Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host Peter Atia, this podcast, my website and My Weekly Newsletter, all focus on the goal of translating, the science of longevity into something, accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoyed
This podcast, we created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are or if you want to learn more now, head over to Peter attea, m.com forward, slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's today's episode, I guess this week is gone Layman. Don is a professor emeritus of Food Science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he served as a member of the
As well as a chair of foods and nutritions the director of human ecology. And the associate dean of Agriculture, he earned his bachelor's and master's degree in chemistry at Illinois, State University and his Doctorate in human nutrition and biochemistry at the University of Minnesota. His research has focused on muscle development protein and amino acid metabolism and nutrition in the context of athletic performance, obesity, diabetes and cardio metabolic Health. Don currently consults for many food industry. Companies, including craft Nestle Hershey, the dairy Council. The egg board, the beef board among others.
This episode and discussion with Don really focus around the concept of what he calls, a muscle Centric nutrition view, which is, how should we think about nutrition protein and various amino acids? If our goal is to maintain or maximize and build muscle, especially as we age in this episode, we talk about Don's background, his interest in protein muscle, insulin, anabolic factors, in general, we explain what the RDA. For protein is how it came about, how it's clearly being misunderstood by people as a
Commended amount of protein versus a barely minimum protein amount for survival, talk about the nuances of animal versus plant protein, talk about the difference, in protein requirements between children and adults, even normalized to mass, of course. And we talked about what happens to children, who are protein deficient early in life. And then we look specifically at protein needs under various circumstances. So, for example, what's the maximum amount of protein that can be consumed and used in one sitting? Meaning the most amount of protein that you can consume and
In one sitting which still contributes to muscle protein synthesis talk about the ideal timing of consuming protein throughout the day and around exercise to talk about the importance of protein quality. When looking at how much or how little a person consumes and then we talked about how these things change as you age. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Don
language.
Thank you so much, for making time to sit down today. I've heard a lot about you over the past couple of years.
Is from our mutual friend, Lane Norton, who suggested that we sit down and go even deeper down this nutrition pathway. What you may not know about me is nutrition is my least favorite subject. I say that only because I'm so tired of the religious aspect of nutrition. I enjoy talking about nutrition through the lens of biochemistry, but they're after my patients for it, has dwindled over the past decade. I have a feeling we'll get along, just fine because your entire background is based on nutritional biochemistry as opposed to
To nutrition
religion. Well, first of all, it's great to meet you, Peter, even electronically. And my interest was a little sort of the opposite. I was interested in Biochemistry first and studying organic chemistry, just seems so boring and esoteric that nutrition. I could actually apply my biochemistry two things people were interested in. I kind of like that split but I totally get your aspect of the Zealot ends of the
spectrum. You know, you grew up on a farm if I'm not mistaken. Correct, and
Yes, that's
correct. And before we started recording this, you mentioned to me that, your parents, your dad lived to 97 your mom to 102. So you're at the midpoint of your life right now is essentially based on your good genes, but what was it? Like, growing up on a farm, 70 years ago?
It was a great experience. Back in the 50s when I was born agriculture, was very poor in the United States. And so you sort of grew up in that background. But I think I learned about animal,
Growth. I learned about reproduction, I learned about growing corn and soybeans. I learned about life cycle and I just got an interest in food. We were growing up. We were had it there on the farm and so it just made me interested in it. And then combined with that, I always had an interest in science and evolved be a kind of a natural marriage. I guess
when you're going to college, did you study biochemistry and organic chemistry? First? That was your
undergrad. Yeah, the sir,
Dippity of how I got into Nutrition, a certainly wasn't anything. I knew about, I was in a small town. I went to a school that had, like, 400 people in it, and so, certainly wasn't a thing I knew about, but I know I like science. So I went to First Illinois, State University to study chemistry. And I pretty quickly realized, I had no aptitude for inorganic chemistry, but I sort of understood biochemistry pretty. Well, I got to the end of it and it was actually during the
It Nam war and I was scheduled to go into the military. So I was totally unemployable and the university said, hey you're doing really good at this. Chemistry stuff will give you a graduate assistantship and you go and you go and all of a sudden I ended up with a deferment, getting a master's degree in Biochemistry and my mentor. At that time, say you really have a knack for this nutrition part of it. Why don't you do a PhD? And I sort of said, oh, really? And so I ended up at University of Minnesota.
Doing a PhD in nutritional biochemistry and fell in. Love with all of. It certainly was no grand plan, but it fit my background of Agriculture food Sports Nutrition. I fell into a group that was doing muscle metabolism and it just kind of all fell together for me,
was ancel keys at the University of Minnesota at that time.
He was not, he had left, but his legacy was there with George Blackburn, Ivan, France, and some of those individuals. So,
So I certainly got that background while I was there, and certainly invested a lot of my early thinking of nutrition and laying Norton, who you've talked with before is, has talked about how are thinking of nutrition evolves. My certainly has evolved.
Tell me a little bit about at least as far as you can remember, what was your underlying philosophy of nutrition Circa 1975, which is probably when you were doing your PhD, I'm guessing
one of my
Really is thinking about nutrition again. It sort of dates to my interest in animal growth, but also Sports Nutrition. I very early developed the philosophy. That nutrition was really about to tissues the brain and skeletal muscle. If those two tissues were healthy, you are going to live a pretty good life. Everything else is regulatory the liver, the heart, the kidney, that got everything else, adapts to your
you of environment. But you have to focus on those two. And I think if you tailor your nutritional requirements around that thinking, you end up with a much more sensible approach, I sort of coined the concept that my colleague. Dr. Gabrielle lion, and I always use a muscle Centric nutrition if you keep muscle healthy, you've got a good shot at avoiding obesity, avoiding diabetes, avoiding cancer, etc, etc.
Let's go into that a little bit. I mean, I want to get into some weeds on a whole bunch of other really nuanced.
But let's follow this thread for a moment. So, when you say that, I assume, you're at least in part referring to the following two facts. One muscle is the largest sink for glucose 75 to, 80% of our glucose storage capacity exists within skeletal muscle, and then there's another factor of muscle which is, it's a very early Depot for excess adipose tissue. So once we start to let little droplets of fat accumulate within muscle cells,
And it leads to this process of insulin resistance, that then creates a problem for the first point that I made, which is you now make it harder for your carbohydrates, storage unit, to accept carbohydrates and of course, that leads to hyperglycemia and ultimately diabetes. Is that part of why that formulated your thesis or is there more to it
or to it? I think what you stated is correct but I do think about it differently. I think about muscle really serves two functions.
It's one. The obvious one is mobility. Most people get to the age of 65 beyond that most people actually died from some form of immobility, Falls breaking, something hospitalization. So functional mobility is critical, but the other aspect is metabolism and muscle is a primary site for insulin activity. You mentioned glucose storage. I look at it more as an issue of glucose.
Utilization and also fat utilization. So basically your blood glucose and your blood lipids are heavily, obviously, the amount you eat makes a difference but the actual level is heavily dependent on your muscle metabolism and you sort of comment about insulin resistance being associated with fat. Actually insulin causes insulin resistance. So if you chronically elevated, insulin too long, that is the
Definition of type 2 diabetes. Is that basically insulin causes insulin resistance,
say more about that. It's hard to untangle some of the causality here. I spoke with Jerry Schulman God probably it's been two years ago and in his Paradigm you have the accumulation of diacylglycerol hides within the actual myocyte. So not interstitially right? Or not between them but it's the actual accumulation of lipid within and that's what I'm blanking on which enzyme now that
inhibits. But it's basically down the pi3k pathway, the pi3 kinase pathway where you basically render the muscle cell less sensitive to the signal of insulin, telling the glute for transporter to come up. And so this hyperinsulinemia is effectively the first way that you can externally measure insulin resistance is that in line with what you're saying?
Yes, and no. So Gerry Solomon's great, I definitely followed
Research a lot. The thing to understand about the biochemistry is you can create the models to give you a negative feedback so he's absolutely correct. That diacyl glycerol or ceramides will feed back to the insulin, receptor. The glute for transport and the insulin receptor and cause insulin resistance. That's true. That is a philosophy of fat Centric. That fat causes all the problems.
But on the other hand, you can do the exact same thing with glucose too much. Glucose will also inhibit the insulin receptor and cause that same exact feedback, it doesn't accumulate the ceramides or the diacylglycerol. I did some research with diacyl glycerol and if you do it in the issues of high carb, low carb, you won't find those effects. So the question then becomes which ones more likely to be physiological.
People are eating 350 grams of carbs per day are because they're eating 90 grams of fat per day, which ones likely to cause it Bob wolf. There's a philosophy called the ramble hypothesis. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it basically, the philosophy is the Randall hypothesis. Was that fatty acids, diacylglycerol caused all the problems. And what Bob wolf did was basically run that experiment with stable isotopes and he showed
His actually the reverse that fatty acids are not inherently toxic but glucose is, it has his own disease, we call it diabetes. And so, when you eat excess carbs you must get rid of them, you're absolutely have to dispose them in the next two hours or fat. Basically can hang around for much longer. It's just simply not that toxic to the body. In fact, the body always wants a certain level of free fatty acids in the blood because that's the fuel for the heart, Okay? So,
Always high. What about the ability to turn that excess glucose into fatty acid Via de novo lipogenesis? Are you saying that doesn't happen quickly enough to alleviate some of the toxicity of acute hyperglycaemia?
It doesn't happen super quick. I mean, that's a great question. There's a lot of people who argue how much the novel lipogenesis actually occurs, but basically, when you get into requiring high amounts of de novo lipogenesis,
Assists. Now we start talking about fatty liver and so now you start seeing triglyceride problems, people who are actually doing a lot of de novo lipogenesis, typically have elevated triglycerides. So, that's one of the first signs that you're disrupting that flow triglycerides in general. Are there to recycle free fatty acids? So, to add a post is always dumping free fatty acids out for the heart and other tissues. The problem comes.
Then is when you start blending that with too many carbs and too many fats. So first and foremost calories are always the problem. But when you have excess calories and then you start rebalancing these macro nutrients is, when you get into trouble,
you're obviously intimately familiar with this, maybe even some of the listeners are, but there's a very famous paper by Mark, hellerstein Circa, mid-90s 94-95, that demonstrating it really. A very small amount of de novo lipogenesis taking place with carbohydrate feeding. I absolutely believe the results of the
Paper. But I also think it's a very narrow context, and it's not necessarily the context of an overfed individual. Therefore, I think our capacity for de novo lipogenesis, depends heavily on total energy, content, or total energy balance. And therefore, I think there is a scenario where in the hellerstein paper you can feed a high-carbohydrate diet but within the overall composition of a low energy diet or a balanced Energy diet and DNL is actually quite low conversely, you can feed a high carbohydrate
It in the context of a high energy diet and I think we would probably see a much greater amount of
DNL. Totally, you're exactly like the
context matters and I do think that the first, if we were describing this as a polynomial, right? Like the first order term is energy. The first order term is how many calories are coming in and that probably matters, more than the ratio of carbs fat.
Go back to that. Randall hypothesis or wolf discussion. You always want to think about it. Is that carbohydrates excess?
Cosas toxic. If the blood level is high, you'll damage basically every tissue from your eyes, to your toes. And so you have to dispose of the glucose so Heller. Steans what he showed was that, if you have a diet said, the American diet, 50% carbs, 35% fat and you take in a thousand calorie meal or eight hundred calorie meal, which one are you going to put into fat quickest? You're going to put in the easiest
The one that's already fat. And so, the carbohydrates going to get burned and the fats going to go to fat, it just simply the body is selecting the easiest path way. But if you switch that and jewels, Hirsch did it and then Jeff volek did it later. If you switch that to a 80% carb, 10% then you'll see that de novo lipo synthesis. And one of the interesting things out of it is when the body makes fat, the only thing it can make is saturated fat. So,
so, we have a lot of saturated fat in the blood that actually doesn't come from eating fat. It comes from eating carbs
again in the context of how much we're eating, right?
Yeah, exactly. It's important for people to realize we burn around 100 calories per hour. That would be 2400 calories per day. So 100 calories per hour in a two hour period, you only burning 200 calories. So, everything else has to be stored. Average, American meal is 400 to 1,000 calories? That means you have to
Or all of that.
Is that an argument? You think, for spreading out calories more over the course of the day
that takes us into a protein discussion and I would say absolutely not two angles to that. One was, there is a theory back when I was in early in my career back in the mid-80s by Bill Lavelle and he was arguing. That lots of small meals was good for less fat deposition and it was an artifact of how
We did the study, he did it with animals and basically showed that when you met the adaptation to lots of small meals the animals didn't gain as much as if you adapted them to like two meals per day. But the artifact was when you adapt an animal to two meals per day, they go through a starvation period because they have to learn to do it and when you come out of a starvation period, you're making more fat. So we redid it with a longer adaptation period, and what we found was that
Reducing the number of meals per day. Actually is thermogenic Lee, advantageous. You actually waste more calories. So we actually redid that publish that the other aspect we can get into is protein. Protein needs to be distributed at specific meals. The distribution needs to be high and eating. Lots of small meals is a really bad choice for a lot of reasons and we can get into that.
Yeah, and I definitely want to get into that because if there's one area I really want to double click on today, it's everything from
Um, protein timing, protein type animal versus plant protein efficiency, amino acid variability, all that kind of stuff, we're going to go deep on that, but let's go pick it up back in University of Minnesota, you've got the Legacy, and I'm guessing at the time, Keys is really famous for two things in the mid-70s. I think, by that point, he's probably already published his seven countries study and the hypothesis. Now is a very fat Centric view of the negative consequences of dietary fat specifically,
I to re saturated fat in the American diet, especially as it pertains to a SCV D and then I suspect, the second thing that he's probably still famous for is the starvation experiments I'm guessing done in the 1950s. I mean, these were done on conscientious objectors, so they're probably in the 40s or 50s,
right? I can't exactly date that but you're exactly right. I mean we learned a lot about starvation at that point, for obvious reasons, we can't Dukes experiments like that before, but we learned a lot about body composition and how the body.
Are so those are good. But certainly the Legacy was there and when I got the Minnesota, I sort of bought into the cholesterol and saturated fat and total fat, and okay, this is what everybody's teaching and you know, that's what I was forced to learn. That's what they were teaching and so I bought into it. But as I slowly started doing experiments and early in my career, we did a lot of fasting type of experiments with animals to look at composition changes and I did malnutrition.
Work and Northern Africa. And I sort of got into all of that and I started realizing, you know, I don't really believe that. And one seminar I will always remember at Minnesota was individual by their name of Fred Kumar, L came to Minnesota and gave a seminar about the dangers of cooking oils and specifically, trans-fats and Blackburn and France, just ridiculed him. Basically said, this is the craziest thing we've ever heard all these
Plant oils are great. 20 years later we banned trans fats from foods that are only as the most dangerous fat that you can encounter. I always remember that, just sort of thinking, wow, people who have bought into this, Dogma aren't necessarily, right? And we need to keep questioning it.
Speaking of friends, obviously in 1973, he completes a study, the Minnesota coronary experiment. I actually find this to be one of the most difficult.
He's to interpret not so much the one that he published 16 years later by the way in 1989. But the one that Chris ramsden republished just a couple of years ago based on all of the data from Francis study Plus data, he never published this to me is one of the most complicated stories. I will tell you I have posed this question to every friend of mine who is more steeped in nutrition than I am. And I still don't have a great sense of how to explain this.
He's results. So I'll explain it for the listener in the viewer, and I'm curious to your thoughts. So the experiment was done in basically institutionalized patients. So again, maybe not a study. That could be done easily again today, for ethical reasons, but had the advantage of being so well controlled. You basically had patients that were randomized into two groups, their total energy was identical, their total split of macronutrients was identical. The only thing that differed was that in one group, it was high.
Fat. And in the other group, it was high poly unsaturated fat. The hypothesis being tested was, is saturated fat intake leading to increased major adverse. Cardiac events heart attacks and strokes The Experiment. I can remember exactly where I think ran about five years in 1973 showed no difference. There was no difference in cardiac events despite the fact that the group that was on the higher polyunsaturated, fat group did indeed have much lower
Cholesterol levels. This predated the sub fractionation, so they weren't measuring LDL and HDL. They were just measuring total cholesterol at the time. There was some correlation between cardiovascular disease and total cholesterol levels at the extremes. That was certainly true again because I didn't think we'd be talking about this. I don't have the numbers all in my mind but will link to it all but directionally, I believe that the higher pufa group relative to the saturated fat group was about 30 milligrams per deciliter lower in total cholesterol.
And based on everything we know today, we would assume that much of that was in LDL cholesterol, indeed, being lower and non HDL cholesterol. And yet there was no difference in events. And of course, it's become a very famous and unfortunate story in nutrition research and that friends chose not to publish it because he didn't like the results, it didn't match his hypothesis, which was that the group on Lower saturated fat would have fewer events ramsden, went, and published all of these data, plus a whole bunch of sub data. As I said, just a few years ago, I believe,
Even the British medical journal and actually found something that threw a wrench in my initial hypothesis. My initial view of the Minnesota coronary experiment was it probably wasn't a long enough intervention, it might be that five years was not long enough to appreciate a difference. And so it was underpowered or Too Short in adoration to see a benefit if there was a benefit but in ramsdens analysis, you actually saw the opposite because he now looked at some subgroups and you actually saw a higher incidence of coronary
Events in some of the people that were consuming, the high poly unsaturated fat diet. And I can't remember, what the dominant oil was. I'm blanking on it. I don't remember if it was canola or safflower. I think it was safflower. So, how much of that do you remember? Don from your time there? And can you shed any light on this or do you have any thoughts on how to interpret that
experiment? Well, first of all, I am definitely not a lipid expert. So I sort of remember the study but I can't put any more
Firs to it than you did. I actually did some research with Ivan, France, and pennycress featherton when I was at Minnesota. So I sort of was in the loop at the time but that's been a couple of years ago. I think if one really looks at the literature on saturated fat and is fair about all of those studies, you find a very mixed bag, the women's health initiative, and all of those kinds of things. And unfortunately, the people who believe the hypothesis of either the
He'd publishing it or said, well, it could have been wrong and they tried to find all kinds of excuses as opposed to just believing it. There's an old theory in science that the theory is correct. It will get stronger over time and if it's not it gets weaker. And I think one would have to realize that a the cholesterol Theory, the total cholesterol theory has definitely gotten weaker, and the saturated fat hasn't held up very well, we still believe it, but your comment a little bit ago.
Go. It's first and foremost calories. If you put excess saturated fat on top of too many calories, that's probably a problem. But if you're at or below your calorie needs, I don't see any data that suggested it is. So like sort of joke or comment all the time is that if you're committed to being obese you probably ought to pay attention to the quality of your fats. If your goal is to be lean and healthy calories, is what you're paying attention to in the macro distribution is sort of your
Preference. So let's talk a little bit. Now about how your interest in protein came about because of all macronutrients. This is the one I have to pay the most attention to and it's honestly, the one where I feel like I fall the shortest. I feel like I have some days when I nail it, and I have too many days when I come up short, I never go overboard. I never go to bed at night thinking. God, I ate too much protein today, but I do go to bed sometimes thinking, I don't think I ate enough for my goals. My goals are to
surmise muscle protein synthesis, my goals are to preserve lean tissue as long as I can in frankly, that's the goal for my patients. So how did this become a strong interest of yours?
Well, the real interest started my Master's Degree because I got interested in studying protein, turnover protein synthesis and I was working with Arlen Richardson, who was expert in aging and we were studying age-related changes in protein synthesis and we actually discovered the changes in mRNA over time.
That the poly, a tails on mRNA gets shorter, your ability to put ribosomes on the message goes down and you have lower synthesis. So that efficiency of change a protein synthesis over time is a theme that runs through all of my research and we'll get into efficiency and adults and things like that. So that was sort of the beginning. When I went to Minnesota, then I sort of got a muscles focus on it. And one of the first things I learned in graduate school,
Is, we don't really have a protein requirement. We have a requirement for nine, essential amino acids, and organic nitrogen organic. A means which all translates into the fact that we can make 11, amino acids and 9. We have to have in the diet and one of my favorite Clips, I use when I'm talking into groups on stage, is that protein? We should think of as a vitamin pill, we don't have a daily requirement for a vitamin pill. We have a requirement for
All vitamins. Inside the pill, we don't actually have a daily requirement for protein. We have a requirement for nine or 20, amino acids inside of it. And so, is talking about a protein requirement, just to reflects ignorance, we have a specific requirements for nine, essential amino acids. And that gets into the complexity, then, because these amino acids are essential for building blocks for new protein, but every one of them has a metabolic role.
Like leucine and mtor or Arginine and nitric oxide or lysine and carnitine or cysteine and glutathione and all of those roles are vastly above the minimum that is detective or nitrogen balance for the RDA. And so that's where people fall apart is that we think about vitamin C and we know there's a minimum RDA to prevent scurvy but people will take five or ten kinds of that, during covid for immune response. But we
Thinking that way about amino acids and it's exactly the same,
you know, it's a great Point. Don. Maybe we should spend a minute, helping people understand what an amino acid is because, you know, I took biochemistry, I have my little cue cards. I can draw every one of the amino acids not anymore. I carry. Yeah, as you think not anymore but there was a day when I could draw all nine of them but let's help people understand. I think most people understand what glucose looks like. If you listen to this podcast, you're no stranger to the idea that
glucose is a six carbon ring and each one has a couple hydrogen's on them and one of them's got an oxygen and a hydrogen on it as well. I think most people who have listened to this podcast, have a decent sense of what a fatty acid looks like long stretch of carbons if it's saturated, there's no double bond. So, it's just littered with either two or three hydrogen's depending on where it sits in the chain and then of course, you store them by putting three of those onto a nice little three-carbon glycerol backbone.
But I actually think most people understandably have less Clarity around, what an amino acid is. And you've already alluded to the fact that there were 20 of them and nine of them, we can't even make if we were deprived of these things, we'd be dead. So we got to eat them. But can you give folks a sense of the nomenclature? What is an amino acid? What are these things look like
a little bit like a fatty acid. Amino acid has a carboxy end connected with a carbon and then it has a nitrogen and so when we eat
Eat protein, we get these amino acids in some sort of a string, but we totally digest them down to probably individual amino acids may be dire tripeptides and we absorb them that way. They get to the blood as single amino acids for the most part, and then the body begins to reconnect them based on the messenger rnas where our DNA tells us how to reconnect them. And so we connect a carbon to a nitrogen and we string them together of these 20 amino acids, though. They all have that.
Acid and nitrogen part, but they also have a side chain ranging from very simple one like glycine with just a hydrogen to ones like tryptophane that have a big aromatic part to them. And so all of these are different and they go into proteins and different structures. The DNA tells us how we put them together and proteins, can be simple like insulin with 51, amino acids, or they could be like, myosin with thousands and then every protein
Of the body has a different turnover rate. Some of them like insulin, might last 15 minutes, and some of them like myosin or was take collagen might last 250 days, and so they turn over at different rates, so that's sort of what they are. But beyond that building block structure, then every amino acid has other kinds of structures in, might be like lysine, we're part of it becomes the molecule known as carnitine, which is
Fatty acid metabolism or it might be the nitrogen off Arginine. That goes to nitric oxide for basal restriction, or it might be cysteine, which goes to part of creatinine or glutathione. So we can get the leucine, which is sort of my favorite, which is a signal, which really got me interested in protein and metabolism is a signal for muscle protein synthesis. So again, they all have this building block structure, they get strong too.
Together in different links but they also have other metabolic functions and that's what people don't recognize when they're talking about protein requirements.
So let's talk about that RDA because when we look at our patients and evaluate them from a nutritional standpoint, almost without exception, we come to the conclusion that they are not getting enough amino acids based on how much protein, they're consuming. Now, I don't know how much of that is the nature.
Which food is prepared these days the nature, by which protein makes up a certain amount of the caloric intake based on various types of prepared foods and things like that. And how much of that just is based on a belief system of what people need perhaps coming back to the RDA. So first of all, let's tell people what the actual RDA is and and how it came to be.
So the RDA is a recommended dietary allowance. Some people think it's a day late, but it's a dietary allowance, so it's sort of a generic number.
Brr and the argument is that for all rdas, we sort of test a population and come up with an average number and then for a safety factor, which average would be 50% would be deficient. And so we had a safety factor of two standard deviations, which supposedly 97.5 percent of the people would be adequate to prevent any signs of inadequacy at that point. But that also means 2.5 percent of the people are actually deficient at that point.
That's sort of the definition. Where does the R&D come from? I think it's useful to go back in history. Just a little bit that on protein. How did we begin to evaluate protein needs while all came out of animal Sciences? Back in the early 1900's? Before we even knew all the essential amino acids farmers, were trying to say, how do I get animals to grow? Best, you know, and different kinds of proteins, and things like that, and they develop protein quality scores and things like that. How
Much growth did I get for what? I fed, how much nitrogen did I deposit for how much I fed? So, these were all rapidly growing animals and we develop this concept really of nitrogen retention that. Basically, we now translated into what's called nitrogen balance, and that's how we determine the protein. Requirement basically, what's important at all of that discussion that long-winded, explanation, is that
All of the concepts were developed for growth. Where nitrogen balance was positive. You could measure a change over time and as we've now tried to start applying that to non-growing adults. It gets a lot more vague. So it's important to recognize that what we think about protein requirements is a developed from nitrogen balance, where you measure all of the nitrogen you're eating, which you can do pretty good. But then you have to measure all of the nitrogen you're losing which were really
Bad at and we call that nitrogen balance.
Can you explain how that's done? We're going to talk so much about it. I think it's worth getting into the details of how nitrogen balance is calculated. Let's do it in a human. If I came into your lab. How would you do this?
So let's start with the front end. Let's start with nitrogen in. So that's basically you just take a bunch of food and you're doing a chemical analysis and you measure the nitrogen and you multiply it by a factor of six point two five. So a you're measuring.
It's not really protein. It could be nucleic acids, it could be anything with nitrogen. You're calling it protein. And then you're multiplying it by six point two. Five which says I believe that protein contains 16 percent nitrogen which also isn't always true. So now we've got this error on the front end and now on the back end we're going to try and measure losses. So the primary loss of nitrogen the body is in the urine urea so that's pretty easy to measure. You can collect that.
At second would be the stool so you can collect that. But then you get into things like, sweat skin loss and hair loss and respire Tori nitrogen, ammonia in the breath and those are all incredibly vague. So everyone who knows nitrogen balance says that nitrogen. Balance underestimates requirement everybody uniformly. But that is where the RDA comes from. When you do short-term studies,
What you find is most people and again all these studies were done with college age students. So they're kind of right at the end of their growth. Basically in a short-term seven day study, they look okay so that's where we're at in the last 20 years. Those of us who study protein have gone beyond that and said well, nitrogen balance is one outcome but it like the vitamin C argument there are other outcomes based on amino acid metabolism.
They may be more important than minimum, nitrogen balance and we now know that protein handling, the efficiency goes down as we get older. So now we have much higher requirements that most of us talk about for
adults. So just to be clear done going back to something. You said the reason we all agree that standard nitrogen balance underestimates. The requirement is. It's easier to measure the some of the ends than the sum of the outs. Yeah, exactly. And the chances are
Are significantly under estimating the outlets,
especially if you do. I mean, when I was a surgical resident, there were times. We did nitrogen balance on patients, who were on long-term? Tpn Total parenteral Nutrition in the ICU. These were patients that we wasn't clear how long it would take for their guts to start working again. So they had to be fed all of their nutrition through a central line, which is very complicated feeding to do. And
And when we would have the nutrition team come and do a consult and do a nitrogen balance, I mean they literally had to put a tent over that patient. You know, they were doing the best that they could in the ICU to basically create a laboratory environment to calculate nitrogen balance, which turns out, you're not surprised very important for critically ill, patient that is a hyper hyper catabolic State. And if you're trying to create an anabolic state in that person to keep them alive, it's imperative that you understand.
Much nitrogen they have or how much mentioned that they require. So the simple idea of I'm just going to tell you how much protein you're eating and I'm going to measure the nitrogen that's coming out in your urea. That's just not going to cut it that's just too simple.
Yeah and currently a lot of those studies are simply done with a factor so they don't put them in tents or buildings or whatever. They just measure urea in the urine and everything else is just sort of. Well we think it's a one pattern. Yeah exactly. Exactly.
Yeah, and so obviously were perpetuating and error based on
ignorance. So then let's go one step further done. How do you use Isotopes to now really get into what's happening? Not just on the boundaries but how that nitrogen? And by the way, I think it was one point we should make for The Listener who might be still lost as to why we're talking about nitrogen. Proteins, have nitrogen, amino acids, all have, nitrogen carbs and fats, don't so
Is where we can really speak to the source of the nitrogen. And as you mentioned anything with a nucleic acid is going to have nitrogen as well but the majority of the nucleic acids come in
proteins, come in protein
foods. Yep. Would be found in protein based foods.
You're exactly, right. I mean, fats and for the most part annoying essential fatty acids, carbs and fats are basically energy sources. Their carbon-carbon bonds, that provide energy where Amino
It's have a very different purpose and structure and that nitrogen is part of what makes them
different. In other words, we consume carbohydrates virtually exclusively for their energy content fat, mostly for its energy content. There's some structural importance that comes with fat and cholesterol but really, you don't want to be consuming protein for energy, right? The only caveat, I would say to that is that there might be reasons that people are high.
We're sensitive to carbohydrates. We're taking in more protein beyond what you might actually need for protein. Metabolism, might be a substitution for carbs calories, we can get into that conversion and things like that. But I talk with people and they say how much protein, what's your high-end? And I sort of give them one number and I say but you know the caveat is you might want to take more if you're really trying to struggle with a carbohydrate
issue. So now let's talk about that measurement of what's actually
Happening with those amino acids. Actually, this question, what is keeping before that when people think of protein, they think of meat, that's going to be a great source of protein. Obviously, there's protein in most foods, have some protein in them, but if you are eating a piece of steak, how many of those 20 amino acids are in there? Are they virtually all in
there? If you're looking at animal Source proteins, whether it's meat or eggs, or milk, basically all of the amino acids that are human would need are in those
It's because they're basically obviously chickens, not a mammal, but the others are mammals. And basically, we have the same amino acids, the same protein. They're all their meat is a good example, because they're all pretty much in the right balances. But every protein has a little different balance of essential amino acids. You can look at Dairy, proteins, and dairy proteins are something we can fractionate because they're all water-soluble. So we know a lot about Alpha lat.
Act, albumin versus lactoferrin and lack of globulin, etc, etc. We know that a lot of differences about amino acid, compositions of individual proteins,
going back to what you just said, then animal protein. We typically think of, as meat, mammals beef Pig stuff like that. Then of course you've got sort of bird protein, mostly chicken for folks, and then fish protein and then you have eggs,
dairy. The first three are exactly the same for protein. So whether it comes from a cow or a pig,
Ignore a chicken or a fish muscle protein is still muscle protein. And how do
we think objectively about the quality of a protein? This is a topic that you've talked about extensively but there's a way there's a numerical way to talk about that. Isn't there? An efficiency of that protein versus tofu versus soybean versus rice? All the way down into lower and lower protein density Foods?
Yeah, pretty cool.
Quality is something that I think a lot about and I'm actually working with a group now to sort of reinvent, how we think about that. But I think you're referring to printing quality in a sense of PD, casts or die, as or something like that. Basically, we realize that, when you look at a protein, there are two factors. One is what's the composition of those nine? Essential amino acids. And the other is what's its bioavailability? How well do we it digest it and absorb it with
Animal proteins and most isolated proteins, you know, even soy protein isolates. The digestion absorption is pretty close to a hundred is usually 95% or higher. For all animal proteins. For plant proteins though, it gets into, you need to realize that in a plant. The protein is there for the purpose of the plant. And so a lot of it is attached to fibers to structures. Plants have proteins attached to the leaves and the stems and the
Roots and the flowers and the seeds. And when you start to isolate that you just eat it in a raw form, it may only be 60 70 % available because we can't digest the fiber. So those are the two factors we can put those two together and get a protein quality score. And we can determine that a whey protein isolate because of its essential amino acids, is 20% better than a soy protein isolate, just because of the amino acids, or we can
Hair. A wheat protein wheat? Bran, and we realize that it's only forty percent available. So if you look at wheat, bran, Don a cereal box and say it was a wheat flour and it says there's four grams per serving. There's actually less than two that you can actually absorb. That's how we look at it in my opinion. Some of the problems with those right now is it's hard to compare across foods and it's hard to build a meal. That way we can say that ways better than soy. And so if
If you're only eating those two things that's okay, what happens when you start putting them together. And so I am working with a group trying to build a protein quality score that really based on three amino acids, lysine, methionine and leucine which in my opinion or the key markers for adult help and so we're trying to restore it differently. Again, long-winded story about protein quality but that's how
its measured know that's very interesting going. So what you're saying is from understand you correctly, you could Brute Force
Way through life by looking at every single thing you eat and trying to figure out the die as score for its protein. Okay. I'm about to have a rib eye that's going to be about a 96% die. As I'm going to have my soybeans over here. That's about an 80% die as I'm going to have my way isolate. That's 100% die as I'm going to have my shredded Wheats. That's a 40% die ass. That's a tough way to go through life because you can't just add up the pros.
Yeah they're not truly additive you can't really figure that out and
The average person doesn't even have that data. I mean, if you go into the USDA database with whatever 7000 Foods, there are 4,000 that actually have amino acids scores and of those. There's probably less than 300 that have died as scores and so you can't put it together, there's no way. And so we're trying to develop a system that allows people to get better than that. If you look on a label on a package,
And you see, again, a wheat cereal that says it has 4 grams of protein. Well, again that's a nitrogen analysis, times 6.25 for all the problems I've said. And then, if you look over in another column, it will say daily values. Almost, No Label have daily values for protein because that would require a PD casts or die as score, and nobody has them. And so that for G, really would translate into less than two, but nobody's being told that.
And by the way, just for folks who are
Hearing us used the term. Diocese digestible indispensable, amino acids cor.
Correct. Why? And I have a big problem, the digestibility is where a lot of people have been focusing, but I have a big problem with the amino acid scores because they're incredibly low. They're way too low. There are established by the World Health Organization by the FAO, which is really designed to prevent malnutrition in Africa, where we know from our Institute of medicine that the essential amino acids scores are
Much higher than that should be. You mentioned stable isotopes are a little bit ago or tracers. We know from stable isotope studies that all those FAO amino acids scores are too low and so that's part of the equation that we're not telling people either,
I want to come right back to that. But I'll finish this one point, which is what you're offering is an alternative to people living in spreadsheets to calculate how much actual indispensable amino acid. They're getting is a, what if we make this easy?
Seer and you focus on the actual content of three amino acids. So we're going to take a subset of essential amino acids. And if I recall I remember leucine was clearly one of them. Lysine was one of them was methionine. The
other one. My finds the other one. Yeah.
So we're going to take the finding leucine lysine and we just want you Peter to walk around and make sure you get enough of those with each meal. If you do that, the rest will take care of itself. Is that effectively what you're
saying? That's exactly what I'm saying.
If you look at die as scores right now, the amino acid scoring a I've already said is too low, but if you look at how they're scored, they're not scoring apples and apples. They're scoring apples and oranges. So if you look at the soy deficiency, all legumes like soy or P are limiting or deficient in Matheny and you score that against way what you end up is the limiting amino acid and way is considered histidine and no one has ever shown.
Histidine tube actually be a limiting, amino acid, an adult. It's a limiting amino acid in children and babies. So now we're comparing apples and oranges, they're not fair. So if you compare Matheny to methionine, it's not 20% higher. It's 250 percent better comparing soy and whey. We need to compare apples and apples. We need to compare them across the three essential amino acids that are actually likely to be limiting where histidine phenylalanine to my knowledge.
No one has ever shown those to be limiting an adult. So why do we consider them limiting?
So you've already mentioned, the importance of leucine and listeners of this podcast are no stranger to losing, because we've had David sabatini on. We've had Matt caber line on. I mean, we've gone Deep In The Weeds on mtor. In fact, it was one of David's postdocs. That actually discovered the leucine sensor on mtor, so we know. Now, pretty unambiguously leucine is an amazing trigger for mtor, of course,
Going to be a subset of people listening to this who are confused. But wait a minute, Peter if rapamycin is good and rapamycin inhibits mtor, how can leucine be good if loosing turns it on? And of course, they're forgetting the chronicity of the state, sometimes you want it on sometimes you want it off but when we're talking about eating, we want it on, right? We want to be able to turn mtor on for muscle protein synthesis.
So let's Circle back to our earlier, comment about how often you eat. So, now we've got an issue of mtor and whether it needs to cycle on and off.
Off and not only does leucine turned it on, but so does insulin, probably the worst case scenario and you can use a lot of animal studies to back. This up would be people who eat a lot of small carbohydrate meals. That continuously activate mtor, what we want to do. As you specific meals, with the right amount of insulin to activate, muscles Centric and tore em. Tours in every tissue and what you don't want to do is continuously activate it and liver.
Or some other tissue. And so that's where the confusion gets into it. Is people ignore the fact that insulin is just a big as trigger in other tissues, where Lou scenes a very unique triggering
muscle. Let's go back to the practical application of this. So we know why leucine matters. Can you say a bit more about Matheny and lysine? And why raising them to the level of leucine becomes a great proxy for overall protein load.
If you look at limiting amino acids, actually in food, lysine is always limiting and Grains and that has been shown in animal science over the years. That's a major limitation in how you feed, what the minimum amount. So that one is probably limiting for protein synthesis. It's also in carnitine and some other things, but lysine is probably mostly for protein synthesis Matthias. I mean, if we look at the amounts, we
We need about three point four grams of Lysine per day. We need probably a little less than one gram of Mathai, any, so they're not in the same proportion either, but the Messiah need is what we call part of the one carbon pool. And so, basically for the body to make and repair DNA to make and repair RNA to make taurine Downstream to make non-essential amino acid, cysteine to make glutathione the oxidant Matheny needs the key to all of those.
Pathways Matheny is one of the most limiting and it's limiting at all legumes. So we think of soy and P, and lentils, and things of that nature is higher quality protein, they are but they're still limiting in the thigh
aney. What are some of the natural sources of food that are high in
methionine? The classic one of quote, sulfur amino acids is eggs, eggs are quite high in the sulfur amino acids, which are Mathai, inning and cysteine, but
All animal products are adequate in them. And basically, all plant products are pretty low in them Europe, in a farm. Yes,
we look at animals like cows, which are quite muscular eating basically, just hay and grass for them to be able to be as catabolic as they are and produce so much muscle. Does it just speak to the incredible volume of that plant that they have to chew to make sure they're getting enough methionine and of Lysine and enough?
Sluice, thank you men, anabolic. Not
catabolic. Sorry anabolic. Yeah. In such an anabolic State, I mean, what volume of total protein in the form of grass and hay, and things like that. Do they need to get a sufficient amount of those muscle building amino
acids that sort of wanders into a sustainability argument, which I really love to wade into. But cattle, ruminant animals are a very important part of the food chain because of their stomach, which
Followed bacteria. One of the things to think about for essential amino acids is really the only place they come from in life is bacteria. Nothing else can make them our primary source of them in nature. Is the bacteria on roots of plants. So the bacteria on the roots will take the nitrogen. Why do we fertilize our garden as nitrogen? The bacteria will take that inorganic nitrogen and for
Anika means with it and those organic amines, then can be made into proteins in the plants. But as I said earlier, the problem with plants is that they don't have the same balance as we need. They have the plants to make roots and flowers and things like that. The beauty of a ruminant is they can take that plant and they can digest it and the bacteria then will rebalance all of the amino acids, they'll capture inorganic, nitrogen and
Make the essential amino acids that mammals need, and they concentrate it for us. So, basically, humans, one of the arguments as humans evolved, by being able to use more concentrated protein, if we just ate plants, it's hard to get enough, but if the ruminant animal can actually digest, all of that form it into a proprietary amino acids. So basically for every 60 grams of protein, an animal eat, they will
Make 100 grams of essential amino acid balance
protein. Wait a minute, say that again.
So, for every 60 grams of plant-based proteins and nitrogen that they'll take in, they can upcycle that to 100 grams of amino acid, balance protein, so ruminants are called up cyclers. So whether it's in dairy, or meats, or goats and sheep, and deer. All of those room in an animal's upcycled by eating grasses, they produce
Is great, quality protein? No, other animal can do
that. And just to make sure I understand the mass balance of that. The bacteria are obviously the engine of that upcycle, but you can't make nitrogen out of nothing. So you're
saying they're making protein out of
nitrogen's, right? That's what I was going to say. So they're getting the nitrogen from the fertilizer that went into the grass.
Not quite there, getting nitrogen. That's in organic in the plants, but it's not actually in protein forms. Okay? So it's in the fibers and other
He's of things. So they're able to upcycle that, they're able to increase the value of non amino acid nitrogen. Plus they capture all of those other
nitrogen's. So first of all I had no idea that was happening. I never heard of that phenomenon. So that's incredibly fascinating. Secondly, are they also disproportionately creating amino acids that weren't necessarily there in the plant? So in other words, if you use the example you gave earlier which is you eat, 100.
Of cow protein, you're going to probably get quite an amount of methionine lysine. And leucine is it true that that amount of amino acid was not even present in the 60 grams of grass protein that they consumed
that's exactly what's happening. So the bacteria, if you look at the Flora in the cow, they have certain bacteria that will produce Mathai, any oral icing, so they can basically take an amine nitrogen.
Or they can take glycine a non-essential amino acid and they can make it into amino acid. One of the supplements that you can actually feed a cow, is you real human waste product type of thing, we excrete nitrogen waste as urea and the urine. You can actually feed your real a nitrogen source to a cow and they can make it into my theanine or leucine or lysine
unbelievable. So it's interesting argument. Now we're venturing from nutrition into religion.
Because they're certainly a group of people who would argue that. We should not be eating any animal protein whatsoever. We shouldn't eat meat, we shouldn't eat eggs, we should need area, Etc. A counter-argument to that would be. It's awfully difficult without these animals. To get adequate amino acids, especially if you stop thinking of it in terms of an RDA and start thinking of it in terms of essential amino
acids, I try and stay away from the religious argument of it. That's a personal preference as you say, I grew up on a
A farm where we raise cattle and pigs, we raised corn and soybeans. And so, I saw it as a life cycle type of thing. I think of it as a biochemist and there's just no question that room in an animal's play a very important role in our food system and one, we can't really replace. We can't just idle millions of Acres of grassland and pretend that we can grow avocados on them or broccoli cattle. Basically, spend a year
There are life on basically, nothing but grass sheep, and goats the same, but those are amazing contributions to our food system.
I was completely unaware of this capacity to concentrate and almost up produce both in quantity and quality of amino acid. But it's a very interesting finding so where were we before we went down that path because I was just trying to understand how it happened. So I also didn't appreciate the role of the bacteria. Oh, I know where we can go back to you mentioned that.
That you have spent some time, studying the difference between call it twenty year, olds, and 60 year olds, in terms of the efficiency of muscle protein synthesis and this is where you probably have to get into the Isotopes. Now you're getting into sort of a nuanced stuff, but what do we know about a 20 year old versus a 60 year old? Who puts their muscle under a progressive overload? They're doing resistance training, they're being provided with adequate amino acids and let's assume they're being provided with not just the right.
Quantity. But the right quality of amino acid, what do we know about the assimilation of that amino acid into new muscle tissue across any pick? Any age you want? I just use 20 and 60. I know you've studied this at very specific age points.
Piece of background before we get into, that is important to recognize that whether you're 16 or 65 year, body needs to make nearly 300 grams of new protein per day. So, there's a protein turnover, every tissue in the body.
Body is turning over some as fast as liver enzymes. We replace every our muscle proteins, we replace with half-lives of around 15 to 16 days. So every 30 days College interns over at about half-life of 100 days, which is why. If you've hurt your knee, it takes so long to repair it. But basically, if you put that into thinking the body replaces, literally, every protein in it about four times a year, that's a pretty remarkable.
Brr and then if you think of we have to make 300 grams a new protein per day, the average American intake is around 80 grams or less women, 70 men, 90. That means that there's a recycling thing going on. So of every new Protein that's getting made in the body, about six out of seven. Amino acids are getting recycled all of that sort of feeds into this process of protein. Synthesis, protein turnover,
Oh, and what remember I said what I was doing with my Master's Degree, we were studying the age-related changes. What we now know is that, as you get older, the efficiency of that protein turnover goes down. So we're a sixteen-year-old. You give them a certain amount of protein. They'll have a very good response of 65 year. Old will have maybe no response at all or 10% or something. But what we have learned with the study of leucine and
Initiation factors. And all of that is that if you give an enriched source of essential amino acids, more protein, you can actually make the adult. Look, just like the sixteen-year-old. So, what we know is that the efficiency goes down but the capacity to respond doesn't. And so what we're now thinking, is that what we now know is that if you have a requirement, it's about twice, the minimum RDA. So instead of .8 is 1.6 grams,
Amps per kg, we can get the adult. The 65-year old to respond just the same as the 20 year old, as far as muscle protein synthesis.
You know, moment ago. Don we talked about how it's a slippery slope if you just focus on total protein. So when you say 1.6 grams per kilogram, does this assume it's from a way like product and an animal-based product, and if that person says, hey, I'm 65 years old, and I'm on a plant-based diet. Are you going to say that?
Bird is going to need to be higher. That's a great question. A great way to ask it. What we know is that most people who go to a plant-based diet, a vegetarian diet decrease, both the quantity and the quality so your point is exactly right. If you're on a plant-based diet, you'll need more protein and that means you'll have to have more calories. But what's the threshold for that? What we would probably argue is that if you have 100 120 Grand,
G of protein per day, it probably doesn't matter, the distribution between animal and plant because you probably have enough to cover it. Okay? If you're only eating 50 grams of protein per day, then it makes a big difference. You'll never catch up to your essential, amino acid needs. So somewhere between fifty and a hundred and twenty, it depends on what you choose. If you're going to be plant-based have 125 grams of protein per day and you're probably fine, but
You're going to be vegetarian and you think you're going to get a wrong with 56 grams per day, you're going to get in trouble.
Going back to this difference. Earlier about the call, it anabolic resistance between the 65-year old in the sixteen-year-old. The obvious thing that comes to mind is there's a huge difference in. Androgen level between those two, what are the other things that might explain this anabolic resistance that? By the way? I think it's very interesting that you can overcome that, by a higher amount of protein. But, prior to that work,
Around. What else do you think explains anabolic resistance?
Clearly the hormone issues are first and foremost. So I always make the comment that when you're growing hormones, are your friend, they're sort of driving it. And you look at malnutrition in Africa and children will grow on really lousy diets. They may not grow as healthy. They may not live as long, but there's a survival reproduction nature to that. Now, we switch the talking about
Healthy aging and I want to live to where my parents I want to get to that century mark. Now we talk about healthy aging and now we change the criteria that we're looking for. Let's just think about mtor for a second, try and put that in framework. There are four different signals that regulate mtor. We've mentioned leucine. We also mention insulin and enzyme Factor known as a kinase, which is carbohydrate. Sense is energy sensitive and
Then another molecule known as red one, which is stress sensitive, particularly resistance exercise. So there are four different things, the individual balances, when you're young and growing insulin, and igf-1, dominates that and Insulin. First, and foremost, as a growth hormone. And when you stop growing at 25, it ceases to have an effect on protein synthesis and muscle. And so, now the shift the whole thing shifts the protein quality protein, quality is not new.
Is important when the system is dominated by hormones. And so now what we know is as we get older, we can buffer that loss of the hormones by higher quality protein, mostly Lucy and resistance exercise. Those two factors will balance out the growth issue that young people have the benefit of the growth part. So that's the way you have to think about the change in efficiency with aging, speaking
of Aging at the front end of what you just said. I want to go into the
a little bit more. And I think most people will recognize that this is an enormous problem in the developed world and we should talk about it through that lens. Because I think that's where it's most Stark, but I'm curious as to, whether or not you think this could become a problem or even plays a role in childhood obesity rates. So let's talk about what happens to a child that is protein deficient at the beginning of their life. What is the implication of that later in life?
So when I got into protein Don water, low and Joel millward,
Peter garlic and Vernon young worse, the Godfather's out there that I learned from and I got involved with some International malnutrition with a US International agency for International Development, usaid project and Morocco. And so we looked at that and that led us to doing some animal studies. And basically, we look use the animals to look at malnutrition and recovery. And what we found was that malnutrition and starvation insults
early in life would start muscle development, basically limited, the DNA development, limited to cellular development and basically stunted lean mass in the children and in the animals. And if that was stunted, basically, what happened is the individual as an adult was always predestined to have low lean body mass and high body fat obesity. And that was really the origins of how we started thinking about muscle Centric help.
If muscle didn't develop, right, if it was metabolically correct, you are predestined to some of these other things and I mentioned Gabrielle one, doctor Gabrielle lion. That's sort of how we put that concept together is muscle Centric Health. We've got to have the correct development and we have to have the correct protection as adults because that's kind of where both your mobility and your metabolic Health.
Start, don't what's the mechanism. Do we have a sense of why, you know, for example, maybe people are aware of this but
But when you look at children in places like Africa who are really malnourished at first, glance you, almost pause and think, well, why are there belly's so big? If they're malnourished and yet they don't realize. That's an actual. That's an extreme. I don't even remember it. Was kwashiorkor. Was that the name? Exactly. Yeah. And what's the pathophysiology of that? Why is the extreme malnourishment lead to that? Protruded abdomen and things like that.
So there's sort of two terms, two directions that childhood malnutrition
Was one is called merasmus, which is sort of the Skin and Bones. Look. And the others kwashiorkor which is that inflated belly looking the belief of those two differences is that in kwashiorkor, there's disproportionately poor protein, and that leads to changes in water balance and edema people have argued. Is that cortisol based, you know, is dress based it appears to be an imbalance in the protein to energy relationship where
We're in more asthma. They're just short of total calories and total protein at everything, but in kwashiorkor, it appears that the quality of the protein. They're eating these starchy porridges and things like that totally deficient probably in lysine and methionine and that leads to water and balances and other
things. And what is it about this critical window of development? Where this protein deficiency makes it very difficult for them to
Put on lean mass later in life and creates a propensity for adiposity.
We actually did some of that original research stuff. We did way back in the late 70s. Early 80s muscle is a very unique cell structure. We have what are called muscle fibers. And unlike a liver cell, which has a DNA, a nucleus in each cell muscle cells are multinucleated, they have whether called satellite cells around them.
Them. And so as the original fiber begins to develop the satellite cells, will put DNA these nuclei into it. And what we determined was that each DNA has a certain amount of protein it can handle and so what the DNA ultimately determines how big your muscle can get. And so what we determined was that late in pregnancy early in lactation if the insult occurs during that you stunt these satellite cells and you
Develop enough DNA. So the muscle is always limited and its potential sighs.
Wow, I was aware of the propensity for adiposity later was not aware of the limitation and lean growth. So this is really the double whammy it's effectively lifetime Sark obesity.
Yeah. So basically, you're decreasing your lean mass or decreasing your metabolically active tissue. And so you're sort of stuck with minimal calories will deposit
fat in the u.s. it would be hard to imagine a child.
Developing kwashiorkor but clearly there are kids in the United States that are disadvantaged enough that they're not going to be exposed to high enough protein and either quality or quantity. Do you think that there's to a lesser extent? Some of this problem that's going to happen in developed Nations like the
US? I think it's possible. Frankly these are the kinds of things. I worry about with The Advocates of plant-based diets. We're starting to see New York City, taking animal proteins, out of school lunch.
I mean, what is that really going to do? We're conducting a public health experiment without actually having any knowledge of that. I think that's frightening. The issue is public school, lunches, nursing homes? Daycares. These are all under these federal guidelines where we're diluting out the quantity and quality of protein at the same time with no knowledge of what that's really going to mean. So I think that's pretty frightening to be doing that kind of Public Health experiment without knowledge of it.
I hadn't even considered it through that lens. Actually, let's talk about something else that we alluded to briefly but now I want to get back to which is maximum protein usability or assimilation in a given setting. So I'll tell you where I come at. This one of the challenges that I've observed in taking care of patients is when they get into a very heavy, Regiment of time, restricted feeding, you're probably aware of this Don, but there are ideas that say, look, if you can just
limit the amount of time that you eat, but not place any limits on what you eat or how much you eat, or what you're eating from into this sort of intermittent fasting window. It produces some health benefits and it's certainly an effective way to reduce calories. So if the goal of the exercise is, to reduce total energy expenditure and you create a narrow enough window, you will indeed do that. But what we've seen repeatedly is people who after say, six months of adopting a very narrow feeding window.
A one meal a day will lose weight but disproportionately will lose lean tissue. The diagnosis here is pretty straightforward. They clearly reduced energy intake but they probably reduced protein intake too much and so body composition actually got worse despite the fact that weight went down which then gets to a point which is well, can't you just eat all of your protein in one meal. So if a person says I'm just going to eat one meal a day. Let's just say this is a very active person, right? So they're going to eat 3,000 calories in one sitting.
Which I will raise my hand to saying, I can do that quite easily. I'm quite a glutton. Even if I was able to eat, 150 grams of protein in one sitting, is it clear that my body will get the benefit from that that it would? If I ate 50 grams three times a day,
he is quite clear that you won't get a benefit that there is a limit. So now we need to think about the body as muscle versus everything
else. We're going back to the muscle Centric view that I like you.
Probably sensing a theme with me at this point, the muscle. There's a lot of data. Now, that muscle can handle protein meals for an Optimum anabolic response between about 25 and maybe 60 grams. Then you start getting into distribution. If you're going to have 150 grams per day, how should you distribute it? One of my pet peeves in nutrition. I'm slightly getting off track. Here is people refer to?
ER, to protein as a percentage of calories protein is not a percentage of calories proteins that absolute number. You need to decide on what you're going to build your diet around. So right now we're building it on 150, the issue with protein is being an absolute number. If your calories go down, say you're now a 75 year old woman in your calories per day is now 1,200 calories. You still have 100 grams per day. Protein, requirement. So now your
Needs are 35 to 40 percent of your calories. If people are doing weight loss, it's an absolute number. So people should never talk about percentage of calories. That's basically people who don't think proteins important and say, well, fat should be 30%, carbohydrates should be 50% and that's the leaves 15%, you have to think about protein first. So that was the issue as far as distribution from my research. One of the things that we believe is the most critical.
A meal of the day is the first meal of the day when you have had an overnight fast. Your protein synthesis is down and that mtor signaling molecule is down regulated. It's inhibited and until you have enough leucine around 3 grams, which translates to about 30 grams of protein for most people until you have a meal that has 30 or more grams of protein, your muscle stays catabolic. So you're continually
Kick down protein. We think that's a significant aspect of Aging that people have lower and lower protein. They don't eat protein at breakfast. We know the efficiencies going down in the first place. So we want a front load protein and the day. So we want at least two meals that are well above 30 grams of protein. So I always have people shooting for 4045 at the first meal. Another 45 45 at their last meal.
And then in between, if we're talking with people who are say, an elderly woman trying to maintain minimum muscle, I'll concentrate on those two meals. If I'm talking with somebody who's trying to do weight loss, I'll concentrate on three because I don't want them getting hungry. If I'm talking with someone who's trying to be hypertrophy of muscle builder, I'll concentrate on for so. How many meals per day? Do I make anabolic and muscle? And by anabolic, I'm thinking 35,
G armoire. And the data that we know for absolute certain is the first and last meal are absolutely important. The middle meal, I'd be hard-pressed show you a single study where anybody's ever looked at
lunch. And so the reason that you're saying for the anabolic person we need for meals is we know we needed for positive, nitrogen balance. We're just going to have to get the
amount to aspect. There's one is mtor signaling muscle protein synthesis. Leucine effects are the others total protein per day?
And so those two lead say, well, if I need more protein and I max out at 50 grams, I need another meal. And what about
timing? Let's just talk about someone who's doing their strength training in the morning. So let's say someone's going to do strength training from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. do you want them having that first bolus of protein before the workout?
There's some debate about that. You'll find some people and trainers who believe that we did some studies and most
More with the animals where we looked at different timing and we find that exhaustive exercise is catabolic no matter what. So, having protein ahead of, it doesn't make it. We find the benefit is after the exercise, when the system is now finally tuned, we've inhibited red one. The system mtor is ready to go. So we find the benefit is after exercise not
before and just to be clear. What you're saying is look, you can take all those Amino
No acids before but it's not going to prevent you from becoming catabolic during exercise because again exhaustive exercise is a catabolic activity. So you are going to be breaking down muscle. No matter how many amino acids are on board while lifting it's more important after the lift that you have a good
meal, you'll find some disagreement in that in the literature. But I strongly believe that what you just said is correct and my research
supports that,
That and talk about the efficiency or the window in time, post a workout in, which you want to make sure you're getting that first big meal of protein. So you a funny story, my youngest son, who's now five. But when he was like three for whatever reason, he just fixated on protein, probably because we kept telling him to eat this and eat that, because there was protein in it. Hey, eat your salmon, it's got protein. Eat this because it's got protein.
And basically, he has become the protein police of the preschool, he walks around and he looks at kids snacks and he's like that doesn't have protein that granola bar does not have protein that has protein man. You can imagine what these people who work at the preschool, say to my wife, when she drops him off, and picks him up. She's like, are you a nutritionist? And she says no. Okay, it's just your son, really fixates on everybody's protein consumption. So we joke about how he's going to be like
Of those bro protein guys who's just going to be all obsessed with his protein and when he's eating it and stuff like
that, I've lost our train of thought here for a minute, but just as focus on the children for a moment. So we're talking about adult protein needs and I don't want everybody to walk away thinking gee I need to get 50 grams of protein in my kid, children will be very efficient at maintaining growth with small snacks of 8 to 10 grams of protein, where that will have virtually no impact for an old.
Adult. So protein bar that had 10 grams of protein as a perfectly legitimate, snack for a child. We're essentially, the only thing it would do is probably increase, liver enzymes, and a 70 year old. So don't want all the mothers think they're doing a Bad Thing by giving their child, a 10 gram protein snack.
I remember what we were going to come back to, so I'll take us back there. But let's talk about that a bit more because that's actually news to me. I didn't realize that there was minimal benefit in smaller quantities of
Of protein. So this is another argument for, don't dribble out. Your protein, commit to it. It's binary, you eat it. When you eat it and then you don't when you don't
ya. So again, children versus adults in the adult. If we have every meal of the day, let's say we have 100 grams of protein but we take it in and very small meals 15 grams trickled in all day long, you will never stimulate muscle protein synthesis but your liver will be perfectly fine. Your gut.
Will respond to that amount of protein, your gut, your liver, your heart, your kidney. All of those organs will respond to the net protein per day, no matter when you ate it. But muscle, doesn't muscle is specific. Muscle is such an energy to you mentioned earlier. There's so much mass. The muscle muscle isn't triggered and less. The diet is exactly right and we could get into T Lee logical arguments about leucine at this point branched-chain amino acid. Why does the
Muscle sense that. But basically, the muscle senses energy insulin protein before it triggers and if all of those aren't balanced, it won't trigger but your liver will
to your point. Elia logically you might make the case that the liver has more concern for the brain than the skeletal muscle. Maybe it gets priority over being happy because it has to maintain glucose homeostasis, and without glucose homeostasis. The brain would literally die within 20
minutes, your liver,
Our heart. Those have to function middle of the night. Your liver still has to be making protein. But your muscle doesn't while you're laying there in bed, your muscle is catabolic, and it's supplying amino acids. So all those other organs work. So while I argue about muscle Centric Health, the reality is moment, the moment it's organ based but long-term your overall health is determined on keeping the muscle healthy because it keeps everything else healthy
Just because I want to keep talking about this before we go back to where we were before, I distracted us, is the reason that it's okay for kids, to be eaten much smaller amounts of protein, is it simply just the mass? My youngest weighs 25 kg right? Is it basically just saying look, he probably doesn't need more than 40 grams of protein a day. So for him to have a 10 gram serving is 25% of his Protein. That's like me having 40 grams
and plus is protein synthesis. As we mentioned, earlier is driven by hormones.
We're yours isn't so his growth is, highly efficient is driven by hormones and he will accommodate it in small doses and you're right. He probably only needs 45 for the day anyway.
So I'll take you back to where we were before I sidetracked us. It was now asking about how big a window you have. Oh yeah to refeed to maximize muscle
growth. So we actually did that first experiment in rats. So Josh, Anthony and Trace
See, Anthony were in my lab just before lame came and what we were looking at was exhaustive exercise. Again, a rodents we were looking at this catabolic State. We were trying to look at how to muscle regulated recovery. And so, we were looking at what we were called, initiation factors and we discovered the link between leucine and an initiation Factor called eif. For that is sort of the downstream effect of mtor, mtor is
Regulator and it stimulates EI of 4 and s 6 and other initiation factors. And so, what we found was that when you came out of an exhaustive exercise, muscle is catabolic until you took in enough Lucy to reverse it. And so, we started looking at feeding right after exercise and stew, Philip van Jones, and Luke family lot of people, sort of picked up on that. Okay, so now the caveat is the biggest effect of
Being right. Afterwards is about a two-hour window but that's in untrained individuals. If you begin to look longer, you can have a ballot of resistance exercise and you'll detect the difference, you'll start regulating that red, one, protein factor and you'll see an anabolic effect the next day, 24 hours, 36 hours later. So when does your protein effect, will it makes it more effective all the time. The more trained you get, the less you
In a sea of post-exercise effect. So if you're beginning training near the first four weeks post, exercise protein probably makes sense. If you're well-trained, you basically training the same way and you've been doing it for six months, I don't see any effect difference between having protein within two hours after exercise versus just having your three or four meals per day. You won't see any difference in either mass or strength.
I remember having this discussion with Lane as well and
Being very surprised by that being pleasantly surprised by the way because it says, hey look, once you get to a point where you're well trained enough, you don't have to be so maniacal about meal timing, you can just focus on the big picture, which is total protein protein quality, and spreading it out. Such that you don't exceed, the metabolizable fraction of it at anyone
sitting exactly you'll hear trainers. Take that last statement metabolizable energy and you'll hear trainers say, well you can't use more than 30 grand.
Reveal. You won't die gesture or whatever. That's not true. I mean you'll digest and absorb 100 grams of protein at a meal. But muscle in particular only has a window of round 25 to 60 depending on protein quality. Where it can use it, the liver will use all of it, I made it doesn't matter. We have what is known as first pass metabolism of protein, which confuses the issue even more. When you eat a meal of protein approximately, 50% of the protein is
Degraded to nitrogen and carbon before it ever gets to the blood, almost 50%, the exception to that or the branch chain amino acids, leucine, isoleucine valine and almost 75. 80 percent of those get into the blood and we're back to that teal a logical argument. Why did muscle learn to sense that? Because that basically shows up in the blood and direct proportion to the meal and the muscle learn to sense that as a meal quality it says, oh wow, this meal has
Adequate quality for me, to trigger this very expensive, process of protein synthesis, protein turnover and until it sees that signal, it won't do
it. Well, we're on the topic of muscle done. Another thing I've learned somewhat recently that surprised me was the importance of leucine in fatty acid oxidation by the muscle. You know, one of the things that is such an important pillar of our practice is low-end aerobic training, we call it Zone to Soze.
Zone 2, mitochondrial efficiency. So this is basically pushing your muscles to the maximum point at which you can keep lactate below to mmol and in a very fit individual you can generate a lot of power while still keeping lactate below to mmol. I mean the best in the world can produce more than 4 watts per kilo while still, keeping lactate below to mmol and they're doing so virtually exclusively with fatty acid. So, we will pair this
Type of analysis with see Pat testing and we will look at fat oxidation rates and again, you will see the fittest of the fit have insanely high fat oxidation rates there over a gram, roughly a gram per minute point of that is look, a really good muscle. Doesn't just rely on glucose, a really good muscle. Can oxidized fats, very effectively what role does leucine play in
that. That's a great question and I don't think it's been researched. Well enough I mentioned earlier we
Talk about amino acids and every amino acid has a different side chain. Well, leucine is one that's referred to as a branch chain amino acid and its side chain is purely carbons. It's a carbon chain that looks a lot like a fatty acid and somu scene is one of really two amino acids that are ketogenic. It is metabolized as a fatty acid and what we know is that leucine will also activate the CPT one ends
I'm the kind of show Palmerton transferase enzyme which is the link of bringing fatty acids into the mitochondria for oxidation. So there's a benefit. There it gets even more complicated in that when you have higher leucine, it also begins to inhibit pyruvate from going into the mitochondria. So when you oxidize a leucine, the nitrogen that comes off of it is put on to pyruvate generating an alanine and
So the body begins to recycle glucose. So it becomes kind of steady state on glucose and emphasizes fat oxidation. So, back when you were talking about Schulman studies early, if you overload, all of that, basically, you can make the leucine inhibit carbohydrate oxidation. So if you have huge amounts of carbs coming in and then you overload the system with leucine, you'll inhibit pyruvate oxidation. And so that could look like insulin resistance.
If you look at the physiology of how it's supposed to work under conditions, where you'd be burning fat, like you just described leucine. Actually stimulates fat oxidation and Spares, glucose for the brain and other tissues. So again you really have to think about how the experiment setup, what's getting inhibited, and what's getting pushed you've recently
taken an interest in weight loss, right? So the dietary interventions that can be efficacious for weight loss and treating things like metabolic.
Durham. So let's build out this idea a little bit. How do you incorporate the strategy around reducing energy intake? This is sort of how I think about weight loss. You got to reduce the intake but I think of three broad ways that you can approach that. So three strategies white one is you just reduce calories and that becomes the only focus. So you pay attention to the total energy content of food without thinking about the timing of food or the macro distribution of food. The next approach is you spend less time thinking about the total number of
Every spend more time thinking about the macronutrients, I described it as sort of create a boogeyman in the diet. Some things that you avoid and the Restriction of certain things becomes a roundabout way to restrict total energy and then we talked about time restriction, as well as another strategy. How do you think about manipulating that middle bucket of changing macros to achieve energy
deficit? I totally agree. Weight management is a calorie issue and it's not the same for every individual. Everybody's got a little different
option C. So we understand you can't be an accountant and expect to just count calories all the time, but let me build it as a story of how we thought about it back in the late 90s Atkins. And the keto diet were out there and Barry Sears and you know the Zone diet and Michael leads and protein power. And I was looking at all of those things that we were doing those Lucy and experiments. And we had discovered this effect of leucine on muscle.
Team turnover. And some of these metabolic things with fat metabolism. And I basically took the leap of faith and said, you know, I think the underpinning of all of these diets is really the protein carb ratio. And how can we manipulate that? And so I started thinking, well, if we're going to create diets one, we know that from a satiety standpoint, protein is probably the most satiating lures fat would be next carbohydrate. The least. We were
Concerned about big insulin swings. So we wanted to sort of balance out our carbs per meal. We know that if people are overweight, they tend to have big post-meal carbohydrate and Insulin swings, where they get two hours later, they'll have carbohydrate lows and so we started trying to think about that and we said okay so we think the first meal after an overnight fast is critical so we're going to correct that. So we basically started saying how much protein do you need 30 40
Grams of protein to get both satiety. Protein synthesis effects. We knew that protein at a higher thermogenic effect burns, more calories, more heat than either carbs or fat. So we wanted to front-load that affect people have argued that. Well, that's because protein of the nitrogen, it's harder to digest. And absorb, we don't think that's true at all. We think the thermogenic effect is stimulating muscle protein synthesis. We know that that is a massive ATP expenditure and so,
what we want to do is maximize that at every meal. So our first meal, we wanted to be 40 grams of protein. We wanted to have a carb level that would not over stimulate insulin. So we kept that under around 30 grams for what we created. A carbohydrate threshold concept. We can go into and then fat sort of around out the calories. And we basically developed three meals a day to distribute like that. We basically increase the protein to about 1.6 grams
Per kg and we ran the study, comparing it to the food guide, pyramid with .8. So as far as we could tell we did three different studies one, a total feeding study where we fed everyone, a second study with diet and exercise that was four months and a third study was multi-centered with 120 subjects that lasted 16 months. And so we did three
studies, and the last two were free living, where they were responsible for the food. But the first one they were fed
the
One, we fed them in the lab so we knew exactly what they were eating. The second one, we actually fed them for their first two weeks for a few meals so they really saw what it would look like. And the last one was totally free living based on the diets and manuals that we
develop in each of these was two arms where the only difference was protein.
So in the first one, it was two, arms food, guide, pyramid, high-carb low-protein versus higher protein, low carb the second,
One was two by two. So we basically had the diet treatment and then we had a resistance exercise treatment so high protein, low exercise, high protein Etc. And then the last one was Diet with a generic recommendation for exercise but just a to treatment fact.
So what did the first experiment show the really well? Controlled one?
The well-controlled one, what we found was that with the higher protein and as far as we could measure exactly the same
Orion, take the people on the higher protein, low carb loss more, total weight more, total fat and less lean, and that stabilize their insulin and glycemic regulations, and lowered their triglycerides. Cross the
board. Do you remember with the difference was in weight and fat mass? And was it all explained by the thermodynamics of the difference in protein?
It was closed. We found that. If you assume that body fat, you know,
3500 calories, and you can make that calculation. We figured out that the people on the higher-protein diet, we're getting a benefit of a. I think it was around 170 calories a day eating the same calories so that could be about the thermodynamic
effect. So in other words that amount spread out over the duration of the study, explain the difference in weight loss.
Why? So both groups lost weight, they were both on weight loss diets but the protein people lost I didn't look
those numbers up but they lost the round, eight pounds more and something like six and a half of it was
fat. And did they also complain less of hunger or was there a different subjectively between the groups
we did a society check using an analog scale? We just asked them to rate how they felt and stuff. And one of the things that the dieticians who are running the study always came back and they said that the protein people would never talking about food and snacks.
The people on the high carb diet, we're always talking about being hungry and snacking. There's definitely a different side to satiety and compliance issue to
it. I assume the fat was constant in that study,
first study, which was only 12 weeks. Basically, all subjects in both groups, finished the study and the longer studies would got into four months and longer we found much higher Dropout rates and the high carb group to.
So did the results of all three studies point in the same direction which was exactly that a higher
Our protein weight loss. So a protein sparing weight loss diet which gets back to your point earlier, stop thinking about protein, as a percent of total calories. Protein should always be absolute. And if you want to think about it, that way, as you reduce calories, protein should increase. The total fraction of calories is going to preserve lean tissue, better maintained, satiety better, and plus there's potentially this bonus of the thermogenic effect of
protein. Why it definitely partitions the weight loss stored fat protects
Alma lean tissue, definitely has higher satiety, one of the things we know, in fact for a long time there's a lot of debate whether people over 60 should ever practice weight loss because they would lose too much mean bass and they can't gain it back. Doug patent Jones had the theory that sarcopenia caging isn't a gradual decline, it's a series of acute effects that you injure yourself. You're in bed, you have a surgery, whatever you acutely, lose lean.
Lean mass and you can never gain it back. So we were concerned about that. We want weight loss, but we don't want people to lose any lean mass especially if they're adults. If you are 20 year old, it probably doesn't matter so much. But if you're older, you're beyond 40, it does matter.
It's a scary thoughts on if you think about it, right before he's not that old. And yet, I recently had shoulder surgery. The time that we're recording this. I'm probably about five months out from that shoulder surgery, and I still have not gained back, all of the muscle mass. Now, I think I will gain
Back, but I look at how difficult it has been and how acutely I lost it. I mean, within three weeks, I was 10 pounds lighter, I lost 10 pounds of body weight, and it's obviously not just from the shoulder. It's when you don't have an arm, you can't squat, you can't deadlift, you can't do all of these other things. So obviously some of that was water weight, but I think seven of those 10 pounds was lean tissue. That I lost in a span of three.
Weeks. There's some tremendous research by my colleague, Doug patent Jones, who unfortunately passed away it was last year, who did a lot of that kind of bed, rest, sort of study and looking at older adults versus younger and in the same period of time, an older adult in bed rest will lose four times as much muscle as a younger adult. It's frightening how fast you can lose it and to your point, if you're diligent and do weight training, you can begin to gain it back, but it's hard to ever get
Back to Ground Zero. If you lose it an aging and people ask me well, all this loosing stuff. When does it really come into play? It's not as important for a 20 year old as it is for a 60. But where's the middle ground? Do you know, where does it change? And I think it's a little like bone health. Once you're 40, you're sort of on the back end of that and you need to be much more careful Doug and I ran a study which everybody quotes. Now, where we took 90 grams of protein and looked at it distributed as 3 me,
Meals per day 30. 30, 30 versus ten twenty sixty and we found that with the same amount of protein, the same overall diet, you would have higher net protein synthesis with the distribution to breakfast. So that's kind of where all the distribution data came from. Was that study we ran that study in 37 year olds. The average age was 37. So we think that by mid 30s, you can detect the distribution effects
and just to be clear though,
Do you think that the reason 30 30 30 was better than ten twenty sixty. Because you started the day at 30, or because you had three meals where you cleared the hepatic
threshold? That's a great question. And one that I wish the Twitter world would understand, I think the effect is moving at the breakfast, the first meal, I think that, frankly we'd have been
better off. Should have done the 60 2010 as the other arm. Right?
No, I think it should have been
40, what's the math? 40 1040. I think the first and last meals are the key and I'll give you the reason for that. We've done a number of studies in animals, other people micro RNA and Phil Atherton of done it in humans. But when you trigger mtor at that first meal, we know that it's still stimulated five hours later. So why do you need leucine for mtor at lunch? If it's still simulated, you don't. So there's nobody has actually studied that at this point.
Unless you're the person who just is so big, like if your lane by are 200 pounds and you're a bodybuilder,
but the key to what you just said is now you're talking total protein per day, not a leucine effect. It's not a leucine. A tour of fact, there's
not this special to a total substrate.
It's okay. Lane needs 250 grams of protein per day, he'd be better off putting that in four or five meals than putting it into. So that's a difference that people need to understand is that
Distributing across all the meals. If it's for weight loss, an appetite, that's great but it's not an mtor
effect. So done this kind of brings me to something. We've talked about before, which is so much of this research that you've done has been funded by industry. And a lot of people are going to say, well, we're going to Discount, everything Don just said, because to give us the names of some of the organizations that have funded your work over the last four
decades. So let me back drop that for you. So, I had the leucine.
Concept that leucine was going to be key to protein synthesis and muscle. We ran a study in the early 80s where we realized it was an initiation effect. We started looking for what those initiation factors were going to be, and it CI of for. So we sent that as a proposal to NIH, National Institute of Health for 10 years, it was continuously turned down and they said, well, we only study disease and we don't know of any deficiencies of
protein. So it's not a priority to us. And so, basically, I was left with what turned out to be a revolutionary idea of Reinventing protein that NIH wouldn't fund. I finally went to Kraft Foods. The national Cattlemen's beef Association, the national Dairy Association, American egg board, and some of the other groups who are inherently interested, in protein, we had some from the USDA, I was at a
Grant University. So those were the funding sources that basically unlocked all of this knowledge about protein for adults. Leucine mtor, muscle Centric help. All of that was unlocked simply because we could get funding from Craft and beef. Am I biased? You know, everybody who eats is biased in some way if you look at research and I think maybe Lane said this with you, I never believed research when I read it until I see it in three.
More Labs, so I don't mind if people look at my research and say, I don't believe it, but my research has been out there. Very clear theories for 20 years now, and every test makes it stronger. And so that's how you believe it. The fact that crafter be funded. It's irrelevant. The issue is everybody. Who's ever run? The study after me shows the exactly. Same thing. Do you
think NIH has know you've been semi-retired now? You're kind of not really retired, but you're retired.
And the grant cycle. Exactly. But do you have colleagues that are still in it? Or do you see any evidence that NIH has taken a broader purview to health? If nothing else they should be able to look at the fact that two-thirds of Americans have metabolic syndrome and that should at least give pause to think. We might need to revisit the way we're approaching nutrition and therefore maybe we should be funding quote unquote, non disease, research in nutrition.
I think they definitely have
Have Chris Lynch who's director of nutrition at NIH, now that position didn't even exist, is that
within niddk? Where does that sit?
I think it's across multiple institute's. So, which one actually funds the most, I think niddk might be the one Cancer Institute. I think his unit actually goes across multiple institute's, but again, that didn't exist back in the late 80s, early 90s, you know, I think it may be a little
Order. But there is a general philosophy. Still at NIH. That NIH does not do applied food, research, that industry should fund it. So that becomes a catch-22 you know, if we're going to study the difference between way and soy, unless you can say well that's going to cure heart disease. They're not going to fund it. And so you have to then go to the dairy Council and say I want to do this study and then people say well you were funded by the dairy.
The council or I go to the soy board or whatever it's a catch-22. But basically the alternative is, we put our head in the sand and we don't do the research. I look at people in nutrition right now and literally I don't know anybody in nutrition who doesn't get industry funding. I just simply how you have to get funded. One of the things I would also point out in this whole issue of biased. It's important to recognize that the animal Commodities are all under the
USDA supervision, because they are animal Commodities and they have checked off boards. So that means everything, they say, and advertising has to be screened where the grain industry has big companies like Kellogg's and Pillsbury and Coke and Pepsi and they can literally go out and say anything they want. And so you'll see a product out there that pretends to be an egg and they'll claim that there's better than a
Eggs. But egg can't come back and refute it. So you've got two different Playing Fields, one, that's highly restricted and supervised than the other, which is fair game. You know, first amendment, I can say anything. I
want on that topic, done, how closely have you paid attention to both the plant-based meat and the synthetic meets? I've paid a little bit of attention because obviously, there's two companies that are pretty popular. I can never remember their names. I think it's beyond meat and impossible, meat or something like that. Exactly, got it. And they're
It's based meets. So they're making meat out of plan and then you have a whole host of companies. None of whom I can remember the names of that are actually trying to make synthetic meat the little bit that I've read about that, which really amounts to reading like to scientific articles. Left me with the impression that that will not be technically feasible. Just from an energetics cost, mass balance sanitation, GMP standpoint, that's not going to happen. That's my way of saying either. I'll be proven wrong or that will turn out to be one of the biggest boondoggles of industry in.
Sometime. You have thoughts on either of those two including nutritional composition and how it feeds into an amino acid perspective.
First is going to overview. I think that as the world continues to expand in population, we're probably going to need additional protein sources. We may be near our capacity for animal-based protein. I don't think we can double it again, so we may be near. So we're going to need other sources. So I accept that plant based
Chains are important to us. I totally agree with your comment about synthetic proteins. I don't think that will ever be economically or environmentally feasible. I don't think that's true. Then we get into the popular versions of plant-based Beyond burgers and things like that. And the reality is it looks like a flash in the pan. People try it it And basically if you go to a Burger King and look, they had a good sales for a few months and you track that it was
all people who don't normally go to Burger King, it was people who were interested in a plant-based brooder, they went and tried it once and never came back. So basically we know the stock has fallen through the bottom. Now we know that nobody's using it. The problem with it is mistake Beyond Burger. Basically it's a pea protein that's produced in Canada. It shipped China because we can't process it United States. There's no processing for the most part, they're beginning to develop it but when it came out there was none.
Ship to China. China processes protein ships, has back to the us. We know transportation is a number one cause of greenhouse gas in the world and so now we've shipped it all over the country comes back to the US and they process it into something with like 25 ingredients probably five or six of them are not FDA approved and so now you have wasn't aware of that. Why? I have multiple products, they have multiple components and synthetics that have never really been studied.
Read and they're not FDA approved. So they're basically relying on safety without ever proving it will that ever come back to haunt them? I don't know. In the spirit of having Natural Foods, they're certainly not anything natural about them. Anyway, I think that plant-based proteins have been around a long time. I think trying to pretend that it's meat calling soy, drink, milk or almond, drink milk. I think those are
Travesties, I think those are standards of identity. Almond milk has what? One gram of protein per 8 ounces where cows milk has eight, calling that milk is pure deception, and that's why there are
lots of cashew milk. By the way, that's how I make all my smoothies and stuff. My wife calls it, nut juice. I do too. You're going to have some of your nut juice,
you know, I'm not against using them, but I
think that just think that nomenclature needs to be
like one of the examples I like to use is that
If you look at a wheat cereal pick any, but take a wheat, cereal that has 4 grams of protein per serving. We always said, that's only two probably on the label. It says you mix it with 3/4 of a cup of milk. So now we have 10 grams, and if you look at the lysine balance of that, it's exactly balance. But if you go to soy milk a soy milk. Only has 6 grams per 8 ounce per cup instead of 8. So now you already have less.
Protein. And it's also deficient in lysine. So, it takes almost a quart of milk takes almost 30 ounces of milk to balance that cereal. So, if you're a mother feeding this to your child and thinking, well, I'm doing a plant-based thing, and I'm feeding them a totally deficient diet with 6 ounces of soy milk for breakfast. I'm feeding them a totally deficient diet. How many mothers know
that look, if I don't know that, I'm guessing a lot of mothers. Don't
know. And so those are the
Kinds of things that we think need to come out about protein quality, we want a system where we can show people and additive value and that at the end of it and I put that meal together. There's a company called wise code that I'm working with. We think that we can show with using QR codes and your phone will simply add them up and you can tell what your total meal looks like.
Yeah, that would be incredibly helpful as I alluded to earlier still something I have trouble with is doing it, especially on days when I
Of access to, as much meat what it comes down to, for me is just how much that I have from leftovers the night before. So I've got a meat-based meal, which is my dinner, Wild game is sort of our routine, right? So L can Venison and stuff like that. And if I'm smart enough and thoughtful enough to make a lot extra, I can basically have it for breakfast and lunch the next day, but sometimes I'm not. And then I'm making protein shakes, I'm getting a venison bar here and there, but it gets a lot harder and I'm having a hard enough time, just making sure I hit the total grams per day of
Protein, there's no attention on my end, going into a, how much methionine is here, how much leucine is here? How much lysine is
here? If you've got 125 grams of protein in your diet per day, chances are you'll hit those numbers where leucine is a meal to meal. Number lysine is a daily number, it doesn't matter meal to meal. It's a total
guess for me, that's probably okay. But then I think about it for my wife or my female patients where it's hard to get them up to
20 grams per day.
We struggled with all of the adult women we had. In our studies. We had whatever 3 400 is a real struggle to keep a female at 100 grams of protein per day. It's just a struggle, then quality becomes an issue, that's my concern. With the whole plant-based movement is that do people have the resources? Can you make that healthy? Sure, you can, but you a need, a lot of knowledge. You need a lot of food skills and you're
to have to eat synthetic products because you can't get it from eating, you know, lentils and rice. You just can't eat enough of them. And so you're going to have to have shakes or supplements or something to get to that kind of level. Otherwise the track record says that vegetarians will end up somewhere in the 60s for their protein per day. And quality does make a difference at that level.
Well done, this has been really interesting. I'm so glad that we were introduced. I can talk about protein.
A because it's an eternal interest of mine personally, but also in terms of helping as many of my patients as I can, it's not the macronutrient that gets the most debated on Twitter that's reserved for carbs and fat. But this is the one that I think we need to be paying more attention to. So I'm grateful for the work you've done and for the attention you brought to it today in our discussion,
I appreciate the opportunity to do that one. Thought I'd leave you with that. We haven't touched on is people talk about high protein and I think it's important to try and come to grips with
what that means. If you look at all of the epidemiology, which I think is pretty bad science. The definition of high protein is about 1.2 grams per kg and low protein is actually below 0.8. And so, a lot of them will express it as percentage of calories and they'll say less than 10%. And so, when you look at the epidemiology, you need to realize they're talking about very narrow ranges of protein intake and it really isn't the Protein that's making a difference.
For instance, the calories, and the other things that are going with it one last thought for four years, I was director of research for the American egg board. So I funded all of the research that basically got the cholesterol Direction eliminated from our guidelines. One of the things we funded though, was, there was a lot of research suggesting that eggs had a high correlation with obesity and diabetes and heart disease. And so if we funded some research with Teresa
Eels and Victor goni who are experts in the nhanes data. And what they looked at was that in the epidemiology, the difference between the first quartile and the last quartile for egg consumption was three to three and a half. So they were basically saying that a half, an egg per week was a difference in causing obesity heart disease and diabetes. And so what they did was they went into the nhanes data and they factored out all of the eggs that were eating at fast, food versus the eggs that were just eating at home.
Middle quote, good nutrition setting and what they found is, in every case, eggs now became a positive, they reduced obesity, they reduce. So basically, it's not the egg, it's the egg in the company had keeps and you can make anything a bad
diet to your point when we talk about epidemiology pointing at high protein, being a problem, you realize anybody who's tried to actually consume high protein realizes it ain't high protein, its high calorie, that's the problem.
And the protein is along for the ride because again, one point two grams per kilo is actually kind of low protein in the context of high calorie diet.
If you look at epidemiology and you do any food surveys, what you realize right away is that the data for protein is pretty good. If I ask you how many eggs you ate yesterday, you'd give me the number if I ask you how many ounces of milk, or how many grams of meat, you'd give because we sell those by ounces and weights.
If I ask most people how many carbs they ate yesterday, they'd miss it by 200 grams. And so that's the problem with that. The demonology is that the errors are not homogeneous bro. They're not equal celt anyway. I ramble on but a great pleasure to chat with you Peter.
Thank you Don. This was fantastic. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics, we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you.
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