How To Build Muscle, Lose Weight & Stay Young For LONGEVITY | Donald Layman

the process of Aging we know it's a it's a slope what we want to do is change the angle of that slope and we know that protein and exercise can do that most of us don't think about metabolism as the sourced in our muscle but that is the greatest source of our ability to burn calories and regulator metabolism right I'm not sure the I think the

better way of saying is it's the most flexible way to burn calories and Metabolism uh the heart the kidney the brain you know an arresting metabolism uh something like and I forget the numbers off the top I should have looked it up um you know 70 of resting metabolism is organ based but muscle is another part and it's flexible how much do you have how metabolically

active is it how much exercise that changes the picture and when we look at energy balance long term we're talking about you know 100 200 calories per day so this is well within the realm of what muscle can manage and I wonder how this work sort of led to you uh coming up with this idea of muscle Centric health because let me let me tell you

something Dr Layman as as a doctor I don't ever remember a course on muscle other than like this is this muscle this is that muscle and Anatomy but I never really took a course on truly why muscle's important how you take care of muscle like I know how to take care of your heart and your liver and your kidneys but like muscle is just was a

part of your skeleton so what who cares like if as long as you have it that it's working and it's not damaged then that's fine but you you've really come to understand that muscle is the key to healthy aging so can you take us through that discovery on your part of how you came to understand that and what that means yeah well that unlocks and unfolds

a whole lot um so let's wade into it um so I got into the whole field kind of accidentally uh you know I I grew up on a farm in Illinois so I I watched animal growth a lot so I understood about diet and exercise and and I was very interested in science so I went off and studied biochemistry and and one of the first things

I got into was studying protein synthesis uh individual by the name of Arlen Richardson an Illinois State University and he was really well known in the Aging field and what we discovered in my Master's was that as we age the process of synthesis becomes less efficient uh there are things that change our ribosomes aren't as active the messenger rnas change they don't have the long poly

a tail the whole process becomes less efficient and that's part of the aging process process and I'll come back to that then as I started uh going on into nutrition I got involved with a group that had a big interest in in muscle I was always interested I was sort of a pretend athlete uh when he was interested in athletic performance uh and so muscle was

kind of inherent to me uh as we started looking at malnutrition and then I got the opportunity actually to work in Northern Africa with malnutrition one of the things I found very quickly was with children is if they had nutrition insults really early in life really in that first year uh they would reduce the number of nuclei the number of muscle cells that they could develop

and so they had a reduced muscle mass and what I learned was that that was basically predestining them to obesity so I started thinking about wow muscle really has a big role in body composition and so early in my career we ran a lot of rodent studies kind of looking at malnutrition at different ages uh and things like that and we found that uh that relationship

of muscle to obesity um yeah and so from there uh I sort of got interested in the Obesity question and clear back in um the early 80s people were looking at obesity and fat cell number and brown fat and all of that and basically doing really interesting research that got them nowhere and I finally decided that the reason is they were studying the pathology of being

fat as opposed to a way to become healthy and the way to become healthy was a metabolically active tissue muscle and so that was sort of the whole kind of background to it um other pieces of the puzzle is uh people talk about protein and Metabolism we were studying protein turnover and we realized just how expensive that process is I've seen estimates that protein turnover in

the body actually accounts for as much as 40 percent of rusting metabolism 40 and you know some people would say 20 it all depends on how you want to factor out transports and and break down and all things but anyway the issue is it's a really big part and so that kind of all rolled together to me that if we want to look at health and

long-term Health what we need to do is maintain protein turned over because that maintains your body proteins healthy and it also so maintains your metabolism healthy and that's sort of how you know Dr Gabrielle line and I sort of put together the concept of muscle-centric Health yeah kind of protein-centric diets so I think to me you know as I sort of looked at my own biology

and my NF1 studies and I've treated you know tens of thousands of patients so I've seen this in my patients but I you know I I was a very active guy my whole life I ran I did yoga I I did not think protein was that important you know in my earlier years we learned about you know the importance of you know carbohydrates as a source

of energy and that's what we should be doing and in the 90s we learned about the food pyramid and should have six to 11 servings of bread rice from pasta day and that's when I was you know running every day and I mean I literally ran four miles to medical school every morning and four miles back every night you know and I and I was fit

but I didn't have very much muscle and I look at I picture myself at 40 and now and my body looks completely different and I'm not a I'm not a gym rat I hate the gym but I really only started strength training through bands you know three years ago at six years old and I'm just sort of shocked to see the changes in my body composition

and my body using the science of having the right type of exercise combined with the right kinds and amount of protein at the right times and I you know I I'm quote older right and so I have this this tendency to what we call anabolic resistance which means it's harder to build muscle as you get older which what you were saying and and yet I find

I'm able to do it by sort of using this sort of Science and and I really would sort of shocked me to realize how how much um our a dietary advice was so wrong about eating consuming you know large amounts of carbohydrates not paying attention much to protein worried about too much dietary fat and it's really created this epidemic of obesity metabolic syndrome and all the

consequence of that really to aging and and sort of to me you know I may be a little late to the game here but it to me understanding the role of muscle and aging has been so key and looking at sarcopena which I want to get into which is muscle loss and looking at how we kind of address that as we get older or even at

any age is so important because on an abstract level we can you know talk about the science of this but the question people really want to know is what do I have to do to build highly effective functioning muscle that keeps my metabolism good and keeps me living well and healthy and a long time I think part of the confusion is One Nutrition is actually quite

a young science I often tell my students that you know I I actually got into nutrition for learning from the first generation of of nutrition researchers so I'm kind of like a second generation you know and aging does affect me now uh the you know and so it's a young Science Nutrition uh really grew out of study and growth in children and what we now know

is that protein metabolism is very different in a growing child than it is in an aging adult and that's something we've really just discovered in the last 20 years one of the things we you know we've discovered is issues of of how much protein do you need and and distribution and muscle Focus uh before it was really just about maintaining growth curves and what we know

is that you can have a child eat small meals of eight to ten grams of protein and they'll grow perfectly fine you can have them have five meals a day of snacking on 10 grams of protein and they'll be absolutely fine but that doesn't work in adults at all adults children are really driven by hormones insulin growth hormone igf-1 Etc where adults are no longer driven

their metabolism is not driven by those hormones they're now driven by diet quality and in the case of Muscle uh exercise particularly resistance exercise and so those are some of the things we've discovered in looking at things like leucine and mtor is we know there's a balance there of how to affect it for adults and one of the things I like to tell people is uh

you know the average of person if you ask them about protein is they'd say well it's really important for children because they're growing well growth only accounts for about five grams per day of net gain maximum growth where everybody you and I or a 16 year old has to make 250 to 300 grams of new protein per day just to replace body proteins we're constantly repairing

and replacing and the issue of Aging is that process becomes less efficient and one of the things we've discovered is that from a muscle standpoint we can make that efficiency better if we choose the right amount of proteins and the right amount of resistance exercise so the process of Aging we know it's a it's a slope what we want to do is change the angle of

that slope again we know that protein and exercise can do that yeah that's right and I think I think most of nutrition has been focused on fat and carbohydrate and protein sort of the neglected nutrient you know you're gonna protein whatever 20 of your diet you're fine you have to worry it's fine the truth is it's such an essential part of of our nutrition not only

in terms of uh as you said replacing all the 100 grams of proteins we use for all sorts of things from our immune system to structural proteins to you know brain chemicals I mean just peptides I mean we we just go through so much every day but it's so important in terms of of keeping your metabolism healthy as you get older which is the key to

longevity and the phenomena that happens is insulin resistance which is this phenomenon of like pre-diabetes diabetes or the Continuum from normal all the way through that and and a big way of combating that is not only cutting back on starch and sugar but is optimizing your muscle Health function and amount and so can you talk about the role protein plays in in weight loss and regulating

our blood sugar and regulating our cholesterol and triglycerides and our hormones and reversing pre-diabetes you know you know tell us about that and particularly you know um if we if we just sort of talk about weight loss we're all talking about calories well calories the old story about weight loss and I think it's the old story because I think there's a new story is that it's

all about energy balance calories in calories out as long as you don't overeat and under exercise you're fine and that turns out to be not quite the story because if you eat a high carb low protein diet you may not get the same benefit as if you're eating adequate fats of protein and less carbohydrate and starch so can you talk a little bit through that that

whole range it's a lot I know but you can take your time and pack it off but I think it's it's really where the money is yeah so um so my whole career we've been studying protein turnovers I said and sort of understood how much that impact in metabolism so I'll come back to the protein side but in the late uh 90s we had the Atkins

diet and the Zone diet and we had all these diet we had the Jerry Riven sort of discovering the concept of metabolic syndrome yeah and the debate out there was kind of a carbohydrate versus fat debate and it wasn't really going anywhere it was kind of stuck and I thought you know the reason they're not getting it is it's not really a carbohydrate versus fat it's

a calorie versus protein discussion and so we started running a series of studies um looking at substituting protein for carbohydrates so the the protein what we knew as I mentioned earlier is that protein had a big impact on energy expenditure in fact people talk about thermogenic effects of protein and they in freshman nutrition book will say it has something to do with digestion absorption metabolism which

is nonsense it actually has to do with protein turnover protein turnover is a very expensive energy process and when you trigger it at a meal one of the things we found with animals is the amount of ATP expenditure uh during say an hour of treadmill running in an animal is about uh equivalent to the same effect of giving a protein meal so you can either eat

a protein meal or you can run an hour on a treadmill and you spent the same amount of calories so that kind of triggered us to thinking about muscle and and we know that there's also a satiety effects of of protein uh we know it repairs body functions uh we know that there's this interaction with insulin so let's go to the insulin story yeah um if

you if you look at insulin resistance forever everybody sort of tried to Target fat and you can design high fat rodent models you can Define you can design obesity models and they will cause insulin resistance but what people and there's a Randall hypothesis that that high-free fatty acids inhibit uh carbohydrate metabolism and it feeds back through ceramides and diacyl glycerol uh and it causes insulin resistance

at the receptor and all of that and you can show that that works but what has also been shown is that carbohydrates cause insulin resistance it's an energy balance thing and what Bob Wolfe showed was that if you look at the two of them together in a highlight you know with really sophisticated stable isotope metabolism what you'll find is that carbohydrates always dominate metabolism and so

can you explain what that means dominate metabolism yeah I will um so so if you look at the American diet uh we get about 50 55 percent of our calories from carbohydrates and 30 38 from fat so the dominant issue to is carbohydrates so that means associated with every meal we have this big influx of of sugar of glucose and the body has to dispose of

it in fact diagnosis for diabetes as you know is a two-hour glucose tolerance test and so that means basically after a meal we have to dispose of whatever carbs came in in that meal in two hours or by definition we're diabetic and so to do that say for example the average American is eating close to 300 calories per day 300 grams per day of carbohydrates so

just simple math put a hundred grams in a meal that means you have to dispose of almost 100 grams after every meal well the body only has a capacity of just easy capacity of disposing of about 30 to 40 per hour so that means we're distorting metabolism with another 40 or 50 grams of carbohydrate and the way we do that is we basically begin to disrupt

muscle metabolism muscle is primarily a fat burning tissue and so wait wait wait what you're saying is that carbohydrates too much excess carbohydrates from starch and sugar disrupt muscle function and Metabolism exactly and it disrupts fat metabolism so basically the body has to get rid of that carbohydrate or it causes all the damage we know as diabetes so it basically shuts down all the fat metabolism

and hence we get higher blood lipids okay that's not because of eating the fat it's because of eating the excess carbs and so what we have to look at is what is the balance how many carbs can we use so anyway just slow down for a second there's so much important stuff there you said that that when you um eat excess carbohydrates it interrupts your muscles

ability to regulate your cholesterol and your triglycerides I didn't say cholesterol I said blood lipids lipids so what did you mean by that triglycerides particularly free fatty acids which basically are produced by eating too much carbohydrate right triglyceride are measured in a fasting condition as you know and so basically they reflect uh recycling of fatty acids from adipose tissue however when you have a high carbohydrate

diet now you have to go into to Nuvo synthesis of other fatty acids and that will elevate your triglycerides one of the things that we found in our weight loss studies is if we take individuals and lower their carbohydrate intake from 300 grams whatever they're normally eating down to the RDA which is 130 grams per day we will drop their triglycerides by 20 percent or more

no matter where they start at wow so we actually use that as a biomarker for a low carb compliance if you don't drop if they don't drop their triglycerides by 20 percent you know they're not following Elizabeth you can tell they're cheating and having that extra Bagel it's so it's so predictable yeah amazing so so kind of keep going with what you're what you're saying so

the balance is the muscle has two two primary fuels it uses fatty acids and uses glucose its preferred fuel is fatty acids but when excess glucose is around uh it it inhibits uh transport of of triglycerides or fatty acids into the mitochondria you get the accumulation and carbohydrates themselves will cause insulin resistance they'll feed back to the insulin receptor and muscle and so people say well

obesity causes it uh uh insulin resistance but actually just excess carbohydrate causes insulin resistance um yeah so that's a very different model because I think people say well you you you become diabetic or in some resistant because you are obese and you're saying a little bit something different I think obesity obesity is a symptom of diabetes uh it's a symptom of insulin resistance which comes first

well we tend to not look for those characteristics until somebody comes in and they're obese they have high blood pressure and we say we should look at your glucose oh you're fasting glucose is high we should look at your insulin oh you're diabetic uh but the reality is it it's the other way around it starts with insulin resistance and you become obese well that's interesting because

that that's exactly what uh David Ludwig talks about whose Harvard researcher about the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity which is that you become sort of insulin resistant and that leads to obesity and that it's really the the sort of overeating is not the cause of obesity but obesity becomes the cause of overeating in a kind of a perverse way because essentially your your fat cells become

hungry and you become in some resistance you need to eat more to satisfy them yeah I don't buy that kind of thinking exactly I think of it as a muscle Centric issue is you mentioned earlier when you were you know a 20 year old athlete you could eat any carbs you want uh well and I didn't have muscle though I it was interesting I I was

fit you were burning so the muscles even though you didn't have a lot of mass the muscles were still very actively burning it as we get older you know once we reach 40 and Beyond now that metabolism begins to slow down the question is did you change your diet to drop your carbohydrates in half and most people would say no I probably increase them and so

you know that's part of the issue so you know I do feel that carbohydrates actually are a more risky metabolism uh more risky macronutrient than fats because they dominate metabolism fats are much more passive in metabolism uh I don't really buy the whole insulin obesity theory in quite the way it's uh it's projected but calories aren't equal and carbohydrates are a more risky issue uh if

you want again if you take a muscle Centric approach keeping muscle healthy uh and Insulin active uh is your goal if you're taking a fat Centric approach now you're trying to treat the inflammation or the pathology of being fat and now fats probably do make a difference I'd say you know to people you know if you're committed to being overweight and obese then probably the facts

you choose make a difference but if your goal is to be normal weight then your calorie totals what matters so so take us through that because I'm sort of hearing a conflict in what you said between carbohydrates being worse for your muscle and for your overall health and yet you're saying it you know all calories are not necessarily different in that way so I'm a bit

confused and probably my listeners are confused sure so carbohydrates are an important fuel for muscle and so out of the 70s and 80s we got the idea that you know blood sugar and carbohydrate loading and all of that was very important for performance but now we're talking about very high-end performance so if we're talking about people who are basically sedentary maybe go for walks and things

muscle wants to use fat and so loading up the body with a huge amount of carbohydrates 300 grams per day means the majority of those are going to have to be converted into fat because we can't you the muscle aren't isn't going to use them if you're if you're running eight miles a day as you were uh you can burn 300 calories per day but if

you're basically sitting in front of a computer all day um 130 maybe Max that you can use we we when we're talking about Grant you mean grams grams grams yeah uh thank you uh when we're talking to individuals about their carbohydrate threshold or their carbohydrate needs we basically say well 130 grams is the recommended dietary allowance that allows for five servings of vegetables two to three

servings of fruit and three servings of brain grains Okay that's the RDA basically every gram of carbohydrate you use above that has to be accounted for by exercise at a basically the rate of about 60 grams per hour of medium to higher intense exercise so basically the average American with 300 grams per day needs to have three hours per day of active exercise High intense exercise

to account for otherwise you're going to be obese it's a carboxyl I mean just by simple math if 55 percent of our calories come from carbs and 35 from fat how can fat be the problem so you're saying that it's our excess carbohydrates that are driving a lot of the Obesity epidemic absolutely I mean that's where we're eating the excess calories and that's frankly the easiest

one to change you know if you people who are you know the Paleo carnivore type of diets if you reduce your grain consumption most people will get their calories under control yeah I think that's right I think I think we we you know you know calories do matter it's just I think that you know my experience is if I focus on the quality of the nutrients

that my patients are eating and I tell them to produce the refined Sergeant sugar or increase plant you know rich foods in terms of vegetables and fruit uh and and have good quality fats that I don't really have to tell them to lose weight or count calories that it naturally will sort itself out and the metabolism will actually increase when they do that um and and

I hear that's what you're saying yeah when we when we teach it in our weight loss clinic at the University of Illinois the way we taught it was you make your you make your protein-centric decision how much protein they are going to be and that may be vegetarian it may be carnivore but you make a decision about protein then you can eat all of the high

you know the colorful fruits and vegetables and berries the high fiber type of plants you want those are your fill colors and then the starchy sugary things the the bread the rice the potatoes can never be larger than you know basically a one-to-one ratio with a protein and if you do that you can't literally can't overeat it's virtually impossible to overeat the protein part right right

right people gonna people can eat a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies but it's it's hard to eat like a 30 ounce piece of meat yeah the the you know you go out and you have a dinner say you had an eight ounce steak and they come to the end of the meal and they say well would you like chocolate cake or another eight ounce steak very

few people will choose the eight ounce steak you just can't eat more of it it's very you know it's satiating you you just get full of it even if you like even if you're a carnivore and you like it you still get full of it now you you can always eat another donut that is true so you basically um we're sharing you know some of your

research around the how um eating the same calories if it's higher carb low protein won't give you the same results as eating the same calories if it's higher protein lower carbohydrate right right can you explain that yeah so so we did a series of weight loss clinical trials and the reason the reason I'm asking is heart interrupted is because most most of us still believe that

it's just about energy balance calories and calories out is all I have to worry about and if you burn more than you eat you're gonna be fine and the reality is the choice between carbohydrate and fats it's pretty much calories and calories out they kind of burn about the same but protein is totally different um so um let me describe so we the the second of

the series of studies that we did was a two by two experiment where we had high carb low protein basically it was the food guy pyramid followed it exactly so a great diet right uh and the other diet the other diet was a high protein reduced carb uh basically we substituted protein for carbs gram per gram okay uh this was this was four months 16 weeks

uh 50 48 women on the study uh at the end of it both groups lost weight so calories do matter uh I may not quite get these numbers correctly women on the high carb diet not using exercise loss 14.8 uh pounds I think it was pounds yeah 14.8 pounds uh in the 16 weeks uh the women and then we had another group a same diet but

doing exercise so this exercise we get into the exercise issue but they were doing seven days a week 30 minutes a day of exercise 16 weeks they lost a tenth of a pound so it went from 14.8 to 14.9 uh so really no difference from the effort but if we looked at the body composition the individuals who were on the high carb diet low protein uh

64 of their weight loss was fat which means 36 percent was lean tissue and we believe that is one of the issues for diet rebounds that people are using their lean tissue particularly muscle during these restrictions uh and therefore their ability their resting energy expenditure their ability to burn calories goes down yeah bound and when they rebound they'll gain back the fat and not the muscle

yeah worse off for having doing it so the carb group plus the exercise what we found is that the composition went to 78 of the weight loss was fat so now only 22 percent was lean so the exercise had a bit it didn't show up on the bathroom scale but it showed up in composition and that matters for metabolism right much tremendous effect on metabolism next

group then is the low carb high protein after um same 16 weeks what we found is they lost something in the 17 and a half pounds so with the exact same calories they lost three pounds more weight and what we found was they lost almost 300 cow they burned almost 300 calories per day more more what we then looked at body composition and their composition was

76 percent fat loss 24 lean so basically the carbohydrate was seven days a week of exercise was the same as doing a higher protein diet without exercise without exercise yeah so just basically changing your diet to higher protein was equivalent to adding seven days a week of exercise which of those looks easier and did the fat remain constant in terms of that the dietary fat was

just slightly higher in the high protein diet so uh in the low protein in the high carb diet they had approximately 40 grams per day of fat and then the high protein diet they had approximately 50. so a little bit higher same calories per day though slightly different metabolic macronutrient composition the last one we went to the high protein plus the same exercise they now lost

19 and a half pounds so 5 pound more doing exactly the same effort uh same diet same calories uh and now the weight loss was a little over 90 percent fat only less than 10 percent uh lean so basically we saw the synergistic effect and so one of the things I like to point out is that basically you know you know the synergistic effect of protein

plus plus exercise uh as far as body composition but the converse of that is that a high carb low protein diet negates the benefit of Doing exercise well that's a big a big Discovery if eating a high carb diet you can exercise and you're not getting ahead it's actually following the food guy pyramid dramatically reduces the effect of Doing exercise so let me let me summarize

this so basically if you if you eat a high carb diet lower protein and exercise you're worse off and if you don't exercise and need a higher protein lower carbohydrate diet and the other feeling is to clarify is I I learned that muscle obviously Burns far more calories than fat and and you know I heard seven times as much so if you if you actually are

gaining losing weight and I don't know if the seven times is right or not I just learned that years ago and I had that suck on my head but it's it's definitely more but so if you if you lose weight and then you gain back the weight you're losing muscle and fat but then you're getting back fat so basically you could be the same weight you

were when you started and actually have a slower metabolism being burning less calories so you actually eat less and I've seen this on my patient go I don't eat that much and they're very obese and I'm like this is because you've basically replaced your muscle with fat and it's You're such you have such a slow metabolism yeah yeah it's uh I mean that's that's what people

refer to as the yo-yo dieting problem is that you lose weight the bathroom scale says you're being successful but you're not correcting body composition uh and you know when you gain it back uh adults don't gain back body muscle very well it takes enormous amount of resistance exercise to gain it back so when you gain it back what you gain back is the fat and so

now what you have is a worse body composition one of the things my dietitians when we were doing the weight loss studies they always used to when they brought people in they would always ask them about previous diets and they always referred to individuals as weight loss virgins because if they were they hadn't gone through yo-yo diets they would be much more successful on any of

our treatments so if they'd already messed up their body composition with previous diets they would never quite as successful it's so interesting and and and when you're talking about approaching those diets what was considered high protein like in terms of Point uh what programs so we were you know so the the food guide pyramid recommends the RDA so that's 0.8 grams per day which is 0.3

36 pounds per day per hour 0.36 sorry 0.36 grams per pound yeah anyway that's the minimum amount for just maintaining that's not optimal amount for absolutely it's the minimum That You Don't See deficiencies uh and just like frame of reference uh of women over 65 40 percent are below that number 40. um wait wait that's just a huge bombshell you dropped because the prevailing narrative out

there is that we as Americans eat too much protein and you just said that 40 percent of women over well 65 you said don't get enough protein don't meet the minimum we don't need minimum not not the amount we need for Optimal Health but yeah the minimum basically how much vitamin C do you need not get scurvy 60 milligrams yeah you know it's not very much

right or how much you might even eating do not get Rick it's 30 it's so you're talking about really not optimal levels for health maybe you need a thousand or two or five thousand for vitamin D to be healthy right and I I don't quite remember the statistic on this one but in the in women 16 to 26 I think it's 30 or below the RDA

16 to 26 30 yeah very young women you know they're all conscious about weight loss and how they're eating extremely low uh so we've got the two extremes men not so much men tend to make the minimum okay but again not the optimum we think the optimum is about twice the RDA so 0.8 grams per kg our diets were aimed at 1.5 1.6 in women we

find the metabolism there's a threshold of around 100 grams per day if they fall below 100 grams per day we lose a lot of the metabolic effects so we tried to Target women uh in the 100 to 120 grams per day range and people say Well it relates the body weight yeah true uh but in our weight loss studies we had women everywhere from 140 to

300 pounds and we found that number still work pretty well that's remarkable I mean that is a lot a lot more than most people are thinking about as being and then and now you're talking about a younger person you're not talking about someone who's like 70 who may need even more than that uh so we're talking about you know metabolism that's really Geared for people over

40. um again I mentioned earlier that young people will grow on small amounts of protein distributed and you know when we're young we can kind of abuse our bodies and it looks okay I know I'm not I'm not I'm not I'm not able to abuse my body like I used to for sure I know that a 20 year old female on a really low protein diet

probably is okay but you start getting a 60 year old female low protein diet and they're not going to be as okay you're going to see it in their skin you're going to see it in their hair you're going to see it in a lot of their muscle mass you're going to see it in different ways so you know we always want to kind of realize

that young people and older adults are very different in how we think about metabolism you know we always say that you know some place in the end of your 30s to your 40s you should be making a pretty conscious diet change and most people aren't you're not even talking about when you get to 50 60 or seven you're talking in 30 or 40s we need more

it's measurable we can measure these changes in protein metabolism and people know you can measure changes in bone metabolism starting in your the in the 40s so in that fourth decade uh you know after 40 we we know that some of the things that we measure in terms of distribution of protein protein at meals we can detect the difference in mid-30s wow when you're seeing this

sort of revolutionary and goes against a lot of the prevailing views out there which is that before but it's based on your it's not just based on you know uh nothing it's based on Decades of research and very rigorous research 40 Years of research where we have actually tested these things and measured that both in animals and in humans and we're pretty confident in how these

work so you're busy and we know the mechanisms behind it yeah when you get into the mechanisms in a minute but basically you're saying is that all calories are not exactly created equal when it comes to how they affect your metabolism yeah right and absolutely related to protein you can have a little bit different kind of debate about carbon fat but protein is 100 different metabolism

and it's the only it's the only essential macronutrient the other two are just calories well there's essential fatty acids but yes right maybe three grams per day right yeah we're eating 70 to 80 grams of fat per day three are essential so yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly so I I just just want to take a little sidebar for a minute and I want to get back

into uh the protein conversation about what kind of protein what is the amount of protein what does it look like a quality of protein leucine a lot of things I want to talk about but I want to take a sidebar on on another study that was very similar to yours which put people in a metabolic lab and gave them food and measured their metabolic rate when

they had isochloric same calorie diets but one was let's say 60 fat um 20 carb versus let's say 10 to 20 fat and sixty percent carb so high carb low fat versus low fat high carb and and this was David Ludwig's studying what shocked me in that study was even though they were eating the same amount of calories the metabolic rate particularly in those who are

already in some resistant was 400 calories slower in those who had the high carbohydrate low-fat diet and the high fat group burned basically 400 calories more a day you have any thoughts on that yeah I can't really speak to that I I I I'm not sure I'm familiar with that specific study Kevin Hall has some similar metabolic studies and doesn't find those kinds of differences those

are short-term studies those are like two week studies so that's the difference in it takes a bad adaptation takes a while so I think that was part of the flaws in that yeah I you know I I can't I can't lead to those two studies uh my reading of the literature is that from a calorie standpoint fat calories carb calories uh there's just they're still just

calories um I do feel that when the fat is not insulinogenic right so if you drink a liter of olive oil your insulin doesn't go up so so what I was going to say is that if you're in excess calorie situations high carb diets will cause more problems because of the insulin issues and high chronically High insulin if you look at the time course of insulin

resistance what you'll find is that uh as an individual becomes insulin resistance the the body will slowly increase the amount of insulin released at a meal to try and keep blood glucose stable and it keeps going up and up until basically it damages the pancreas and you can no longer sustain that and people then go to external insulin and other kinds of drugs etc etc but

basically continuously increasing your carbs to force the body to dispose of them causes insulin resistance yeah yeah absolutely okay now I want to get no I thank you for that sidebar I want I want to get into an area that maybe is controversial as being a Republican or a Democrat or being you know let's not go there Jewish or Muslim or whatever it's it's vegan versus

not vegan right and and I think you know there there is so much um media and I would say you know information out there online and in movies that that seems to convince people that you can get adequate amounts of protein and build massive amounts of muscle being vegan now I just got back from Rwanda I was on a vacation and it was one of my

bucket listings and I went to see the gorillas now the gorillas I've never seen a gorilla they're huge massive amounts of muscle and they are essentially vegan except for a few insects and and you know what I didn't know before I went was that they eat 55 pounds of food a day and they eat half the day and they have these enormous intestines those giant bellies

that they have are not fat they're they're intestines so you know can you speak to this whole idea of can you actually adequately meet your protein needs being strictly vegan especially as you age and can you talk about some of the research around and what we'll I'll kind of repeat the question around mtor activation and the idea that we want to inhibit mtor which is this

this part of our cellular metabolism that activates muscle synthesis but also when you inhibit it it actually increases autophagy which mimics calorie restriction which is the thing that's been proven to extend life in in all animal models so so help us sort of understand one can can we get adequate protein being vegan and especially as we age in two how do we deal with this this

basically seemingly contradictory idea that we should inhibit mtor to extend our life but we need muscle to be more as we age to be healthy so help us with that so wow unlocking a lot of different things there um okay so the vegan story yeah you can be perfectly healthy as a vegan but it's tough uh basically what we know is that to be equal you

have to eat more total protein and more total calories so your gorillas are stuffing themselves basically this the solution to that is they better be physically active uh and so being a vegan at 25 or 35 um Works a whole lot better than being a vegan at 65 or 75. now you have both physical activity and metabolic rates going down and it's hard to eat enough

to get to it uh you know my comment earlier that 65 you know 40 percent of women over 65 don't get enough protein just to be equal uh and being a vegan doesn't make that better uh so so you know I think there's an age issue in it um my problem with vegans is is when they sort of take a moral superiority approach to it I

just have no I have no tolerance for that uh you know if if you want to do it for a personal reason if you want to do it for some metabolic uh reason uh cardiovascular disease you've got really high ldls or something I'm okay with that high fiber okay I'm okay with that is it metabolically better uh I don't think so I think that a balance

of animal Foods um in the united one of the things you have to look at it is not only can it be done the issue is can people do it and in the United States uh most people have nowhere's near the food knowledge or the food skills to pull that off in the United States we get 70 percent of our calories from plant-based Foods now only

30 from animal-based foods of that 70 percent 51 percent comes from added sugars oils and hydrogenated fats and another 33 percent comes from refined grains so of the 70 percent 80 percent have no nutritional value they're just crappy calories and if you look at the 30 of the calories coming from animal Foods basically we're getting 65 percent of our protein a hundred percent of calcium vitamin

D B12 and over 60 percent of iron zinc selenium B6 niacin so the question is if we take calories out of that animal fraction what are we going to eat are we going to eat broccoli and Brussels sprouts and green beans are we going to eat bread and you know candy bars and donuts and french fries I mean that's what Americans eat yeah right right now

of our plant-based protein in the U.S and worldwide 80 percent of the protein comes from wheat which is absolutely lousy protein Source but wheat as a flower particularly not even as whole wheat right I mean most people don't eat wheat berries they eat either whole wheat flour or white flour which isn't that different sure like I just said you know 50 50 you know you know

uh 33 percent of it comes from refined grains you know yeah Etc so so a lot of it is from but anyway the point is uh people aren't eating beans and lentils they're eating they're eating french fries and and bread but let's say but Dom let's say they work because you know let's just take like you want to um let's say 30 grams of protein right

in chicken let's say it's four ounces which has about 270 calories if you want let's say beans let's say black beans that's two cups of black beans to get 30 grams of protein we can talk about protein quality that's 450 calories so if you want to have 30 grams of protein that's fine if you want them 120 grams that's four times that that's like you know

800 calories from protein versus like versus like thousands of calories and if you think brown rice you have to have 24 cups of brown rice a day which has 1200 calories times 20 times like uh six how am I good at math but that's like 20 000 calories a day to get enough protein from brown rice right so 100 agree my first point was that if

you're going to be vegetarian or vegan you're going to have to have more total protein because the quality is down and more total calories to your point right now I mean the average beans uh black beans for example are between three or four to one carbohydrate to protein so if I want a diet with 100 grams of protein by definition I'm going to have to have

350 grams of carbohydrates which we already said most people can't metabolize you know it's just too many calories um so you know it's much harder it can be done it's much easier how could how could you do it really because if you're eating you know let's say bottom line is that almost all vegetarians reduce their protein intake the average all of the studies say that the

average protein intake for vegetarians is in the mid 60s okay the average adult intake in the United States is women are around 70 and men are around 90. so they're reducing their protein intake they're reducing their protein quality when you're young you can kind of get away with it when you're older and you're stressed with sarcopenia not so much okay we're talking about protein quality because

you know people say oh your beans and Grains you combine them it's great you know you can get full protein and that's fine but you know just doing the math if if brown rice six cups of brown rice has you know uh uh uh 600 30 grams of protein you multiply that four that's 120 grams that's 31 000 calories not to mention how many carbohydrate grams

are in there and then when you add protein you know the 450 grams of protein I mean sorry uh 30 grams of protein and two cups of beans that's 450 calories times four to get 120 grams that's 1800 calories so you know you're going to be eating so many extra calories with also carbohydrates unless my conclusion unless you actually have pulverized concentrated protein powders that are

made from plants and add extra leucine and branching amino acids on top of it it's going to be very hard to do this and I and I've met these guys who are bodybuilders who are vegans and they eat jacked up plant proteins powders not I think yeah again the the the national surveys the inhanes data and others all say that average vegetarians are in the low

60s protein per day so if you're going to try and get to 120 grams to your point you're going to have to have isolated purified proteins you can't do it with eating food because you're just going to get too many calories so so people who are being vegetarian by the way I was a vegan vegetarian for like 10 years or more actually when I was younger

so I I I I get this and I understand why and there's the and then there's three real issues Health um environmental and moral and moral I can't argue with health is more complicated and uh you know I think environmental it's very nuanced in terms of regenerative agriculture and we can talk about that but I think I think I sort of want to get into the

protein quality because I read died for a small planet and if you combine protein from Beans and Grains you get complete protein and you don't have to worry and yet the thing that you talk about which is really unique and that that I learned from Gabrielle Lyon my friend who was your student was that leucine is a rate limiting amino acid in protein synthesis and in

English that means if you don't have enough of this particularly amino acid you can't turn on the switch like flipping a like a switch to turn on your your engine to build muscle and unless you have that amount so and and typically plant proteins are very low in this particular amino acid leucine and other branched chain amino acids so can you help us understand like that

that concept and what do we do about it so so there are nine essential amino acids um and interestingly they're not all equally essential uh the ones that show up most in diets you mentioned leucine the other two are lysine and methionine uh all grains are very low in rice Etc all grains are very low in lysine and all legumes beans are very low in methionine

and they're both pretty low in leucine and so uh you'll see advertisements that say well this plant protein contains all the essential amino acids well every protein contains all the essential amino acids but they're not in the right proportions you know the the thing I always like to say is that plants have proteins for the sake of the plants they're building roots to seeds and flowers

and seeds which are pretty different than brains and hearts and livers and muscles yeah you know uh your comment about animals uh we have evolved to use animals to correct that balance for us particularly ruminant animals uh they have the ability to take plants and basically convert those back into amino acid balances that are correct for humans uh so that and they eat all day they

eat all day and they eat enormous amounts of food so those are the essential amino acids that are missing um what we know and what my lab discovered is that when you're young as I mentioned earlier uh the protein synthesis particularly in muscle is driven by hormones but after you start stop growing into your 30s now it's driven by diet quality and by exercise and diet

finally the body for reasons that I love to think about has learned to recognize leucine um I started studying these Branch chain amino acids back in graduate school I was fascinated by them there were some early studies some great researchers uh that showed that um leucine could stimulate protein synthesis in certain kinds of muscle diaphragm and things like that back in those days um and Al

Harper at Wisconsin and some others had also shown that leucine is not metabolized in the liver where all other amino acids are metabolized in the gut and the liver leucine the branched State amino acids leucine valine isoleucine aren't and so they end up going from the diet the gut into the bloodstream basically an exact percentage that you ate them well muscle now can see the diet

muscle is getting a dose of how to what what did that meal look like by the amount of leucine that shows up and for reasons we don't really know uh it learned to sense that as a trigger for protein synthesis through a mechanism we now know as mtor what my lab discovered was that this leucine signal triggered the initiation process or protein synthesis and you know

the last 20 years hundreds of labs have looked at that process but we know that know that as an adult not so much as a child but as an adult losing the amount of leucine at a meal is an absolute key to maintaining your muscle Health maintaining your muscle protein synthesis and so that's a that's a key part of diet and to your point all plants

are relatively low in leucine and so quinoa for example to to use whey protein at a meal you can eat 20 23 grams of whey protein about 120 calories and stimulate muscle protein synthesis where quinoa it takes something like um 50 grams of protein and 100 you know 2 000 calories to make the same effect you know you just you just can't it's almost almost 20

times the amount of calories to get the same amount of leucine and so you know again quinoa has leucine in it but it's at such a low amount and the nutrient density is so low the relationship to calories is so low uh that you can't eat enough of it yeah yeah this is such a radical idea that you're talking about Dr Layman because you would get

so much pushback from the vegan community that this is true and yet this is just basic science this is not controversial this is not in any way um challenging you know the Decades of research that you've done and others have done to prove that that this basic biology of building muscle requires this particular amino acid leucine at a particular amount per meal which is about two

and a half grams and and people will say well you know if you do the right complementary proteins if I take my wheat and I combine it with corn and I combine it with pee and I do this and I process I can make a balance and absolutely you can do it all of the the vegans who understand this process now to the point we made

earlier are almost all using supplements they're using protein powders yeah um you just can't do it with just pure Natural Foods you have to do some sort of process powder to get to it um otherwise you're going to end up in the low 60s that you know you just can't eat enough food to get to that protein level and the amino acid supplements that people will

get or added leucine they can be gotten from plant proteins right you don't have to get them from animal protein so if you want to be strictly vegan can you synthesize them in the lab from plant components and then add them to a protein powder or where is it coming from is what I'm asking okay so so I was talking about protein powders where you're isolating

a protein from P yeah the whole protein and you know it's 70 Pure or something amino acids the primary source of amino acids is yeast they're grown in yeast environments and then they're isolated from that okay so it's a it's a it's not a plant but it's it's some kind of something okay I got it all right so so ethically it's okay and if you're committed

to being vegan you just have to understand that you can't get around the science of needing this amount of leucine per meal to activate muscle synthesis and especially important as you're older so you have to either take these additional supplements or take the extra protein powders with extra leucine and I know there's for example vegan protein powders that are jacked up I call them jacked up

where they add Ranch amino acids and they add leucine to supplement and those can be very effective so I'm not saying you have to eat meat I'm just saying you have to get real about the science of muscle otherwise you're going to end up having poor metabolic Health aging faster lower hormones more inflammation and all the things we see with aging yeah I I mean if

you go back and history in the 1980s we got a recommendation for plant-based diets it was called the food guide pyramid [Music] and you know people responded to that and they decreased Dairy consumption egg consumption and and beef consumption by 35 in each category and they increased grain consumption by 40 percent and we got epidemics of obesity diabetes and no change in heart disease at all

so you know the the issue is can you create a healthy plant-based diet well you can but you can also create a very unhealthy plant-based diet and that's what most Americans have done yeah exactly that's my problem you know if people say you know do we need a more plant-based diet I say we need a diet with better plants I like that I like that okay

so I want to flip this upside down a little bit because there's the age in question uh and this whole issue of mtor and I'm just going to explain that a little bit for people but basically uh one of the key things we've discovered as we age is that there are a number of things that go wrong and one of them is deregulated nutrient sensing it's

inhibit this process that's critical to longevity called autophagy meaning you clean up your cells and you kind of it's like the recycling and garbage disposal system in your body so in other words if you just cooked all day in your kitchen but never clean up it'd be a freaking mess and that's kind of what we're doing with our diet so how do you reconcile the need

for uh regular leucine consumption to build muscle with aging and muscle being the currency of aging and this problem of needing to give mtor a break or inhibit mtor and not stimulantor with leucine which is the primary stimulator of it and with saying we need actually less protein as we age or or actually avoid animal protein because it's high in losing right because this is the

debate going on right now and I need you to help kind of navigate it because you're the expert okay so let's let's talk first about mtor and then those talk about the Aging studies okay so first thing to know about mtor is it's present in every tissue in the body and it regulates differently so we've been talking about mtor in muscle but how about in liver

or a tumor cell or whatever there are multiple regulations of mtor we've been talking about leucine and and uh exercise but the other two are insulin and ATP so now we have four regulations what we know is that in liver protein synthesis is regulated by energy what we know is that protein synthesis muscle is regulated by leucine so now we've got different things going on what

we know is in tumor cells it's regulated by in insulin and energy not by leucine okay so now we're beginning to get this dichotomy going on uh when we teach yeah because people don't realize that Android not only similar by protein but also by sugar and Insulin which is caused by too much sugar and starch right exactly so now we've got this problem going on is

that we have high carbohydrate diets we have high insulin environments we know we actually did some breast cancer research and we know that tumor promotion is far more promoted by by insulin than it is by leucine or or um or high protein okay so so we've got this dichotomy going on now one of the things that we also teach about protein for muscle is it's meal

based and the reason we want to do that is we want to turn mtor on and off and so we teach it about optimizing protein at about five hour intervals okay the worst thing you can do with protein is eat it in small doses all day long like like vegetarians do yeah okay because that chronically stimulates it and now what you've got is the problems the

potential that you're talking about is too much mtor all the time what we want to do stop is turn it on and again mtor isn't like an anabolic hormone mtor is a is a switch that turns on initiation factors and what it does in muscle is it turns on capacity factors there's a there's a initiation Factor called eif4 another one called S6 it's a ribosomal protein

and basically what these do is they increase your capacity for synthesis particularly of structural proteins okay uh that doesn't work the same in other tissues it's a muscle specific kinds of effect okay so we wanted to turn it on and then mtor should go away we want it to turn back off once you turn on these ribosomal proteins and this mRNA recognition and things it'll run

for two three hours you want mtor to be turned off so now we get into the longevity studies and you say how are those run well the way they run them is they put a a rodent in a sterile cage and they give them food ad limit them so they're eating constantly 24 hours a day you can open up their stomachs and they're they have gut

fill 24 hours a day so basically we've now turned on him to our 24 hours a day and lo and beholds you get problems then they what they do is they restrict the animal and then compared to this adlib atom to a restricted and as soon as you restrict an animal what does it do it goes to meal feeding because it will eat its food and

stop and then fast for the rest of the day okay so now you've gone to meal feeding and now you correct the situation they're trying to argue it's a protein restriction it's really a it's a calorie restriction rats and actually rodents overeat by 40 percent we're left in an ad libbitum cage at the University of Illinois we can considered a 40 percent restricted Road Norma okay

so a forty percent restriction just normalizes them basically we know that obesity shortens longevity and that's what those longevity studies are showing overeating is bad okay we agree but to basically say it's a leucine mtor study is basically ignoring the science that basically mtor leucine are required to keep muscle healthy and we know that longevity that muscle really is is highly critical to everybody having a

healthy aging process so we've got that dichotomy of how the studies were run uh but basically uh mtor and leucine are critical for healthy long-term muscle so so basically it's about when you eat it's like I call it the Goldilocks problem you want to simulate them toward the right times and the right amount in the right way with the right quality of protein but you don't

want to do it all the time every day 24 7 and you want to give yourself a break and allow mtor to be inhibited to initiate autophagy clean up your cells and kind of mimic calorie restriction or actually be calorie restriction which then helps you extend your life is that is that what you're saying yeah I I think that's a totally reasonable way to look at

it yep and and you know you you do I do worry because I see you know people who are plant-based as they get older they get really frail and they get really weak and I mean are they you don't do that my my colleague Gabrielle lion you know sees that type of patient and she works in the gerontology she actually did a gerontology residency at washu

and that's exactly what she sees uh you know people who are low protein uh they become more frail I think it's 300 000 hip fractures and individuals over 65 per year in the U.S and one third of those never leave the hospital huh so talk let's say practically about how much protein you should eat in terms of food and when you should eat it in terms

of the day like and then this whole controversy like time restricted eating or like you know what what what's the right math here so uh once we for asking for a friend by the way I know I'm sure you do um so after we sort of discovered this leucine mtor relationship and working with colleagues at Galveston University of Texas Doug Patton Jones and I we're looking

at the American diet and we realized that the average America needs 65 percent of their protein at one meal late in the day uh and we started thinking about protein turnover and muscle and so when you go when you go into a nighttime fast um your muscle becomes very idle but all of your other organs are working perfectly fine in the middle of the night your

liver is making proteins it's turning over enzymes every hour and so you have to keep building proteins in your liver and so the question is where do those amino acids come from well during the middle of the night they're coming from muscle muscle becomes catabolic and it's breaking down and so during that 12 hour fast you're catabolic breaking down muscle when you wake up in the

morning and you eat no protein you're still catabolic you're breaking down muscle until you have a meal that has at least 30 grams of protein at least 2.5 grams of leucine you're catabolic so the average American and the other thing we we discovered was that the meal effect of protein is gives you an anabolic period of about two hours so what we have in the United

States with adults is we have a two-hour antibiotic period around dinner and a 22 hour catabolic period the rest of the day so anabolic means building muscle catabolic means breaking down muscle just for the average person fast we're breaking it down to give amino acids to the to the liver the organs the gut the kidney the brain and then we have to replace those if we

don't replace them that's aging that's sarcopenia that's a steady loss of muscle over time and so what we decided what Doug and I looked at and said what we need to do is move that protein we're probably eating too much at dinner let's move it to the first meal when you come out of that fast and so when we did that in animals or in humans

what we found is what we immediately corrected this muscle loss and corrected body composition so distribution for me is moving is putting more protein into that first meal after an overnight fast second meal interestingly enough nobody's ever really studied it so we know that the first and last meal are really important we assume the marital meal is okay is important the study that Doug and I

ran actually used an even distribution and everybody has run with that you need 30 grams per meal every me that was just a coincidence we thought the design was cute the real issue is we move protein to breakfast so so we people shouldn't worry so much about getting 30 grams at every meal it's about the total amount during the day you know when I when I

talk to people I say I would like to see you get 45 at breakfast I would like to see you get whatever 20 to 35 at lunch depending on how you're trying to control calories and another 45 to 50 at dinner that's what that's the pattern that I personally use and is there anything to the idea that if you don't have at least 20 to 25

or 30 grams at a meal that you can't turn on mtor exactly synthesis in other words if you add 10 grams of protein it's sort of just your burnished calories it doesn't actually activate this again liver versus Muscle yeah a regulated different so if you have 10 grams of protein at each meal your liver and kidney and brain will look you're working your gut they're still

fine because they're not regulated by leucine muscle is and so you know it's not that it's just burned as calories because frankly all protein is just burned as calories interesting point to think about uh uh it's just that it's not going to protect muscle and so the minimum amount so the the studies that were run uh multiple Studies by multiple groups but one that was sort

of the first was by Bob Wolf's group at at Texas and basically they looked at what was the equivalent um of giving 1.7 grams of leucine versus 2.7 and they found that 1.7 had no effect at all muscle was totally idle 2.7 totally turned it on so we know there's a steep threshold somewhere between 1.7 and 2.7 we've sort of calculated that out and you'll see

most people will say 2.5 um we don't know whether it's 2.3 or 2.5 or anyway so amazing what you're saying is is like you know if you want to get two and a half grams or so of leucine you need about four to six ounces of meat or chicken or fish and about 20 to 25 grams of some kind of whey protein yeah exactly great okay

so that's like a take home I think you know and that's good that made me feel good because you know basically Americans are eating sugar for breakfast bread uh muffins bagels cereal pancakes french toast sweetened yogurt I mean your average Joe play yogurt for breakfast has more sugar than a can of Coke so the average the average American breakfast is somewhere between 75 and 100 grams

of carbs and about 10 grams of protein yeah so that may feel good because this morning I had about uh 22 grams of goat weigh and then I added extra protein I added uh you know it's a combination of pumpkin seed pea protein and Bovine collagen so I put all that together and I get about 40 something grams of protein so I'm I'm actually feel like

I'm doing a good job I had almost the same combination frankly and and um I know people have been talking this is just a little bit of sidebar uh is is about the idea of collagen and collagen protein can you talk about the challenges with that I know you put your head back so that tells everybody and listen listening not watching the podcast he just threw

his head back and rolled his eyes so what is the deal with that yeah so you know as a protein expert we make fun of collagen it probably is the single worst protein on the face of the Earth it's deficient in at least three essential amino acids uh extremely high in arginine and glycine people talk about hydroxyproline hydroxy glycine these Hydro but the body can't use

those basically once an amino acid is hydroxylated the body can't use it anymore and so basically it's an absolutely crappy protein if you look for studies basically you'll say well it seems to improve skin health and it seems to improve this and that um it makes no sense and there's no mechanisms to back it up um I frankly think it's a waste of money uh I

I just don't buy it um you know is there a possibility that glycine or Arginine helps with growth hormone to help stimulate some of these things possibly but I've never seen any science to back it up so basically you have this protein that has a lot of testimonial people love it and yet you have the science says it's absolutely awful and so that's kind of the

bottom line okay a couple more questions and I'll let you go uh because these are all things that people are asking all the time in terms of exercise timing and protein intake can you talk about that because the produce study did review especially as we get older you know when we should eat protein in relation to when we exercise to get the maximum muscle building effect

um let's talk a little bit about exercise before we do that so type of exercise for a healthy adult that weight loss study that we talked about basically we did five days a week of anaerobic just sort of walking exercise mod real moderate intensity and two days a week of resistance which was basically yoga and stretch wait resistance was yoga and stretch yeah so so the

issue of muscle growth muscle uh health and protection is stretch eccentric motion is actually more important than concentric stretch is important a lot of great research back in the 70s about this we've kind of Forgotten so if you're trying to build muscle if I'm wanting to be a football alignment then you need to lift heavy weights you need to lift weights 70 percent or higher of

your maximum lift capability but if you're an aging adult just trying to protect your muscle you'll get a massive benefit just by doing yoga just by doing stretch okay so that you won't but you won't get bulk you won't get bulk which a lot of adults don't aren't looking for and you wouldn't necessarily get definition you wouldn't necessarily get definition definition would be partly muscle and

partly fat yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna send you after this and I'll post it in the show notes my picture at 40 and 62. I was doing yoga and running and I was like I did yoga I don't need to do anything else that's strength training and maybe it was but I can tell you my body looks so different now and I'm like the obvious joke

here is please don't no I had my okay okay okay but I'm sorry what uh uh exercise what was your original well the question was you know timing in relationship timing and protein so all of that we what we did we sort of started this ball rolling is that we were when we were studying the Lucy and mtor question one of the things we want one

of the things we know is that if you go into fasting the longer you fast you start down regulating protein synthesis not only at the initiation phase but also at the transcription phase you fewer ribosomes fewer messenger rnas so what we wanted was an acute catabolic event so we did exhaustive exercise and what we showed is exhaustive exercise causes a catabolic event muscle and what we

showed is if you give protein right after exercise causes recovery people have run with that and said well you should have extra protein post exercise well the research what it actually shows is that's probably only important when you first start if you're an untrained individual who does an exhaustive bout it will be catabolic but if you're well trained in an event it really doesn't matter when

you have the protein afterwards other than you're going to be catabolic until your next meal yeah and so you know if your next meal is two hours or four hours later if you want to go out in the morning and exercise before breakfast that's great I tend to exercise sort of early afternoon I'll go out and exercise it too uh I'll eat again at seven it

doesn't matter where it occurs if you're well trained if you're starting a new training regimen if your first two weeks of football practice in the fall taking protein right after that's probably a good idea it'll reduce soreness probably it'll help you recover quicker before you have your next football practice in the afternoon but as far as an average person it doesn't matter you know all these

jocks going to the gym with a bottle of protein and gulping I think is kind of humorous interesting because in the in the produce study it did seem to say that it was important to have protein within an hour or two of of working out for and all those individuals all those experiments are untrained individuals with maximum exertion so if you're kind of in shape already

you can kind of get your protein throughout the day but what you're also saying is that morning protein is essential then you you know you're in this you're in a state of breakdown until you turn off the breakdown with the build up by eating enough protein in the right quality in the morning you know I'm not particularly hooked on you know is that at seven in

the morning or is that at 10 30. I don't really care so you know time restricted feeding um now you're doing that to control calories and so weight control and that may be a more important issue than three hours earlier breakfast um so I'm okay with time restricted eating I'm not I'm not okay with intermittent fasting uh but I am okay with time restricted feeding uh

and and that first meal I try never to use the concept of breakfast because that implies the time of the day I always say first meal and if that first meal is at 11 that's okay love that last video You're Gonna Love the next one check it out here and we look at the causes of the Hallmarks which are our diet toxins stress physical and psychological

stress uh our microbiome and microbes and various kinds of allergens