscle mass even just having it is going to be protective is going to allow you to consume more calories without putting on adipose tissue so i think explaining to people maybe the function of muscle as an organ would be really helpful oh my pleasure probably my favorite topic so muscle as your metabolic currency it is largely responsible for your resting metabolic rate which is really essentially the calories that you burn at breast it is one of the largest sites for glucose disposal which is exactly what you were talking about whatever twinkie diet he was on was being utilized by the muscle tissue and another component of skeletal muscle is that it's a site of fatty acid oxidation so we hear a lot about high cholesterol well actually muscle is so metabolically active that's one of the fuels that it uses so truly the three components of muscle as a metabolic organ are number one resting metabolic rate it determines everything about what you're doing muscle mass is incredibly unique in multiple different ways you know really not just as locomotion which i think in our 20s we all think about muscle as locomotion and looking good in a bikini or mankini whatever you choose but really the the true essence and the true benefits of muscle are far beyond that just as its ability to utilize calories utilize energy and you know of course we have to get into the topic of the importance of high quality protein which i'm sure that we'll talk about but muscle in and of itself is so interesting it's actually an endocrine organ so when you contract it it secretes things it secretes proteins one of these proteins are called you know this group of proteins is essentially called myokines so it's responsible for all those things that i mentioned the resting metabolic rate the glucose disposal fatty acid oxidation but also interestingly just as you had pointed out of the uh fat adipose tissue being an organ which is the nemesis of muscle right it's the nemesis of muscle muscle in itself when you contract it also secretes things these myocains go throughout the body and are anti-inflammatory things like interleukin-6 bdnf for brain function it's just multi there's just there's many many so bdnf is is something brain-derived neurotropic factor if i'm uh getting that right so that's the people have referred to it as sort of a feel-good chemical so you talked about muscle as an endocrine system for anybody that's not familiar with endocrinology that's basically hormones so um is that what triggers the release of bdnf is the actual contraction of the muscle i mean it's certainly part of it yes especially now when you think about that balance of inflammation muscle also releases interleukin-6 which people always think of you know as the cytokine storm as this interleukin that causes all these damaging things down the line but truly muscle as an organ secreting interleukin-6 actually has an anti-inflammatory effect so walk me through then when my my tissues are at rest the the metabolic rate is that the tissues are repairing themselves like how does that they're just very active they're turning over you know they have mitochondria it's just an active tissue they break down protein you know build new protein it's just this kind of balance between an anabolic catabolic effect continuously turning over okay so anabolic being building muscle catabolic being tearing it down um talk to me because this is one of the things that ends up making muscle so critical for people to understand as they get older more and more critical you've talked about how muscle is basically a storage place for um amino acids and i know that like if somebody gets severely burned they almost can't take in enough amino acids as you get older if you get sick muscle if i'm not mistaken muscle is one of the like most direct predictors of mortality um that's amplitude if you want to survive the more muscle you have the more likely you will survive so what i'm assuming that's like a form of catabolic where the body's like yo we've got a problem in the immune system we've got a problem with in the case of burns trying to um replenish the tissues so what is the body breaking the muscle down into so it typically breaks it down to amino acids so it's an amino acid reservoir and those amino acids are utilized for fuels and it's really a storage form and also you know it goes there's other proteins in the body that may require it but typically it's that amino acid reservoir it's really interesting so i've always not always but certainly in my once i became aware of what's really going on in nutrition in the body you recognize that fat has this incredible role to play which is you can imagine us out foraging hunting and there's a period where you don't have any and it's a battery it's essentially like hey mitochondria is going to need it for the process of generating atp which is the energy that actually keeps the cells alive and allows them to function and then so you're like whoa it's actually really powerful in a context where we can't just overeat overeat overeat you get why the ability to store fat is this incredibly powerful thing so i'm in a store basically potential energy fantastic literally you're you're the first person i'm aware of to talk about musculature as a storage mechanism as well and being able to store um many different things that the body ends up needing um why you know that way you don't want to do that so you don't want to rely on your store of amino acids you don't you want to keep that muscle as healthy as you can for as long as you can and that's really where this whole kind of question of dietary protein comes in because as we age and just really overall there's only two ways to stimulate muscle mass and that's i'm sure you know from the quest days is dietary protein right that's essential and then resistance training but in society right now we have we have really two fundamental issues we have this fixation on obesity and that is the pathology versus the cure which is under muscle so that that's one venue and then you have this dietary component where people are incredibly confused about optimizing protein protein is incredibly emotional for people and it's really the key macronutrient for maintaining muscle mass and also helping with obesity diabetes alzheimer's cardiovascular disease these are pathologies these are metabolic pathologies that can be corrected by having healthy muscle tissue it's interesting so let me ask a super pointed question you can only pull one lever so if you you have two levers you have diet and you have muscle mass which would you have somebody pull for longevity you can have an amazing diet but you have very little muscle mass you don't do a lot of exercising or you're like my swimmer friend and you have in just incredible output you're exerting yourself tremendously you've a great amount of lean body mass we all know what swimmers look like they look fantastic but your diet is a twinkie diet like you called it which of those two levers is going to be more impactful okay so i'm going to tell you what the research shows and then i'm going to tell you my personal experience word so the research would say hey if you had to prioritize one over the other prioritize resistance training okay that being said in clinical practice i have absolutely never seen that work if they prioritize dietary protein and they get that first meal right by lunch they feel better i'm not asking them to wait four weeks you nail that first meal by the second meal you feel better you want to deal with body composition you want to deal with optimal aging you want to overcome this concept of anabolic resistance which we can talk about the only and most effective now again this is my personal opinion based on seeing hundreds and i've been at the bedside of hundreds of dying people geriatrics is no joke and if i could pull the lever and go back in time what would i tell them you know i would say you've got to do both but when you're young you have more flexibility and you can out train a bad diet but as soon as those hormones begin to change if you have low quality protein and by the way protein is utilized in a dose response so it's a a meal dosage it's really a 30 to 50 gram meal dosing so that's between four and you know five to six ounces of protein per meal and if you go under under that you are below what's called this leucine threshold and i want to make this very palatable for people so basically there's essential amino acids and out of these essential amino acids that's really what determines the quality of a person's diet and the quality of protein so when they are sub threshold of one particular amino acid which is leucine if you eat food that is sub threshold to that two and a half grams of leucine you will be skinny fat you will never activate the proper mechanisms to turn over muscle protein synthesis and this is a huge problem in our society you know there's nutrient sensors in the body so hitting that particular amino acid load which is really four to six ounces easy and it's easy for people to anchor their meals in you know four to six ounces of protein and then you stimulate your muscle tissue which we know is an endocrine organ let's talk about that if you're not trying to body build if you're not trying to get bigger um so i'm thinking i know somebody love her to death she's amazing but her diet is ridiculous but she's skinny her whole family's skinny it's crazy and so i've always said i guarantee if you look at her biomarker she's going to be skinny fat she's going to be probably pre-diabetic judging by how she eats it's you know pure insanity because i want to differentiate between busting your ass in the gym and what you're going to get from that and then just like hey even if you don't care about the gym even if you don't buy into that there's just a quality of tissue issue and if you think of it as an organ it's like saying the quality of the tissue of your liver or your kidneys it's like this matters so if people could do one thing and leave this conversation with nothing else other than muscle is the organ of longevity and eat high quality protein animal protein and plant protein are totally different and if you have a diet of plant protein it is very hard to sustain and calorically devastating because you need between 25 and 40 percent more so it's like six cups of quinoa for one small chicken breast if you really wanted to think about the amino acids necessary to stimulate that tissue and listen that's not the only way to do it could we add in branched chain amino acids to lower quality protein absolutely but why would you do that when we have you know cattle or a ruminants that have that we've been consuming for two and a half million years and have the capacity to take low quality plant nutrition and produce high quality nutrition with that is nutrient dense and highly bioavailable for humans so i understand i've heard you say the same thing like i understand people have they may have a um a moral desire to eat plant-based food and i get that due to somebody who's absolutely i just love animals and i long for the day where we can lab grow meat and that there was never an animal i'm involved in that process but i'm also just selfish enough to say i'm going to protect my health you know when you look at obviously sustainable farming and things like that i'm all for it i couldn't be more behind that but wanting to understand sort of at a mechanistic cellular level what's happening and i don't care what the answer is vegan vegetarian animal a mix thereof i just want to understand like at a cellular level what's happening um and to get that i think understanding the what branch chain amino acids are why they matter and how the profiles differ from plants to meat i think would be really helpful yeah i i couldn't agree with you more so really the quality of our diet and this is globally the quality of our diet is largely dependent on protein so there's 20 amino acids and nine of those are essential of those essential amino acids an essential meaning i i cannot produce it in my body exactly so the key branch chain amino acids and when you think about branched chain it's just a structure right it's just a nomenclature you've got leucine isoleucine and baleen and out of those three which by the way should all be consumed together because everything in life has its own balance of those three amino acids leucine is the most relevant for protecting the organ of longevity and on a cellular level having the right amount at one time dosed appropriately which is where that two and a half grams that's from the that's just from research you know it's really truthfully it's between 1.8 to 2.5 grams of leucine which the majority of people are not going to go how much leucine is in my food right it's not on the back of a label which just goes to show you how protein has been the black sheep of the macronutrient family for decades when you look at a label all it simply says is protein but understanding on a cellular level that really eating protein at a meal centric dosing meaning you at one time you're not drinking protein shakes over a course of two hours but at one meal at a boldest amount you are getting between 30 and 50 grams of protein which would translate to between four and six ounces of high quality protein would reach that leucine threshold so once you reach that leucine threshold you trigger this this complex called mtor mtor is the mechanistic target of rapamycin which then is actually a nutrient sensor anything below that the body's like i don't care i'm not going to put on muscle or i don't care i'm not going to really stimulate this very expensive elaborate process for the body it doesn't care so that's where you get skinny fat because you're grazing all day at this low threshold meal especially important in aging because you don't have that flexibility and when i say aging i'm talking about 40s you know you've got to stay on top of it but once you reach that threshold of arguably two and a half grams of leucine which you could have a two ounces of fish and then a scoop of branched chain and get up that leucine level but mechanistically you need that branch chain that essential amino acid to then trigger the rest of what needs to happen for muscle protein synthesis and listen the way that they measure muscle protein synthesis it's not like you eat it and then you're laying down protein it truly i mean that's not an accurate assessment right i would be um not being truthful if i said that but it really is a period of time over a period of time as you continue to do with anything correct optimized habits you then can protect your tissue and protecting tissue is everything you know and it's very dangerous because when people do weight loss you know you lose some fat but you also lose tissue and now we're in a situation where we're not outside and we're not doing resistance training and we're not actually moving that endocrine organ so you know it becomes much more difficult to maintain and recoup that tissue and the tissue is just one aspect it's truly the metabolic aspects you know of the of muscle and if you want to prevent diabetes heart disease alzheimer's cardiovascular you know cardiovascular disease that whole spectrum tissue you know muscle tissue will do that for you and then you put on high quality protein you're going to keep inflammation low you're going to keep calories in check you're going to up regulate your thermoeffective feeding these are all really important you're going to do you're going to have lower blood pressure because some of the amino acids one in particular helps lower blood pressure i mean this is amazing stuff it's a muscle-centric approach to wellness and the paradigm is totally wrong yeah it feels very different like when when i started working out you can actually feel just the difference in in a lot of things you can feel the difference in mobility and strength and just overall well-being um and then some of the data in terms of how people bounce back from long-term chronic illness i know in the cancer community one of the the things they look at is when muscle mass gets too low they're just like they're they're one illness away from demise and same thing with old people it's like hey you might be able to survive the flu if you've got enough muscle to see you through but if not then you could really be in trouble so it's interesting to hear that broken down i want to go back to what you were saying about that first meal um which i think you're quite careful not to necessarily refer to it as breakfast but your first meal um getting getting that right i'd love to hear what right is like in the real world am i eating eggs am i eating chicken breast am i eating quinoa like what am i eating you are not eating so if you get that first meal right if your meal is bolus with protein you do a few things number one you stimulate your muscle tissue which is arguably the most important organ right but number two there and there's really good data that it actually helps with satiation and blood sugar regulation so you are not going to be chasing 90 minutes later your um blood sugar you are not going to be obsessed in your mind and not able to focus because you want to eat or you feel like you have to take a nap yeah i encourage people to try to overeat steamed chicken breast it's like good luck like you will tap out long before you get obese that is for sure um so what are give me some ideal protein sources am i eating is it chicken breast is it red meat so we eat a lot of beef in our family beef bison eggs uh we are not a low fat family so you know for breakfast for us might be half a pound of bison each with a little bit of olive oil and maybe some avocado but we're low carb for that first meal we tend to do carb back loading or if we're going to have carbohydrates use carbohydrates around a meal now my husband is a seal so they you know they kind of like go crazy and train and then eat and train that's navy seal for anybody wondering no arguably he's probably an animal but it's okay um so that's how we but the first meal is always the same why do you do carbs later in the day that's interesting because you've been up and you've been utilizing your tissue so you depleted your muscle glycogen essentially i mean listen the data would show in a 24 hour period so i want to be very careful to say this is my experience because the data will say well in a 24-hour period how much carbohydrates are you utilizing and i would say it's much easier to backload your carbohydrates or utilize them around training perhaps post-workout so i do believe that training low glycogen state is very beneficial do you work out fasted or do you have your first meal i do so i work out fasted and do you have a strategy behind why you do that so i think that training low i like my body to become very proficient and and and efficient on its own i like to be able to make all the glucose i need right and because my diet is high in protein there is what happens is it goes through gluconeogenesis so truly for every 100 grams of protein that i eat my body generates 60 grams of carbohydrates itself so i am not reliant on quinoa for breakfast or carbohydrates my body becomes so good at making and generating its own that it allows me to eat any carbohydrates in you know truthfully i don't need a bunch of carbs it when i work them in it would be you know possibly if we had a really busy day we have a little infant you know and we have no child care so we're just kind of you know busy and we're training and you know if i've gone for a lot of training that day and i'm running around chasing her i might have you know and it's meal specific so there's a carbohydrate threshold which is how i like to think about carbohydrates i might have you know 20 grams of some kind of carbohydrate in the evening and and truly the carbs that i love and everybody says this are green leafy you know vegetables but i really like things like cilantro and chives things that maybe have more medicinal purposes and that's really what we use so so herbs is medicine which one's what effect i am certainly not an expert on herbs but i will tell you one of the things that we use is this isn't an herb but i'm just very strategic so like in the morning i'll use something called sun up green coffee and it's it's this one company that i just really love and i have no connection to them but they have a product that i think nobody knows about that everybody should and it's raw green coffee so it looks like tea i don't make it i get it clear like that it look it tastes like tea and it really and it has a high amount of polyphenols which i know that there's a lot of debate in but i believe in polyphenols and what does what do the polyphenols do for you so they're antioxidant they have numerous effects anti-cancer activity and i will tell you that i am able to maintain my body composition by doing these very strategic things and just being very conscientious of utilizing simple tools that i have found incredibly helpful like for example um jalapenos using raw jalapenos with capsaicin you know the whole goal is optimizing body composition and you utilize these in an you know over a period of time in enough amounts and the body generates its own effect and listen this is totally subjective you do have to control for calories but there are things that we just as scientists or as practitioners physicians don't necessarily understand but i can tell you that it works so i use chlorogenic acid in the morning i've never heard of that what is it that's the green coffee that's why i use the green card fluorogenic acid yeah has high amounts of chlorogenic acid you're going to treat those syllables put together before chlorogenic acid okay it's a compound that helps with fatty acid metabolism interesting okay so we have our green coffee um and then uh what else are we doing in terms of um herbs um a lot of cilantro and they you know there's some belief in through what mechanism i don't know but very detoxifying you know a lot of individuals with quote heavy metals will utilize a cilantro based kind of compound cilantro parsley chives garlic people are like i am not coming your house that's all right but it would be interesting because i think that that's the you know i think we're all looking for ways to optimize longevity at the not just at the end of life so it doesn't really matter if you live to 100 versus 105 or 95 to 100 if the last five years suck right so how do we live a way that surpasses what we've seen for longevity but the quality of our life is together and that's the question is not the length right so it's not quantity of life it truly is quality towards the end so really i'm starting to experiment with these things as it relates to longevity and quality really fast give people a bit of a breakdown on your background in geriatrics one i don't know that everybody knows what geriatrics is and then two i know you spend a lot of time in palliative care so what that is and sort of the it's giving you sort of a tough edge and no approach to this that i really respect so first what is geriatrics and palliative care and what have you learned from it yeah and i'm going to tell you where muscle-centric medicine came from there was a turning point moment that was during my fellowship um so geriatrics is really it's taking care of aging and it's over the it's 65 and older and that's what's considered geriatrics and then palliative care is the end of life so you are really at the end of your life whether it's a month or so and and that's really transitioning to the other side whatever that other side is so when i did my fellowship at washu it was a two-year fellowship and part of the deal was i was going to get to do nutritional sciences so i've trained seven years in nutritional sciences but the deal the deal is in order to do clinical research so i did two years of clinical research part of the way that it worked was as a physician i also had to have clinical duties part of those clinical duties the agreement was you know there's always a give and take um the agreement was i got to do obesity medicine and run a weight loss clinic and and image people's brains and be part of you glycemic clamps and do all this really rad stuff but in order for me to do that i had to take care of people in nursing homes at the end of life in the hospital and geriatrics and i'm sure everybody many people have had aging parents it is not i mean diseases of aging are heart crushing bone sucking like it is so harsh and that's why i feel so passionate about this message because i've actually done the work and sat at the bedside of these people you know and at the end at that moment in time you can look back and you know people have a lot of regrets and i will never forget and muscle-centric medicine came from a very specific moment part of the research i was doing is i was imaging people's brains it was obese brains midlife incredible women around you know late 40s early 50s and i have to change the name of this woman so we'll call her sarah and sarah was the nicest woman and she had three kids she'd been overweight her whole life and i'd stay with her you know we did 24 hour euglycemic lamp sit with her and you really get to know these people you see them at multiple points in the study and one of the parts of the study was imaging her brain just to see what her brain looked like and when we imaged her brain she had a lot of like flattening of her matter and it came from midlife obesity and we knew that within you know really 10 years down the line she's going to have alzheimer's what is the flapping of the matter what is that so the gray matter right so that the brains the wider the waistline the lower the brain volume so alzheimer's they're meant there are many multiple different aspects of alzheimer's but alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes of the brain it's a metabolic illness that can be prevented just like diabetes just like cardiovascular disease just like hypertension and listen i i want to say this with a little bit of reserve because there are genetic components lifestyle choices mid-life having access to the right information changes the trajectory of aging i was so heartbroken when we reviewed her fmri study i was heartbroken because all she told me was you know i've emotionally eaten my whole life i have three children i'm a stay-at-home mom and i put everybody first and her habits were so deeply ingrained and she was obese her muscle tissue wasn't there she literally in the next decade was going to have alzheimer's and she had no idea what she's in store for or what her family was in store for and at that moment i knew that chasing body fat was the wrong thing to do it was all about muscle as this metabolic organ and if she had turned her attention to protecting that because it controls body composition it's metabolically the the bigger the waistline the smaller the brain why yeah what mechanistically is happening because it is very inflammatory so there is insulin receptors in the brain you know it can affect the br the blood-brain barrier insulin resistance in the body and insulin resistance in the brain and one of the other things and we'll talk about muscle but the the the protein component affects satiety so that overeating that emotional eating your body is going to feed until it gets the protein that it needs and that's something super interesting looking at cravings from that perspective yeah and it's actually called the protein protein leverage hypothesis and this is well maintained throughout species where they will feed so you'll continue to eat and overeat and overeat if you're eating a low protein diet until you reach that protein need for these to tidy mechanisms to shut itself up very troubling so now give me what does muscle do that interrupts that why is it anti-inflammatory like if we look at what i just laid out as how we get too much insulin into the system what's muscle's role in so muscle is the largest site for glucose disposal glucose in and of itself is cytotoxic it is really critical to get glucose out of the bloodstream and take it up one of the ways the largest site for disposal is actually muscle tissue the more muscle you have the more metabolically healthy it is the more that it's actually utilizing nutrients appropriately the more carbohydrate flexibility you actually have so it's in and of itself protective and we talked about when you when you contract it by secreting myokines it is anti-inflammatory so fat is the nemesis of muscle talk to me about what the muscles are secreting um this isn't uh interleukin 6 i'm familiar with only because of what's going on with coronavirus so that sort of cytokine storms and stuff is that's become more um people are talking about it more but the other stuff like what you just said which i i couldn't even tell you what you just said um what's that called again and why is it anti-inflammatory so the interleukin-6 is really the big one that's what muscle is famous for but when you think about muscle tissue as it relates to inflammation and obesity and really protecting sarah the story that i told you if she had been able to get her tissue under control just mechanistically from getting her protein intake up right and making sure that that tissue was emptied but because she was largely inactive and you know there's this this concept where when the muscle is full everything starts feeling back into the tissue or it just can't get in so basically you have an increase remember there was this whole big discussion about branched chain branch chain amino acids cause diabetes because everyone with elevated glucose also had elevated branched chain amino acids i've never heard that before tell me more there's some research that had come out where people had mistakenly said well those with elevated levels of branched chain amino acids it correlates to high level you know it correlates to diet bran chain amino acids in the bloodstream that's right correct and actually that's absolutely true but not for the reason people think the reason it was true is because branched chain amino acids are utilized by the muscle but there's let me guess so this is that backup mechanism right so the brand chain amino acids should be going into the muscle but they're full what are they full with they're full of glucose no full of glucose they're full of fat they're just full they can't accept any more substrate because they're not being used exactly now we're on to some now we're on to it so these diseases of obesity these diseases of being over fat they're not diseases of being over fat they are diseases of impaired muscle so if you fix that muscle tissue and that's through lifestyle keeping inflammation low keeping calories in check and truly we are domesticated as a planet can we define fix so when we say fit because if you had stopped shy of the word fixed i would have said add more muscle which is where i always expect you to go is this a a game of quantity and quality primarily quality um these are great questions and i i don't think anybody knows the answer and here's why because muscle is the most under under-appreciated organ we have percentages of body fat that we know are not great but we don't know i don't know what percent muscle mass you should be you don't know what percent muscle mass i should be and this is so important to understand because if we really truly want to help obesity alzheimer's cardiovascular disease it's really about optimizing muscle tissue and nobody knows that answer i would say from a professional opinion quality and quantity matter of course i'm not talking about in the extremes of you know a bodybuilder in the olympia although that's incredibly healthy tissue right oh can i tell you a secret here's something i would love to know how does muscle mass correlate with um surviving coronavirus i thought about that kind of early on and i thought i do wonder well if you think about it the higher the muscle mass the better the protection against all cause mortality and more bit just in general crazy people need to let that one sink in across all cause mortality i agree so listen if someone goes and they're on a vent or they're aging i mean what are the things that are going to be most important muscle tissue you want to survive you've got to be able to support your system yeah man it's crazy muscle muscle muscle so now let's talk about how do we get some muscle so obviously we need to eat we need to get our leucine levels right we need to eat a certain amount of protein which i think you said roughly one gram per lean body mass that's the recommended amount i actually that's what is would be considered in the literature one gram per pound lean muscle mass and i would say that's a great starting point i would say it should be one gram per pound ideal body weight okay so the lean muscle mass is very very plus a little bit of fat you're saying yeah sure whatever you want as long as calories i'm 180 pounds grams of protein 180 yes sir okay and then you know what's your caloric target we would you know i would probably break up your protein meals and 50 grams or so could you go over yeah would you have much metabolic benefit no so 50 grams of protein per meal so seven times you know six would be 32 grams so i mean brother you're gonna be eating a lot or if you didn't want to do that you would have a lower dose of protein and then how to add in your brown chain amino acids so that's one strategy and then you asked about fat so fat is more you know for men i like to keep them a minimum of 80 grams for hormone production so i would say a minimum of 80 grams of fat but again this is all based on calories and carbohydrates take it or leave it and i'll tell you what is more important is also as you age and we all become more mature hate to admit that i'm aging but we are is that you actually have to get that meal threshold right so you would be doing yourself a service by getting 50 grams of protein per meal because you're gonna get a robust response for muscle protein synthesis and anabolic resistance mechanistically the body becomes kind of um immune or desensitized to amino acids so you require more amino acids at one time to get the sensing more robust and especially in aging like in geriatric population you need that sensing mechanism to be very robust and that's where your amino acids come in and getting that you know amount per meal correct so you overcome this anabolic resistance and to lead into resistance exercise right that is essential and um there's a lot of questions or someone you know if someone is aging there's some great work out there from mcmaster university and they say you know they've shown that it's not the heavy weight it's the two fatigue ability and exhaustion that's interesting it is interesting that they would get the same benefit because for a long time i said go out and work as hard as you possibly can until you want to quit at least twice or throw up and that may not be the the that may not be a overarching recommendation so really having a well-designed trained program you know planned out program is essential and you'll respond quicker if you're under trained or detrained right and then the more advanced you get the less gains you're going to make but resistance training is key i love it i love your approach if you were going to make one recommendation for people to make one change that would have the biggest impact on their health what one change would you have them make optimize optimize your i only get to pick one only one so i want to know are they eating more chicken breasts are they hitting the gym sleeping better whatever they're gonna eat more red meat they're gonna optimize their protein intake number one thing that they can do i love it look i love your whole approach i think this is so powerful and so important and i hope people take it seriously muscle will change your life i will just tell you that from experience where can people connect with you so i'm very active on instagram dr gabrielle lyon l-y-o-n um and then there's a link i have a youtube channel there's a link in my link tree in instagram um i have a free protocol on my website for people who are just getting started and interested in a protein centric approach and that's dr gabrielle lyon.com twitter same name facebook and i have a newsletter where i always vet scientific information and i put a few studies that i think are incredibly relevant and also great resources so it's very well curated nice i love it well guys subscribe to that newsletter and speaking of subscribing if you haven't already be sure to subscribe here and until next time my friends be legendary take care hey everybody it's time to talk about mental health as a lot of you know i suffered from anxiety for years and trying to tackle something like that on your own is not always the best so if any of you are feeling lost or hopeless or have anxiety or tremendous fear or feel like maybe you're sliding towards depression getting help is a critical part of getting better but a lot of people are nervous to even try out therapy or don't really know where to start well now there is a service called better help that makes therapy more accessible and affordable so you can get a counselor with the sort of expertise that might not be available to you locally better help assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed professional therapist within 24 hours you can log into your account anytime to message your counselor and betterhelp also has group in our sessions every week where members can learn in groups directly from licensed counselors on multiple topics like relationships and ways to overcome your anxiety especially if the thought of seeking help makes you even a little nervous be sure to check out over 60 000 positive reviews posted on the better help site that's help as an h-e-l-p better help is 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financial aid is available for those who qualify during the sign up process as a viewer of health theory you can get 10 percent off your first month so visit betterhelp.com forward slash ht and get the help you need today all right guys take care and be legendary thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 384,284

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Gabrielle Lyon, Health Theory, muscle, muscle-centric, medicine, osteopathy, wellness, protein, animal, vegetarian, obesity, lose fat, lose weight, gain muscle, glucose, herbs, palliative care, geriatrics, dementia, inflammation

Id: srEy7JzLvL8

Length: 48min 50sec (2930 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020