(upbeat music) - The truth about protein powder and protein in general. All right, first off, you gotta realize that protein powders are an
incredibly new invention. Well, high-protein diets have been around for a very long time. Certainly, the Atkins diet
was a high-protein diet. And it's been a trend
in the nutrition world, and it comes and goes. Currently, the carnivore
diet is a high-protein diet, but in working out world, gym world, personal trainers will try to convince you that you have to get more
protein in your diet. And thus, protein powders
have exploded in popularity. After all, just look at Costco or your local health food store, the shelves are lined with tons of them. Why? Because protein is essential. Well, I wanna take a minute and tell you where this idea came from. First of all, let's agree
that protein is essential. Protein is essential for muscle building. It's essential to build connective tissue and for wear and repair of cells. How much protein is
essential will shock you. So there have been some studies done in multiple institutions. The ones I like best have been done by Professor Christopher
Gardner at Stanford, who's a protein expert. And you should know how the recommended daily requirement of protein comes about. They take a bunch of people, a bunch of volunteers, and they put them in a laboratory setting, and they look at what's
called nitrogen balance, and they find the estimated
average requirement of protein to maintain a neutral nitrogen balance. Nitrogen is what makes protein different than, say, fat or sugar. So when they find the
estimated average requirement, 50% of people will do not well with that estimated
average daily requirement, they'll need more. But 50% of people will actually need less. This was the average. So the government says, "Well, we don't want people to miss out on any necessary protein, so we're going to cover our bases. So we're going to actually
quadruple the amount of protein that the average person would require, so that 98% of people, if we recommend this much protein, will get their daily requirement." So the average daily requirement, the recommended daily requirement is 40 to 60 grams of protein per day. That's not what most people need. That's two to four times more than what most people need. Another way to think about it is if you actually ate the
recommended daily amount, 40 to 60 grams, 98% of us would be eating more protein than we actually needed. Stop and think about that again. If we ate the recommended
daily allotment of protein, 98% of us would be
eating too much protein. Well, so what? As Professor Gardner likes to explain, and I've explained as many times as I can, we have no storage system for protein. We have a storage system for sugar. It's either in glycogen in
our liver or our muscles, or we can store it, convert it into fat in our fat cells. And we have unlimited
storage capacity for fat, we have no storage capacity for protein. So unless you are actively making muscle, you can eat all the protein you want and it's not going to make more muscle. It's going to be converted into a storage form of energy, which is either glycogen, and you fill up your glycogen
storage very rapidly, or fat. And here's the bad news. Looking at radioactive labeled
nitrogen in human volunteers, the average protein meal, whether it's 25 grams or
50 grams or 100 grams, only about 13% of that meal goes to your muscles only. The rest is either burned as energy, nothing wrong with that, or stored as fat. You have such little
requirement for protein. And these experiments have
been done in volunteers looking at plant proteins, looking at animal proteins, looking at whole proteins, looking at proteins that
have been broken down. And I'm sorry, the vast majority of protein that you eat does not become protein in your muscles. You could eat all the protein you want, you will not build more muscles unless you are actively
trying to build muscles. But then, guess what? You are getting so much
extra protein in your diet if you are eating the U.S
recommended daily amount that you'll always be
able to build more muscle. And this has actually been shown in people who have been given
minimal amounts of protein and put on an exercise program, and they still do superbly well compared to people who are
put on a high-protein diet because most of it doesn't
go to your muscles, folks. Most of it is converted to sugar and fat. Sorry about that. So, does eating protein
help you build muscle? No, it doesn't, unless you're actively building muscle. But you've already in a regular diet getting more protein
than you actually need. Does it build strong bones? You're already getting enough
protein in a regular diet to build strong bones. And if you really want
to build strong bones, then you need to seal leaky gut because leaky gut is
the cause of weak bones. How about it helps you lose weight or maintain a healthy weight? No, because most of the
protein you're going to eat is converted to sugar or fat. Now that doesn't sound like a
good plan for losing weight. It lowers blood pressure. No, protein converts to sugar or fat. And the fatter you get, the higher your blood pressure goes. Reduces cravings, promotes satiety. No. The problem with powders in protein is you instantly absorb that protein instead of if you ate a
piece of fish or a steak, it would take you hours and hours to break that fish or steak apart into individual amino acids. So quite the contrary. Protein powders are the worst
way to cut your appetite because they'll be absorbed instantly and you'll go looking for more. Helps you stay fit as you age, prevent sarcopenia. I'm sorry, the vast majority of sarcopenia comes in older age from
people living alone and not participating in a
family gathering of eating, and they forget to eat. So why are protein powders so bad? Well, they're certainly
not there to build muscle. You gotta remember that protein powder is a predigested food. Now what do I mean by that? The more enzymatic digestion, bacterial digestion that happens to break your food apart into amino acids in the case of protein into glucose in the case of carbohydrates, into free fatty acids in the case of fat, the slower you absorb these foods and the slower you can
distribute them to your cells. But when you predigest these things, it's instantly absorbed and affects your insulin levels. and there's no place to put this so it goes right into your fat. Believe it or not, Kellogg's Corn Flakes were advertised as the world's first predigested food, which unfortunately was a harmider of all the awful things to come. So if you see any processed food or ultra processed food, just realize that what's
happened to this food is it's been predigested for you. So a predigested protein is the last thing you want to eat. A new study looked at people who ate ultra-processed foods were linked to a 50% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. Why? Because of exactly
what I said happened. This excess protein gets
it turned into sugar, which in turn gets turned into fat. Now finally, most protein powders are either way protein
or casein protein base, and they're loaded, spoiler alert, with gut-busting, artery-busting Neu5Gc. So that's that miserable sugar molecule that attacks your gut, that attacks your blood vessels, your joints, and your brain. And you don't want that. What you want to eat is whole foods and you want to eat them whole, like our great-great
grandparents always did 'cause there was no predigested food. And that's how you want
them to trickle in. Now, is there a healthy
way to use protein powder? Well, yes, but 99% of people aren't
using it the healthy way. If you are actively strength training, you wanna wait about 10 to 20 minutes after you complete your workout, and then take your protein powder with a small amount of carbohydrate to have the muscle cells hungry and take delivery of the protein. And this has been shown over and over again in clinical studies. I personally prefer plant-based proteins. Why? Because the proteins in plants will not stimulate mTOR, which will aid you, I guarantee you. But key about plant proteins is they're usually
available with tons of fiber so that you will slow down the absorption of those plant proteins because of the fiber. For instance, hemp protein
is also loaded with fiber, so it's a very good option. Now, there's things to
avoid on plant proteins. If you see plant proteins that are made with pea or soybean, there are a ton of them out there. Those are loaded with lectins and my patients react to them. On the other hand, if you see pea or soy protein isolate, the lectins have been removed. But remember, those are still predigested. It's still a whole lot
better to eat the whole food. Now, also beware that tons of these protein
powders have added sugar and they're often concealed in the form of agave nectar or coconut sugar or maple sugar, and that is not the way to do it either. Finally, the beauty of my product ProPlant is it combines plant
proteins, hemp, spirulina, and flax proteins with fiber and no added sugar so that you get the
plant proteins you need, but the fiber slows down the absorption. So it's a win-win. You feed your gut buddies and you get the adequate amounts of protein you're looking for. That's it for today. Sorry about that. Protein powder is not your friend. If you found this video helpful, I think you're gonna love this one. Look for Alaskan salmon. Alaskan salmon by law
has to be caught wild, that's not true of Canadian salmon, Norwegian salmon, Scottish salmon. Look for Alaskan salmon.
