Protein Amount, Quality and Timing - with Dr. Donald Layman | The Proof Podcast EP 236

there's no question in my mind that as far as muscle strength and hypertrophy the resistance exercise is probably at least 75 percent more important than the protein level welcome to the proof podcast a space for science-based conversation exploring the Health and Longevity benefits that come with mastering nutrition physical exercise mindfulness recovery sleep and alignment facts nuance and trustworthy recommendations minus the hyperbole hi friends great to be here with you I'm your host Simon Hill I'm a qualified physiotherapist and nutritionist with an undergraduate science degree and a masters in the science of human nutrition today I sit down with Don Layman PhD to talk about protein you might be wondering why is Simon dedicating so many episodes to this topic most recently with Christopher Gardner and Stuart Phillips this episode with Don Layman and the next two episodes with Dr valtter Longo all on protein seems like Overkill perhaps but hear me out each of these professors are considered experts in nutrition and while they agree on a lot there are several aspects of this science that they see differently how much protein do we need what protein source is best Etc some focus more on body composition and strength like Stuart Phillips some on metabolic Health like Don Layman some on chronic disease weight loss and planetary Health like Christopher Gardner and some on longevity like Dr valtolongo my goal here is to Simply Understand Each of their positions and then to combine that with my own understanding of the literature and human physiology and be able to say here is my position based on the evidence that we have today on protein and this is what it means for you when shopping at the grocery store and making meals at home so in effect synthesizing the views of these experts along with the scientific literature to give you something solid that you can walk away with so you can be more confident about the role of protein in your life as always all references are included in the show notes and if you want to watch this you can do so on YouTube where full-length videos of each episode of the proof can be found please do enjoy the episode this is me and Professor Don Layman PhD talking all things protein Don lame and welcome to the show I've been a long time reader of of your work and I've wanted to connect with you for a while so thank you so much for making the time to do this my pleasure to join you assignment and we were we were just chatting um small world I've had Stuart Phillips on the show and if I'm correct I I believe you Elaine Norton's supervisor is that right that's right lane did his PhD in my laboratory so he's one of a number of really great students that I had yes and uh I'm sure knowing his his uh Persona uh and I think people would people would be familiar with him online he would have been a a fun student to to supervise I suspect yeah the lab meetings were very entertaining I think he has a a very healthy level of skepticism which uh makes for for interesting scientific discussions that's for sure um Don we've got a lot of of things that I'd like to explore with you today and I'm aware that this will likely turn into an open conversation where we can continue in in future episodes it's almost impossible to cover everything that I kind of want to with you in in one session um but perhaps for listeners that haven't come across your work um how would you summarize your your research interests and and perhaps the questions that you've really been most interested in sort of trying to answer through your career wow that's a 40-year career so there's a lot of them um clearly I'm interested in metabolism I'm interested in sort of a muscle-centric approach to metabolism I think is one looks at the body and you're trying to tailor things there's really only two tissues that you have to think about one is muscle and the other's brain everything else is sort of there for regulation um I'm also I'm interested in metabolism but I'm particularly interested in amino acid metabolism protein needs I'm interested in muscle from a functional aspect but also from metabolic aspect you know control of blood glucose blood lipids um you know all of that then relates to body composition weight loss performance so that's kind of the the big package of everything and for us to kind of set the stage I guess to to where we're going to go I think in this conversation I mean you mentioned their metabolic health and the importance of skeletal muscle and and I think for some people that might be the first time that they've kind of really heard that or thought about that and and often I guess at a high level you think more of muscle you know helping you do functional things get up off the couch or lift the weight at the gym um so perhaps we just take a further step into the importance of having a good amount of skeletal muscle what what do we understand about uh the the amount of muscle that we have particularly as we age and how that does intersect with our metabolic health yeah so muscle makes up you know depending on your body composition or you know 50 of your body 50 of your protein um and as we age as we get Beyond 40 uh the efficiency of how the body maintains it tends to start downward uh muscle is a major source of glucose metabolism it's a major source of fat fatty acid metabolism and if you have problems with blood sugar with blood lipids chances are your muscles aren't healthy so we you know we talk about them from dietary standpoint or heart standpoint or all kinds of things at fat body fat adipose standpoint but the reality is muscle is really where it all begins and and unless you're super Physically Active that is on a downward Trend as we get older so you know how do you manage that you know what can we do about it those are all topics I think are really into interesting and I think we can do things to make it better when we say you know a good amount of muscle and if you were to kind of think about as as we age you know often you hear people saying you know do resistance training it's important to to maintain a good amount of muscle um and I'm I'm kind of assuming that there's a bit of a spectrum when where you go from sort of under muscled where maybe you are putting yourself at risk of some of these um metabolic negative metabolic consequences to having sufficient muscle is that something that we've been able to quantify within the research you know what is a good amount of muscle if someone's listening and thinking well I'd love to to to know if we know that firstly and then if I can test it yeah you know I don't think there is any really good number we typically think of it from the other direction we think about what's an unhealthy amount of fat well you know we think that well if you've got more than 30 percent body fat then you're likely going to be at health risk so you know that means the rest of its lean body mass you know what percentage of that is muscle um you know I I don't have a real number to give you on something like that I think that um you really look you know and again somebody who sticks foot six is going to have a different level of muscle than somebody who's five foot uh and they both can be perfectly healthy so uh you know the issue is you know how functional is that you know what are you doing are you physically moving are you physically active is it metabolically healthy and you can be you know both the activity and the nutrition are hand in hand in terms of how healthy it is so I don't think the amount is the key for for any individual for you or me we could simply say well for me x amount of muscle is probably a good healthy level but that's probably quite different than what it would be for you is this where strength comes in is strength a kind of better proxy for for sort of determining our you know risk of say uh Frailty or or even total mortality I often say grip strength used in the in the literature quite a bit um certainly certainly mobility in the Aging literature which um functional aging is not exactly my specialty but you know walking you know gate speed and ability to get up out of a chair and some of those are very much predictors of health and mortality so strength is certainly part of it um I also think a lot about the metabolic aspect which someone can be fairly metabolically healthy and not necessarily be super strong you know I I don't I don't personally think that uh resistance exercise is the key to metabolic Health you know sort of the the sort of the flip side of your question so I personally think people need to practice some level of both resisting you know hip type of exercise some level of resistance and some level of aerobic because they're not the same outcomes and when you mention metabolic health um translate that for someone listening like what in terms of actually measuring something um are you talking like hbi 1C or fasting blood glucose what are we talking about when we mean metabolic Health yeah so um I focus a lot on protein turnover so uh having good rates of protein synthesis responding correctly I I think that's important um I think blood glucose blood lipids are also important your mitochondrial Health determines your ability to oxidize blood lipids um so I you know those are the kinds of things I think about with metabolic Health um do you have the right level of Branch chain amino acids or you metabolizing your lipids or your triglycerides and your blood at the right level all of those things are part of that package so would you would you say the goal here from from your view the goal here is to have a sufficient amount of muscle whatever that is for the for the individual to act as a good way to kind of dispose of blood glucose to metabolize glucose um and at the same time healthy functioning mitochondria and trying to avoid that that sort of visceral fat build up around around the organs is that a kind of decent summary of of metabolic health yeah I you know again the amount it's about activity um the the larger your muscles are you know if I started lifting more weights um I would convert muscles toward white muscle type I would have less mitochondria per unit of muscle uh so that doesn't necessarily make it better for metabolizing glucose I approach it quite differently uh I I think about you know what's my calorie need what's my carbohydrate threshold so there's a minimum need of carbohydrates of around 130 grams per day and we could debate that number but then I think about you can add about 60 grams per hour of intense exercise the question is how do you balance all of those things uh and that you know that relates to your muscle mitochondria so are you doing your aerobic activity the strength aspect sort of lets you know are you strong enough to do those activities affectionately but the size of the muscle doesn't necessarily lead to metabolic health if you want to think about animal research a little bit the uh there's there's classic things in like the swine industry uh where if you over muscle an animal it becomes metabolically incredibly unhealthy uh they're very prone to lactate toxicity and things like that so big muscle isn't the answer healthy muscles is more of a mitochondrial and functional mobility as opposed to just big I know that we're going to focus mostly on nutrition and amino acids but while we're on this we're talking about exercise here and the stimulus because I find this fascinating just thinking about well what is metabolic health and if we're thinking about muscle tissue and um I'm hearing you talk about the it sounds like quality is is really important it's not just the quantity and the importance of mitochondrial function or efficiency from a from an exercise point of view and I appreciate this is kind of a side step outside of your primary area of research is it is it that hit training where you're getting up to that kind of very high intensity 95 of your max heart rate where your providing the best stimulus to improve mitochondrial function or is it more of that moderate intensity kind of steady state longer exercise that you would say is better for a metabolic Health point of view from from a mitochondrial point of view so so if you look at a a range of activity it's somewhere around 60 percent of VO2 max capacity is where you're making a transition from primarily using fats mitochondria to more anaerobic using glucose anaerobically producing lactate so 95 percent of capacity would be a very heavy glucose use without producing lactate so this would be glycogen based and and so I don't think that's the answer I think that um closer to in the 60 to 70 percent range is where you probably would most people would Target again if you're if your goal is to be an Olympic Athlete then you want to train up in that 95 to 100 range if you're just trying to have healthy muscles what you want to do is be sure you're stimulating your heart rate maybe up in the 120 range you want to be doing resistance exercise size that's sort of the level that is probably going to be maximizing uh mitochondrial development and not necessarily relying all on glycogen to produce the activity okay yeah I think um a lot of folks these days are talking about Zone 2 training I'm not sure if you you've kind of heard that trendy term used but that's that's sort of sitting in sitting in that that zone of what you just explained there and a lot of endurance athletes do that um to sort of I guess in Lay terms they say to become better fat burners and to improve their aerobic capacity um yeah and and sort of metabolic uh or mitochondrial efficiency as they kind of put it um Don as we as we age so I appreciate here um what we're talking about in terms of muscle is it's not just quantity in the sheer Mass um the quality and the function of that muscle is really important if we think about age related changes to muscle how much of that is just written in our DNA and is unavoidable versus something that we actually have a say in and can intervene and make a you know tangible difference in um aging is a phenomena that we can't stop but we can definitely alter the line the slope of the line can be changed um we mentioned uh uh Stu Phillips he and I were at a conference last week and uh you know he was talking about the catabolic crisis concept which was sort of coined by Doug Patton Jones um that for most people we have an aging line but for most people aging is a process of individual events where we are catabolic we're in bed because we have some disease or a surgery or an accident or whatever and the older we get the more dramatic those are and what we know is that once you get Beyond 40 that may be a little young but once you get Beyond 40 you never recover from catabolic events very well you can do lots of exercise you can do lots of uh resistance type training but you always tend to make a step down and so you know there's there's clearly an aging process it's been studied in every kind of animal species that's used it's known in humans we know there's a trend that way but you can definitely change the trajectory and what you're trying to do is protect yourself against these catabolic events too yeah there's there's a lot of talk about how how bad a hip fracture can be when you're over the age of of 65 and and the the mortality in that first 12 months after a hip fracture is incredibly incredibly High Bob Wolfe published a paper a few years back and it I think it was titled something like the underappreciated role metabolic role or health role of skeletal muscle something like that but basically his point was in in developed societies the majority of people reach 65 and after 65 the majority of people die from a muscle problem from a fall from a hip fracture from an injury that leads to pneumonia whatever uh functional mobility metabolic health of muscle are far more important than what most people give me credit for yeah can I can I ask you a question about I guess lifespan and Longevity it's become a craze right and I wonder um I'm I'm presuming I'm sort of projecting onto you uh if I was you with the research you're doing you you could be easily left in a position where you're thinking why are we focusing so much on extending life and not enough on vitality and getting into our later years avoiding Frailty and actually having high quality years where we we can function and do the things that we love do you feel like the pendulum has swung a little bit too far towards what's the next magic compound to extend lifespan while we may be at a population level at least overlooking some of the most important things that we can do to really improve our quality of life and health span yeah I you know and even if you look at the statistics of the last few years and the average lifespan has actually gone down in the last few years and obviously covet's part of that um you know I I would begin that answer by saying uh my mom passed away a year ago at 102 and my dad passed away at 97. so I've been watching longevity uh and the issue of quantity of life is critical uh you know I think that uh both of them would probably say you know the quality of their life really went down in the last few years and if you ask them gee could could we extend your life another 10 years they would both say no um so I think we do need to start with quality of life and I think functional mobility skeletal Health there's all that the longevity data I I actually began my research uh career my Master's Degree studying aging with Arlen Richardson who is fairly well known for aging research and we discovered things like the changing of the poly a tails on messenger RNA and as they shorten we're less able to make new proteins I've been studying the aspect of the decreasing efficiency of muscle protein synthesis with aging so to your point these are somewhat in our DNA but we can overcome that with the right kinds of exercise and protein and certainly flatten the curve uh and I think that's the issue where we're trying to change the curve to maintain the quality of life longer I think there's some maximums out there is is the maximum human life 120 or 110 or whatever but the reality is people Beyond 90 aren't particularly healthy and I think that's where we need to be thinking yeah no it's something that I think about all the time I would rather live to 90 with a very high quality of life then live to a hundred but have you know 50 18 years of very low quality life and function and be very dependent on on people around me so I think it's something that I totally totally agree with that worthy of thinking about um so you just you mentioned there that you know two of the things that we do have control over exercise and nutrition and um we can utilize these in various ways to improve our our functional capacity as we age are they the two big buckets is there anything else outside of nutrition and exercise that that influences this in a meaningful way sleep stress [Laughter] fluids okay yeah you know I think there are a variety of things how would I weed each one of them um you know I I put exercise pretty high functional aspects of exercise pretty high I put sleep pretty high I'm a nutritionist um you know and nutrition The Single part of nutrition that's really most important is calorie control you would say that in terms of um how functional capacity um and maintaining our quality of life as we age as we've been discussing from a nutrition point of view you'd say calorie control more important than than protein optimization sure I think one can be healthy with really quite a wide range of protein I mean clearly if it's too low that's a bad thing um but there's an interaction between exercise and protein that and also age that comes into play the younger you are and the more physically active you are the more your protein intake can be in you're pretty healthy the older you get more sedentary then you really need to pay more and more attention to protein I want to dig into to to why that is um yeah I've got a lot of a lot of questions on on protein but um around source and timing and and all of that but I'm I'm glad you sort of put that into context there um before we do get into to protein I think it would be good for folks to kind of um understand I guess a bit of the landscape the science in this area and when I look at it anyway and I look at lots of different studies your studies and and other folks studies it seems like in that researchers are interested in in two main things when it comes to protein and muscle and you can correct me if I'm wrong but one is changes in in what's called muscle protein synthesis or MPS which I'll get you to to help Define and and and unpack and then the other is changes in sort of hard outcomes like the size of the muscle or the strength would that be a kind of fair summary of a lot of the research in this space it's looking at these you know biomarkers of of protein synthesis or changes in function and muscle size sure exactly right um you know and at some level we need to get you know lipid oxidation and car and carb and glucose oxidation into that package um but yeah I agree okay so if someone's hearing muscle protein synthesis um or MPS for the first time or maybe they have seen someone on social media or have seen MPS on a study before as I understand just in terms of muscle physiology there's a there's a bit of a sort of constant state of flux with with in muscle tissue so there's synthesis of of new uh contractile proteins and then there's breakdown occurring at the same time can you kind of just explain the physiology here at whatever level you think is helpful for the listeners um and how how nutrition and and exercise sort of interact with this okay um let me do some physiology first and then you can ask me the second questions again um the first thing I think is important for everybody to understand is that whether you're 16 or 65 we all need to make almost 300 grams of new protein per day every protein in the body is doing what we call turnover and different proteins have different lifespans uh there are proteins in the liver that are replaced every hour there are proteins in the muscle that are replaced every month and a half and there's connective tissue like in your knee joints and whatever that are replaced every six months or so but the the Striking thing people need to come to grips with is that about four times every year you've replaced the equivalent of every protein in your body so that's kind of interesting to keep in mind uh if you're looking at maximum rate of growth how much protein can you do with resistance exercise and lay down per day that number is about five grams and so you need to make 30 and only 15 and only five of it could actually be net gain okay so that's turnover if you look at the whole body then about of that 300 about 25 percent is muscle muscle makes up 50 percent of your body protein but only gets 25 percent of your turnover okay where the liver and the gut and the kidney have these gets 75 percent in the middle of the night your liver has to be making protein or you die where you muscle becomes a reservoir of amino acid it's kind of sitting there and it's not being used while you're sleeping and so it actually donates the amino acids that the liver is using in the middle of the night so you've got this balance thing going on where protein in the liver is constantly being made where protein in the muscle is only getting made associated with meals and so there's this constant going back and forth that you referred to between synthesis and breakdown what's in that balance during fasting period muscle is in a net negative and during feeding periods it's in a net positive liver's not doing that so that's kind of an overview of what is synthesis synthesis that process of making those new proteins whether they're enzymes or structural whatever those new proteins you make every day and in the muscle particularly as we get older is very much meal driven and we can get the distribution about that question later right you've just um got me rattled my brain with a bunch of questions I want to come back to this idea of eating a large amount of protein before bed um and it kind of ties into what you were just saying then about sort of donating amino acids from muscle to liver um I want to Circle back and see if any type of meal timing can can reduce the kind of let's start with breakfast before we go to that time but right yeah we'll go through we'll go through the whole day of protein timing um but where does muscle protein synthesis as measured in studies sort of come into this I mean interested is that looking at the sort of an amount of protein synthesis or the rate of synthesis what's being actually measured when studies are say putting people into a resistance training program feed them protein and then they measure this thing called MPS yeah so muscle protein synthesis is more of a rate rate of protein synthesis you can calculate an amount to go with it based on you know how you know you measured your rate in what one gram of tissue and therefore you have X amount of tissue you could you could get an amount but generally we talk about rates if you look at muscle uh say after when you wake up in the morning you've been fasting for 12 hours muscle protein synthesis is at its lowest level and it might be running at say a basal 20 30 percent and then with the right kind of breakfast you can have that more than double um you can go from basil 20 up to 100 of whatever Max is or something so you get this big meal effect and do we have any real sense for uh how well correlated muscle protein synthesis is with say things that we care about which now I'm questioning because originally I was thinking about hypertrophy but now you've got me thinking that well actually maybe we care about other things more so than muscle size but I'm I'm my question here is how how meaningful is MPS as a biomarker with regards to what you and I care about for folks that are aging um and would like to maintain their function that's a remarkably good question and the reality is we don't have a great answer for it um there's been I mean we know for a fact that the magnitude of protein synthesis that we measure in a two-hour period would correlate to somebody quadrupling their muscle size in a muscle in a month you know and that doesn't happen so the part of the process I talked about turnover so synthesis is one part and degradation or breakdown is the other part and they tend to go together when synthesis goes up breakdown also goes up and when synthesis goes down breakdown goes down um and and there's a crossover during after a meal synthesis is the higher one and in the middle of an overnight fast breakdown's the higher ones we have a net loss um how do you average that out where people are going to newer techniques with deuterated water and things like that where they can measure synthesis and turnover over a much longer period of time days maybe week and that may translate better into actual compositional changes right now I would say we use synthesis as a marker of testing diets does it relate to strength or not very well does it relate to mass not particularly well uh doesn't relate to making nutrition choices we think it does um so I view it more as a a testing method than a pure translation to outcomes and so with with that in mind I'm assuming that you you just see a role for both types of studies or studies that are even looking at the two of these together and sort of combining what's happening at a more sort of mechanistic level with what's happening at a function level sure and you know you know you and I have been talking about functional outcomes relative to strength or Mobility or metabolic function or you know and and that then ultimately longevity or mortality I mean so we those are different outcomes uh in the short run you know we need to have things to test and um you know and that's you know I think they're I think they're pretty good markers for making decisions but again they're not translating to those outcomes per se when when we look at MPS so we're looking at that right something else that I've I've seen um in different studies is are we are we are we most interested in how high or the increase in that rate or are we interested in like like area under the curve similar to like blood glucose area under the curve so you might have a certain protein that you have after a workout and it gives you a great big spike up but then it comes back down and then another protein which doesn't Spike as quickly but stays up MPS stays up um and perhaps the area under the curve is similar is do we know if one of those is kind of more meaningful than the other well first of all there's been a lot more studies of the first type where they're looking at like a single time they'll pick an hour after a meal or two hours or whatever now is the methods are becoming a little better and we can get more continuous you know values we're getting more area under the curve and I I think people would side toward the area under the curve um but again that really doesn't tell you this story unless you can also put breakdown with it which we can't do so does a does a spike give you a bigger anabolic difference to break down or does a long drawn out synthesis curve which one gives you the better net gain um ultimately you have to measure six eight weeks out and say well I got more muscle so that weren't worked the problem with all of that is that it's hard to control people that long you know how do you control their diet you maybe control their exercise but how do you control their diet for eight weeks uh you know people will give a supplement or do but that doesn't really tell you the answer so that's the problem with nutrition is we can't really control it that well and people don't like animal studies I frankly do like animal studies because you can control them and you know my my argument is usually you know if the animal study and the human study agree then that's awesome if the animal study in the human study don't agree then you need to ask some real tough questions as to which one's wrong my question was you mentioned there we can't measure muscle protein breakdown so I'm I'm kind of thinking about this and and studies are looking at okay what happens to the rate of synthesis but as you say really what's important is what's the net effect and in in order to sort of understand that picture you have to consider well how much muscle protein is being broken down um why can't why can't we measure that first and foremost reason is that we recycle about six out of every seven amino acids so when you're measuring synthesis what you're doing is putting in some sort of a tracer uh in the blood whatever uh you drink it eat it whatever uh it's in the blood and you measure it getting incorporated into protein and that is kind of a one-way track um you know because of the turnover you can measure it that way but to measure degradation now you have to measure the amino acids coming back out so how do you trace that and the problem with that is that as you break down a protein six out of every seven amino acids on average gets reincorporated and so now you've got this massive problem of how do you sort that out um people have done things like you know using muscles and test tubes in the past where you can kind of trap the amino acid and we get some idea about it you can do sort of whole body breakdown where you can kind of look at dilution effects but to actually look at muscle inside of muscle about the best thing that's been done so far is three-methylhistidine which is a a an amino acid called histidine that once it's in the protein gets methylated and once it's methylated it can never be reused again so you can see it coming out in the urine that seems to be a reasonable term it's not quantitative but at least gives you a direction of what's going on we just don't have great we don't have great techniques for it yet something else I want to ask you about measuring MPS and sort of looking at isolated proteins whether you're comparing say whey versus egg versus soy or whatever it is um and I appreciate getting down to this kind of very granular level has its role and is important in piecing this together but how generalizable is that to how people actually eat in the real world in terms of having a sort of mixed meal with multiple Foods after they do a workout for example yeah um we did a series of we had a weight loss clinic at University of Illinois and we did a series of clinical weight loss studies um basically as we started looking at um people's diets and the Champaign-Urbana area what we found out was that about 65 of their protein was coming from animal sources and 35 percent uh was coming from plant sources uh we can get into the whole issue of leucine and mtor at some point um but basically we knew that the real key to the meal was having enough leucine to trigger muscle protein synthesis and so we basically tailored meals and we came up that the minimum was around 30 grams per meal to have enough leucine to balance that out we were aiming at 2.5 grams of leucine is the minimum and depending on the age it might be three grams but anyway we're aiming at a minimum of 2.5 and so we were aiming at 30 and so you've probably heard the idea of 30 grams of protein at a meal that's exactly where it came from we reinvented that number to go to go with our weight loss studies um so uh you know I you know I sort of lost a train of the thought here on the the question that's that's yeah that's that's helpful I guess my my question was more it was a question more around methodology and I guess um at the the the application of findings from studies yeah so let me go back yeah yeah so let me go back to your question so uh I just did a seminar with away conference just here two days ago and the you know one of the things that is important to keep in mind is that uh in Whey Protein leucine's about 12 and in soy protein it's a little less than eight percent so you can get to 2.5 grams with 23 grams of whey protein or 22 and it takes 32 with soy um both will have the same effect if you give everybody 35 grams but if you only give 20 grams whey will have an effect and so it won't right yeah and that's I guess relevant if you're having a protein shake but if you were having if you're having a mixed meal for example when it had I don't know edamame or something and then some other Foods in there and the leucine happened to be over 2.5 if you're having a mixed meal with 45 grams of protein in it and it's a a combination of of foods um it's not a problem if you're if you're eating 120 grams of protein per day at the combination probably doesn't make much difference if you're eating 50 grams it probably does and that's an important point so some of what we're going to get into um from my understanding and even speaking to Stuart Phillips becomes a lot more of an issue if you're not eating enough protein um absolutely so so let's talk about that because the RDA is set at 0.8 grams per kilo maybe 0.83 I think in grams per kilo in Australia it's a little bit different um 0.8 right so that is heavily debated I think that there are some people who have been led to believe that that's all they need and look I I see this um you know I expose myself to lots of different communities and dietary patterns but certainly have had uh people on the show for more of the plant-based background and I keep my eye on different communities out there and I will say there is certainly this kind of message that in some areas that you don't need to focus on protein the RDA is 0.8 grams per kilogram I want to know from you someone who studies protein metabolism is thinking about quality of life Vitality function how was 0.8 grams per kilogram calculated and is that a optimal or sufficient level to to maintain the the sort of muscle quality and function that we we would like to have into old age yeah the a lot of different things come to mind so I'll just I'll take it directly the way you ask it then we'll go to amino acids um in terms of where does it come from uh way back in the early 1900s range before we even knew all the amino acids people had to uh determine uh how much protein you could feed animals you know how do you get them to grow and so they basically developed the ability to measure nitrogen and so what the RDA is sort of a holdover from the 1920s 30s and 40s where we learned to measure nitrogen and when you're growing you can measure it because there's a net nitrogen accumulation and so you can say well a child can have X amount of protein and they're growing normally and we can measure the heart outcome when you start becoming 25 to 30 and you're no longer growing now nitrogen balance is a pretty sloppy measure and typically the way they do it is they titrate the protein down they go down towards zero uh and they ask uh in a short term like seven days at what point do we come into balance at what point does the amount of nitrogen going in protein that you're eating balance with the nitrogen going out whether it's in urine or stool but also skin and hair and breath and all these other things that you can't measure very well so that's how it's determined mostly in young males 20 you know healthy 25 year olds or 20 year olds at college and that's basically where it comes from uh it's widely known that nitrogen balance underestimates um protein requirement when they do the studies they generate what's known as an ear an average intake an average requirement and then they give two standard deviations above that which is supposedly a safety factor that 97 percent of the population will be safe but by definition that means three percent of the population are actually deficient at the RDA okay by definition that's that's how it's designed um then the question becomes does it relate to aging and we know that the efficiency of protein use goes down with aging so we know that the RDA is based on 25 year olds we know that it doesn't relate very well it's a 65 year olds there have now been in the last 20 years or so I don't know exactly 100 of studies that have shown that you can always measure the difference between 0.8 and 1.2 1.2 grams per kg for a 65 year old in whatever outcome you want to measure is always better even in in sort of hard outcomes like strength or actual muscle size in any any outcome you want to measure if you if you start trying to look at if you start getting it closer and closer and you say well how about 1 versus 1.1 we probably can't tell the difference but 0.8 versus 1.2 every study will show a difference so if that if that data exists out there uh why why hasn't the RDA been updated if it's based on the these nitrogen balance studies in young males there's problems with that and we have heart health outcome data showing that actually no not 0.8 grams per kilo actually 1.2 grams per kilo or thereabouts is better as we age to maintain function why hasn't that been changed do you think it will change okay so let's let's put it into a framework of something else vitamin C uh at 60 milligrams per day the RDA it prevents scurvy but in the last two years of covid I would say most people have been taking five grams or more okay so we know that for every nutrient there's a range of intake dri Dietary Reference intakes and so they go from a minimum to prevent a deficiency up to some upper limit and so what you and I are talking so so the RDA the argument for the RDA was well it prevents a deficiency we're not in negative nitrogen balance that's our definition of deficiency does that correlate with optimum health does vitamin C at 60 milligrams correlate with Optimum immune health no it doesn't so we take more so why can't we think of protein that way why does 1.2 have to be the RDA I mean what's the deficiency you're preventing uh right now the deficiency you're present preventing is nitrogen balance and you and I can debate whether that's a good deficiency but that's been done that way for a hundred years now and that's a lot of history to change so I I personally don't think the RDA is a useful argument we need to just come to grips with an Optimum Health intake is different than the minimum to preventive deficiency most people in the United States aren't after minimum Health they're asked after Optimal Health yeah no that's a that's a great Point adequate versus optimal um when you frame it like that I think it it makes a lot of sense and um I know people will be thinking well at what cost at what expense we will get to longevity and uh mtor and and all of that but um before we do that just to kind of double click on this so if we're thinking about the average General um uh adult out there who is just interested in healthy aging they're not a bodybuilder um is it 1.2 grams per kilogram is that where you're you're sort of currently at in terms of that's the kind of lower threshold that you would want to meet on a daily basis on average so if yeah so if I was having a healthy 55 year old who's pretty Physically Active you know doing some resistance doing some aerobic training I usually Target the range of 1.2 to 1.6 and they can kind of fall in there wherever they want you know whatever meal pattern they want but um you know can we measure the difference between one you know using protein synthesis using the tools that we have can we measure the difference between 1.2 and 1.6 the answer is no if you had to choose and I realized that you can actually do both of these so in some ways by the way I personally use 1.5 in all my studies okay there you go um if if you had to choose between these two scenarios done um and again this is a hypothetical so let's say um 55 year old woman um one gram per kilogram of protein but is doing resistance training very consistently is getting good volume in over a week is getting close to failure so is providing a really good stimulus but protein is at one gram per kilogram versus same woman different scenario she's she's not doing the resistance training as regularly often misses it gets it in a couple times a week maybe not training is hard but is consuming 1.6 to 2 grams of protein per kilogram which scenario is better from a skeletal muscle point of view think about that for a minute but there's no question in my mind that uh as far as muscle strength and hypertrophy the resistance exercise is probably at least 75 percent more important than the protein level so [Music] um the comparison of you know can more protein make up for not doing the exercise the answer is no uh would it buffer it at all um foreign s going to be otherwise you're going to take them in as what you're going to take them in as carbs or fats or I mean so I'm assuming you're giving me a calorie neutral scenario one person's burning more calories the other person's not so we're getting into all these complications of body composition without uh anyway there's you've got a complicated scenario there okay well we'll leave it at resistance training did I waffle on that answer enough no I think I mean I guess a a really um another way of putting this which again is very hypothetical is let's say you you didn't do any resistance training but you had the perfect protein intake distribution whey protein you're getting two grams per kilogram every single day um your body's not just going to magically be laying down muscle tissue why but you know if if we now start putting that into a aging scenario where we're going to moderate it over um 20 years and you're asking me about 1.8 versus 0.8 grams with the person doing no exercise the person with 1.8 is going to be better off okay that's a good point is is this protein intake of you know you said in your studies 1.5 but you recommend that sort of 1.2 to 1.6 as being a more optimal intake is that the same for men and women is there any evidence to suggest that protein intake would differ between gender not it doesn't seem to [Music] um both in the young studies or in the elderly studies they seem to translate pretty well so I think I think you know the lean body mass is sort of ultimately you'd like to have the protein relative to lean body mass but we typically don't know that so it's for body composition um women typically at the same weight would have a little less lean mass so potentially they could have a little lower um amount we did a lot of weight loss studies with women uh and we found that there's a real hard line at around one gram per kg uh if they got below that we pretty much lost all the beneficial effects of protein or exercise or whatever um they just changed their body composition they might lose weight but they had the same body fat percentage when they after they got done you mentioned before it could be or it is difficult to see if there's a difference between say 1.2 grams per kilogram and 1.6 with the the kind of technical capabilities that that exist within the field of science at the moment I'm assuming that comes down to how sensitive these these kind of tools are um and you also have mentioned that it gets harder to build muscle as as we get older do you do you think given given that given this sort of concept of anabolic resistance that as someone goes from say 40 to 50 60 to 70 that that protein intake should actually increase on a gram per kilogram basis and do you think that that would be meaningful I don't think there's any studies to really give you a hard answer about that um I actually had that discussion with Stu Phillips just a couple of days ago and we both feel that the sensitivity to some of these signals goes down as you get each of those decades so in my opinion the answer to that question is yes that you probably need it to go up and the other thing that comes in to complicate that is that as you go through each of those decades your calorie needs are going to go down so that means your protein needs to be a higher percentage of your diet no matter what so both the amount of protein probably tends up or at least the quality the is the the percentage of your diet that needs to be essential amino acids probably needs to go up and so you know you you you you brought up a plant-based issues I think it's I think it's far more it's far easier to have a heavily plant-based diet when you're 20 and 30 than it is when you're 60 and 70. and so your yours you're sort of coming to that conclusion because as you're getting older appetites down you're eating less calories and your appetite may or may not be down but your calorie need is definitely down right so calorie needs are down and therefore um your your more likely to be getting inadequate amounts of leucine and total protein on a perm per meal basis to optimize this sort of MPS signal that you're referring to right so there's data to back up that kind of thinking that the efficiency of how you trigger a meal and then we can get into whether the meal makes any difference or not but the efficiency of how you trigger the meal goes down with passing decades yeah let's let's go into that but something that's just on the on the top of my mind here is is do you think in that sort of instance and it's probably applicable not just to those who are eating very plant-based diets but elderly in general um shakes and more isolated proteins potentially even amino acid supplementation are these things do they have a potential benefit in that population I definitely agree and research studies have been done like that uh to show that that can be beneficial um I I definitely think that um you know as chewing becomes more of an issue you know what kinds of things can you eat I think supplements you know protein foods or whatever you want to call them mixes that have higher protein density are important to think about leucine supplementation may be worth thinking about too okay let's let's dig a little bit more into leucine so um you mentioned two and a half grams of leucine um is kind of like a threshold when you consume that amount from from what I understand and listening to you and reading your work is that triggers a sort of uh maximal muscle protein synthesis response um to that to that meal and as you alluded to earlier that's where the 30 grams of protein quality protein in a meal came from because that essentially helps you get to that 2.5 grams of of leucine so at a at a sort of muscle level um why leucine why this particular amino acid why is it important what's it doing okay so as I mentioned earlier there's a real difference in how the body regulates protein synthesis in the liver versus Muscle the liver has this continuous need for protein synthesis so it's around the clock and it regulates more by energy so unless you're super starving the liver goes about it's doing its business in muscle because it's so big and it costs so much it requires so much energy there's some estimates that you know very high percentage of basal metabolism rates are actually for protein synthesis muscles really inexpensive uh thing to maintain so the body is learned to do it at meals it's learned to do that and I want to come back to Children versus adults but do it at meals what we now know what we discovered in the late 1990s is that one of the triggers for all of this is the branch chain amino acid leucine for years since the 1930s we've known that the branch chain amino acids are not metabolized in liver all of the other amino acids are metabolized in liver but these three branch chain leucine valine and isoleucine get sent out primarily to skeletal muscle so the body has learned to sense it it is senses it as a indicator of protein coming in and basically when that leucine concentration goes up from basically fasting levels to about three times fasting levels uh it triggers a complex inside muscle known as mtor and that's the main sort of Central regulatory function that triggers all these sort of initiation factors and we trigger maximum protein synthesis what we now know is that there are actually Four signals that the muscle is integrating at the same time this is very different than liver it's integrating protein by sensing leucine it's integrating growth hormones insulin and igf-1 it's integrating energy ATP and it's integrating stress resistance exercise when all four of those are correctly balanced it triggers mtor and muscle protein synthesis so all of those it's looking at um what's interesting is that in children it's dominated by the insulin it's dominated by the hormone side and meal distribution doesn't make any difference in children but once you stop growing the hormones no longer control that system and now it's dominated by meal quality and leucine is the primary key growth hormone and it's a growth hormone is one of the the hormones insulin and igf insulin and IGA um we may as well tackle the longevity piece now okay um because this is this is usually where I think people get a little bit confused right they're listening to Don Layman expert in protein metabolism and and I think they're sitting there thinking you know what I this makes sense I want to have good quality skeletal muscle I don't want to be frail now they they flick the channel and they're listening to Volta Longo and I think you know where I'm going with this and now all of a sudden they're exposed to um information um which from my read on it seems to come from two sort of main areas of evidence one is that there is various studies looking at animals where there's been specific amino acid kind of restriction or protein restriction I think it started in trout of all animals and then there was my studies looking at okay if you restrict the methionine or branched chain amino acids what happens to lifespan in an animal and then the second sort of piece of evidence that gets cited or intertwined into this story of low protein being good for longevity is um some n Hanes sort of data that showed people under the age of 65 or 50 to 65 that had high protein intake had much higher mortality in cancer incidents and so Don I think people get caught in the middle of this and rightly so when they're exposed to the the information both of those sets of information you kind of end up just thinking okay well is it a case of I'm going to optimize my protein I'm going to be strong but it's going to come at the expense of cancer or a shorter life help people reconcile this so which one do you want to take on first the crappy epidemiology or the crappy animal studies I'm in your hands so let's you've obviously had this question posed many times I'm sure you've had a lot of private chats with your colleagues so you know walk us through the history here okay so let's start with the animal studies um rodents have been primary what have been used to do these studies so when you put a rodent in a Laboratory um it's a sterile environment they never get any diseases they never break any bones they never have any trauma they never have to recover from anything um you know they're in a sterile environment um so that's you know that protects them they never have to recover from anything um tell me how a rodent eats you know how a rodent eats come on me a rodent eats continuously 24 hours a day in captivity it's called adlibitum and so if you take a rodent out of you know at any point and you look in its stomach its stomach is full of food humans don't eat that way humans eat discrete meals and so what you do is you regulate things up and down mtor is a signal up and down but if you basically put an animal in a cage and feed it a hundred percent of the time then it's constantly regulated up okay and then if you go back and do a restriction like Longo does and others one of the things to recognize is when a rat is in a cage and fed ad libitum the only thing it does is eat so it's overeating by 40 percent and what did I tell you a little while ago was the biggest issue in nutrition calories okay so when everybody says that it's about protein or it's about something else it's about calories they're obscuring the issue and we'll come back to that with the epidemiology data um and then when they go in and they start restricting what the first thing that happens is the animals will eat the diet and then fast until the next time they get fed so you've got one group eating continuously Around the Clock getting 80 40 or 50 percent overweight and now you've got another group that is actually food restricted so they're only eating part of the day and now they're more like a human eats and they're fasting part of the day these two have nothing in common we know that if you restrict if you restrict calories you increase longevity we did those experiments back in the 70s the animal studies to me are total sham of the people not knowing how to do the studies so just to clarify something so you essentially um what you're saying if I heard correctly is that in these studies where they do protein restriction an inevitable outcome of that is simultaneously there is calorie restriction and then it becomes difficult to say well what do you attribute the change in lifespan too is it the differences in amino acids or is it of the fact that compared to the control that animal is now eating far less calories and and it's important to understand that your control is abnormal your control is an obesity model because they're overeating okay so you're you're now bringing it back at the University of Illinois the Animal Care Facility they allowed us to do a 40 restriction of food intake to to rodents because that actually normalized them 40 restriction yeah I'm I'm following what you're saying you're saying there is an artificial sort of um enhanced contrast between these two groups and a a if you were going to to actually test whether amino acid restriction or protein restriction did have a significant effect on lifespan you would want calories to be equated but then it becomes difficult because you're starting to introduce well what what are animals or people eating instead yeah you're gonna have to feed them discrete meals of the same calorie level with the two different proteins for two and a half years that hasn't been done for obvious reasons you know it's labor intensive you go back and ask Lane one of the things that he will always hate me for is all of the studies we ever did with animals were meal fed rodents are very good animal models for human metabolism if they're meal fed but if you don't meal feed them then you don't have the same model so calories are the issue you've got to be 100 we know that obesity shortens longevity no question about that and you have to be careful that you can sort that out so now we go to the human epidemiology and now you've got the same problem when you go in and say that uh well people who ate more meat or ate more protein have shorter longevity or have more the fact is they have more calories you can't sort that out and they have different meal patterns I was director of research for the American egg board for four years and one of the things that we looked at was there's a lot of epidemiology that say eggs egg intake correlates with obesity and heart disease and diabetes but if you factor out the people who ate hamburgers at fast food every day and basically find the people who had protein intakes that had reasonable vegetable intakes it all washes out and eggs become a positive so again it's context and the people who want to make the anti-protein argument aren't interested in the context we've written editorials about Longo's research and the mishandling of data and the misinterpretation of data multiple times so in so in Longo's sort of analysis he found a higher protein under the age of 65 was associated with increased mortality there was no adjustment for for diet quality or for calories body weight all that sort of stuff um I can't tell you that exactly but what I do know is he went through and he manipulated the protein categories until he found a small group of people that were down around 0.7 grams per kg and he compared that to the other so he manipulated the data did he manipulate specifically body weight I'd have to go back and look at that I don't remember okay what do you think what's the what's the I got a couple questions here what on on Dr Longo and I don't want to make this personal but it's it's not just Dr Longo this is a a um a view that's held by you know not just him other people in the in the field of kind of longevity as well that you hear people talking about what's the motive here because um from what I understand Dr Longo he eats an omnivorous diet with animal protein himself so it doesn't seem to be a plant versus animal thing what why do you think if the data does not show what what he's saying do you think he is actually convinced by the data that's what it shows or do you think there is another sort of motive behind this low protein message I I don't know him I've never talked with him so I can't attribute motive at all um you know I uh I mean there there is you know definitely you know biased in terms of people who work in those areas uh you know they're they're definitely looking for data to support their bias is there such a thing as too much protein you mentioned methionine you know I think those are reasonable questions I I don't know the answer to that uh the methionine restriction data uh is very extreme um you know it's done in short terms so I don't know I don't know how to translate that into long-term Health um you know I see people going out and you know at you know people pushing you know two grams per kg protein I never personally pushed that I don't know what the upper limit is from a health standpoint I can't see any particular benefit to that the only you know you know is there a risk to people taking uh you know consuming 130 grams of protein per day I'm not convinced of any data that backs that up okay let's that's comforting for anyone that's worried about protein and and Longevity you sort of mentioned one study there but is there is it is it that study in in animal models or what what science would you like to see in this area if any to fill some gaps to better understand the effect of specific amino acids or protein on lifespan back to our earlier conversation I don't really think life span is the answer I think Healthy Living is the answer I think those are the right studies and I you know I I think I see these lifespan studies sort of clouding the picture I um and again you know what's the motivation for that I you know Fountain of Youth I don't know but uh even people who think they've studied longevity you know I don't know of anybody who thinks they're moving the 120 age maximum any you know people aren't going to live to 150 and chances are they wouldn't want to live there so you know I don't I just don't think longevity is a very useful Target and I did I did when I started my career doing aging research so you know I get it no I um I I tend to agree with you on that I think we uh we made that clear earlier the other the other thing that comes to mind with regards to um vitality and health Span in general I think that comes up here and this comes back to source of the protein as well Don and um I think um we can probably go into a lot of the weeds here so I think we could probably keep this high level for now but I I want to chat to you about cardiovascular disease because something else that I think about personally here is I've got cardiovascular disease in my family um I'm aware that it's the the number one probably likely reason I'm going to die prematurely and um even if even if you have a heart attack and survive it can still affect your sort of quality of life and if we look to like the latest of um aha sort of guidelines for preventing cardiovascular disease they have a very clear statement that says to choose healthy sources of protein and they're not anti-animal protein that still is in there but they talk about lean meats um but then below that healthy protein they they have a very um clear line that says mostly protein from plants so um I want to I want to workshop and and this with you and just tell you sort of how I respond to that I guess I see everything that you're talking about with regards to muscle protein synthesis the importance of building and preserving skeletal muscle as we age not just for being able to get up and down the steps but for metabolic Health um as well and I sort of land in this position where I think that it's a a safe bed to have a optimal amount of protein intake certainly above the RDA um but to be having a bias towards plant protein over animal protein and I want to know is that a crazy position for me to kind of to take when I'm looking at all of this so let's back up a little bit um so what do you think the protein intake in the U.S is right now I'm going to take a stab that I mean it depends on the dietary pattern but in an omnivorous dietary pattern 1.2 1.3 grams per kilo something like that much much lower it's between 0.9 and water okay okay so let's think about the plants what percentage of calories in the U.S diet comes from plants there's a large percentage I would say coming in from heavily refined plants for sure oh now we're going now we're getting somewhere so 70 percent of the calories in the American diet comes from plants of those uh 55 comes from sugars refined oils and hydrogenated oils another 35 comes from refined grains so of the plant calories the American diet that's in the American diet over 80 percent of them are coming from garbage so your idea that we need more healthy plants I couldn't be more I couldn't endorse that idea more so my argument is we don't need a more plant-based diet we need a diet with better plants I have heard you say that so the protein level is not the problem we get by far the majority of our nutrients in the American diet come from that you know should people eat more broccoli and avocados and green beans absolutely okay but that's not what they're eating and but that's not the problem of animal Foods are people eating are there people who have dietary patterns eating animal foods that are unhealthy too many fast foods too much pizza the number one source of saturated fat in the American diet is cheese on pizza the number two source is hydrogenated oils plant sources beef has gone down 40 percent since 1975 while cancer sort of stayed the same heart disease has got higher obesity and diabetes has skyrocketed so you can't blame it on beef yeah well I think I mean a lot of that's been swept with chicken right which I would argue is you know yeah we can you know and and the primary source of chicken is breaded and fried in vegetable oils I think there's um a lot of a lot of I mean you're saying a lot of good things I think everyone would agree that the primary problem with the standard uh American diet or standard Western diet is the fact that what is it 60 of calories are coming from Ultra processed um Foods I guess I personally see benefit and there are substitution analyzes looking at this where you um control for things like saturated fat and fiber and you do get a reduction in say APO B containing lipoproteins for swapping some calories from animal protein to plant protein um and I always come back to the fact that if you if you do look at the average APO B containing or APO B level Across America it's it's high it's it's not you know coming back to this idea of what's normal versus optimal we could have the same discussion about APO B um I think there's pretty clear evidence that the the sort of average level of apob in in countries like America and Australia is uh well well above the kind of threshold where you don't see atherosclerosis um so I guess I'm trying to kind of balance all of these different aspects of of Health if you know you're eating fast food three times a day and that's your problem but if you're um you know eating candy bars uh with hydrogenated oils and too many calories and too much sugar it's also your problem and so I think we can agree that unhealthy diets are unhealthy um are there healthy diets that are primarily animal based that have good fiber contents and and good vegetable content I would argue there are are there unhealthy vegetarian diets I would argue there are just by saying it's plant-based doesn't make it healthy no I would I I definitely agree with that I think you know I go back to some of even Lauren cordaines I'm not sure if you're familiar with him but some of his early papers where where he he writes about the the kind of paleo diet and and I would agree that in the way that he puts forward the paleo diet that's a tremendously healthy dietary pattern um I think the way that often it's done online is different um to kind of what he describes which is a very low saturated fat kind of lean animal protein um style diet with high fiber I don't know of much research to show that if calories are in check what level of saturated fat actually makes a difference you know if calories aren't in check then it seems to make a difference you know where did this 30 fat number come from basically it came from a room where two groups were arguing and one group was arguing that it had to be below 10 and the other group was arguing that 45 was had plenty of research behind it and they were absolutely at a stalemate and somebody said well would you accept 30 as a compromise and so they all agreed on 30 and there's no data at all back that number yeah I I mean I'm not sure the the total fat amount I would agree with you I think that you know it's kind of irrelevant but I do think the quality of the fat and I would say trying to put an exact kind of percentage on it is in some ways it's okay I guess at a population level but it's on a personal level people respond differently if you have enough physical activity that you're burning the calories you come in it doesn't make much difference if you're storing the calories that come in then it makes more difference yes but I still even even on that I'd push back a little bit because you can be lean and be dumping a a very high saturated fat diet and have very high LDL cholesterol um I've seen it it's in the it's in the literature okay let's let's come back to to protein um and optimizing it so we've spoken about the the total amount um and you've kind of um made it clear that you feel like it should be higher than the RDA sort of between that 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram mark how important is distribution um you mentioned earlier that in some of those protein studies and and mice are eating all day so they're activating mtor all day um now in some bodybuilding communities people will talk about eating six seven meals waking up in the middle of the night is is that an example where you are over activating mtor should we be trying to get our protein in from less meals so that we have less of these kind of pulses what what do you how do you kind of reconcile all that well I think you describe two different populations with different goals the bodybuilders um you know are trying to maximize their mass in shortest period of time uh and I you know so I think higher protein intakes and you know in in multiple meals is a good way to go I think that's I think that's logical does is that is that a good you know prescription for long-term from health I'm not sure what the studies on bodybuilders are in terms of that in terms of of the average adult who's trying to maintain their health uh I go for two to three meals a day that have 40 plus grams of protein in it that's sort of where I start meal distribution when we discovered the mtor we discovered that triggering protein synthesis was a key and so the amount of protein the amount of leucine in the meal was important it's important to recognize that literally every study that's ever been done on that's been done with breakfast so the only the only meal where we absolutely know mtor is down is after an overnight fast so the only meal that it's ever really been shown the distribution is key to is breakfast so I Doug Patton Jones and I ran a study that has been widely over interpreted where we took 90 grams and the American distribution of 10 20 60 and we did distributed it at 30 30 and we showed that there was more net protein synthesis in a 24-hour period that has led people to say that we need an even distribution through the day that's not what it proved that's not really what I think it proved what I think it proved is that 30 grams of breakfast is a lot better than 10. gotcha what we also know is that when you trigger mtor at breakfast mtor is still fully triggered five hours later so why do you need 30 grams at lunch so so the idea there is when you wake up and you've been in this sort of fasted I guess catabolic state that by triggering him to hold your your helping preserve muscle you're helping prevent that breakdown that would otherwise occur if you woke up and say fasted to midday right so when you wake up you are in a catabolic muscle condition and until you have a meal that has 30 or plus grams of protein you're going to stay in that catabolic condition okay so um this sounds like the food industry marketing breakfast as the most important meal of the day what in the food industry has 30 grams of protein at breakfast well I mean you mentioned the American board egg board before um do you ever get asked about a conflicts of interest or um you know funding from um industry you know it's a question that I see come up all the time and I think I think it's it's worth worth explaining to people why industry fund studies and why there are affiliations I think it's important for people to understand in the United States there are two major funding things one is the National Institute of Health and they only fund research relative to disease they don't fund research relative to health they fund for disease and then there's the National Academy of Sciences which funds incredibly fundamental research so if you want to study the effect of a protein or you want to study the effect of soy you have to go to the industry to get it NIH tells you that and so that's the Catch-22 that there's basically no one in nutrition virtually that doesn't have industry money and so you know is that a bias I guess it is uh but then you have to go back to the review system you know if somebody said well I don't like your research because you had money from the egg board um I say fine but my research has been out there now for 22 years on this topic and the longer it goes the stronger it gets that's the that's science there's nobody everything I've done is totally visible everybody can reproduce these studies and every time they reproduce them they're right and so that's the proof If I see somebody comes out with a new study that claims something crazy I say well that's interesting when I see it in two more Labs from different places I'll begin to believe it you know I don't believe it you know I see long goat research and when I see it in two more reputable Labs that do the same thing with the right controls I'll take it seriously but at this point I don't and that's the way people need when you see a headline in the newspaper that means it's a first discovery of something off the wall which you know 10 years from now come back and ask if it's the same thing then you'll know what the science is telling you reproducibility have you ever felt compromised in terms of publishing a study or the methodology given where the fundings come from one of the things that people don't the answer of that is no because I don't deal with companies like that um one of the things you need to understand is that the commodity-based companies um eggs beef Dairy they're all under the direct supervision of the USDA and those funding commodity companies under the law have no jurisdiction over your publication they can't interfere they can't even see it you know sometimes when we send it into publication we'll give it to them as a courtesy but they can't even see it in the writing stage however if the funding's coming from Coke or Kellogg's or something like that it's free reign they're under the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission and as long as they don't say they're curing cancer they can say anything they want so when people ask me well aren't you concerned that you had money from the beef board or from the egg board I'm certainly not anywhere near as concerned about the people at Harvard taking money from coke with with all of this industry funding what happens if a study uh produces a sort of result that would be negative for that industry does it does the study being funded have to be published or are there a bunch of studies out there that could have negative results that have never seen the light of day which would affect how we're kind of looking funding agency in the commodity area has no jurisdiction over that so an investigator could choose not to publish it um and so you could say that's some kind of a bias in the area of other companies Kellogg's Coke whatever they do demand to see it before it's published it's not a Level Playing Field that people need to understand and the biased um I would argue is more biased toward refined things than there is toward Natural Foods Dairy eggs Meats fish okay coming back to to meal timing where we kind of just started here um there's a few ideas out there I think within particularly within the bodybuilding Community um one is about sort of the anabolic window um so you mentioned then how important breakfast is but let's say for example someone's training in the afternoon they do their resistance training in the afternoon how important is the protein bolus before that training session and sort of immediately after I don't think there's any real data that supports a bolus before we've done some of that type of research in animals where we could really control it and we never found any effect um we were the first to publish protein after research because what we what we were looking for is conditions where we would doubt so we know that overnight fasting down regulates mtor and protein synthesis so we were looking for other conditions exhaustive exercise will also do it so we thought okay so this is where we can test you know what's the controlling mechanism and that's actually where we discovered the leucine mechanism what people need to know about that though is when it's been translated into humans it seems to only really be affected in the early phases of training if you take an untrained person and you stress them with a new training regimen taking in protein right after seems to be beneficial but if you take somebody who is well trained at the level that they're training at uh whether they have it right after exercise or whether it's the Met during the day it doesn't seem as far as I'm concerned from the literature it doesn't seem to matter so anabolic window I think has been over interpreted I think it is something that in training and new stress probably is useful um protein immediately ahead of exercise I don't see any data that convinced me that that's useful okay so in in order of kind of priority um achieving an optimal sort of total protein sounds like that's going to be very important when it comes to protein a good amount of protein at breakfast so coming out of that fasting period let's just change that to first meal so people don't think you know it doesn't have to be six in the morning it could be 11 in the morning but whenever you eat first it should be high protein and I also then like to have a large meal late in the day so I think your your last meal of the day let's call it dinner in the United States I think that should be a big meal also so I get the feeling that you probably aren't a huge fan of time restricted eating or some type of fasting I'm okay with that I think it's a calorie control mechanism so again you have to ask what's your objective so if you're an adult struggling with calories um eating twice a day you know once a noon and once it's seven maybe that's a good model for you or six or whatever you want so restricting the number I mean one of the things we know is one of the major issues in obesity is snacking having more food experiences per day eating a fourth meal late in the day uh those are all calorie problems and so time restricted for me that is just you know I frequently will actually resort to eat you know I I work from home most of the time I will frequently resort to two meals per day uh 10 30 and 6 30. you earlier spoke about the the mice eating all day and that being a different scenario because of that constant activation of mtor is that do you also think about snacking like that is that another reason why you prefer just having a good high protein meal then no food followed by another good high protein meal some hours later so so yes I I want I want mtor to pulse I want you to I want it to go up and I want it to come back down and so I definitely wanted the pulse I don't want it to just be up um backing tends to be high carb high fat high energy um you're talking about cancer earlier uh one of the things that long goes interested in is igf-1 so we ran a cancer study in animals looking at the difference between high protein versus high carb and both stimulate igf-1 what we found is that we got more tumor growth and promotion with a high carb diet than we got with a high protein diet so again calories are key but the you know as I said at the beginning there are multiple signals for mtor insulin is one of them what kind of carbohydrates were used in the in that study um we used a combination of of cornstarch and sugars so so very refined the the other idea that I see out there um Don is and you have kind of spoken to this because earlier you spoke about the fact that it's not just skeletal muscle that makes protein there's proteins made in our liver for example so there's a requirement for protein over and above skeletal muscle you've also established the 30 gram sort of protein dose came from the leucine research but there's this idea out there that if you eat more than 30 grams of protein well anything about that is a waste your body cannot use it um can you help us make sense of this so let's think about a 50 year old who's stable body weight so they're not gaining or losing weight and they eat 100 grams of protein per day what happens to that that's a good question um well won't all be incorporated insulator it all gets wasted it all gets broken you have to burn the exact equivalent per day of what you take in so whether you take in 90 or whether you take in 160 you're still going to burn it all the issue is you need a constant supply of the essential amino acids to keep that cycle running okay yeah so so you know you need you need a constant supply of the protein to keep it running the 30 grams you know the 30 grams doesn't even Max protein synthesis and muscle uh there was a paper by Doug Patton Jones at one point where he sort of argued that 30 was the optimum but there's been a number of other people that have shown that when you look at protein synthesis and muscle um 30 again depending on the quantity of protein it could be 25 but something around 30 triggers it but it probably still goes up it's a it's a flattening curve you don't get as big a response with additional protein but it probably doesn't Plateau until 50 or 55 or 60 grams so I personally recommend people have 40 grams of protein at breakfast and get 55 at dinner and then lunch can be 20 or whatever you want um so I distribute it unevenly with one fairly large meal that's kind of maxing the system and another meal that's just kind of early triggering it so that's you know that's how you know people people you know every when you eat a protein if you eat a meal that's got 30 or 60 grams of protein in it when it comes in almost 50 percent of that protein those amino acids are oxidized in the liver in the gut before it ever gets to the blood it's called first pass elimination so it's always happening so the idea that you'll hear some trainers say well you can't absorb more than 30. well that's nonsense you'll absorb whatever you eat can be a hundred grams um you can't utilize it well the efficiency probably goes down as you go higher um so you know 30 grams might be you know a cost benefit you might get the maximum effect for the fewest calories so if your issues obesity that may be an issue but if your issue is I want to gain muscle mass then 50 my 55 might be a better Target for you so again you know it's the range of activity after a meal is probably 25 to 60. that in that range you probably get a benefit are you aware of anything that we should do or could do or shouldn't do that would affect the amount of of say branched and amino acids getting to muscle tissue after a meal and I think of this because I recently saw a paper looking at cold therapy and it looked at folks jumping into an ice bath after a training session and it actually showed reduced amino acid uptake into the muscle tissue which got me thinking that you know for for hypertrophy purposes perhaps jumping into an ice bath straight after training session is not a good idea because it could blunt um these effects so give me a little more information were they taking an oral dose of something and then looking at muscle uptake right yeah whey protein uh post exercise looking at MPS and it was blunted by ice therapy one of the things we know for sure is that an ice bath would slow down gut motility so my guess is they simply their gut they're gastric emptying their gut motility they're just not absorbing it very fast are there any any ways of doing the opposite any hacks or or sort of things sauna or heat the opposite that could increase the uptake of of amino acids the first thing that comes I mean obviously you can put it in IV and that would be quicker you could give free amino acids versus complex proteins uh don't give it with fiber don't give it with fat don't give it with things that slow down gastric emptying so all those things may make a difference but to your point or the discussion we had earlier what we're looking for is area under the curve and so we have to get them we have to get to a level we have to go from about a hundred micromolar plasma concentration to 300 micromolar to trigger the system so if you have a flat system that goes up to 200 and lasts for five hours that's not useful so you've got to get up to 300 and then you want it to last for a while um the thing that we also know is that protein synthesis in the muscle will shut down after about two to two and a half hours even if leucine's still up so there is something called muscle full or refractory period that once muscle runs for a while it stops my research research by Lane Norton on Gabe Wilson in my lab suggested that it's an ATP thing that the muscle is actually burning so much ATP with protein synthesis that it just has to stop one more thing one more thing before we leave that the other thing that we know for sure though is once you trigger a protein synthesis with muscle and muscle with leucine you have to have all the other amino acids to make it run so giving free leucine and triggering mtor isn't very useful you have to have the rest of the meal to go with it are there any other compounds so other than leucine being important and then the rest of the essential amino acids are there any other compounds that you can supplement um that would be important um would be uh would work in this process of enhancing muscle protein synthesis well the one that the one that is widely used and has been heavily studied is creatine which clearly can improve muscle mass and strength um interestingly nobody really has a very clear idea of what the mechanism of that is as we've talked it has the outcome we can measure strength and muscle seems to be good uh doesn't seem to have any side effects so I would say it's the one supplement that has totally positive effects from use for people who are looking to gain Mass or strength how does testosterone levels play does that interact at all with with this process we're talking about here sure so the hormones the the steroid hormones definitely increase capacity they tend to so so we've been talking about protein synthesis regulated at the initiation level so this is at the point where we're actually putting the amino acids together based on an mRNA testosterone tends to change the capacity level it changes the amount of ribosomes that are around it changes the amount of Gene transcription that's going on you have more messenger RNA so it tends to work at the transcriptional level and the capacity level where leucine tends to work at the translational initiation level so definitely it has an effect um you know it affects every tissue so there is our risk to the hormone you know steroid hormones it's why they're illegal for the most part yeah I was more um interested in like if if someone had low testosterone levels and they were doing their resistance training would would they have an impaired ability to synthesize new muscles issue yeah I would I would think that's the case and that's probably one of the reasons why it's harder for uh 55 or 60 year old to gain muscle mass than it is for a 20 year old 20 year olds are still pretty anabolic and if they start lifting weights they'll typically put on muscle mass 60 year old starts doing it it's really hard to put as as a 70 year old I'll vouch for it's really hard to put on muscle mass I'm sure you're doing pretty well in that department with all the information that you have um we spoke a little bit before right we're sort of coming to the end here um there's a clinical condition that we didn't cover um chronic kidney disease so often in this protein discussion um Kidney Health comes up and and I think there's sort of two two sections to this there's one um that that says you know high protein diets are bad for people with chronic kidney disease and then there's the the next section which is that high protein diets are just bad for kidneys in general and you know often you hear of the the young person who went to see their doctor and their doctor found out that they were eating a high protein diet and they told them no that's going to be terrible for your kidneys and they scared their parents and um you know the parents told them to change their diet so is there any truth to this do we need to be worried about protein intake at these levels that you're recommending with regards to our Kidney Health um so the simple answer is no um so where's it come from basically we know that people who have end-stage renal disease kidney failure uh have to reduce solutes their kidneys not working so whether that's sodium and potassium or whether that's nitrogen the kidneys just simply aren't working so you have to reduce you know salt intake and nitrogen intake the question then becomes does protein cause it and that has been pretty clearly shown not to be the case in fact the diet the National Academy of Sciences when they were putting together dri specifically concluded that low protein diets actually are a bigger risk to kidney failure than high protein diets okay so we're the opposite now we get into the situation where somebody has renal problems is it stage one they have low kidney function stage two stage three stage four is failure stage five failure um that's an ongoing debate uh we know that when you go from a low protein diet to a higher protein diet the kidney actually becomes more efficient you will clear the nitrogen out of the blood quicker on a high protein diet than you do on a low protein diet the glomerular filtration rate actually goes up so in a kidney situation let's say you have stage two and you're you've dropped your filtration rate down into 60 70 range or something now what should you do basically if you lower your protein level the kidney will shrink in size and your GFR will go down so most people now who really are paying attention don't even consider lowering protein until at least stage three and maybe stage four so there have been multiple reviews in the last 10 years at least four I can think of that has specifically looked at this question and resoundingly said protein does not cause kidney damage okay well we can we can link to those into the show notes along with many of the other studies that we've um spoken about Don I'm conscious of your time we've been running here for a couple hours now is there anything that you feel in at least in this discussion relative to the things we've been speaking about that we didn't touch on that you wanted to kind of make clear or do you think we we covered most things now I think that we've covered and I think that you know people treat protein and and plant-based dietses and either or thing and I think we need to get over that I think that a healthy diet has healthy forms of protein they can be plant or animal uh and it has helped healthy plants there are very unhealthy plant-based diets um and people then get into the issues of environment and all sorts of other things it's important to recognize the United States that at this point 50 percent of our fruits and 25 percent of our vegetables are already imported and transportation is the biggest cause of greenhouse gas in the United States so the issue is getting correct balance about this and what do we think we're going to accomplish and not you know not assuming that everybody's going to switch to a healthy plant-based diet you know that requires food skills that requires food knowledge nutrition knowledge that the average American doesn't have and so we have to be careful about sort of dreaming about the unknown uh doesn't mean people can't make healthy diets out of it but uh the average person can't and the average person won't the few points in there that I think we could have a healthy debate on but we maybe we maybe save that for for another one the I'll send you I'm going to send you an article on Transportation that I want you to read and and it's it's looking at the the environmental footprint contribution from transport in Foods uh around the world um I think you'll be surprised the the in this data set the contribution of greenhouse gases through transport of imported Foods makes up a very very small percentage of most Foods if they're coming by sea um Air Freight becomes an issue but that's less than one percent of foods so I'll share that with you um let's keep the dialogue open and always up for some healthy debate but it's uh a pleasure having you on the show as I said at the start I've read uh a lot of your research over the years and um heard great things from from Stuart and Lane so really glad that we're able to connect and shed some light on on a really important topic that I think is confusing and and hopefully listeners today um have some good takeaways and things that they can action and and move towards uh a life with Better Health span and vitality so I appreciate all the work that you're doing and and hope that we can continue the conversation going forward great thank you Sam thank you for joining me for this episode and your interest in science-based conversation I hope you enjoyed it and found the information covered interesting and instructive if you did and you'd like to show your support for the show please subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can stay up to date with new episodes and watch them in video format yes the full length videos please also consider subscribing to the show on the Spotify and or apple podcast app wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts you can also leave a review on Apple or Spotify again a great way to support the show and make our content more discoverable for others to enjoy and learn from if you have any comments about the episodes suggestions for future episodes including guests you'd like to see on the show or questions that you'd like to have answered please leave those in the comments section on YouTube I myself and my team will take note of these comments when planning future episodes finally the best way to support the show and receive discounts on products we love is by checking out our sponsors at theproof.com forward slash friends enjoy your week stay well and I look forward to catching you in the next episode

Channel: The Proof with Simon Hill

Views: 202,091

Keywords: simon hill, science, nutrition, evidence, facts, diet, how to, vegan, plant based, healthy living, wellness, podcast, conversation, the proof, the proof podcast, plant proof, health, the proof with simon hill, fitness

Id: 6NNBgm0c3zY

Length: 116min 57sec (7017 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022