Barbell Shrugged - [Amino Acids] Leucine’s Role in Muscle and Metabolism w/ Dr. Donald Layman, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash #761

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

Dr. Donald Layman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Fellow of the American Society for Nutrition. Dr. Layman served on the faculty at the University of Illinois from 1977 – 2012. Dr. Layman has been a leader in research about protein, nutrition for athletic performance, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular health. Dr. Layman has over 120 peer-reviewed publications. He has received numerous awards for his research from the American Society for Nutrition (ASN) including election as an ASN Fellow. Dr. Layman served as Associate Editor of The Journal of Nutrition and the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior and on the editorial boards of Nutrition & Metabolism and Nutrition Research and Practice. Dr. Layman has an extensive consulting background including work with NASA, the Shriners Children’s Hospital, the US Air Force plus numerous food companies and organizations including Kraft Foods, Nestlé, Danone, Agropur, the American Egg Board, and the National Dairy Council. He is also active on social media and widely sought as a keynote speaker. Dr. Layman earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemistry and biochemistry at Illinois State University and his doctorate in human nutrition and biochemistry at the University of Minnesota. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Work with Dr. Donald Layman X: https://x.com/donlayman Website: MetabolicTransformation.com Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

shrug family this week on barbell shrug dr donald layman is coming into the show and one of the most beautiful things that happens sometimes on barbell shrug is i get to meet and interview and talk to the person that did all of the research on how i've essentially been living my life for strength and conditioning for the past 28 years he is not only the mentor to some of the more popular people like Lane Norton, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who studied under him and mentored them, but he's also the guy that way back in the day decided that getting multiple meals of 30 grams,

of at least 30 grams of protein per meal was the way that you go and build muscle. And now he's doing tons of research on amino acids and actually their role in muscle growth and keep maintaining muscle, which is very, very cool. There's multiple moments in this where he talks about his own research where Doug and I are like, oh, wow, you're the guy.

You're the one that did all the research many, many years ago that I started following and had great results with, which is very cool to just talk to somebody that's, one, been in the game even longer than I have, which I feel like almost 30 years is insane. But he's going on many more decades of research than I've even been lifting weights. And he's the guy that wrote the book on exactly how we get protein, how much protein to eat, timing that protein. And now he's doing it, breaking it even more down into amino acids, which we are going

to be digging into today. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galvin is doing a free video on the three-step process that we use to optimize or unlock your true physiological potential. And you can access that free video over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Bass. Today on Barbell Shrugged, Dr. Donald Lyman. Welcome to the show, man. Lyman. Sorry. Yes. Today, we're going to be talking about, here's the clickbait. Ready? Why there are no protein requirements.

There's only amino acid requirements. Lots to dig into, right? Because everybody knows one gram per pound of body weight is the only number that matters when it comes to protein. And then you pre-show just said that that's actually not true. which makes me super happy. Yeah, I like to be controversial. Let's start there. There you go. I love it. First off, I'd love to kind of dig into the macronutrient side of protein. And then what are amino acids so that we have a very good base of knowledge of kind of like, what are these two subjects that we're going to be talking about here? How they relate to each other?

Yeah. So the idea that we have a protein requirement dates back to before 1900, before we even understood that we had amino acids, before we even discovered them. So animal scientists knew that they had to feed animals something with nitrogen in it that was called protein. So we started out with ideas of protein requirements. And even though we finally discovered all the essential amino acids in the around 1930, we're still stuck with the old surrogate protein. And now as we drift into discussions about plant based proteins and protein quality, it's time to actually treat them as nutrients. Protein is nothing more than a food source for delivering essential amino acids.

I'm very not as dialed into amino acids. Our body makes nine of them, correct? Makes 11 of the 20 and nine are essential. So you are in the ballpark. We're close enough. And we have to eat the meat to be able to get the remainder of them. But how are we supposed to, like, what are the kind of requirements of each of those? Or how do we structure without, do we need to know every single amino acid? And how do we know that we're actually getting appropriate amounts of them? That's actually a really good question because some of that hasn't been studied very well. Of the nine essential amino acids, which we've studied the most, we know that each of those

amino acids has metabolic roles beyond the fact that it's used in protein synthesis. Protein synthesis is actually the least important, not, no, that's not, it's the lowest level threshold for protein requirements. It, you can meet that at a very low level, but you take something like leucine, which we study a lot, the optimal, the minimum requirement for building protein is about 2.7 grams per day. We know to optimize muscle, you need almost three grams per meal. That's a very different metabolic optimum versus the minimum for nitrogen balance. Yeah.

It's also referred for leucine. Leucine threshold is three grams per meal. Dan preaches that all the time over here. Is leucine really the only one that has like a clearly defined threshold or is there a specific number for all the essential amino acids? To some extent, we don't really know. But if you look at another essential lysine, that appears to be a requirement per day. It doesn't appear to be a meal based requirement. Probably the same with most of the other amino acids. You know, does it matter that you get threonine in proportions because it's a

very important prebiotic? Probably better off getting it in doses. And you can look at other amino acids that aren't considered essential, like glutamine. It's probably better to get it in doses than all in one meal. So the reality is we don't know the best distribution for all of them. A few of them we have really pretty good ideas, like leucine and lysine. Wait, so as interesting as this is from a scientific perspective, like practically still, if you're just eating 30 to 50 grams of protein, you know, meat protein, animal protein per meal, are you pretty much all your bases still covered here? Exactly. And one of the reasons that we have brought this up, though, is that we have this

narrative now of everybody needs a more plant-based protein. And we know that when people shift to a more plant-based protein, they almost always decrease both the quantity of the protein they eat and the quality at the same time. And we've modeled that. And at some place around 50% animal protein, you begin to get in a real risk that the RDA isn't sufficient. You need more protein than that. So, you know, you'll see athletes that want to be vegetarian and use supplements, that's fine. But with just natural foods, it's very hard to do that. And that all

relates to the essential amino acids. To your point, if more than 50% of your protein that you're eating comes from animal sources, you'll easily meet your essential amino acid needs. But if you get below 40%, the RDA isn't sufficient to meet your essential amino acid needs. So now you really need to know a lot about how to do supplements. Why is it important to get it per meal? Why couldn't you just get it all at once versus just like spreading it out? What's the importance of that? So let's answer that both by age of the subject, but also by the amino acid. So the amino acid leucine we know is a specific trigger for muscle protein synthesis. So that is a meal-by-meal trigger.

And so that's important. Leucine, I mean, lysine, the other essential amino acid, that appears to have a very slow turnover pool in the body, no particular signaling efforts. And so that appears to be a daily requirement. You could just get it all at one meal. So the answer to the question, you have to answer amino acid by amino acid. And that's why I argue we've got to move beyond talking about protein and we have to treat amino acids as

nutrients. You know, we don't, we don't treat vitamins as a red pill. We have a requirement for a red pill. We treat them as 14 individual vitamins. And that's the same with amino acids. They're individual nutrients, and we need to move away from treating it like a vitamin pill. It's protein because all proteins aren't alike. Yeah, I made a nutrition product probably like in 2009 or 10, something like that. And I was trying to make a point this is it's not like pure science this is me doing research online but

i took back the old beans and rice have complementary proteins idea and then flushed out how much you would have to eat as far as beans and rice on a daily basis to get 200 grams of protein in your day and it was it was like like three or 4000 calories of beans and rice in order to get your 200 grams of protein. And then and with that, the leucine was still like a third of what it would have been if you got those 200 grams of protein from eating beef. Yeah, we have a paper under review right now sort of making that exact point. And we use the beans and rice example in the paper. Beans and rice are a complementary protein. So vegetarians would think about it because beans are low in methionine, but they're adequate in lysine, where rice is very low, all grains are very low in lysine,

but adequate in methothionine. So you put them together, 50-50 mixture, it becomes complementary. But to your point, the nutrient density is very low. So the calorie number is going to destroy you. So, you know, you just keep having, you know, at a meal level, you're going to have, you know, a thousand calories just to get close to your protein needs. So basically, you have to get fat to get enough. Exactly.

And there's, you know, that's the, I don't know if you guys have ever heard the concept of the protein leverage hypothesis from Steve Simpson, but his argument is that's what happened with the food guide pyramid. You know, eat at the bottom, eat all those grains, we basically diluted out the amino acid density of the diet. And so people, humans and animals tend to eat toward a protein target. So we ate more calories to get to our protein need. And the data shows that we after the food guide pyramid came out, Americans increased their calorie consumption by between three and 400 calories a day, even though they probably decreased exercise during

that same period, hence an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Yeah. From like the lab perspective or the overall health, is there a recommendation for just living a healthy life and then is there a different recommendation if i want to lift weights like travis mash like is there is there a spectrum of these things or is it the requirements and i can still be travis by being pretty average the young young traps, I should say. Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work.

Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep, and then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns, and then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world class program and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com.

You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. In 2003, the National Academy of Science Institute of Medicine came out with what are called the dietary reference intakes. So for every nutrient, there's a range from the minimum level, which is

called the RDA, up to some upper limit. So for protein, that goes from about somewhere around, I'll do it in metric, from 0.8 grams per kg up to about three grams per kg. So, you know, that's 0.35 grams per pound up to something like two grams per pound, something like that. So that's considered a viable range. So where are we going that what we have seen in the last 20 years of research is that we think the healthy range for adults, so we're talking about people over 20, is probably in the 1.2 to 1.8 grams per kg. A lot of athletes will go up to, you know, 2.0, you know, gram per pound. You know, I think that the evidence is as we get older, the efficiency of protein turnover goes down and sort of a U-shaped curve relative to exercise, that if you're real sedentary, your protein need actually goes up. If you begin to exercise some, the body, your muscle in

particular, becomes more efficient with the protein, so you can actually get along a little less. I always say, if you're going to be vegetarian, you better exercise well. Okay. But then if you go to athletic performance, it goes back up. So it's a U-shaped curve. So just because you're exercising some doesn't mean automatically you need more protein. But if you're going to try and maximize your muscle mass, most people are going to go up into the 1.8 to 2 grams per kg to try and do that. Yeah. I've kind of been on the lower side of it for a while now.

And you kind of hear these, I mean, especially when you're younger, if you don't eat your protein, you feel like tomorrow I'm going to wake up and all my muscles will be gone, which isn't 100% real. I've tried. I've eaten a little bit less of my body weight and protein a couple of days and didn't get, didn't go away. Um, but, um, I find, I find it really hard sometimes to get 200 grams of protein in at 41 years old. And I'm probably somewhere at about half, like slightly over half of that now. And I'm still wondering, maybe there's some

insecurities in there of, am I getting weak? But I still feel like I'm maintaining muscle mass, body composition. I impress myself. My daughter still thinks I'm cool. That's all that matters. Right? My daughter counted my abs the other day and I felt like the coolest person in the world. One, ego boost. Two, setting expectations for later in life. Make sure those things are there. But I haven't really noticed any differences in performance where my younger self would have thought this is the end of the road.

You're officially old. Yeah. We know from a muscle standpoint, if you sort of take activity, resistance exercise and dietary protein, 75% of your muscle mass is going to depend on what you do in the gym. It relates to exercise. 25% probably relates to your protein intake. If you really look at the research, there's no research that tells that going above 1.8 grams per kg, that that's better. Okay. So I'm probably smaller than you. I'm about a 165 body weight. So my protein target is about 120 grams per day. So, you know, I've done that for probably 30 years. Yeah. You know, it's sort of, you know, I, you know, I hear a lot of people go to say a gram per pound. I'm not offended by that, but there's no research to say that's better than 0.75 grams per pound. But wouldn't it be hard to render such research?

Because you would need to find, say for a bodybuilder, you would need to do a research with several people who train all the time, which is hard to find. Most of us are working with college kids, which is hard to compare them to, you know, the bodybuilder that we're talking about. What do you think? Absolutely. All of these kinds of studies are difficult to do. And frankly, our methods aren't that sensitive. Our ability to detect protein synthesis, for example, between 1.8 grams per kg and 2.0, we can't detect that. Even if it was different, we can't detect it. So then you get into how long do you have to have the individual on it before you can detect them

changing muscle mass? Well, you'd have to, I mean, you'd have to have them under very strict conditions for probably at least six months to pick it up. And so you, you know, we can't tell. So, you know, I think it, it you know it kind of comes down to your personal preference but you know to the point that was made a minute ago in the short run you're not going to pick it up but you know some some people have reasons to have the higher protein because they want to be sure they have lower carbs so you have to eat something are you better off eating another you know 40 grams of protein per day or 40 grams of carbs? And depending on who you are, you might be prefer the 40 grams of protein. Or what about using extra protein for to curve,

you know, satiety or, or even the possible, isn't there like a possible benefit that it might raise the body's internal temperature? Or do you think that's absolutely false? I think protein has a very specific, well, two things, satiety and thermogenic effect. I think protein has both effects. As far as satiety, I think it plateaus out somewhat. I think that, you know, is the difference between a 40 gram meal and a 60 gram meal different satiety? I don't, I can't put any research that says that. As far as thermogenic effect, protein has the highest thermogenic effect. And if you read freshman nutrition textbooks, they'll say,

well, it's because protein's more difficult to digest and absorb and metabolize. I don't think that's it at all. I think it's the issue that protein triggers muscle protein synthesis. And that we get into the distribution again. Muscle protein synthesis is a very metabolically expensive process and the more often we trigger that per day the more calories you will burn and so i think that is the thermogenic effect of protein so having one big meal at dinner will minimize the effect thermogenic effect of protein what you want to do is have a distribution through the day particularly at the first meal and you make this seem so i mean you're answering so many questions i've had about like why does it increase you know thermogenesis like which have you are you still eating as much food as you used to oh no no i mean i used to when you were squatting a thousand

pounds but i mean like yeah 40 and totally i mean and that's that to when you were squatting a thousand pounds, but I mean, like 40. Totally. I mean, and that's the, that's, you know, that's a key for older adults is that as you get older, your calorie needs are going to go down. Yeah. To maintain weight. I'm not trying to be huge, you know, either. I'm trying to be healthy. I'm trying to maintain weight.

And if I eat 2000 calories a day, I'll probably gain weight. You know, it's so how do I get 120 grams? How would I get 200 grams of protein in 1800 calories? You know, that's, that's a challenge. So, you know, absolutely. You know, that I think is a huge message for people as we get over 40, your calorie needs per day are going down, but your nutrient needs, your essential amino acid needs don't go down. And if anything, they go up. And so as you get older, you have to have a higher quality diet with each passing year. Yeah. I feel like this is like a big group hug right here. Cause I've been struggling with it when I, like I,

I seriously, like the last year or so, I look at two pounds of meat to get down a day. And I'm like, where, where, and when do I have time to do this? And like,

what, how much sauce do I need to put on this to just like get this food down? And it's just not possible anymore. Like my body almost, it doesn't reject it, but it's like, it doesn't, it doesn't flow like it used to. And I wonder if it's just because I've hit like maybe peak muscle mass of my life. There is no more real like building of lean muscle tissue. Like we're just trying to just trying to maintain this for the next 50 years.

I mean, but couldn't you though, like I watched Boyer co like he was in his 50s now obviously there was drug and you know i'm sure there was like enhanced games dude but like nothing yet i mean he's been taking his whole life it wasn't anything new to him but i did watch um charles pull again he luckily i got to see those two training together well charles coached him, but I watched him put on significant, you know, muscle. And that was in his fifties. I think with the right kind of training, the resistance kind of training, the right kind of volume, I think you can put it on, but with each patching year,

it gets more difficult. You know, I think the challenge is, the challenge is trying to maintain it. One, one of the things I like to point out to people is that most of protein synthesis, most of protein turnover is trying to maintain what you've got, that the maximum rate of protein growth, whether you're 16 or a weightlifter at 45 is around five to six grams per day. And that's at the high end. But the protein turnover per day is somewhere between 250 and 300 grams per day. For a 16 year old or a 65 year old, you have to make almost 300 grams of new protein per day just to live, stay alive. So hypertrophy and growth

is an absolutely minor part of the protein turnover process. Can you take more into that? I've never actually heard of the protein turnover process. What does that kind of entail? So every protein in the body has what we call a half-life. So it will last, it has a certain lifespan. So proteins in the liver will only last an hour or two. And then they are degraded and you have to make new ones. So you make a meal by meal.

Proteins in the muscle have a half-life around 15 to 16 days. So every 30 days, you're replacing a lot of muscle mass. Proteins in the muscle have a half-life around 15 to 16 days. So every 30 days, you're replacing a lot of muscle mass. Connective tissue has a half-life of 100 days. So if you have a tendon issue, it's going to take you six months to repair that. But if you think about protein turnover, 300 grams per day, basically you're replacing every protein in your body four times a year. And that's why how you do that with exercise and protein is critical to how you age. If you don't replace it correctly, you're going to have a slow loss of muscle mass, bone mass, all protein

structures. Aside from getting enough protein, whatever that number is, is there any other way to that? Is there anything else, Rob, that affects the rate at which you're losing muscle mass independent of protein? Or is it just purely focused on protein and exercise? Exercise. Exercise from a muscle and bone standpoint. Exercise is the first issue.

You need resistance exercise. And as you get older, that stretch component, that resistance component becomes more and more important because you tend to be doing less of it. Your body's becoming less efficient. So, you know, I talk to people about, you know, where do you get started? Well, at least get started with stretching and yoga. The stretch part is part of the maintaining process. People think about the concentric motion. How big of a barbell do I lift? It's actually the eccentric motion that has a huge effect on your muscle stretch and how your protein turnover works. Oh, I mean, like, yeah, go ahead, Doug. I think we're going to say,

did you say you can, independent of lifting weights and doing resistance training, you could be doing just stretching and that will help you maintain muscle mass as you get older. If you like just did yoga as opposed to nothing, that is a significant factor in keeping muscle mass. Yep. So we did a, we did a weight loss study. So aging is obviously hard to study. It's hard to outlive your subjects. You know, you need 20 years to study it. Uh, so we did a weight loss study where we're sort of challenging people to lose muscle mass with weight loss. We did the first study that looked at combining resistance exercise and protein to minimize protein loss. So basically what we did was a very light resistance exercise. It was basically a stretch exercise. We had the

individual subjects do a nautilus work with no weights on it because all they had to do is go through the range of motion. We had them do it twice a week. And by doing that, the amount of lean mass they lost during the weight loss, we decreased it by 10%. So they're able to maintain, not necessarily add, but maintain. Right. So, you know, again, if we're looking at hypertrophy, we need volume and we need weight. So what we're trying to do either in aging or during weight loss is trying to not lose it while we lose weight, just lose fat. Yeah. So we did that and we showed that if you take a, at that time, it was a high carb, low protein. It was the food guide pyramid. If you do that, 40% of the

weight lost is lean body mass. If we add resistance exercise on that, we could take it to about 35. You know, we can make it a little better. We go to protein with that. We could, I think the, it was, uh, uh, just adding protein, no exercise. Uh, I believe it was like 25% of the was lean mass. And if we combine the protein with that resistance exercise, just stretch, basically, uh, it dropped it to 6% was, was lean body mass loss. Nice. Yeah. This is a paper we published in 2005. It was the first study to show the interaction of protein and exercise in a catabolic condition. What do you really just, when you're working out,

say you're doing your resistance exercise, making a big focus on the eccentric portion, which I mean, even with my young athletes, it's a big, it's a big focus for us in lots of different, you know, ways, not just eccentric, but the speed of that eccentric, you know, so what about focusing on that, you know, as opposed to just doing yoga or something? Absolutely. So I think, I think, you know, bringing weights in, it makes it better. But what we wanted to, so we were, we did the study with midlife women who weren't, you know, 10, 20, 15 years ago, it wasn't a high priority to go to a gym and lift weights, you know, midlife women weren't the group that wanted to go in with the bros. So we, we wanted to basically look and say, okay, what's the starting point where we can actually detect it. So we brought them in, we had a trained yoga instructor who basically took them through 10, 10 to 15 minutes of a yoga stretching. And then we had a seven,

I think it was a seven position nautilus training they went through, but no weights, just range of motion. And those were the effects we got. So obviously adding weights on it, we could probably even do better. And other people have sort of shown that. Yeah, I'm curious when you get into populations that are not performance based, kind of more diabetic populations or things like that. If people are struggling to be able to eat, say, even 100 grams of protein a day, are you able to or have you ever seen research where you're kind of supplementing the amino acid side of things to improve health, even people that are coming from like a big deficit on the health side? The best example of things like that is actually renal disease, kidney disease. And in those cases where you have renal failure and you're looking at, you know, having transfusion, you know, having dialysis all the time, what people have shown is that you can just give essential amino acids or you can just give keto acids and you can minimize

nitrogen. So, you know, there is a place for that. Sort of to your point, people look at supplementing essential amino acids or supplementing leucine or branched chain amino acids. And by far and away, it's far more effective and far cheaper just to eat food. You know, is there any reason to go out and have those? We have done cases where we have people who are doing bed rest or people who have very limited capability of eating. And what we've done is try and get them to say 15 grams of protein at a meal and then supplement branched chain amino acids on top of that to get to the leucine threshold that we talked about before. So that's a viable thing to do. Sometimes during weight loss, we'll

say, you know, get your 40 grams of protein at breakfast, at lunch, aim for maybe 15, keep the calories down, and we'll supplement you with branched chain amino acids. So it'll act like a higher protein meal, but you don't have the calories and then have a higher lunch. So, you know, we've done things like that, but in general, people going out and buying expensive amino acids is a pure waste of money. I need to come clean with you, sir. I can't tell you the number of times people have walked up to me in my 41 years of existence and asked, should I buy branched chain amino acids? And I just go, save your money. Please don't.

You don't need to do all this. And then you're on here telling me how important they are every time. Well, I'm telling you how important they are, but I'm telling you also that buying them is a waste of money. So I, I, I invented the branch chain amino acid story. I'm telling you, there's no reason to go out and buy them. I remember Lane when he was younger talking about the importance. However, you know, he is, since then has said, well, maybe not, you know, if you just get in the right amount and the right, the right amount and the right quality of protein is probably fairly irrelevant. So. Yeah. One of the things I think is really interesting about leucine, and this is getting into the weeds a little bit is why is

leucine, why are the branched chain amino acids, the only amino acids metabolized in muscle? All the others are metabolized in the liver, but those three are only metabolized really in muscle. All the others are metabolized in the liver, but those three are only metabolized really in muscle. The body has evolved to recognize leucine as a signal. It's a signal that the diet has enough protein in it. Leucine is actually, to your point, fairly prevalent in the diet. It makes up around 8% of every protein. So it's fairly prevalent. And so the body has evolved to recognize that as a signal that you're getting enough protein. And when you get enough protein, it will then trigger muscle protein synthesis, which is very expensive. And it's never triggered until the protein in the diet's correct. You have to

maintain the liver protein synthesis or you die. So no matter what you eat, that will still work. But muscle only triggers when the diet is right and leucine is the signal the body has learned to recognize. So without leucine,

like you're going to have a tough time. Yeah, without leucine, it's just not going to trigger. It's not going to happen. Yeah time. Yeah, and without leucine, it's just not going to trigger. It's not going to happen, yeah. I mean, leucine, so muscle protein synthesis is always running. It's not like a light switch on off. It's always running. Even at middle of the night, it's running at maybe 30%.

And so if you take in a meal that doesn't have adequate leucine, it might go up to 50%. But if you take in a meal that has adequate leucine, it might go up to 50%. But if you take in a meal that has adequate leucine, it'll go up to 100%. And so that's the issue is you want to optimize the meal effect that you're having and leucine's the key. And it's interesting, it's the key in older adults. In younger adults, it's not. So this is a huge point. So I want to make this clear to everybody. When you say younger, what age is this? Under 30. Okay. Okay. So not like my three-year-old making sure he gets a pound of meat a day or something like that. When you're

under 30, hormones are all on your side. And so you're going to grow no matter what kind of meal you have. And so basically you're driven by hormones. So if you have a meal that has eight or 10 grams of protein in it as a three-year-old or a 10-year-old, you're going to grow perfectly fine. But if you have a meal and you're 45-year-old and have a meal of 10 grams, you're not going to get any effect in skeletal muscle at all. So where's the threshold? Somewhere in the 30s where it changes from being driven by hormones to being driven by diet quality. And so people will say, well, gee, I need my 30, I'm a young athlete, I'm 20 years old and I need my 35 grams of protein. Well,

that's okay. But for that individual, it's actually protein per day. But once you get to being 45 or 50 or 60, now it's protein per meal that's critical. So huge difference between under 30 and over 40. Yeah. It's super interesting too, because I always assumed the cumulative load with, if I sat down and ate like a pound of meat and a meal, I'm good. I'm good for the day. But, and then you hear the people say, oh, you don't really need five meals in a day to get to your, to your numbers. It's just a total, the total volume is all that matters. And neither of them are correct. And they're both correct at the same time. It just depends upon who you are and where you are in the hormone stage. On that note, you said you came up with the 30 grams of protein per meal.

Yeah, that's where I was headed next as well. Back in the day, right? Yeah. So we were doing the leucine research. Every child or every teenage bodybuilder borrowed from you forever. Amen. I heard it growing up. Yeah. So we were doing the, we discovered the leucine effects

and basically realized that that was a trigger in adults, in older adults, not in younger adults. It's important, but it's linear in younger adults. There's a lot of caveats here. A lot. Yeah. That's good though. I like the nuance and lot of caveats here. A lot. Yeah. That's good. I like the nuance and all the distinctions here.

This is fantastic. It's super important, like the why and everything. So basically, we discovered the leucine effect. We realized that the leucine effect, the minimum was around 2.5 grams to trigger it. We think three probably optimizes. But at the time, we were looking at 2.5 and as i said a little bit ago in a mixed meal leucine makes up about eight percent of protein so if you want 2.5 and it's eight percent what's that number 30 grams that's where it came from

and so when we did the first weight loss studies, we all we tailored all of our breakfast meals between 30 and 35 grams. And so that's what we showed. And so that has become dogma for everybody. You've literally changed the whole, my whole teenage years. Yeah, glad we got to meet at 41. Incredible. And, and Stu, we did the post-exercise things but we did it in animals and then stew phillips came along and basically did it in humans and he showed that with exercise the efficiency goes up and so you can get the same effects with about 20 grams after resistance exercise and so that's where that came from unless you you go too hard. Then you still, unless you work out too hard. The whole post-exercise thing is totally overstated.

Again, we're guilty for developing it. When we did the first leucine experiments, we were looking for a way to, so protein synthesis and muscle is regulated at two levels. One is transcriptional, the gene level, and one is translational, the metabolic level. We were looking at some way to exclusively be metabolic. So we said, how could we do that? At the time, we knew from some other research that absolutely exhaustive exercise would depress protein synthesis within an hour.

So we said, that has to be translational. So we then looked at giving protein right after exercise and we showed complete recovery instantaneous. So that's where the post-exercise come from is also from us. What you have to remember about that is it only works in untrained individuals, exhaustively exercised. So when a person who is totally trained and doing their routine exercise, is there a big merit to having protein right after exercise? Probably not. Your next meal, your next meal is probably totally effective. Everybody's going to hear this podcast everybody yeah you know the post-exercise if you're if you're a high school athlete or some athlete

going in the fall football practice and you've been relatively out of shape and for the first two weeks you're totally sore probably having protein right after your workout's a good idea but if you're a guy who's been going to the gym and doing the same workout for the last three years, having a big, expensive protein shake as you walk out of the gym is a useless thing to do. Yeah, it's interesting. I remember somebody saying, I have no idea how true this is, but I remember somebody telling me one time, they were like, dude, Ronnie Coleman, Jay Cutler, they don't use intra-workout nutrition. They're not drinking protein shakes during their workouts that they work out and then they go eat.

You don't need to do that. And I was like, I was like, I don't know how true that is, but you're showing why it would be possible here. Most people who work out probably aren't going to starve for eight hours after the workout. You know, I come home after, you know, I work out in the morning, I come home and I'm not too hungry. I drink, rehydrate for a while. And a couple hours later, I eat my protein. Yeah. Totally.

Honestly, this is totally a weird theory that I used to think and probably still kind of do it, whether there's any research behind or not. I always just assumed that I was working out, which equated to the evolutionary need to go hunt. And by eating afterwards meant I won. So I always ate a lot of food after I trained because I wanted to win. That's some CrossFit stuff right there. Right? It makes no sense. But I never missed a meal.

I always ate a lot. Some people get gold medals and you get beef steaks. I think it's perfect. Beef in a bowl. Beef in a bowl. It's a thing. Whatever it takes to. I think it's perfect. Beef in a bowl. Beef in a bowl. It's a thing. Whatever it takes to keep you going. We're living beef in a bowl.

Yo, can we create a hierarchy for the quality of protein here? You can do it by category or individual foods. Based on amino acid profile, bioavailability, any other thing you want to throw in there, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the highest quality protein, specifically for men in their 40s and 50s would be so there's no question my friend my friend yeah there's no question that animal proteins are always the best, fish, you know, eggs are all great. Dairy products are great.

Whey protein is great. Casein is kind of an oddity. I'll sort of put that aside as good. Then you start into the plants. Soy is probably the most effective and best balanced of the amino acids. And then you sort of go down with beans and lentils, seeds and things like that. The fiber content makes the protein very low bioavailable. With animal proteins, you're looking at 95 to 100 bioavailability plant proteins range from 40

to 70 in their natural form if you're looking at isolated proteins like soy or pea protein or something like that they're pretty bioavailable they They're probably into the 95% range. But if you look on most of them, they're not pure. P proteins often will be maybe 75 to 80% pure. So what else is in it? You know, it's probably going to be fiber and other things that make it lower bioavailable. The thing to remember is that in plant-based proteins, the proteins are there for the sake of the plant. They're plant proteins. And plants are developing leaves and stems and seeds and flowers, which are pretty different than brains and hearts and livers and muscles. So they're not the same amino acids. They're much higher in non-essential amino acids.

The plant proteins average around 30 to 40% essential, where animal proteins average around 45% essential. So you have to have more of them. And bioavailability, somewhere between 30 and 50% of the proteins that are in plants are bound to fiber, and humans can't digest that. So they're not bioavailable. Processing helps. That's why isolated proteins are more bioavailable. But, you know, in native forms, if you want a natural diet, beans and lentils and all of those, it's hard to catch up with the calorie number and the bioavailability issues. Wow. Yeah. For those of us that are already sold on eating

majority animal protein, is there a distinction between beef, pork, egg whites, fish, etc.? The highest amino acid density out there is actually lean chicken breast uh beef pork over steak i'm correct yeah actually yeah and it's because it's it it has so low a fat content it's just denser uh uh you get into pork and beef they're about the same. Fish varies fish by fish, but salmon is a little less than beef in general. So, you know, but all of those, all of those quote meat type sources have high bioavailability. They have the right essential amino acid content, and they're very similar. So again, we have a paper under review that goes into a lot of this detail because, you know, I think it's time people start recognizing foods differ in amino acid content, and the lower in protein intake you go, the more

important that becomes. If you're eating a gram per pound, it's not a very important issue. But if you're eating at the RDA, it's a big issue. And 40% of women over the age of 60 are below the RDA. That's why we have a sarcopenia problem in the US. Do females as they age almost need more than men? There's no real evidence on a lean body mass standpoint that there's a difference. The problem there is that women in general, because they need fewer calories, tend to be closer to the minimum all the time. So women tend to be much more at risk than men, just because they're eating less to begin with. But in terms of lean body mass metabolism, it appears that they're pretty similar.

What about creatine? You know, like you've always heard, like with steak or red meat, there's more creatine monohydrate available versus like chicken. Is that true? Or is it even important? Yeah. I mean, there's more creatine and muscles in meats than there is anywhere else, which is basically zero anywhere else. But again, it's relatively low. How important is the natural source? We know that from a supplement standpoint, creatine supplements are very effective, but you start talking 10 gram supplements. I'm not exactly sure off the top of

my head how much is in, you know, 16 ounces of meat, but you'd take a lot of meat to get to 10 grams of creatine. It would take a lot. All right. Yeah. So, so, you know, you know, creatine, taurine, serine, anserine, all of those things that are natural in meats we think are important and they're not in plants at all, but there's not really good data about comparing those at this point. Before we wrap up here, what is the kind of the next phase of nutrition research right now? Like what are people excited about looking into that just says there's no data on it, but people think there could be good results in one direction or another, or just where's the science heading right now? Wow, that's a really broad question. So I guess I'll just narrow it down to what am I interested in. I'm really interested in getting people more focused

on the essential amino acids as we talked about. We've talked about protein for so long, we've kind of ignored the amino acids, and it's time to get into looking at those. We know that threonine, 75% of threonine that we eat goes to the gut mucin. So the lower amount of threonine, the lower the gut protection is. It's a prebiotic. How much phenylalanine we know need, the level of tyrosine affects cognitive function. We know that it affects memory. How much methionine do we need or do we really need the non-essential cysteine, which is the downstream effect to glutathione and anti-inflammation. All of those things just simply haven't been researched. We're just not looking at them because everybody's so hung up on the protein number when we need to be looking at the nutrient

amounts. Yeah, I'll know that's working when my kids turn into teenagers and they're echoing your science without ever knowing. They're like, got to check on my amino acids, dad, while I'm lifting weights here. And I'll be like, I know that guy. When Lane and Gabrielle and Tracy and Josh all left my lab, one of the things I always told them is that our thinking is 10 years ahead of anything that's out there. So eventually they'll catch up. I love that. Where can people find you and read more about your work? So I'm pretty visible out there. On Twitter, I'm at Don Lehman,

and my website is metabolictransformation.com. And we can actually find some of our metabolic meal replacements there if you're interested some of the research translated into actually meal replacements that are complete macronutrient mixes amazing i'm gonna go there right now and buy i need some protein bars no protein bars at this point just shakes i like that coach travis mash man i'm gonna have to this is gonna be the first one i'm gonna listen to again and like and put it on slow because there's so many i got a bunch of notes but i know i missed yeah thanks for being on the show no every time you come in here and all the things you've heard in your life are related to a person's research and then it's debunking some of the things you believed your whole life too is phenomenal phenomenal i appreciate it anyway masterly.com you can read all my articles and videos are on

jimweir.com there's something really cool about to come out by the way just a new free program so go check them out doug larson all right very cool uh yo thank you so much for coming on the show today uh again me and and said earlier, we'd heard your name many times from, I believe from Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. And so very exciting to talk to you today, especially knowing that you kind of made some history here. Part of our childhood was because of the research that you did. So very cool to talk to you today and thank you for being here. It was a pleasure to meet you guys and pleasure to talk with you. You bet. I'm on Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. Guys, we're going to be hanging out in person next weekend.

This is very exciting stuff. Real human interaction here down in Dallas at Dr. Galpin and Dan Garner seminar. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged, Barbell underscore Shrugged. And make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin is breaking down the three keys to optimizing your true physiological potential. You can access that free report over at rapidealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.