In this episode, Dr. Rena Malik, MD welcomes Dr. Gabrielle Lyon to discuss the crucial role of dietary protein in optimizing muscle ...

are-red-meats-truly-the-villain-theyre-made-out-to-be-ft-dr-gabrielle-lyon

Are Red Meats Truly the Villain They’re Made out to Be? Ft. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

you've talked about dietary protein a lot and it really yeah and how it is extremely important for our muscle health so let's talk about what is the optimal amount of protein and macronutrient sort of profile for a person who's looking to optimize their muscular Health yes um this is probably my favorite topic and I've been talking about it for 20 years and surprisingly you would think I would be sick of talking about it but I'm I'm actually not because here's why you know you were on my podcast and we were chatting and I think being a physician is a privilege and I think being a well-trained physician is a privilege and I have a unique perspective because I trained in nutritional Sciences for seven years and also trained as a geriatrician for those listening it's typically over the age of 65 it is all about muscle health and aging those things I mean we do this in clinic as just metrics and dietary protein is probably the most controversial nutrition topic we're gonna cover some of those myths so but so but we're gonna talk about well what is protein well protein we don't actually need protein we need the amino acids there's 20 different amino acids nine of which are essential all of which have various needs they are not um there's limiting amino acids and they're not equally limiting and why this is important is because when it comes to muscle Health we're going to I'm sure talk about Lucine which is one of the amino acids necessary for muscle Health but I'm gonna Frame Up For The Listener the one thing that they can do and that is they're going to think this is too much but just hang with me here one gram per pound ideal body weight that's on the high end and people are going to think one gram per pound ideal body weight well what's my ideal body weight last time you felt great and maybe that was College I don't know but it's something very simple to do now I think it's also important to mention that people have probably heard about the RDA which is the recommended dietary allowance that number is set to prevent deficiencies that number is8 gr per kilogram that comes out to 37 G per pound so let me put this in perspective if you are a 115 pound person that's 45 grams of protein that's the minimum to prevent deficiencies we don't want to be minimum no and that's a really great point that is not actually going to support aging and these uh recommendations haven't changed for decades it's not going to be growing our skeleton muscles which is what we need to do to prevent that decline that's exactly right and something else happens it's also important to recognize that that minimum was also based on high quality proteins so the sources of proteins and they were considered so what we consider a high quality protein is something that comes from animal-based sources not for any other reason other than hard fast biological number numbers and so that minimum of8 G per kilogram comes from high quality proteins and I think that that's important to mention because as individuals move more plant-based you have to recognize that you're going to need more total protein to account for um the missing amino acids the amino acids the bioavailability those kinds of things so let's let's talk about some of the misconceptions that people have of them yes one is well the big ones okay so I can't digest that much protein so yes and you know I don't know where this came from but this is this idea that that would be the same uh the same as saying well I can't metabolize that much testosterone well you metabolize in some way or another all the testosterone in your body it's being utilized for something okay could it be bound yes but your body is going to utilize it all the idea that you can only absorb or digest 30 grams of protein there's no evidence to support that you digest and absorb all the protein that you ingest the question then becomes where does that excess protein go and what is the benefit above say 55 grams of dietary protein at one meal um and you could think about that as a 6 o stake or 6 and a half or 7 ounce steak your body will max out its effect on skeletal muscle at around 55 grams but the rest is still utilized whether it's for tissue turnover whether it's for hormone production you name it but the body uses all of it and what about the misconception that protein is bad for my kidneys um there have been multiple meta analyses saying and showing that actually supports healthy kidney function all right the other one that comes up often is you shouldn't eat that much if you're not using it like if you're not training and say you're just living your regular daily life like there's no need for that much protein because I'm not going to the gym right and I would say um as you age the tissue changes and it becomes something called uh more anabolically resistant and it becomes less sensitive to the signaling of dietary protein and when you think about it the way to overcome that is through increasing dietary protein and the evidence supports double the RDA for a more optimal level 1.6 gr per kilogram and that's actually the minimum that I would recommend individuals ingest and that's closer to uh7 grams per pound so you're you know up ticking higher amounts of protein because you have to understand why are we eating protein we're eating protein because we have to support overall protein turnover protein turnover is not just muscle it's everything and the body turns over around 300 grams a day and we only eat what the average male eats about 100 grams of protein a day so the body I just want to make sure people heard that the body turns over 300 gram of protein a day that's right and we are eating so the average woman will eat 68 grams of protein and the average male will eat about 100 grams of protein yeah and I will say I've been weighing my Foods more recently and you'd be shocked at how like little we actually like so you go out to eat and you order like say anything with chicken or or beef or whatever like it's not a lot the amount of protein you're getting is really small I know and we have to think that when you eat a protein forward diet you protect skeletal muscle there's only two major ways to stimulate skeletal muscle number one through exercise which is arguably the most effective just because of the mechanical loading and the Cascade of events that happen after that but the other way to stimulate skeletal muscle is through diet and that's something that 100% of people do is they eat yeah and so you have to get that right if you do nothing else you have to create a foundation of a nutritional plan that is going to support aging you know and also on the contrary you hear a lot of longevity experts talking about reducing dietary protein nothing could be more harmful to aging than reducing dietary protein yeah where did they get that from um well uh some not great science but also this idea that uh it's supresses a pathway called this mtor pathway but it's not based in human data yes and also as practicing Physicians we have to think okay what does support Health skeletal muscle mass supports Health if you recomend recommend below the RDA which we've already established is the minimum to prevent a deficiency some longevity experts recommend. 3 G per kilogram that's you're not even you're not even preventing deficiency at that point right yeah and that is a huge myth so um maybe calorie restriction is a benefit but again the lower your calories get the higher your protein intake needs to be again the body turns over 300 grams of protein a day so even if you're not doing resistance training protein intake in and of itself is going to support skeleton muscle and in fact you know we have used something called the protein sparing modified fast individuals that had to go through surgery or bariatric surgery you name it that needed to really affect body composition and L and maintain muscle mass and lean tissue which also includes bone dietary protein is essential for that you're not going to maintain those tissues even with a tremendous amount of exercise if you do not have protein on board because you need those building blocks you need those individual amino acids so what I want to talk about before we talk about animal-based protein there's a couple things that you've mentioned that I've heard about one is that actually eating more protein will improve your willpower so we're always people are always want to lose weight right the large majority of the country wants to lose weight so if you tell me increasing Pro eating more protein is going to help my willpower to calorie restrict and lose weight that's really powerful it is you know I've been in the nutrition space for 20 years and one of the things that we always talk about is how do we design a diet so individuals are not suffering because for whatever reason people find that hunger is an emergency which as we know that's not maybe having to go to the bathroom on an airplane while you're strapped in and there's turbulence that might be an emergency but hunger is not an emergency and one of the ways in which you design a diet is how do you affect gut hormones how do you affect brain and the way in which you do that in an effective way is through increasing dietary protein and some of the early work came out of Heather Li's lab and basically she looked at younger adolescents and she increased the dietary protein between 35 to 40 grams at that first meal at breakfast and what they found was on brain Imaging is that that next meal individuals were much less likely to pick up cake or something sweet the reward systems on the in the brain were not activated so there's a satiating mechanism with dietary protein again you're hearing a lot of discussion around gp1s uh but other hormones like cck from the gut these are an effective way to increase satiation just by increasing dietary protein it's very difficult to overeat dietary protein for this reason yeah I've heard you say it before but like if you're hungry and you sit down with a chicken breast and you don't eat it that means you're not hungry exactly I mean that is the ultimate but you know you might sit down with a bag of popcorn you're like popcorn or uh chicken breast which which one are you going to go for yeah if you're not hungry there's no way you're going to eat that dried chicken breast yeah but if you're hungry you'll eat anything um or if you're eating for uh honic reasons which people eat for a lot of other reasons other than hunger um and there's something very interesting called the protein leverage hypothesis I don't know if you've heard about it and it's really fascinating and this is that the the human and actually across animal species will eat to a certain level of protein and it comes out to be roughly 20% protein maybe a little bit less but one of the reasons why this group and it's Simpson and um his colleague uh believed that obesity has become such a problem is because the ultr processed foods and the high palatable foods and less protein intake that people will continue to eat this drive for food is actually a drive for amino acids wow that's that makes a lot of sense yeah so you course correct so you've in terms of dietary protein intake how should you spread it out through your day there's a lot of contention around this topic and I know that that probably seems silly people go from one meal a day to two meals a day and I really fault in part my mentor Dr Donald Layman because him and Doug Paton Jones did some of these original studies that talked about protein distribution and protein distribution was 30 gam of protein three times a day but I think it's really important to recognize the backstory as to where this came from and what they found was initially individuals that followed a normal American eating plan which was a low protein breakfast we'll say 12 gram of protein a moderate protein lunch maybe 20 to 30 grams of protein and a big protein dinner where you have your steak and potatoes those individuals with that were backloading protein when you redistributed protein to the first meal of the day and the last meal of the day that their body composition Changed by doing nothing other than redistributing the macronutrients so I want people to take a moment and listen to this so if you look at the studies that are isocaloric meaning they had both groups and and I worked on some of these early studies both groups had the same amount of calories so let's just call it500 calories one group backloaded protein and had um lower protein breakfast moderate protein lunch and then a high protein dinner when you redistributed those calories from protein to that first meal of the day and equally throughout the rest of the day they saw body composition changes a loss in body fat and increase in lean tissue by doing nothing else than changing the way in which they distributed the calories that's amazing that's that's that's I mean that's amazing yeah so the question becomes they were measuring this with dexas scans they were measuring with dexas scans um and then the next question is how sensitive were those scans SC right so you need a significant amount of change to be able or meaningful amount of change to be able to determine outcomes especially as individual's age so when you have your first meal of the day between 30 to 50 grams of protein you're coming out of an overnight fast you stimulate the mechanisms that are responsible for muscle protein synthesis for any Physicians listening or individuals that are uh involved in healthcare muscle protein synthesis is a way in which we measure it's a biomarker for muscle health so you either turn it on or you don't and lower protein intakes below a certain threshold do not stimulate muscle protein synthesis and what happens is is sarcopenia or obesogenic sarcopenia is a huge problem we know the majority of individuals are obese I mean that's crazy the majority of our population are either overweight or obese so if you can imagine what percentage of those individuals have healthy skeletal muscle I would argue that the majority of them don't and if we do not correct not just what we eat but how we eat the loss of skeletal muscle mass is going to be clear but if we can redistribute protein then you can change body outcomes and there's one more important thing to mention about dietary protein which I think is underappreciated is this idea that protein has this thermic effect of food thermic effect of feeding so when you eat fat you store a large majority of the fat when you eat carbohydrates you know you utilize all of it but protein when you eat protein in this distributed way because it stimulates muscle you will use 20% of that food for example if you have 100 calories from dietary protein and you eat um between 30 and 50 I'm just picking 100 then you'll get a net gain of 80 calories because 20% of those calories will be utilized whether it's digestion absorption but probably because of the stimulation of skeletal muscle because again skeletal muscle is a nutrient sensing organ system and that is practical and very easy to understand to change body composition we haven't even talked about exercise specifically the combination of diet and exercise yeah so you've said and you said 30 gram three times or totally distributed throughout meal I've heard you say 50 g in the morning 50 g at dinner and then that's more important than the 30 throughout the day why is that um because that first and that last meal are the most important I understand the first meal what I think I'm struggling with is the last meal because you're going into overnight fast got it got it and if you have a a protein amount especially as you age that is sub threshold so let's say 20 gram of protein and you know you might hear some other protein experts say well that 20 gram is going to be enough I think when an individual is aging or suffering with low levels of inflammation or obese or any kind of chronic condition you require a certain amount of protein to stimulate that tissue and so by dosing it appropriately just think about how we dose medicine we stimulate that tissue and we know that you're going into an overnight fast and that becomes critical you're not having es and flows of blood sugar hopefully you shouldn't be because part of protein will generate glucose and you generate glucose through a process called glucono Genesis for every 100 grams of protein you might generate 60 grams of carbohydrate but it's slower it's less efficient and you're not dependent on dietary carbohydrates to maintain blood sugar yeah it's releasing and as you mentioned in a more steady fashion absolutely you're not getting those spikes yeah and you have to support whole body turnover if you hit the health of skeletal muscle by between 30 to 50 gam of protein everything else falls into place because you've now guaranteed yourself a robust amount of again these amino acids which every you know all 20 amino acids have diverse biological roles and when you hit that then you know you hit skeletal muscle but now you've provided your body enough to get all the other needs met if you enjoyed this clip of the romic MD podcast make sure you check out the full episode with my friend Dr Gabriel lion right here

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