Dhru Purohit Show - Two Crucial Things To Focus On If You Care About Longevity, Weight Loss And Metabolic Health With Dr. Don Layman

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough, Mitopure, and BON CHARGE. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dr. Donald Layman, a pioneer in establishing optimal protein and amino-acid requirements for chronic disease prevention, performance, and longevity. Dhru and Dr. Layman discuss the importance of dietary protein for blood sugar control, building muscle mass, weight loss, and preventing age-related loss of lean tissue.  Dr. Donald Layman is one of the world’s leading researchers on protein and amino-acid requirements for athletes, adult health, and chronic disease prevention. His research is focused on the impact of diet and exercise on the most troublesome chronic diseases today: obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic syndrome. With a highly respected academic career spanning over four decades, Dr. Layman has received numerous awards for his research publications in optimal protein intake, glycemic control, and weight loss. He has both a master’s degree in biochemistry and a doctorate in nutrition and biochemistry.  In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Layman dive into: -Misconceptions around protein (3:03) -The downsides of not getting adequate dietary protein (11:18) -Protein, muscle synthesis, and longevity (13:08) -Dhru’s South Asian heritage and risk for cardiovascular disease (20:14) -Why dietary protein is important for women (32:55) -The history behind the RDA for protein intake (36:11) -Fasting and protein intake to prevent muscle wasting (41:46) -Early epidemiological research and the deprioritization of animal protein (51:29) -Leucine: the rate-limiting amino acid in muscle protein synthesis (1:06:46) -Resistance training and protein requirements for weight loss (1:17:32) -The pros of industry-funded nutrition research (1:31:54) -mTOR, protein intake, muscle synthesis, and cancer risk (1:40:50) -Building your diet around protein intake (1:54:55) Also mentioned in this episode: -Dr. Layman’s research publications For more on Dr. Donald Layman, follow him on Twitter @donlayman or through his website, https://www.metabolictransformation.com. Magnesium Breakthrough really stands out from the other magnesium supplements out there. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off plus a special gift with purchase, so just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10. Mitopure is the first and only clinically tested, pure form of a natural gut metabolite called urolithin A that clears damaged mitochondria away from our cells and supports the growth of new, healthy mitochondria. Head on over to timelinenutrition.com/dhru for 10% off. BON CHARGE is a holistic wellness brand with a HUGE range of evidence-based products to optimize your life. Right now, my community can go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What we know is with the aging curve, there tends to be a decreasing amount of muscle mass. We lose mobility, we lose metabolic regulation, and we lose those metabolic functions. And so it's very important that we do things to try and protect muscle as we age. If you're curious about the massively important role that protein intake plays in insulin sensitivity, metabolism, say tidy and weight loss, and even grip strength and long, longevity, today's episode is definitely for you. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Donald Lehman. Dr. Lehman is a leading researcher on protein nutrition for athletic performance, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular health. And on today's episode,

Dr. Lehman will be taking us through a deep dive on the world of protein, including the key role protein plays in preventing and minimizing muscle loss as we age, which is key for longevity, the top protein myths that are still quite pervasive today. The simple formula Dr. Lehman uses to calculate adequate protein intake for both men and women and why 30 grams of protein first thing in the morning is super key. The problem with nutrition science and how studies are designed and how industry funding may not lead to the biases we expected to. And lastly, and most importantly, the role that strength training plays in making sure we're able to, again, man or woman, young or old, activate the protein that we're consuming.

Now, a little bit more about Dr. Layman. Dr. Lehman has a career that spans over 40 years, and he's received numerous awards for his research and nutrition teaching. Dr. Lehman has both a master's degree in biochemistry and a doctorate degree in nutrition and biochemistry. His career spans over 40 years and he's received numerous awards for his research and nutrition teachings. He is a professor emeritus in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Champagne, and brings a lifetime of research and education to today's conversation. Now, before we jump into today's episode with Dr. Don Lehman,

I want to give a shout out to my dear friend, Dr. Gabriel Lyon, who's the first person to introduce me to Dr. Lehman's work. I appreciate you, Dr. Lyon. It's always a pleasure to have you as a friend and a mentor in the space of protein and muscle synthesis. Thank you for introducing us to your mentor, Dr. Layman. And now on to a fantastic episode with Dr. Donald Lehman. Dr. Donald Lehman, thank you for being on the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. I'd love to jump right into things.

And I want to start off with all this little. that's been published over the last probably like 30, 40, 50 years on the importance of protein, which your work is such a central pillar of. What are still some of the top misconceptions that you see floating around, especially in this day and age of social media, around the subject of protein? Wow, that's a great question. Well, first of all, thanks for inviting me on. Great to finally virtually meet you anyway. Yeah. Yeah. topics. Well, I think there's two or three that would come to mind. One is with the scenario of a narrative that we need a more plant-based diet, I think the issue of protein quality is becoming

more and more important. If everybody eats, you know, over 100 grams of protein per day, it's not that important. And most diets are a combination of animal and plant proteins. But as it becomes more and more a narrative, we need a more plant-based diet. The literature, the science, tells us that most people will decrease their protein intake, their quantity, down to fairly close to the minimum RDA. And when you do that, quality becomes more and more important. So I think that issue, we've got some papers out right at the moment being reviewed, and we're arguing that it's time to stop talking about protein as a requirement actually and start talking about essential amino acid requirements.

We actually don't need protein in the diet. We need nutrients. And the nutrients are essential amino acids. So I think that's one big part. And the other big part is sort of the whole issue of sustainability and climate. And what's the role of animals and creating healthy diets and those sorts of things? So those are, to me, two big ongoing issues. There's other issues about mechanistic things like the, how do you really structure

mTOR, how do you structure meals and things like that. So those are three areas that I'm currently still working on and writing in and have some thoughts that, you know, we'll hopefully put into the literature. Yeah. And before we get into your research and the work that you've done over the many years, Let's take that first one that you've mentioned, which is this idea that, you know, this narrative that's very popular and has been popular probably for the last couple decades that we need to, as a global society, if you listen to, you know, the elites of Davos and other individuals

that are out there, we need to start moving the entire world towards a more plant-based diet. So help us understand from, because nobody watches this space closer than you. what is that argument from that space that is advocating primarily for a plant-based approach? And how are they thinking about the topic of specifically protein as related to that argument? Yeah, the argument takes a couple of different forms. One is I think every nutritionist would agree that Americans in particular don't eat very healthy plants. You know, the number one plant in the U.S. diet is french fries, and the number two is tomato sauce on pizza, and the number three is lettuce. So, you know, I think every nutritionist would say,

you know, broccoli and avocados and green beans would be healthier. So in that sense, we need a better plant-based diet. The problem with the narrative is we need a more plant-based diet is we already have a plant-based diet, over 70% of our calories come from plants, but of that over 80% of it comes from added sugars, oils, hydrogenated fats, and highly refined carbs. So, you know, again, we don't need a more plant-based diet. We need a better one. And behind all of that is really industry money. The narrative is funded by companies who make money by selling cheap grains and, you know, oils and sugars and things like. that. So, you know, that's the idea. The other part of that argument is that it somehow is going to

save the planet. You know, by far and away, the problems with global warming are fossil fuels. And that has to do with urban sprawl, increasing populations, etc. Fossil fuels make up more than 85% of greenhouse gases, animals are a fairly small amount. And in the United States, it's really a small amount. So again, we have to be careful with those kinds of arguments. You know, Ken, would we better off if China and India and Brazil had better agriculture? Absolutely. But, you know, depriving children in New York City of high quality proteins on Monday isn't going to solve problems in India. You know, that brings up the question really around your research is that separate from the global warming conversation, which you just touched on, what are the top

downsides when we look at a society that's not regularly getting high quality and quantity of protein in their diet? What starts to happen to the body? Yeah. So right now in the United States, somewhere around 60% of our protein coming. from animal sources, whether it's, and fish is in that category. So fish and eggs and milk and meats, and meats could be cattle or pork or chicken, whatever forms, about 60% and about 40% from plants. And that's almost exclusively grains. The 80% of the plant-based protein in the world, and also in the United States, comes from wheat. Wheat is deficient in lysine, trifene, threanine, lucine. And so all of a sudden, if you make a shift and just simply eat more wheat,

we're going to be deficient in multiple amino acids. And that will relate to long-term body composition, but it also relates to everything from metabolic signaling to the way we burn fats, to the way our brain functions with tryptophan and serotonin. So it relates to all sorts of things. So if we push it down to very low protein intakes with an imbalance in essential amino acids, we're going to get into metabolic problems. And that

doesn't show up too often in our 20s, but it will definitely show up in our, you know, 60s and 70s. And let's talk about that in the 60s and 70s. You know, what do you see, you know, we had on a devotee slash mentee

of yours, Dr. Gabriel Lyon, and she unpacked this in a previous episode. but remind us again what we're seeing with the connection of protein, muscle synthesis, longevity, and that whole conversation. Give us a review because I don't think still people understand how important protein is to muscle and how important muscle is to longevity. Yeah. So it's important to understand right up front that the body regulates protein, how we make proteins,

protein synthesis in different tissues in different ways. In our organs, we make proteins in the middle of the night when we're not eating. We have to or we'll die. If the liver doesn't continue doing its thing, you know, at three in the morning, you die. Muscle only makes protein after meals. And what we found out in the last 20 years and not necessarily my research, but others, is that as we get older, the efficiency of how we use. protein goes down. So where a 15 gram meal of protein may have a fairly reasonable effect on muscle

protein synthesis in a 25-year-old, it'll have almost no effect on a 65-year-old. But what people at Galveston, Bob Wolf, and Doug Cotton-Jones, and others have found is that if we double the protein, If we increase the protein quantity and quality up into the 30s or even 40s, the older individual can respond just like the younger individual. And what we know is with the aging curve, there tends to be a decreasing amount of muscle mass. We lose mobility. We lose metabolic regulation. And Dr. Gabrielle Lyon and I talk about this all the time. We lose those metabolic functions. And so it's very important that we do things. things to try and protect muscle as we age. Resistance exercise. Exercise in general is probably the number one issue, but the number one is keeping your protein correct, keeping it high and keeping

it high quality. So those two things are really important to the aging process to help us maintain body composition, functional mobility, our ability to metabolize carbohydrates and lipids, just everything about how the body runs. Gabrielle and I always talk about, you know, muscle-centric health. Basically, if your muscles are healthy, you've got a pretty good chance of a good, long, healthy life. You know, we've done a lot of episodes on the topic of metabolic health, and in particular, the importance of being insulin sensitive.

And what happens to people when they become insulin resistant? and a lot of individuals who listen to our podcast know that there's a big conversation around making sure in the context, of course, of overall calories that we're very mindful about the total carbohydrate load that we put on our body, especially processed sugars, refined flowers. The next leap at that to your work is that, well, muscle is a big part of that. You know, can you connect the dots there? You talked about a big picture, but I just really want to make sure that you're not.

sure that that connection is known in the context of today's conversation. Yeah. So, you know, how much carbohydrates do we use, do we need, and how do we use them? We know that the body needs approximately 70 to 80 grams of glucose, blood sugar per day. To run the brain, red blood cells, kidney, there are tissues that are absolute users of blood glucose, of sugar. The dietary guidelines people have put a safety margin on that, so we have an RDA of 130 grams per day. The average American is eating a little over 300 grams.

So we're eating three times that. And so then the question is, where does it go? I mentioned the obligatory tissues, the brain and the red blood cells, but then beyond that, what else can use it? muscle or adipose tissue. We can either burn it with exercise or we can store it as fat. And so the question is how do we balance those things? We've worked a lot on thinking about that and trying to figure out the amounts. We basically came up with the numbers, and I could go through how we did it, but basically glycogen storage, gluconeogenesis, muscle use, etc., etc.

we said that you can use about 35 to 40 grams of glucose at a meal before it requires really high insulin values to get it to store. And when you start doing that, you shut down muscles ability to burn fat. That begins to disrupt your lipid blood lipids. And it also triggers your adipose tissue and liver to start making fats out of it. So a lot of people will argue that, well, you get fat and that creates insulin resistance that you have too many fatty acids around and that inhibits insulin and glucose use, but it's actually the other way around. Insulin actually creates insulin resistance. The higher the insulin gets after your meal, the more insensitive your body gets, because glucose is actually quite toxic. I mean, it actually has its own disease. It's called

diabetes. If you have too much blood sugar and it lasts too long, you damage basically. every organ in the body diabetes. So linking that back to muscle, is it fair to say then that this is another reason why, especially as we get older when people become more susceptible, naturally through the aging process to these chronic diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, etc., that do seem to have a link into overall sugar that's being consumed in the body and refined carbohydrates, Maintaining and keeping your muscle mass, and in some cases, growing it if you're under-muscled, is an important part of staying insulin sensitive because muscles are one of the key mechanisms

to use up that free-floating glucose inside of the body. Exactly. And my long-winded explanation, I mean, muscle is really your only flexible user of glucose. The other things are all set, and that gives you a number of around 100 grams, day, as I said, people are eating 300. That means to use that with muscle, that means every individual needs to have three hours of intense exercise every day to use that much carbohydrate. If you don't have it, it has to get stored. And, you know, where can you store it? People say, well, you store it in glycogen. But if you're already carbohydrate full, those stores are already full, the only thing left to do is make it into fat.

You know, this is a topic that I'm personally very attached to talking about on the podcast because I come from a South Asian background. I'm Indian and a lot of Indians in North America and also Indians now in India who are adopting the Western diet and all the principles that come along with it. Our population set seems to have a little bit of a predisposition towards insulin resistance. And you have a group of people, especially in North America, that are typically professionals, right? So they're sitting at a desk often. And they also don't have a culture necessarily.

Like I really didn't grow up seeing my parents work out besides playing like some sports and things like that. There was no history of, you know, strength training inside of our, you know, community and things like that. Now there's starting to be that revolution, which is really beautiful to see. And you have a lot of individuals that fall into the category of skinny fat on the outside. They look like they are kind of a normal body weight, but then they typically have a lot of abdomen that, that adipose tissue that's there. And many of them are suffering from diabetes. And many of them end up with increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

In fact, Stanford University has a whole department that's dedicated to, just looking at heart attack risk for the South Asian population, because out of any ethnic minority here in the United States, they have the highest risk of cardiovascular disease. But their lifestyle seems to be highly promoting all the things that we know that don't work, especially growing up. I was vegetarian. So you're tending to under eat on protein, which we'll talk about here in a second. You're sitting a lot. You're getting a lot of your calories from carbohydrates. It's like if we want to induce cardiovascular risk, if we want to induce diabetes, that sounds like a perfect recipe to be able to do so. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned home country

India. I mean, India is one of the fastest populations, you know, in terms of growing the epidemic of diabetes. And it's exactly the term you described as skinny fat. They don't, they don't look overweight as many Americans, you know, do. And I think it's just, it's a good example that, you know, one of the things Dr. Lyons and I like to talk about is that is, is obesity the cause of other things, or is it a symptom of a metabolic error? And we like to think of it as a symptom, that the insulin abnormalities, the metabolic dysregulation is occurring, and that leads to us accumulating weight. And so if we can shift around to focusing on muscle health, we can correct the problem, and that will help us avoid the issue of obesity. And, you know, we, we always talk about the

issue of, you know, people have been studying obesity since I was in grad school, so, you know, 40 years or more, and we still, in fact, it's getting worse. And my, you know, Dr. Lyon and I always talk about, they've got the wrong target. The target isn't adipose tissue. that's the pathology of the problem. The issue is if you want to correct it, you need to focus on muscle. Yeah, it's so fascinating. And even for somebody who was in the world of wellness, not as a researcher, not as a clinician, just as sort of what I call a professional amateur, like I like to read, I like to study,

I like to listen from people by no means an expert. And I'm always the first to say that. I was very confused about the topic of protein because I was hearing a lot of different mixed messages about things. And I really do credit, you know, Dr. Lyon and then her putting me onto your work as being a big shift. And, you know, not that this podcast is about me, but I always like to share my journey with the listeners. So August or last year, I also just came back from a big trip to Italy where I took my family.

I was celebrating my 40th birthday. And I got serious because I was turning 40 about wanting to really look at how under muscle I was. So I am on the leaner side. I was vegetarian during some of the biggest growth spurts that I had in my body. and I never really built up a solid layer of muscle, and I always had to fight so hard being on a plant-based diet, not that it can't be done, we'll chat more about that, to get any kind of gains that were there.

So when I weighed in and did a body composition through caliber testing with the group that I was working out with here in Los Angeles, you know, I came in at 26% body fat. And I am not a heavy individual, and most people who would look at me wouldn't think that my body fat percentage would be that high. And really what it was is I wasn't so fat. I was just undermuscled. And that was causing a big situation where fat was really running the show instead of muscle being a big part of it. I'm big on glucose monitoring. I also track my insulin resistance and my fasting insulin.

And not that I had any issues in that category, but I also saw by adding on lean muscle mass, which I added on about eight pounds since that time period. And I've dropped my body composition now to about 12.4% working out with this group over here and adding more high quality protein again based on your recommendations. I've seen a whole shift that's happened in how I feel, how I perform. And it's kind of crazy once you apply all these things into your life, how quickly things can change. So I'm not asking you to react to that. I just wanted to share and really actually give you and Dr. Lyon kudos for being a big part of how I've been shifting my health more recently. Well, I appreciate the comments and, and, you know, it certainly makes us feel

good to be able to provide that kind of information. And frankly, it's a story that we hear all the time, you know, that, you know, it's, it's, and I said earlier, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a efficiency of protein use goes down, but your calorie needs go down a lot too. So probably by 30% from your 20s to your 60s or 70s. And so that means you have to have a lot higher quality diet. You have to have more nutrients in fewer calories. So that's really an important issue. A couple of things you mentioned that I think a little history for me might be useful to you. we talk a lot about adults and aging as I get older I think more about it the the issue for me first started back when I was early in my career and I did some work in northern Africa and we were

looking at malnutrition and so getting back to your story one of the things we discovered is that if children on very poor quality protein diets, and I won't use the word vegetarian, but low protein poor quality diets, don't develop muscle mass. And we looked at that in animals and also in children. And if they don't develop the muscle mass early, it kind of predestines them to be skinny fat, to be over fat, because it's very hard to develop the muscle later. We know that there are kind of periods of time where muscle cell development is much more rapid. And if you don't do that, the number of cells you have will tend to be lower. You can make the cells larger hypertrophy, but the hyperplastic growth tends to be limited.

So that's a real risk. And people, you know, I worry about the movement toward plant-based diets as mothers think they're doing a good thing and they're pushing their children toward plant-based diets, if they, in fact, stump their growth during those early periods, those children are going to pay for that in their 50s and 60s. And so I really worry about we don't have the right information. Mothers aren't getting the right perspective on this. And things that they will do in their own personal diet,

they probably shouldn't apply to their 1-year-old or their 2-year-old or their 5-year-old. And so I really worry about those kinds of mess. right now. Yeah, it's so true. And on the flip side, again, there's so much to pack about your work, but just while we're on this discussion topic, when I was, you know, eating a vegetarian and later a vegan diet, and you would see these anecdotal stories of people who were really great at building, you know, like vegan bodybuilders, right? And it always gave you hope that if you just did it right, and of course, strength training is a huge part of the equation. We're going to chat about that in a second. But one of the thoughts that I had is just from my observations, when I would see individuals who

started vegan or vegetarian from a young age and then continued that all the way into like, let's say, their mid-20s and adulthood, I noticed a significant difference between those individuals versus, let's say, somebody who grew up eating meat and probably getting higher quality protein in their diet, and then choosing at, you know, their mid-20s or 30s now to go vegan. It almost seemed like it was easier for them to maintain the muscle that they had already built up versus, you know, somebody who was vegetarian and vegan getting gains and looking like they were like a professional athlete. Is that something that you've seen? Absolutely. I mean, in life between like 20 and 40, we sort of have this honeymoon period of life where you can kind of abuse your body in lots of different ways and you're still fairly healthy.

But if you do that when you're, you know, one, two, three, four, five, that's a lasting impact. And the problem with that is the children can't make that choice. You know, it's imposed upon them either because of socioeconomic, you know, environmental issues or, you know, family concerns. Religious issues. And then it, you know, catches up with us again at the other end of life when we get into our 60s, 70s and 80s that, you know, catches up. So, you know, a lot of people hear some of the things I say and say, well, you can be vegetarian. You can, but it always requires more knowledge. You have to understand proteins.

You have to understand how to make complementary proteins. And you have to have the resources to do that. And you're going to have more total protein and more total calories to pull it off. So, you know, it's not that it can't be done, but the average American doesn't have the food knowledge or skills to do that. If you go out and survey the average American, the average American doesn't even know where carbohydrates come from. So it's, you know, it's a big step to go from, you know, what's wrong with the American diet to, okay, let's make everyone vegetarian and that'll solve it all. That's not the solution. You know, like a lot of wellness podcasts, my audience is, you know, probably majority women.

And you've been very vocal about why this topic is so important for women in particular. You know, can you chat a little bit more about that as regard to women's total protein consumption based on the data that we know from different surveys and things that are out there? And how in particular, with a lot of the goals that maybe women have, with body composition and weight loss, protein plays a central role. in helping them achieve those goals. Yeah. Women, you know, for social issues, you know, body shape appearances, society imposes different pressures on women. And they tend to be more sensitive to body shape and what they're eating than a lot of men do.

What we know from the national surveys is that women, in general are fairly close to the minimum RDA. The average for the entire population in the U.S. is around 70 grams per day, which is above the RDA. But if you start looking at subgroups, of women over 60, 40 percent are below the minimum RDA. That's why women have a big issue with sarcopenia and muscle aging issues. Of women under 20, I think it's something, it's not quite 30. 28% are below the RDA. So with the two extremes, women are eating extremely low protein diets. And quality comes into that. You know, if you're going to be that low, all of the data, one of the things to keep in mind is all of the data for defining the RDA was done with high quality

animal protein. It wasn't done with wheat. It was done with dairy or eggs. And so what we think of the RDA, is based on having a 100% animal protein. So again, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very low bar. And at the two ends of the aging extreme for women, they're eating below that bar. So they're at risk. Yeah, and it's worth digging into the RDA. And I've heard you talk about it on many podcasts that are out there,

you know, Peter Atia and Simon Hill and Jason from Mind Body Green and things. But it's worth touching on that. because this is an area that a lot of people get confused and they still see different sides arguing for different things. So there was a clip that I had where Dr. Gabriel and Lyon was on this podcast and we clipped it out for social media because we thought it was very interesting. And it went super viral. I think it has like 10 million views now. It's kind of crazy. And she was talking about the RDA and a little bit of the history on the RDA.

And I'll let you explain it a little bit. But then in the comments, one of the prominent comments that was there was, a gentleman, I'm forgetting his name, but I believe he's been on Joe Rogan before he's a a vegetarian athlete and MMA fighter. I'm forgetting his name again. And then he came in and said, no, the RDA is like exactly where we should be around. And so people are confused. So give us a little bit of a history of the RDA and how we came to some of those numbers. Back in around 1900, even before we knew all of the amino acids, animal scientists had to figure out how to to feed animals to get them to grow. And so they developed various ways of, well, if we fed this,

we can measure growth or we fed this, we can measure nitrogen accumulation. Those were techniques we had back then. And so protein has traditionally been measured by nitrogen accumulation. That works pretty well in kids or young animals because they're growing. They are actually accumulating. But if you're talking about a 45-year-old adult who's in maintenance, basically, they're not accumulating any new protein. They're replacing proteins, but basically they're stable. That's a very poor technique to measure your requirement based on accumulation of something you're not actually accumulating. So the issue of not the measurement of the RDA has historically been based on short term about seven-day nitrogen balance techniques where they basically lower

the protein intake down until your intake and your excretion, urine, etc., are equal. Everybody knows that grossly underestimates the actual protein requirement. Everybody does that. And the RDA is based on making that number and then putting a two standard deviation above it. And by definition, what that means is that 97% of the people shouldn't show any deficiency, but 3% will actually show frank deficiency at the RDA. That's the definition. Okay.

That data was also all done with 20-year-old college students, 20, 25-year-old college males. So A, the definition is healthy young males eating high-quality protein. That's what the definition is. So, A, 75% of Americans are overweight, so they're not healthy. A, they're not physically active. 50% aren't male. I mean, you kind of go on and on. The RDA is a very low bar at the end. 2002, the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, said, well, that's not adequate. For every nutrient, we know there's a range of intake going from the RDA, which is the bare minimum, up to some upper limit. And so people have sort of been testing that for vitamin C and vitamin D and zinc and things like that.

For protein, we don't have a really clear range, but we know it's somewhere around three grams per KG, you know, something above a gram per pound. And so we have a range from the minimum RDA of 0.36 grams per pound up to at least one gram per pound. where you want to be in that can be a personal choice, but age, physical activity, type of diet all makes a difference in that choice. The worst case scenario would be a 70-year-old who chooses to be sedentary, who chooses to have a plant-based diet. That's the worst possible set of circumstances because you have everything going against you. And about how much muscle loss is happening just as as a byproduct of aging when we're not hitting those protein requirements?

Yeah, the estimates, you know, sort of not with any routine exercise or protein choices. The routine average is usually said to be around 8% per decade. 8% per decade starting at a particular age? Around 40. Around 40. So you hit 40. So we seem to peak both muscle mass and lean body mass. and bone mass all seem to peak sort of around 40.

So I mentioned earlier, we kind of have this honeymoon period from end of growth around 20 to 40. You can kind of abuse your body with a lot of different things in that period. And it all seems to work pretty well. But once you start getting beyond 40, now you have natural aging going against you, efficiencies going down, your calorie needs are going down. You need to make some adjustments. And most people don't.

You know, we had on a really great practitioner and advocate who first became known for some of her viral talks on fasting. Her name is Cynthia Thurlow, and she's a nurse practitioner background. And we had her on recently to talk about her updated views, and especially in the context of where she is in her life, probably, I think she's in her later 40s, maybe early 50s. I can't remember exact age. And she was saying how, you know, how fasting was a big part of her healing journey. in the beginning to help her. But now at the age that she's at, she is very careful and mindful to not do, you know, longer fast, like a 24 hour or more fast because her central concern is losing muscle mass. And she's fought so hard with her protein. She's also a good friend of

Dr. Gabriel Lyon, who's been influential in her work. She's fought so hard. She's probably heard me say that, in fact. So she's probably heard you say that on on that. And it really just brought up this larger question of how you see fasting in the context of all your work and what we know with longevity, with muscle, how important muscle is. So can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah. So I think you explained it pretty much the way I would think about it. During our third, you know, between 20 and 40, that honeymoon period, people who do fast, you'll lose weight, but generally you'll gain it back. and you'll gain it back, you can gain the muscle back. Fasting when you're early in life, that's a permanent loss of muscle,

a failure to develop muscle cells. Fasting later in life, we know that in a fast, and you can think about it in terms of weight loss, you can lose about maximum of two pounds of fat per week in a fast that would be fast, everything above that has to be lean tissue. You just can't account for the calories any other way. And so in a fast, you know, that might last multiple days, four, five, six days or something, 50% of the weight loss will be lean tissue. And it may very well be mostly muscle tissue, certainly the further you get into it. And we know that once you get beyond 40,

your ability to regain that goes down dramatically. And the older you get, the worse it gets. Back when we first started doing our weight loss study, so that's almost 20 years ago, the early 2000s, there was a general thinking in the aging world. So we had the issue of obesity and aging, and people were arguing, you know, should 65, 70-year-olds ever actually try and lose weight

because they lose so much muscle mass, that they can never regain. Is it worse? Are they worse off for the muscle loss or for the fat loss? You know, which is what's the balance there? And so, you know, I think what has happened in the last 20 years is we now know that if you try and restrict calories but do it with resistance exercise and protein, our research has shown that you can restrict that muscle mass loss down to like 5% or less.

So you can make it almost exclusively fat loss, where if you just go in and do a high carbohydrate diet, I'm going to restrict calories, I'm going to lose weight, no real exercise addition, somewhere around 35% or more will be muscle loss. And that can't be regained. That's a real risk. And that's why women frequently, we talk about yo-yo dieting and women are a little more prone to it than men, they'll try different diets and they'll lose some weight and then they'll gain it back. And that yo-yo dieting progressively makes them have less mean body mass.

So especially if somebody's trying to lose weight and improve their body composition and a lot of my audience probably is in that category of like 40 above, we have to keep in mind based on where you're coming from, if I'm hearing you correctly, is if you don't have strength training, and appropriate levels of protein, we're going to get into what's appropriate, you are going to be losing muscle, which again is going to come back to all these other things, it's going to make you more insulin resistant.

It's going to increase your likelihood of, you know, hip fracture and falls, things like that, because of lack of grip strength, right? We know the connection between longevity and grip strength. And all the other, the downstream effects that are there. That's what I'm hearing from you. Yeah, exactly. I have frequently said and thought from early in my career that when we design diets, we should always have two tissues in mind. How can we keep muscle healthy and how can we

keep the brain healthy? Everything else in the body is regulatory. Everything else will adapt to what you eat. But those two tissues have specific needs and we need to keep those healthy, whether we're talking about sleep or mental acuity or Alzheimer's or whether we're talking about muscle function and daily mobility or insulin sensitivity or even blood lipids. Those two tissues regulate everything. You know, one more question on this muscle loss that comes along with people losing weight. This seems to be one of the things that is also related to the hot topic today, which are these, you know, drugs like O-Zempic, right? People are losing weight,

but it does seem that they're losing muscle mass as a part of this. Have you followed this at all? And do you have any comments on it? No, I have not. I feel like I've sort of superficially looked at that. So I have no real expertise, you know, so I won't wait very far into it. But, you know, all of these kinds of drugs, Osemptics or rapamycin for long-term, longevity or so. All of these kinds of drugs really worry me. You're using a drug which will have multiple effects in the body, most of which have never been studied for really long term to basically mask a metabolic problem. I find it really objectionable. But again, I am not an expert in it, so I'll leave it at that. But philosophically, I'm enormously bobbed.

rather as a biochemist by thinking about that. Let's go back to protein. Now, one of the other reasons that it became quite popular in the plant-based world to sort of deprioritize protein. And there are individuals that are out there that are now coming out that are plant-based saying no protein is actually very important. Yes, we do have to work harder. And they're coming from that angle and they're acknowledging that it is more difficult

and then they have their arguments as to still why they think it's worthwhile. Right? But they're not deprioritizing protein. But talking about the world that plant-based world that I kind of grew up in that said, you know, you don't really need protein. Look at a cow. Look at a gorilla. I've told so many people in the past the same sort of story, not being an expert, like, yeah, look at a gorilla. How does it get its protein?

How does it get so strong? Actually, you know, that's a great thing for you to expand on first before I continue forward. How is it that a gorilla or a cow or a rhino gets so big and strong? What's the difference between them and human beings? I have no clue. My understanding is a gorilla eat something like 50 or 60 pounds of food per day or something. So they have enormous capacity for eating a lot of food that we can't eat or digest very well. I'm not an expert in the gorilla digestive tract, so I'll stay away from that whole arena.

Well, you hit the main point that was there, which is that these animals spend a majority. of their day eating and the quantity they eat is a huge quantity as is related to their mass. Do you believe in the idea that the evolution of human beings and especially the explosion of our brain directly was related to our ability to concentrate calories in particular things like protein? Yeah, I really do. I think nutrient density was a very important aspect of human development that we could get so much of our diet in much more concentrated calorie forms.

That's haunting us a little now that the food industry has learned to put very concentrated calories and highly palatable foods, ranging from donuts to chips. So, you know, it's sort of a blessing and also a curse now with modern food industries. But clearly, nutrient density is important to human existence and it allowed us to evolve. of. And I mean, your comment earlier about, you know, I think a lot of vegetarians are hearing the message about protein and understanding the issue about aging. And, you know, I will always say that, you know, if a person's able to eat 120 grams of protein or more per day, they can probably be vegetarian. It's hard to eat that in natural foods. And so that probably means they're going to end up having some process protein powders or things like that to make that work.

But you can do it, but it requires some knowledge. I mean, I could put it together, but, you know, I've studied nutrition for 40 years. I know the average person on the street can't put that together. So, you know, it's a, it's again, you know, by all means it can be done. I think we have to work carefully when we start putting it into public health recommendations. When we start saying we're going to make all nursing homes and all schools and all daycares and all hospitals subscribe to a plant-based diet, that's a real risk because we have at-risk people in environments that may not be able to balance it. And so those are where, you know, I don't really

care if a 30-year-old female with a good knowledge of nutrition wants to be vegetarian, that's great. but I really worry if my mom in a nursing home is limited to a plant-based diet that causes her to lose lean body mass. That's a problem. One of the things going back to what I was sharing about the plant-based world is that often the deprioritization of animal proteins as a whole, kind of was usually the narrative about kind of protein, fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, like they were all kind of lumped in together, right? So if you're familiar enough with the argument, can you talk about some of the things that you've heard from that side that are associated with having, you know, it was not only that protein is maybe not as important, but that too much protein would be doing damage to you, right? If you're familiar with those arguments, can you explain them to our listeners?

And then we'll have your take on it. Yeah, I'm familiar with them in ways you might not actually know. So I was director of the American Egg Board research program when the U.S. Guest dietary guidelines eliminated the cholesterol guideline. So I'm pretty intimately knowledgeable about it. I forget who last said it, but I think it's a little bit of the story of a whack-a-mole. There is this group of people out there who are anti-animal use. And so they first argued that, well, animals shouldn't be used because it's a welfare issue. And that that is a it and go very well. So then they latched on to the cholesterol issue because only animal foods

have cholesterol. So that was good. And we got all these fake margarins and Crisco and snack well cookies and all kinds of nonsense in the market from the food industry. The food industry loved it because they could take cheap grains and sell them for high prices. And just to just to pause you there, right? So what was that data based off of? Was there data when it came to that recommendation of that first association with cholesterol. So the cholesterol and saturated fats came out of epidemiology. My understanding is the cholesterol argument initially primarily came out of the Framingham study. So they followed the Framingham population city in New England, and basically they looked at factors that related to heart disease.

It was an issue of heart disease became a big issue. the 60s, 70s, and so they were looking at populations. And they realized smoking was a big issue and stress and lack of exercise and family history. And somewhere down the line, they came to the issue that there seemed to be an association with cholesterol. And so basically, you know, we began to get it. And around the same time, there was Ansel Keys who was pushing, who was pushing the saturated fat, and so they sort of came together, the anti-animal saturated fat cholesterol issue, and so those were out there. Turned out later, and really looking at the Framingham study, that of the people who actually had heart attacks, myocardial infarctions, that only 84, I'm sorry,

only 48% actually had high cholesterol. And what we've now done after, you know, sort of run that out a little bit further into the 1980s. We got our first dietary guidelines. We got the Food Guide Pyramid. The President of American Heart Association came out and said, well, if we just lower our cholesterol intake, it was around 700 milligrams per day, down to less than 300. We would eradicate heart disease by the year 2000. Americans actually did that.

They dropped their egg intake, their milk intake, their beef intake. by almost 35% in all three categories. They increased their grain, their plant-based intake by 40%. And what we got was no change in heart disease and epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Basically, in the early 2000s, the entire world realized that dietary cholesterol has no relationship to blood cholesterol, all, but it took until 2015 for the U.S. dietary guidelines to eliminate it. So basically, we had a fake narrative based on very poor epidemiology that stuck with us for 30 years and totally disrupted the American dietary guidelines. 2010, the U.S. dropped the food guide pyramid,

which recommended eating lots of grains and eliminating eggs and dairy and meats and we went to my plate, which is front and center, is protein. You need to get your protein, your vegetables, your dairy, and your carbohydrates. So we've had a major change as people realize that the narrative based on the epidemiology was wrong, and we actually prove that cholesterol in the diet has nothing to do with cholesterol in the blood. Some people would say that at least that I've heard, and please, you know, you know a lot more about this, so feel free to tease it out, that, okay, even if we're reducing some of those sources, the milk, the beef, you know, egg, and so that cholesterol is being impacted, that our levels of saturated fat

are still quite high. Is number one, is that accurate? And number two. Saturated fat is another interesting one. If you look at the guidelines, and you mentioned earlier kind of the balance of these macronutrients, if you look at the guidelines for dietary fat total intake, 50% of calories, dietary saturated fat, 10% of total calories, where did those numbers come from? And the answer is they were made up out of thin air. There's absolutely no data to support either one of those numbers. The 30% of calories from fat was the compromise. in a committee room. Basically, there was one group of people arguing that 45% was totally healthy, and another group arguing that 10% was the target. And they were at absolute stalemates,

both had data to support it. And they said, well, would you accept 30? They said, okay. So that's where the 30 came from. It's based on thin air. Saturated fat was not even a compromise. It was just a group of people in a room who said, let's pick 20, let's pick something. number 12, 10, let's pick 10. My argument is if saturated fat is really toxic, then it should have a number. Is it 20 grams per day, 40 grams per day? If you understand biochemistry, it's not percentage of calories. That's stupid. That means an athlete who is having 4,000 calories per day versus an elderly woman having 1,000 calorie, that person can have four times as much

and be perfectly healthy. That makes no sense at all. I mean, if there's a number that is dangerous, give me the number. You mentioned evolution earlier. If saturated fats are toxic, why over a million years of evolution did humans evolve to only be able to make one fat,

palmitate, which is a saturated fat. I mean, we should all be dead. I mean, if it's really... We produce it in our body. Yeah, that's the only one we can make. So when we eat excess carbohydrates, we have to turn it into fat, and the only fat we can make is saturated palmitate. So we should all be dead.

I mean, it makes no sense. Basically, if you really begin to tease out the saturated fat argument, what you find is it's based on eating too many calories, and too much total fat and too little exercise. And my comment is if you're committed to being overweight for the rest of your life, the type of fat you eat probably matters. But if you're going to correct the problem and eat calories within your target, the percentage of saturated fat doesn't really matter that much.

And your original question is, you know, have we changed? The reality is we reduce the amount of saturated fat. fat coming from animal products, but we replaced it with hydrogenated fats coming from vegetable oils, which are even worse. And it has trans fats and everything else. And people say, well, they're trans fat free now. That's not actually true. The issue is the label, if the serving size they list on the label has less than a half a gram per survey, they can claim it as fat trans-free. So what they do is adjust the serving size down to a smaller number so they can hide the trans fats in it. Yeah, which is really problematic.

I recently, upon Dr. Lyons' request, I got connected to a cardiologist based in St. Louis named Michael Twynam. And he ran a clearly heart scan on me. And I also got my, along with it, I got my full Boston heart labs. And inside the Boston Heart Labs, I was surprised even for me to find that, there was a little bit of trans fat that was, you know, in my, in my blood work that was there. It was just a byproduct of he's like, look, even if you're really healthy, if you eat out at all, you're going to get some exposure to it because of the perplexity, the pervasity, how pervasive, rather, these vegetable oils are.

If you eat processed, any processed foods, if you, you know, if you eat chips, if you eat fried foods. If you eat donuts, if you eat processed, you know, any candies, I mean, you're going to get these in the food because they have vegetable oils that have been adjusted to be thick. They're, you know, you know, margarins. They're, they solidified them by hydrogenation. And when you do that, you will get some trans molecules. Yeah. It's, it's mind-blowing. So let's come back to protein because, you know, in your research that you and your team have done over the decades, I want to start off with what were, what was the first research paper that your team put together where you really highlighted and showcased the role of protein and how it's become part of this narrative and advocacy work that you're doing to really spread the message of how important it is? What was that flagship study or that beginning study that really helped you understand the role of protein? Yeah, I'm not sure if there was just one.

There is one that sort of comes to mind. Back when in the 70s, when I was in grad school early and I got really interested in the branch chain amino acids. And so there was work by Al Harper at Wisconsin and others that showed that unlike all the other amino acids, the branch chain amino acids were mostly metabolized in muscle. I thought, that's fascinating. Why in the world would a body evolve to do that? So I thought that was cool. And then there was another group of researchers, Jefferson and Goldberg and Marcy Buse,

that were looking at the effect of lucene on protein synthesis. And they discovered using diaphragm muscle, very thin muscles. Back in those days, we didn't have all the elaborate techniques. So basically you had to have a technique where the amino acid could be absorbed across a single cell. So it was a very basic biochemistry. But they showed that with adding lucine into the cell systems, you could stimulate protein synthesis. And I thought it was really cool. The early 80s at Illinois, we ran really the first real muscle study.

And what we took was muscles from a rodent, from a rhodin, from a rind. rat, and we did in different ways of different levels of fasting. So we would take the muscle out, and as soon as you do that, the muscle becomes catabolic, you know, immediately take it out of the animal, it becomes catabolic. And what we showed is if we put leucine back into the solution, it would reverse it. That's cool. And then we started looking at different lengths of starvation. We would starve the animal for 24 hours or 36 or 40. And we found that the farther we starved them and took them the less the effect Lucine had. So what that told us was that

Lucine is a signal to recover from a short-term catabolic effect. And that's something people don't really get about what Lusine does. So if you're hospitalized and you've been in a hospital because of an accident and you've lost muscle mass and whatever and you've been in it for 10 days,

starting to take Lusine's not really going to have. help because you're not regulating at that immediate step. So what we realized was that we needed to regulate right after an acute effect. So right after an overnight fast, right after an acute exercise. And so we did those studies and sort of realized that this regulation, you can regulate protein synthesis at the gene level, at transcription, or at translation. And what we realized that this regulation of lucene was at the translation level. It was a signaling molecule.

And so later on then, a few years later with better techniques, what we showed is that using exhaustive exercise, an acute drop in muscle protein synthesis, we could get a full recovery of that within minutes, literally, by giving lucine. And so what we determined was that this was an regulation at the initiation factor level. and that led to everything we know about mTOR and lucene and all of that regulation. So those two pieces, I think, were the big contribution we made is we tied it to a moment-to-moment signal for recovery. And we tied in the m-tore initiation and all of that. Everybody was studying liver at that point and other initiation factors.

And what we demonstrated was it was a factor known as EIF4. So if you extrapolate some of those findings that you guys have repeated multiple times, right, or other people have repeated it too, is that correct? Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that in research that I always tell people is I see a new paper that comes out with some outlandish comment. And I say, you know, when I see it in two or three more labs from papers from other labs, I'll believe it.

And so one of the issues with the cholesterol story is the longer it was out there, the weaker the theory got. One of the things that happened with our theory with Lucy, and the longer it's out there and studied by more groups, the stronger it got. So it's ironclad at this point. Yeah. What are the human implications of that and your recommendations of how people think about organizing their own diet, especially if they're trying to make sure they don't hit that

8% muscle loss after the age of 40 that happens every decade? So how do they think about leucine? How do they think about protein in their day? So back in the, right around 2000, when we made the discovery about the Lucene, M-Tor, initiation factors, the Galveston group, Bob Wolf, Doug Patton Jones, and those guys were studying aging and protein synthesis. And as I mentioned earlier, what they discovered was a 25-year-old will respond to 15 grams of high-quality protein, but a 65-year-old won't respond at all.

but a 65-year-old will respond to 32 grams of protein. And so they, you know, along with our research, we started putting the two pieces together and we realized that the real key to that efficiency was lucene. The average 20-year-old is not that sensitive to leucine, but the average 6-year-old is very sensitive to it. When you're growing that regulation of mTOR and muscle protein synthesis is heavily driven by hormones, testosterone, estrogen, insulin-like growth factor, IGF-1, etc. But once you stop growing in your early 20s, now it begins to shift to diet quality.

And by 40, and Doug Patton Jones and I actually showed in your mid-30s, now the body is sensitive to the leucine signal. You know, I commented, why did the body evolve to only metabolize branch chain amino acids in muscle. I don't really know, but the theory I like is that, A, it's primarily metabolized as a fatty acid, so muscle likes that, and B, the body evolved to recognize leucine as a signal that the dietary protein was good. Proteen, leucine is fairly prevalent in protein, across plant and animal proteins, more so in animal protein. but if you had enough lucine showing up in the blood,

it was an indication to the body that the meal had enough protein and it could trigger muscle protein synthesis. So, you know, that's kind of how we sort of put the pieces together. So we had these two pieces from the aging and our research that came together. And what we realized then is that as you get older, the meal distribution of protein became more and more. important. So we went from the idea that protein is just a daily requirement like B6 or zinc or something. If you're a amount in a one-a-day vitamin pill, that's cool. When you're young,

that kind of works, but as you get older, now it becomes more meal-specific. And so what we sort of showed is that the distribution of the protein, you're much better off having 30 or 40 grams a protein in each meal than you aren't having 120 in one meal. And so as you get older, that meal distribution becomes more and more important. So meal distribution, and then naturally as an extrapolation of that, then the question becomes, of the protein sources that you're choosing, how much natural lucine is part of that? And then is there supplemental leucine that's required? Is that correct?

Sure. You can think of it that way. So we know that to have a positive effect on muscle at a meal, the blood level of lucene needs to go from about 100 micromolar to 300 micromolar. And we know that the amount of leucine it takes is somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 grams. That range, you know, if it's pure leucine, if it's pure whey protein, something very rapidly digested, 2.5 probably works. If it's a more mixed meal and slower, three or three and a half, so that's where that range comes from, you've got to raise the blood level from 100 to 300 micromolar.

And so that was sort of the issue. I'm sorry, I kind of lost a train to thought there on the question. Yeah, so I was saying that knowing how important lucine is to muscle synthesis, especially as we get older, then people are naturally asking the question of, is the protein that I'm eating have adequate amounts of lucine and is there recommendations or requirements to take supplemental levels of lucine? You already talked about meal distribution.

So the question, absolutely, lusine varies across food. So way protein is one of the most common. Way protein isolate is about 12% leucine. And so you can have a protein shake with about 23 grams of weight protein, and that will stimulate muscle protein synthesis fine. You can do the same thing with soy protein isolate, but it takes about 33 grams to get to that level. Soy protein has about 7.8% lucene, as opposed to 12, and wheat protein has 6.8. So now it takes about 40 grams. So you can do it with different proteins,

but you have to understand the leucine level. So, you know, again, my early comment was, you know, we need to move away from thinking about protein requirements and then realize we have amino acid requirements. We need 3.4 grams of lysine. We need one gram of methionine. We need 1.2 grams of tryptophanine. need 7.5, 8.5 grams of the lucene. Those are the numbers we actually need. It's not a,

it's not a label of protein. That is totally misleading. And those numbers that you just shared, is that per meal or per day? Those are the, again, depends on what it is for lysine 3.4 is per day because lysine has a very slow metabolic pool. It doesn't turn over rapidly. the lusine number is around two and a half to three grams per meal. Okay, so that adds up to seven and a half to nine grams per day, but it's per meal. So each individual amino acid is a little different answer from a metabolic standpoint. So when you take that out to people thinking about hitting that total quantity of protein that they need, going back to some of your original numbers that you brought up in the beginning of the

episode, if you could just reshare those, right? We talked about the dietary, the RDA requirements, which I think is 0.8 grams per kilogram. Exactly. It was 0.8 grams per kilogram. We already talked about how that was in the most ideal situation. And even then still, there'll be some people that, you know, it's not the appropriate amount for, right? Right. So as we know, you know, I shared earlier that that range from the Institute of Medicine is from

the RDA of about 0.8 grams per KG up to something around 3 grams per KG. That's the range. What the research of the last 20 years has shown is that for adults, certainly 40 years old and older, but probably 35 and older, we think that adults should be in the range of 1.2 to 1.8. So kind of in the middle of that range is more optimal. higher the physical activity, maybe the higher in that range, lower, you know. So we found in our research, I like to think about, you know, 100 grams per day is sort of a magic number. You know, and there are 260 pound athletes would say, well, that's way too low. But, you know, for women who in your audience, we found that in working with women in our weight loss clinics,

and we worked with over 400, we found that that number of around 100 was kind of a magic number. If they got below that, they lost most of the metabolic effects of having more protein, and we tried to keep them above it. So, you know, that's kind of the range. I usually recommend for people, I think the most important change people can make is getting protein into the first meal of the day. And I always recommend between 30 and 50 grams.

at that first meal. I hesitate to call it breakfast because that implies a time of the day. But whenever you eat first, coming out of that overnight fast, whether it's six in the morning or 11, that first meal should be high protein. I also think there's a lot of data for the last meal. The middle meal, there's not much data on it. So we kind of assume it should be reasonable protein, but we don't really know that. So when we did our weight loss diets, we tried to get between 30 and 45 grams of protein, 30 and 50 grams of protein in each of the three meals. Yeah. When you use those numbers and some of the recommendations you've given, like my target amount for protein based on my level of activity with the trainer, the nutritionist, the team that

I'm kind of working with is I'm shooting for about 140 to 150 grams of protein. a day based on where I'm at my level of activity. And when you look at that and based on your recommendations earlier, you realize that it takes a good, you know, it can take three to four meals, right? To hit that amount. I would guess, you know, just I don't know your body weight, but I'm guessed that you're in the 1.8 grams per KG range. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I'm not that high. I'm a protein expert. I'm not that high. I probably shoot for 120. But again, you know, I'm, I'm in my 70s, so, you know, my caloric needs keep going down. But, yeah, I think that those are the numbers. You know, I think we've mentioned exercise along the way. I think resistance exercise is the other issue.

You know, people ask me, well, resistance exercise and protein, you know, protein will not make your muscles bigger. But if you don't have enough, it'll make them smaller. but, you know, so resistance exercise, you know, 75% of the effect and protein 25% of the effect. I mean, to sort of put them in perspective. I like to get people in that range of 1.2 to 1.8. I know Dr. Lyons will go higher. She'll be in more the range of 2.2 grams per KG. I think that's okay.

I don't see a problem with it, but that's more than most people want to eat. I mean, probably the audience that she's talking to is also a group of, again, men and women, but primarily women who are dealing with a situation where they have maybe a few years in their sort of, you know, not their prime from any sort of fertility standpoint, but even me being in that same category of like me hitting 40 and knowing that like, okay, 41, 42, 45, 50 years old, it's going to be harder and harder for me to put on muscles. So you might want to go to town right now and put on that muscle so you don't have such a hard time putting it on later on. And she deals with a lot of high performance athletes and people of that category too.

So from a research standpoint, from a pure muscle effect, there really isn't any data that going above 1.8 grams per KG benefits. The question you then start asking is, okay, if I'm going to have 2,500 calories per day, would I be better eating calories and carbs or more protein? So that's a different question, insulin resistance and things like that. But in terms of purely muscle mass effect, there isn't really any data to suggest numbers above 1.8 grams per KG is better. And so for you right now, you mentioned your age, you said 70. And for you right now, Now, you mentioned your protein requirements.

Because you're talking about the importance of strength training as well, too, is that something that you incorporate in your routine? I know you're a tennis player. Is there strength training that you're hitting? Is there a total amount that you're looking for as your minimum viable dose for your week as it's related to muscle and its role in longevity? So I'm pretty careful about exercising most every day. I actually go to the gym to play tennis three times a week.

and every time I go to the gym, I also do resistance training. So I'll do 40 minutes, 45 minutes of resistance training before and after playing tennis. So I do resistance training every day. You know, I used to do a lot of running. The knees don't like that as much. So I do a lot more biking and elliptical kinds of things than I used to for aerobic. But yeah, I lift at least three days a week.

Is there any research that's out? there or stuff that you've come across or even within yourself of if you're hitting that protein requirement and you're also getting in that strain training what is your level of muscle loss that you're going through or somebody who's hitting that compared to people where you mentioned losing about 8% per decade yeah so sarcopenia is really a tough thing to study because you have to outlive your subjects so if you're talking about something that's going to take you 20 years to study and controlled diet, that doesn't work. So our approach to studying that was to use weight loss. And so we did a what I think is a seminal study back, I think it was 2005. We published it.

It was the first diet study that looked at weight loss with higher protein and exercise. So we actually had four groups. We had a high carbohydrate low protein, which was exactly the food guide pyramid. So it was the RDA.8 grams per KG, the RDA for carbohydrates and fat, et cetera, exactly on it. We did the carbohydrate group and then we did a carbohydrate group with three days a week of resistance exercise. We did daily, they had a half an hour of daily aerobic exercise and two days a week of resistance exercise. And then we did the same thing with a protein group where we now move them up to 1.5 grams per KG protein, lowered the carbohydrate down to the RDA, 130 grams per day,

and then the two groups. What we found was that the carbohydrate group alone, see if I can remember these numbers exactly, 35% of their weight loss was lean body mass. They lost about 14 pounds over a 4.4. month period and 35% it was lean. If they added exercise to it, it shifted to, they lost one more pound. So they've done it seven days a week of exercise. They lost one more pounds. So it went from 14 to 14.7. But now the composition was only 25% lean loss. So the exercise shifted it to fat. We then did the

protein study, and it was exactly the same as the carb and exercise. So they lost more weight. They lost 16 pounds, and of that percentage, 25% was lean. So they got the same, they got better effect, same composition and more weight loss than people who followed the food guy pyramid and did daily exercise. And then we did the protein plus exercise. And what they found was they lost more weight, 19 and a half pounds, more weight, same calories, actually slightly less calories, no, slightly more calories. They lost more total weight, and the composition of the weight loss was 10% lean tissue. And if you look at weight loss, about 3% lean tissue goes with fat loss.

It's just a vascular system. So basically, in reality, they lost about 7% of lean tissue. So basically, that was the scale. So basically, we showed that adding protein and adding resistance exercise would an additive effect of reducing lean tissue loss. If I'm following you correctly, you're seeing that there's still going to be some lean tissue loss, right? But that it's significantly lower.

And the people that were on the higher protein with, you know, some resistance training, are going to better maintain that lean muscle mass. That's there. And presumably, so these were midlife women who don't like going to the gym. So our resistance training was largely stretch. It was largely yoga and very low weights. So you can, presumably you can do even better if you increase the resistance level. So if they're willing to use, to use more weight.

during that weight loss, you can presumably make their no lean loss possibly even gain. Yeah, just seeing my own journey. And again, I'm 40 years old, so a little bit lower than the participants that were there. But in a regular period of strength training going three times a week, this was my results from like last August of 2022 to December, I lost almost about 12 pounds, but I added seven pounds of lean muscle mass in that period. That's important. And so, and I was, you know, a big part of that probably is also just undermuscled in

general. So my body was like just ready for the resistance training and ready for the protein intake that was there. So a lot can happen when you have the, you know, the proper resistance training that's there. Now, the number that you're going to sort of emphasize that point, our study, we would probably have done better on body composition if we increased the resistance exercise, we probably would not have done better by increasing the protein. Okay?

So we had 1.5 grams per KG. If we'd have gone up to 3 grams per KG, I'm not sure we'd have gotten a lot better result, but if we'd have increased the resistance exercise, I'm sure we would have gotten a better result. So again, the difference between low protein, if you look at the, the research and look at 0.8 grams versus 1.5, something below one and above one, you can always detect the difference. Can you detect the difference between 1.5 and 2? There are 3. Nobody can, nobody's actually shown that. So really to hit at home, and this going back to your comment of,

you know, it's 75% resistance training, 25% diet, really getting more than the recommend you're sharing here of protein is not going to do anything for you, but getting less, we already know, is going to do so much damage. Just to clarify, the recommendation that I'm saying is 1.5 to 6, 1.6, it's not the RDA recommendation. It's not the RDA. Right. So the RDA, the RDA recommendation for protein will increase the amount of lean loss during a

faster or starvation. It will actually create a worse situation. So I strongly advocate if you're going to do any kind of a weight loss or whatever, you need to get the protein up in the 1.5 grams per KG range. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to jump around just quickly and come back to something that you were chatting about before. You know, you were on Peter Atia's podcast. I really enjoyed the episode.

And Peter is definitely one of the educators and medical doctors out there that has really helped people understand the role of APOB, right, as it's related to our blood work, cardiovascular health, other things like that. Do you have any thoughts, you know, as somebody's increasing their protein and naturally going towards more animal-based protein, in my case, that's something that I did. coming from a vegetarian diet over the last few years, I naturally saw my levels of APOB go up in my diet. And I'm looking into a lot of different things. Do I have a genetic situation where I don't handle lipids in the same way, some familial history, et cetera? I've always had higher levels of LDL and my APOB is up.

Now I'm metabolically healthy, my fasting insulin is low, other things. Any thoughts about how important that, that APOAB is and how focused we should be on it. I know it's not an area of your specific level of expertise, and you can say pass, so I'm happy to pass. Yeah, I really, I really am not an expert in that, so I will, in essence, pass. You know, in terms of acute heart conditions, triglycerides

are actually more problematic than APOBs. So, you know, I'm very sensitive to, triglycerides and you know I I look at people in a right away in fact we use triglycerides as a marker of diet compliance so I look for values are they above 145 or below 145 if they're above 145 that's a very clear indication that they have too many carbohydrates in their diet I've actually heard you say you have two markers that you look at right you look at two markers to see if people are having enough adequate protein it's fasting glucose and triglycerides. Is that correct? Yeah, exactly. I mean, those two, you know, if you're,

if you're fasting glucose is above 110 and your triglycerides are above 145, we know, I mean, that's metabolic syndrome, that's pre-diabetes. We know that a lower carbohydrate, higher protein diet will totally correct that within a couple of weeks. So that one, we've focused on a lot. The LDL issue, total cholesterol issue, I think there's a lot of distortion out there as to what the numbers actually are. You know, if you've got an LDL of three or 400, obviously that's an enormous risk. You know, if you have a LDL of 140, is that a risk? Is your, you know, what size are your lipoproteins?

Are they small, dense ones? Are they bigger ones? What's your HDL? you know, I think it's a pretty complex issue. You know, I find that with higher protein and animal protein, there may generally LDLs stay about the same, but HDLs tend to go up. And so that, you know, should improve the pattern. So again, not my area of expertise. In people who are at risk, I think they have to be sensitive to that. You know, if they're on medications for lipoproteins, I think they have to decide whether

diet changes have a positive or negative effect. But in general, I think higher carbs are much more inflammatory and much more of a risk across the board. Let's talk a little bit. You know, you've shared about it before, but I know my audience is going to be probably hearing you for the first time. They may have not heard you on some of the other episodes that are out there. So I think it's worth touching on.

And you've talked about how if it wasn't for certain industry funding for you, your work wouldn't have been possible. So I'd love for you to share a little bit more about that. So there's a question about biased and research. And I, you know, one of the things I always like to tell people is that when you wait into nutrition research, you have to realize that everybody's biased. I don't know of any researcher who goes out and say, I have a really crappy diet and I'm going to study it. Everybody believes their diet is healthy.

So they start with biased. One of the things that I found is that back in the 70s, 80s, when we were doing some of that early branched amino acid research, I would send in proposals to the National Institute of Health. And it's important for people to know that NIH studies diseases. They don't really study food. They're not really interested in food or nutrition. They didn't even have a nutrition group back in the 80s. They do have a director of nutrition now, but that's only been in the last 10 years. And so I would send in these research proposals about leucine, which everybody knows I was right.

you know, the history proves that my research was exactly right. And NIH would turn it down year after year saying, well, we really don't have any diseases related to protein, so really we shouldn't spend any money on it. So I finally went to Kraft and to the National Dairy Council and to the American Beef Board and said, hey, I think protein, high quality protein is really going to be important for muscle health. Would you fund this? And they did. Okay.

So my research got funded by industry. And, you know, people can evaluate it. You know, has it stood the test of time? Well, it did. The fact that I had funding from American Dairy Council, did that make it any less effective? No. The research is what it is. So, you know, when I look at issues of bias, I look and say, okay, that's an interesting

study. Has any other lab published it? as somebody else who's not funded by X, Y, or Z published it. And then I start believing it. Until I see it published in two more unrelated labs, I consider it just an interesting fact. It's an interesting tidbit. So, you know, I think people need to be aware of biased,

but kidding yourself that anybody's not biased is just silly. I mean, everybody's biased in nutrition because we all eat in a certain way. And so you can have, you know, somebody from Harvard who says they've never had industry funding, but they're still biased. They eat every day. One of the nuances that I've also heard you say and correct me or correct me if I'm wrong is that there are times where industry may have veto power over a study going out, like if it's a company, right, like a big food company.

But when, but there's other research, not to say that that research funding, you know, is problematic, but you're just helping people be aware of the behind the scenes. But if it's a board, like you were talking about the egg board, they generally are going to let you publish the research that's there, right? Is that accurate? Not only generally, they have no right to see it. So the point you're raising is critical for people understand. There are two very different systems out there.

there are what we call commodity boards, the egg board, the beef board, the dairy council, the almond board, et cetera. These are all under the jurisdiction of the USDA. And everything that comes out of those is screened by the USDA. So when the USDA does, when the American Egg Board does research funding, we will go out and we'll get proposals and we'll fund it. But once we fund it, we can have nothing to do with that. And the researcher can do whatever they want. They eventually will give us a report, but they don't have to share the manuscript with us. They don't have to share the data with us until it's all done. So we had no, and I say this as we, because I was director of the research for the American Egg Board for four years. So I ran the program. We had no role of it. On the other hand,

if Coca-Cola or Kellogg's or somebody like that or Nestle's funds a project, they actually have veto power over it. They can say, we don't like this data and therefore we own it. You can't publish it. And so I don't know to what extent that happens, but that's how the contracts are written. And some universities will prevent individuals from taking that kind of money. The University of Illinois would basically say, well, you can't write a contract that prevents publication, but others won't. And so it's a mixed bag.

One of the things to recognize in the public arena is that everything that the American Eggboard says is screened by the USDA. So they can't come out and tell you that ex-margarine is crap because it has trans fats in it. They can only say that, well, our product is natural, where if Frito Lays wants to go out and say something, or Kellogg's is a better example, as long as they don't put on the cereal box, well, we're going to cure cancer, they can say anything they want. They can say, our product's better than them, or, you know, this is heart healthy, or they can say anything they want because they're under the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission, where the commodities or under the jurisdiction of the USDA.

It's apples and oranges in terms of regulations. So, you know, as I was learning about that through the work that you've been putting out there, I feel like some of the important takeaways that I took away from there was, number one, you know, the inherent idea that industry funding is bad, people have to just understand where else is the money going to come from. And there could be, you know, future things.

And you are seeing crowdfunding. You are seeing that. But it's really not at the level where it's a consistent source of funding, right? I mean, when you mean a million dollar grant, that's hard to do with crowdsourcing. Yeah, totally, totally. The next thing is that, you know, be aware of the different ways that there's a Dr. Veney Prasad who writes a substack called Sensible Medicine, and he calls it, you know,

churnalism, right? It's the churning of these nutritional and studies on the latest things, which, you know, know, people are guilty of that is highlighting the latest, newest thing, but the question that you ask is, has it been repeated in multiple labs that are there? Right. And regardless of its industry or funding or not, that really seems to be the central point. What is the quality and the history of this study that's there? And in some ways, it can seem less exciting because you're not latching onto the latest things, but it's more grounded in the basics that we all can practice on to actually genuinely and genuinely move us towards health in the right way.

When I, you know, when I teach my students in my research lab, and whether it's Lane Norton or Gabrielle Lyons or Suzanne Def Kota or Tracy Anthony, you know, any of these top flight researchers, I tell them, you know, I don't want you ever to read the abstract until you've read the data. Tell me whether the design of the study can give the result. they're talking about, show me the data, and then you can tell me what the abstract, you know, we can evaluate whether the author's blowing smoke or actually knows what they're talking about. And, you know, it's kind of 50-50 out there. A lot of people don't know what they're

talking about when they publish research. They go out and they run a crappy design with poor controls and then they try and reach a conclusion. And unfortunately, you know, that's more common than you'd like to think. And so, again, I never care about things in a newspaper other than I sort of think, well, that's an interesting idea. And then I start looking for who has it published it and what labs have published it. Are these great, are these well-known research labs or is this a fly in the ointment type of place? You know, so I evaluate it. And, you know, that's, that's the only way. And unfortunately, the general public, you know, tends to overreact to the headline. You know, when we were talking about protein, we were chatting about all the different

sort of arguments that have been there over the years about why maybe we should be consuming less. And one is no, the one that's been the most prominent over the last, like I would say, five, six years has been the protein and longevity conversation. And as is related to these studies and how they're designed, I would like to use just a little bit of time because our audience has heard from some of the prominent researchers that are out there, Walter Longo, and they know of the work. people like David Sinclair, and they've heard that these individuals are talking about,

hey, that there seems to be some sort of link between longevity and having less protein. And I think this goes right central into the idea of study design and all the nuances. You know, we're all as consumers of this health information, we're growing up because people like yourself are kind of taking us on that journey. So take us through that category and walk us through as an example of really questioning how research is being put together from your point of view. So let's start with what we've been talking about for the past hour, which is muscle health. One of the things that we know is that for people who get to 60 and go beyond, their health is very dependent on keeping their muscles healthy.

And so we know that protein and exercise are really critical to that. And so, you know, is your real goal to try and live to an unhealthy? healthy 110 or to be a healthy 95. A health span versus a longevity span. So the issue, we know that maintaining muscle is critical to having a healthy, vigorous life. So that stands alone, a lot of data behind muscle-centric health. Okay, now back to the longevity questions. I actually got my start in research doing longevity research with Arlen Richardson, who worked with McKay and others. And so I have some knowledge of longevity research with rodents. So let's do the rodent question first.

One of the things we know is that rodents in captivity, so they're in a sterile cage, they have no stress, they never get sick, they're basically never stressed, and they overeat constantly. At the University of Illinois, we considered a 40% restriction to be normal, to normalize a rodent. Okay. So when we look at the rodent studies out there, what we're looking at is the control is what we call ad libidum fed. They can eat anytime they want. And we know that rodents in that environment eat 24 hours a day. They will wake up in the middle of their sleep and eat again so their stomach's always full.

And so we talked about mTOR earlier. M-Tor is always active in those individuals because they're constantly eating. Okay. So when you begin to restrict them, now we're beginning to slow this process down. And whether we're restricting calories or restricting protein, the animals will eat less. And now they're restricted from eating 24 hours a day to they get food and they will eat it. And so now we've changed them to meal eating. And when we talk about protein, we always talk about eating protein in meals.

The worst case scenario would be to eat a little bit of protein every two hours, lots of small meals, because that might keep mTOR or metabolism constantly active. So what we want to do is pulse it. We want meals where it turns on and turns off. And so when you do the rodent studies and you restrict them down, what you're not, what you're actually not studying is, is calorie, you're not studying protein restriction. What you're studying is calorie restriction. You're studying the fact that obesity shortens lifespan.

And we all agree on that. Okay. So it's not really a protein question. It's a calorie question. Because in nature, you wouldn't see these animals eating all the time because they have the natural aspects of they can't find food. They have to go to new areas. They have predators that they're,

going to be going again. So in a laboratory environment, you're creating an artificial situation where they get to eat all the time. Exactly. So, you know, in the natural environment, they can't find food or when they're sleeping, it's not just sitting there in front of them and they can snack. You know, they go through fasting periods. They don't overeat. We know that rodents throughout their life will continue gaining fat. And that's because they're overeating. Okay. So that's one. And I, you know, I sort of discount the rodent data because of the way it's done. If they actually did meal feeding at equal calories for the whole lifespan, which would be a lot of work and nobody's going to do it, if you actually look at the research out of my lab,

what you'll find is all of our studies were done with meal feeding. Nobody does that. That's one of the reasons our research is different than everyone else's because we meal fed them. We train people will say, well, I don't want to know what rodent studies look like. You know, they're irrelevant. Well, they're only irrelevant if you do them wrong. If you make the animal eat the same way a human eats, they will react the same way. And who gave you that insight?

How did that come that that was something that your lab was going to do? A bad dream one night. No, it just came to me. It really just came to you. You know, we did some things with overnight fasting and we started realizing that first meal was important. And, you know, a couple of things we did. For example, if you do ad libitum feeding to rodents and then you do one overnight fast

and do an experiment, the values you will get for their insulin response and everything is totally different than if you meal feed them all the time. If you meal feed, what we know is that insulin in the body, there are, there are, two forms. There are preformed insulin sitting in vesicles, and then you have to make it. And so insulin release after a meal is bifacic. You get this first bolus, this first burst, and then you get a second burst. If you do ad libidum fed rats, what you get is a massive first bolus of insulin after an overnight fast. But if you meal feed them and train them to do that, it's very small. and so people have misinterpreted the insulin response in animals because of the wrong experimental

design. And that's sort of what led us to it, is we had done some of those things and we realized, holy crap, the insulin response isn't what we're expecting. It's almost negligible with lucene or protein or whatever. And we realized it was because of the meal feeding patterns. And so that kind of led us to all of that thinking. But it sort of evolved. You know, we just did a lot of meal-based things over the years and learned that when you do it right, you get different answers. That's an evolution in my research that most people don't realize. You know, if you talk to Lane Norton or Tracy Anthony or some of the people who worked in my, they'll tell you that that's an enormous part of the research. Yeah, and how we got on that topic is, you know, you were talking about some of

challenges around the idea that too much protein is connected to mTOR and mTOR is associated with less longevity well it's based on these mouse trials that the question is again is it done right now long are you looking at the right tissues i mean mTOR's in every tissue so mTOR is regulated in the liver by insulin in the muscle by lucine so it's different if you're looking at a tumor cell it's related to insulin. It's not related to leucine. So when people summarize these things, we're trying to protect muscle, and they're talking about tumors. Apples and oranges. Apples and oranges. And then can you chat, you know, chat out about mouse data and some of the nuances that are there. That was really insightful. Can you talk about some of these

observational studies that are there as well? The other data is the epidemiology, the observational studies. And so, you know, those drive me crazy because they're such crappy studies. Basically, what you're trying to do, you know, the origins of epidemiology is you have a red pill and a blue pill, and 10 years later, you ask what was the effect of it? That's pretty straightforward. But in nutrition, you've got lifestyles, you know, how do you weight smoking and stress and obesity and exercise and and how much broccoli you eat with how much protein you eat. And so the problem with epidemiology is most of the studies will take one, what we call food frequency questionnaire.

I would ask you yesterday, what did you eat? And you would tell me, you know, how much protein, how much carbohydrate, how much, how many french fries you had, whatever. And then 20 years from now, we'd say, did you get diabetes or did you have a heart attack? So basically that assumes that you eat the same thing for the next 20 years and that what you ate yesterday represents what you're going to eat for the next 20 years. We know both of those are false. So, you know, the old story of computers, garbage in, garbage out, that's what epidemiology is.

We're going with a hard end point, a death, mortality, diabetes, and yet we're starting with really lousy data, food data, you know, from food frequency. And one of my problems with that is that protein is the only thing people remember. If I ask you, how many eggs did you eat yesterday, you'd give me the exact number. If I asked you how much milk you drank yesterday, you'd give me the exact number. we drink it by ounces. If I ask you how much beef you buy it by the ounce. I had a quarter pounder. I had a six ounce steak. I had a six ounce fish filet. But how many carbs were in the bag of potato chips? How many carbs were in the slice of bread? Was it 20 grams or was it 45? How big was the bagel? You know, and so the problem with the data is, is that protein has reasonably statistically, you know, it's, It's a sort of a narrow statistic and where the carbohydrates is all over the board. So when I see statistics that basically say, well, protein relates to the onset of something,

I always tell myself, substitute calories and carbohydrates for the word protein, and you've got the right answer. If in the future people were to look at replacements for these observational studies and these food questionnaires, right, these food surveys, do you imagine, and maybe we don't have the technology or we don't have the means to do it right now, but can you imagine a better way with humans that we could do this? Or is it just a difficult situation? It's difficult. It's difficult. Because we want long-term outcomes, but we can't study it long enough to get those. We can't control your diet for the next 20 years to get the real answer.

So my solution to that, and contrary to what everyone else does, is there are three forms of data, epidemiology, human trials with controlled studies, random controlled trials, RCTs, and animal studies. When those three all agree, take it to the bank. When those don't agree, start questioning it. And people say, well, I don't like rodent studies, and I want long-term outcomes. So the only thing they pay attention to in our dietary guidelines is epidemiology, that means you're going to be wrong because the data is the worst. People say, well, I don't like rodent studies. Well, everything that I did in my research, all of the discoveries we made were with rodents.

If we couldn't have done that, we would still have our head in the sand about mTOR and lucene. Okay, so it's hard to say that rodent studies are relevant. But I know how to do rodent studies. I understand the mechanism. When the mechanism works, then I put it into practice with a human weight loss study. I got exactly the same data. Now I can look out at some epidemiology and I can say, okay, if you really know how to do the epidemiology and you screen for smoking and all of the other factors, protein's a positive factor.

Now I've got all three things together and I'm 100% sure I'm right. The longevity people have very crappy animal studies. They have very poor epidemiology and they have no mechanistic data to speak of. Yeah. And your average person who's listening today, I mean, I'm so thankful for these long format conversations and I so appreciate you giving us this much time because people are confused and eating is something that people do every day. But like a lot of things, you know, we just have to make sure that the people that are,

you know, I actually, I welcome the different ideas and made the best ideas rise to the top because people are very smart. They'll listen in, they'll hear. And just like my own thinking evolved over the years, you know, that's generally how people get started. They think one way and they think stopped working for them and they start to be open to other ideas. I'm not at all and all or nothing and sort of person. And anybody who actually has ever seen me eat knows I'm a really flexible person and how I personally eat. But I think it's important for recognized to know that you build your diet around protein. If you choose to be low, protein, okay, but that means you're choosing to be very high resistance exercise. You've got to buffer that. And the older you get, that's going to be a risk. But you choose your protein, and that's an absolute number. That's not a percentage of calories. Protein's an absolute number. I want 150 grams per day or 120. You pick that, and then you pick carbohydrates and fat relative to your energy needs. I like carbohydrates. I'm going to eat. 300 grams per day and I'm going to put in two and a half hours of exercise. That's a great choice.

I'm okay with fat. I don't have a problem with it. I'm going to eat animal fat. Fine. Just be sure your calories are in check. I have diabetes. I'm going to control my carbohydrates. I have very high LDLs. I'm going to control my lipids. You make those choices for your individual. I think the future of nutrition has to be personalized nutrition. And we, need to have the tools to do that. And one of those tools is having a very clear understanding of protein because it's the single most important nutrition decision we make. Everything else revolves around it. And if you make the wrong decision there, you're really behind the eight ball to make everything else work. That's well said. And you mentioned something just very briefly, but it's worthwhile just

making sure people get a chance to understand that. You're saying that if you choose a low protein diet, you really need to be super active. And this might be one of the reasons that we see, you know, when I was young at the age of 12, my parents took me on a cross-country trip throughout India. And we're driving through these, you know, rice patties and fields. And there's individuals that are out there that their diet does not really have access to a lot of high quality proteins and stuff. And they're most of them in the state that we were in, Gujarat, are vegetarian. But, and, you know, you see women that are 60 years old working in the rice peasant. and their abs are ripped.

And even though they're lean, their muscle is like very strong, right? And they're not obese. And their mobility is great. And even though they may not have protein in their diet at the levels that we're talking about here, they are active all day long, lifting heavy, heavy things. So if you choose to go down that route, you really need to have the activity that matches. And the younger you are, the better it works. You can pull it off easier.

but, you know, exercise and particularly resistance exercise will buffer that effect and you'll get away from it. And, you know, you go back in the United States, you know, pre-World War II and everybody was worked in physical labor. Now everybody works behind a computer. So, you know, we're going in the wrong direction for lower protein and lower exercise kind of lifestyles. You know, and I think those are the big things we have to. come to grips with. Once you start making choices, then you have to make, have other things. We have a fairly big range of choices we can make, but once you start making them, the range of options starts narrowing. And that's what people don't seem to come to grips with.

Well, Dr. Donald Lehman, this has been a pleasure. It's such a fantastic episode. And again, your work as a nature of influencing the mentees around you, Dr. Gabriel Lyon, who's been a big figure in my life has led to positive changes in my life, my life, my parents' life, you know, it's not, I want to acknowledge that it's, you know, growing up vegetarian, it's, it's really a central part of our, you know, religious background, you know, I don't consider myself religious now. So the fact that even my parents, you know, at the age of, you know, 60 and 70, switched their diet because they're looking at the latest literature and working with functional medicine doctors. And my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer many years ago,

knock on wood, she's doing great. She's in remission. But her doctor, Dr. Elizabeth Bohm, sat down and said, listen, you can continue to be vegetarian and we can work on this and try to get to the root of the cancer. And she had a whole team. You know, it wasn't just diet and nutrition. She had a whole team that she was working with. But it's going to be that much harder. I really need to get your carbohydrates down. I need to get your protein up. And if you're open to it, I need you to think about maybe incorporating some animal protein. And that was a big decision for somebody who's been vegetarian their entire life to do it. And I don't want anyone to go away from this podcast thinking that I'm anti-vegetables.

I am a huge vegetable fan. I'm anti-refined grains. And one of the problems we have with this narrative of more plant-based diet is the United States agriculture, we're in northern country. our primary vegetables, plants that we produce are wheat and corn and soybeans. And those aren't the solutions to help. We don't grow broccoli and avocados in Minnesota. You know, we have to come to grips with, okay, a plant-based diet is great.

We just need better plants. But we don't need more wheat in our diet. Yeah. And the moral of the story with my mom is that a large percentage of her diet was refined carbohydrates, flowers, things like that, a little bit more of a kind of processed modern Indian vegetable diet, but processed vegetables. And her vegetables has gone up and she's had these targeted animal proteins and she's, you know, I post on my stories every so often on Instagram. She's lifting weights now, thanks to my brother-in-law and sister and, you know, they're doing

sawn on other things and they feel great. They're probably in the best shape of their lives in the last few years. And so I want to thank you for having that influence on me, my family, And I wish everybody who's listening here, you know, choose your adventure based on all the recommendations that are there. And just know that, you know, if you're not really putting protein at the focus, you're rolling the dice a little bit with your health. And before we conclude over here, if our audience wants to keep in touch with you and follow your work, how could they do that? So I'm not super active on social media, but I do follow Twitter as at Don Lehman, which is real easy. My university email is real easy also, which is DeLayman at Illinois.edu, so that's real easy. I also have a website called Metabolictransformation.com.

And, you know, I weighed into some of the topics of understanding metabolism and weight loss and, you know, how do you evaluate proteins and things. So it's really written for a very lay public. So Metabolicransformation.com might be a place that people will go. and find some useful information. Great. We'll have all those in the show notes to the links to those. Don, thanks again.

A pleasure to meet you. Thank you, Drew. My pleasure.