00:00
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mikkipedia. And this week on the podcast, I speak to Professor Don Layman.

00:12
Don is back on the podcast with me today, and I'm super excited to share this with you. We dive more in depth into specific amino acids and their importance in health. The leucine threshold and why that is important with muscle protein synthesis, but it's not the only amino acid which is important. The belief of how much protein we need in a meal to optimize muscle protein synthesis. We talk about the differences between

00:41
plant proteins and animal proteins, and why it isn't just the amino acids which make a difference to what we need. And we talk about so much more because Don is an absolute guru. He is one of the world's foremost experts in protein metabolism, and I'm just super lucky to have had the ability to have this conversation with him. He is the OG in the protein world. He's got over 100 publications, over 5,000 citations on the subject.

01:08
but he is so good at distilling the information to the general population. So I really think you're gonna get so much from this conversation. So Dr. Donald Layman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Layman has been a leader in research about protein, nutrition for athletic performance, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular health. And as I said, he has...

01:35
thousands of citations and over 100 peer-reviewed publications. He has received numerous awards for his research from the American Society for Nutrition and the National Institutes for Health and for his nutrition teaching. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior and he is on editorial boards of nutrition and metabolism and nutrition research and practice. He has an extensive consulting background including work with NASA,

02:04
the Shriners Children's Hospital, the US Air Force, plus numerous food companies and organizations, including, and he has a bunch of ones including Kraft Foods, Nestle, AgriPure and the National Dairy Council. He earned his doctorate in the Human Nutrition and Biochemistry at the University of Minnesota. He's also got an amazing YouTube channel along with Dr. Gabriel Lyon, where they have conversations about all of this stuff, which I think you'll also find super helpful.

02:32
So just before we crack on into the episode, I'd like to remind you that the best way to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button at your favorite podcast listening platform, leave a five star review. Why not? That will just increase the visibility of the podcast in amongst the thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get to hear from experts that I have on the show, such as Professor Don Layman. All right team, enjoy this conversation.

03:03
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me again this morning, your afternoon. Protein such a hot topic, which is this quite like, are you quite excited by the emerging conversation in the public about protein when for so long it was about fat and carbohydrate? Yeah, I mean, excited sort of implies, you know, it's my area of research, therefore I'm excited about it.

03:32
I think I'm excited from a nutrition standpoint that the focus on fat was really misguided and I think we know that now. Protein is a better way to structure your diet. It's been fun to watch that. Clearly, I've been in the field for 40 years and protein is basically it was something for kids or bodybuilders.

04:01
I think around 2000, we really got a lot more, I mean, in developed countries, we were seeing older populations and we started thinking about that more and we realized that diseases of muscle, sarcopenia, wasting as we got older, osteoporosis, were really all fundamentally protein problems. And so we really started getting some research that kind of refocused it. So I think...

04:29
I'm excited about it not only because I do research in the area and we've made a lot of contributions and discoveries, but also I think it's just better for the general public to perceive what keeps them healthy. I completely agree. And I find it so, I feel for the general public, however, because there is that disconnect in some areas between what we need to be healthy and well.

04:58
as we age, because as you said, we are an aging population, versus the push against the idea that we need protein, because you so often hear, oh no, we get plenty of protein. Plants have plenty of protein, and you get people who are experts in certain areas and potentially their field. People might equate Don Lehmann with, say, this other person who...

05:27
is against protein, I feel like that's a continuing conversation that I have with people anyway. Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. If you look at a lot of the motivations that are out there, a lot of the motivations are aimed at being against protein. For years, we have people arguing about cholesterol. And if you accept the cholesterol argument, you get two things.

05:56
push against use of animals and the other is you can sell a lot of drugs. And so there's money in it. If you push against protein, then you can sell a lot of grains and grains are cheaper. Food industry makes a lot more money. If we make people think that they can eat a lot of grains, then we can sell a lot more diabetes drugs because we have to manage all those carbs.

06:24
You know there's just a lot of motivation against protein. If you look at anything in the food chain, protein is the most expensive and the least profitable. A lot of proteins go directly from the farm to the consumer. Milk, eggs, even meats, there's very little processing of it, requires refrigeration at every step, and there's some wastage to it, you know, it doesn't have long shelf life.

06:53
where the most money is made from selling grains. You can buy cheap grains, process the heck out of it, put it in bags and boxes with shelf lives of two years, and make a lot of money. So, you know, if you just sort of follow the money, you can understand why there's all these people who would be negative about protein. Yeah. And, you know, what I want to chat to you today specifically about is, well, you know, we just sort of start a little bit.

07:21
narrower and then broaden our focus because I do have some crowdsourced questions that people are still interested to understand a little bit better. But what I'm seeing out there in the social media space is this idea that plant protein is as bioavailable, it is as digestible, and therefore it is a like substitute for your animal protein counterparts.

07:50
And that's generally it, like plant is as good as animal. So I thought, you know, you're certainly a person who can tell us whether or not this is the case and why this is even an idea in the first place. Yeah, I mean, fundamentally you look at it and the animal proteins have exactly the right balance of essential amino acids for humans, where all mammals and proteins are the right balance, where the...

08:20
Proteins and plants have amino acid balance to grow plants. They grow leaves and stems and roots and flowers, which are pretty different than brains and arms and legs and hearts. And so they're just not the right balance. The other thing is plants have proteins that are for the structural part of the plant, which means a lot of their proteins are bound to fiber inside the plant, which makes it not bioavailable. So your basic question,

08:49
you know, are they as good? No, they're never as good. You have to have more of them. They all have essential amino acids in them, but typically if you're comparing an animal on a plant protein, you need 50 to 100% more of the plant protein to be equal. So if you decide that you're going to eat 120 grams of protein per day, you can do pretty well with plant proteins.

09:20
But if you decide you're only gonna eat 60 grams per day, you're probably gonna be deficient in one or more essential amino acids with plant proteins. As far as digestibility, one needs to always sort out native plant proteins versus isolated plant proteins. So if you look at a plant protein in a soybean,

09:45
it's probably only about 30 to 40% available. So if you're looking at a soybean and it says you have 10 grams, you're probably only gonna get three or four. However, if you process that soybean and extract the protein and put it into a powder, now it's probably 90% available or so. So it would be comparable to animal protein. So part of it is whether you're dealing with an ultra-processed plant,

10:14
or whether you're dealing with a native plant. If you're looking at beans and legumes and things, quinoa, typically the bioavailability is only around 40%. Right, and I think this is where people get a little bit confused is that they look at a nutrition label and what the protein count is as to what it provides.

10:37
but it doesn't actually indicate how much of that wear actually is available to us to eat. In the United States, I don't know what your facts panel looks like in New Zealand. We have what's called DVs, dietary- Yes, daily values or something. Yeah, so that would reflect digestibility or bioavailability. And most people will find that there are very few DVs on their packaging. Why? Because-

11:04
now they're not actually measuring the bioavailability. So to your point, the FACS panel has a lot of problems with it. One, it's just a measure of nitrogen. So they make a nitrogen measure of the food and probably just the ingredients, and they add up the ingredients. But it might not even be protein. It could be urea. It could be any other compound that had nitrogen in it.

11:31
It's even examples of food companies putting in non-food items that contain nitrogen, things like melamine, which will deceive the assay. There were Chinese examples of many infant formulas that were being deceived that way. So it's nitrogen. Then it's multiplied by a factor of 6.25, which says that every amino acid has...

12:00
16% nitrogen in it. So nitrogen would translate into protein, but that's not true. Non-essential amino acids have more total nitrogen. They have more amino acids that have higher nitrogen contents. So basically a plant is, a plant protein is getting far more credit for protein than it actually deserves.

12:28
both because it has low bioavailability and because it has higher levels of non-essential amino acids, which are higher in nitrogen. So the label is misleading. A typical plant-based label that says, again, that says it has 10 grams on it probably has less than half of what it says. Okay, so and you've just touched on a number of things that I would love for us to discuss to help people's

12:57
understanding of this. And I think the first one, Don, is, can we just sort of remind people what amino acid is, what is essential versus non-essential, and then move on to discuss the nitrogen piece? Because I feel like, because that's, for anyone listening, they'll be like, I think I get it, but I'm not quite sure. Yeah, so we talk about protein.

13:25
And that dates back over 100 years. We've known, you know, agricultural people, we've known that people need protein literally for hundreds of years. But we didn't actually discover all of the amino acids until I think the 1930s. And so in the early, you know, around 1900, we developed a lot of approaches that use nitrogen. That's a pretty easy chemical test.

13:53
where measuring amino acids is a very complex test to measure all these different amino acids. So, you know, I always like to liken protein to like a vitamin pill. A vitamin pill is just a carrying, it's a place to where we package vitamins. We don't talk about the size of the pill or the color of the pill, we talk about the 14 vitamins inside of it. And protein is really just a food source of amino acids. We don't have

14:23
We have zero need for protein. What we have a need for is amino acids. So it's just a food source. There are generally considered 20 naturally occurring amino acids. 11 of them we can actually make in the body. So if we have enough different kinds of proteins, we can make it kind of fill in the gaps. But nine of them we consider essential or indispensable and we have to get those in the diet.

14:52
pretty much daily, if not even meal to meal. So those nine essential, you know, are what we sort of build our protein requirements around. And each of those has a requirement just like we have a requirement for vitamin C or vitamin D, we have a requirement for leucine and lysine and threonine and tryptophan, which are essential amino acids. So yeah, we're getting a little more conscious of that.

15:21
published some work trying to make people think more about essential amino acids and less about protein. And I think as people talk more about plant-based diets, this becomes more and more important because typically when people shift to a more plant-based diet, they decrease their total protein and their quality of protein and the bioavailability all at the same time. And we think that's going to be a real risk. Right now...

15:50
the United States and I think it's fairly common, probably close in New Zealand, we get about 60-65 percent of our total daily protein from animal sources on average. We've done some modeling of that and based on current dietary patterns, if you get down below 50 percent from animal proteins, there's a very real risk you'll be deficient in one or more essential amino acids.

16:20
So again, there's a lot of nuance to understanding amino acids. The general public doesn't understand that right now. And we think there's some real risk talking about plant-based proteins without understanding the liabilities and risks that go with it. Yeah, for sure. And I think people from an amino acid perspective, if they've heard of anything, they've heard of leucine. And it's the one which we almost,

16:49
paying a lot of our protein recommendations on, isn't it? Yeah, and I'll take either blame or credit for that. Since we sort of made the discoveries that made it famous, I think leucine is a very interesting marker. So let's take a couple of other amino acids and talk about them. So two other essential amino acids

17:18
which is very low, deficient in almost all grains, and histidine, we know that those two amino acids are very important in growth. And if you look at malnutrition around the world, malnutrition really means children are not getting enough of those two amino acids. As we get into adulthood, those two become somewhat less important, and we're not adding new tissues.

17:45
The rate of breakdown of those two amino acids is very slow, and producing deficiencies of those is pretty hard. I mean, we just have very large pools. On the other hand, leucine is relatively available in foods, and there's no indication that children or young adults are ever deficient in it. But what we have learned from really my research is that...

18:14
As we get older, our efficiency of making new proteins goes down and leucine becomes a key signal for how we do that. So in a child, you know, in a young adult, take a 25-year-old who's probably not really growing, the leucine requirement might very well be 2.7 grams per day. We think in a 60-year-old it's probably 7.5 grams per day.

18:41
So a massive difference in the requirement as you get older. So, you know, I think that's part of what we think about is personalized nutrition or precision nutrition is that talking about a protein intake's not adequate. We don't talk about vitamin C as, well, as long as you get 60 milligrams, you don't get scurvy, you're fine. We talk about it, well, during, if you get a cold, you should take a supplement. If you're worried about COVID, you should take a supplement. You might take,

19:11
a gram, a thousand grams of it, as opposed to 60 milligrams. I'm sorry, you might take a full gram of it as opposed to 60 milligrams. You know, so we make decisions to personalise it for, you know, different ages, different stages. And I think that's where we need to get with thinking about amino acids. And that translates into food you choose.

19:40
just to sort of remind the listener or bring them up to speed. So I often, you know, when I'm talking to people and I'm relaying to them the information that you've just sort of told us that, you know, I talk about like a dimmer switch, like there's something in your brain, so the dimmer switch gets turned down. I'm sure you would have said that at some point, that's where I've got it from. And so we need more to sort of get it to activate, more leucine in any one particular meal. So...

20:08
Is that true? And at what age is this something that we need to be concerned about? Because people are always like, not that this means, you know, 44, no issue, 45, you've got a big issue. But you know, do we have some sense of that? Yeah, you know, the reality is, is we, because we've been focused on protein, we don't know as much about individual amino acids as we really need to. And we can, you know, make some comments about

20:36
threonine and tryptophan and phenylalanine. Some of those I think are important for people to think about. But leucine, for example, where's the line? Well, when you're growing, your muscle protein turnover, your body protein turnover is really driven by hormones. And so what you're looking for is at what point do the hormones stop driving things? And that's somewhere between 30

21:06
and 40. So we don't really have a hard line, you know, 40, 45, you know, where's the line? We don't know. Doug Patton Jones and I did an experiment with 37-year-old women and we see the dietary pattern, the meal pattern that's driven by leucine by 37. So I typically use the term, I use the age of around 30.

21:33
But there's kind of a honeymoon between 30 and 40 where you can kind of get away with what you did at 25 and it doesn't really hurt, but by the time you're 40, it starts catching up with you. If you think about osteoporosis, if you think about sarcopenia, most people say that, well, we begin the aging decline around 40. We'll lose 5% to 8% muscle mass per decade after 40.

22:02
So, you know, it's clearly starting by 40. Yeah, yeah. And since we're on the topic of aging, this was a question I had later on, but I may as well ask you this now, like there is, as I understand it, is less research at lunch. So often we look at the leucine or protein loads at breakfast and dinner as being things that we need to target. Like, is that how you would sort of frame it?

22:31
Yeah, that's fun. I'm actually writing a research article as we speak about meal distribution. We had Dr. Gabrielle Lyon and I did a podcast yesterday with the people from Luc Van Loon's group in the Netherlands. We've been talking about that. I think one of the things to think about in terms of meal distribution is, first of all, age again.

22:59
The meal distribution, just like the leucine question, is an adult issue. It's an older adult issue. There's a lot of different data that suggests that children or even young adults, 25, 27-year-olds, there's no effect of meal distribution. They have a meal of 10 grams or 20 grams or 30 grams, they'll get those effects. And so it's really protein per day for those ages.

23:30
Once we get beyond 40, certainly in our 50s, 60s, we know that meal distribution does make an effect, that leucine threshold is important. And so, you know, those are things we do know about the aging process. I'm sorry, I sort of lost the question there somewhere. No, no, that was good. Yeah, that was good. So we do need to be concerned about that leucine

24:00
Breakfast and dinner? Like what's the... You mentioned the lunch. So one of the things that people don't recognize or don't think about is literally the only research that's ever been done is at breakfast. And breakfast is a loose term. It's the first meal after an overnight fast. Why do people do it? Well, maybe because the researchers are all lazy. So they get up, they come to the lab, and that's when they do it.

24:26
But the other reason is because it's most sensitive meal, because we've gone through an overnight fast, the body becomes catabolic. We're breaking down proteins at night. And so now we're very sensitive to a protein meal. And so there's a lot of research that we know that first meal is very sensitive to the protein, particularly as adults, less so as child, children.

24:53
But as adults, there's this threshold somewhere around 30 grams of protein. And again, it's not driven by the amount of protein, it's driven by the amount of leucine. And so we think it's around three grams, which if it's whey protein, it's around 25 grams. If it's soy, it's around 35. And if it's wheat, it's around 45. So we use the term 30 assuming that

25:20
average Americans are getting about 65% of their protein from animal protein. So that means it's about 8% leucine. So 30 basically covers it. So that's, what's interesting is there are some studies sort of at dinner and later meals, but to my knowledge, there's never been a single study of lunch. Yeah. And protein synthesis. So...

25:46
There's some reasons that from our signaling data and some of the things that we've studied that we think lunch may be less sensitive. It's part of your total daily protein. So having protein at lunch is good. If you're diabetic, having protein versus carbs is good to stabilize blood sugar. But is there a threshold to lunch? We don't know that. And there are a lot of the data that we have

26:15
makes me suspicious that it's not as sensitive. So I always emphasize first and last meal, middle of day, kind of what's your protein target and what's your calorie target and decide what fits your lifestyle. Yeah, and Don, like there are plenty of people who love to fast and not eat breakfast. And these people who I'm thinking about predominantly do it from

26:43
fact that it's easier for them from a calorie balance perspective to sort of shift the calories into a smaller time window. Is there value in those people having some sort of essential amino acid powder or I don't know whether that's the same as, you know, let's say you get an EAA and it's got that three grams of leucine, is that going to cover their bases until they have a first meal? Like what are your thoughts around that?

27:11
Okay, good. Yeah. You have to have the complete proteins. So once you have leucine, which is a signal to start the process, then you need all 20 amino acids to make the process work. You can't build protein from nothing. You have to have 20 amino acids. So leucine is a signal that says... Leucine is kind of interesting. Leucine...

27:37
The branch chain amino acids, leucine, valine, isoleucine, of the 20 are the only ones not metabolized in the liver. So when you eat them, they pass right into the blood and go out to tissues like the muscle. And so the muscle gets a picture of exactly what you ate. My belief is that our bodies have evolved to recognize leucine as a signal that you just ate enough protein to trigger the process.

28:07
If leucine's too low, your liver will still run okay. Your heart will still run okay. But until the meal has enough protein to trigger leucine and mTOR, your muscle won't kick in. So we think that's a protection survival mechanism. So we think leucine's very important like that. When you're young, insulin and hormones drive it. But when you stop growing,

28:36
Now the body's sensitive to diet and exercise, protein and exercise. So that's why leucine becomes so important. And with that, Don, like you also mentioned phenylalanine, if I said that correctly, methionine, threonine, like these other amino acids, which you feel we need to pay attention to, but currently they're not really on the radar of a lot of people. Of course, your work is changing that.

29:05
Why are these also important? So are we at risk of deficiencies, etc.? Yeah. In freshman nutrition, people always learned that amino acids are the building blocks for new protein. But that's actually their minimum need. If you look at the biochemistry of it, if you look at what's referred to as the KMs, the metabolic rate constants,

29:32
What you find is you'll meet those at very low concentrations, very low intakes, but every amino acid has another metabolic role. So we were talking about leucine, which is a signal for mTOR, Stimulates Muscle Protein Synthesis. Phenylalanine, you know, is related to tyrosine, which is a neurotransmitter, dopamine, and has a major impact on memory. As we get older...

30:00
Memories not so good. Is our tyrosine need changing? Tryptophan is a precursor for the neurotransmitter serotonin. Relates to mood and sleep. As we get older, we may not sleep as well. Threonine is the precursor for the lining of the intestinal tract, the mucin that protects us. Lower your threonine intake. It's like a...

30:26
prebiotic, the lower your threonine, the lower that mucin protective layer is. So all of these things, methionine is a precursor to another amino acid, cysteine, which relates directly to glutathione, which is the primary antioxidant in the body, or to a molecule known as tyrosine, which is another neuroprotective agent. All of these things relate to how much you eat of them.

30:55
If you eat a low protein diet, you may very well meet your need for that building block function, but all of these other functions that I just mentioned deteriorate. You've now inhibited them. They're not working at peak capacity. And I think that's a major issue as we get older. Yeah. And I guess that's the thing, right, is that a lot of things in our bodies deteriorate over time. Like the enzymes that are responsible in those pathways.

31:24
the receptors ability to uptake nutrients, like they're all really being compromised because they've been around the sun multiple, multiple times because you're older. And I guess if you were low in protein, you're just exacerbating some of these things maybe. We know that protein metabolism goes down. We get less efficient as we get older. And one of the things I like to remind people, we might eat 75 or 100 or 120 grams of protein per day,

31:52
But each of us, you, I, everyone else, has to make 250 to 300 grams of new proteins per day in our body just to stay healthy. It's called protein turnover. It's repair and replacement of existing protein. And that process becomes less efficient, and so we have to have a higher quality diet. And there's two things going on. As we get older, we tend to need fewer calories, but we need more nutrients.

32:20
And so what we have is a problem where we have to have a higher quality diet the older we get. And that includes vitamins and minerals, but it also includes protein. And so becoming a vegetarian at the age of 65 is a real risk because we need a higher quality diet to maintain our lean structures, and yet we're shifting to a lower quality diet. And so how do you do all of those things?

32:49
It's not that it's impossible to do it, but it takes a lot of food knowledge, a lot of understanding of amino acids to pull that off, and the desire to have 120 or 130 grams of protein per day. Most people can't do any of those things. Yeah. And do you think like all of this, like this, the conversation around amino acids is information and science that you've been, you know, you've researched, you've done the studies, it's out there.

33:19
So why is it, is it just what you were talking about with agenda at the start of our conversation? Like there are smart people saying completely different things to you. And do you think that actually just comes down to what their overall agenda is or who they're aligned to? Or yeah, what are your thoughts there, Don? Because it confuses people. I don't think there's one answer, but I think that, I think you're basically right. I think it's agenda-driven.

33:49
You know, I think you have to look at the dietary guidelines committees and think about, you know, how have they subtly changed? If you look in, you know, 1980s, 90s, we had the food guide pyramid, which said, don't eat protein, eat lots of grains. And we got enormous problems with obesity and diabetes. 2010, they abandoned that. We now use my plate. And the front and center is protein. It's not even protein.

34:18
It's not a food group, it's a nutrient, it's protein. And then vegetables and fruits and grains, and grains got shrunk down. So it's subtly being changed in the narrative, but it's very quietly being changed. People who spent their life saying cholesterol was going to kill you aren't out there saying, wow, was I stupid? Yeah, yeah, true.

34:48
And Don, like, so, you know, you've just sort of described to us the importance of all of these other amino acids and why we need to think about them. If someone listening is like, well, you know, I get around 120 grams of protein a day, maybe about 80 grams of that is from meat or animal-based sources, should they be concerned about these essential amino acids you've described or they will have their bases covered just by virtue of the fact that that's what they eat?

35:18
Basically, what we have found in our modeling experiments is that if you get, Americans right now, the average in the United States is about 90 grams for men and about 70 grams for women. If you do the modeling for that, you'll meet all of your essential amino acid needs with those numbers as long as your animal protein is above 50%. Okay.

35:46
Okay, so you can meet it. The issue is, oh, I've heard I should be more vegetarian, so I'm gonna start using real milk. I'm gonna go to almond milk, which has no protein in it at all. It's not the one gram that's in eight ounces, isn't bioavailable, and it has a poor nutrient content, amino acid content. If you start making all of those changes and decrease your protein intake down to 55 to 60,

36:16
and a poor amino acid, you're going to be deficient. Yeah. And so that's the risk. People need to understand that. Do you need to have 120? Maybe not. That relates to your answer of physical activity. The other factor in this is physical activity and resistance exercise. We've done multiple weight loss studies and protein sparing

36:46
If you're physically active, I think 70 to 90 probably is pretty good for most healthy adults. I personally try and get above 100. I'm in my 70s now. The older you get, I think you need more, but more sedentary. I think 75% of adults in the United States over 60 are considered sedentary. They probably need to be above 100 grams.

37:14
because they're not doing resistance exercise. So, you know, there's various factors, age, exercise come into the play, proteins, you know, quality choices, all of those come together. We like to suggest people get to at least 100 grams and try to be as physically active as possible to be healthy, you know, long-term, you know, longevity, long health span, if you will.

37:44
Yeah, yeah. No, I like that. And, you know, I often shoot for higher with people also, because of the satiety effects of protein. And it's always opportunity costs. Like if you're not eating protein, but you're eating something, what is it that you're eating? And is it just going to be these cheap grains? Or is it more fat than you necessarily need that's easily stored as body fat? So it's always the trade-offs I always think about as well.

38:10
Yeah, no, I think the satiety aspect is important. And I think that the balance of protein, carbohydrates, and fat, how do we balance all of those? What's your specific need? If a person's sedentary, diabetes, overweight, their carbohydrate intake probably should be really low, maybe no more than 100 grams or less. I play a lot of tennis.

38:39
I do fairly high intensity exercise. My carbohydrate intake is probably 180 to 200. The average carbohydrate in the United States is almost 300, and yet people are sedentary. Basically you earn your carbohydrates with physical activity. We always like to tell people that your baseline for carbohydrates is about 120 grams per day.

39:08
vegetables and fruits and your grain needs. And then you earn those at around 60 grams per hour of intense exercise. So if you're going to have 300 grams per day, you have to do three hours of intense exercise every day. There are very few people doing that. Yeah. So if you're a physical laborer, you can eat your carbs. But if you're a sedentary individual...

39:36
sitting in front of a television or a screen most of the day, you can't tolerate that many carbs. Yeah, yeah, and you're right. You absolutely just don't need them. Don, interesting, and I saw a YouTube that you did with Dr. Gabriel Lyon yesterday around the Luke Van Loon paper, I believe it was from his research group, of

40:03
there being no upper limit to the amount of protein in a meal. And this has done the rounds on social media. Gabrielle and I were actually did a podcast yesterday with, uh, with Jorn from that group. So we, we actually have another podcast that will be coming out in a week or so. But go ahead. Yes. Yes. So, well then can you please sort of give us the, the highlights or the bits?

40:29
Give us the insights that that paper provided us in terms of our understanding about protein amount in a meal and what are the takeaways? Because post that paper coming out and it being publicized, all I saw on my feed were all of these people getting 100 grams of whey powder, going, yes, I can like bump up my protein to this much because there's this seemingly infinite amount of NPS that I can get from it, muscle protein synthesis. So what is the real deal?

40:58
Gabrielle and I had Jordan on, is trying to get through some of that. So his point, you know, having talked directly with him, you know, what was his primary point? And it relates back to what I said earlier, young adults, 25-year-olds are different than 65-year-olds. The meal distribution concept is for 65-year-olds. It has nothing to do with 25-year-olds.

41:28
Jordan is concerned about that because you see a lot of trainers out there that say, well, you can only absorb and handle 20 grams of protein or 25 at a time. And so you need to have 25 grams every four hours and that's the only way it'll work. And his point was that's not at all true. You can handle a lot more protein at a meal than just 20 or 25 grams. And so that was his point.

41:58
point. And I think that's totally I totally agree with that. If you're talking about 25 year olds, it's amount per day. And there's nothing special about having it at breakfast or having it right after exercise or whatever. You know, there's nothing special about that. So I think people need to take a deep breath and back away from that part of distribution. But that doesn't mean that what we say about distribution isn't correct for 65 year olds.

42:26
where they're now losing protein slowly, the distribution does matter, that first meal becomes important because we're less efficient, okay? My problem with that paper is the comments that there's unlimited anabolic response to protein ingestion and that there's no oxidation of it. I mean, both of those simply have to be false. So if...

42:56
If he's correct that there's no limit, the experiment he should have run was a three or four point, what we call a titration curve. What he ran was a two point curve, two point experiment, 25 grams of basically milk protein but casein, which is very slowly digested, and 100 grams with just a massive dose. That's 80 grams of casein, which is very poorly digested.

43:26
And what he found was 100 was different than 25. Okay, fine. They've also published a lot of data that says it plateaus at 30 to 45. So is 100 actually different than 45? Well, that's the experiment he should have run. He should have run 25, 50, and 100. Then I would believe it. If he thinks there's no limit, he should have run 25, 100, and 200. Is 200 twice as much as 100? Of course it's not.

43:56
So, you know, he ran the wrong experiment for the conclusion he wants to get to. If he wants to show that there's no limit, then run the titration curve and show that. You know, and they may very well do that, but that's not what that experiment showed. Did you call him out on this as well? Yeah.

44:26
That can't possibly be true. So basically, if that's the truth, he's basically taken 25-year-old males, which he said are weight stable, so that means they're in maintenance. Their normal daily intake from his data was 100 grams per day. So that means they have to be oxidizing 100 grams per day under normal situations, because there's no place to store it. So if they're not growing, you have to get rid of it. Yes.

44:55
So that means they have to be oxidized. So simply by moving it to breakfast, all the whole hundred grams to breakfast, that means he's now become 100% efficient at turning that into lean body mass if there's no oxidation. So that would mean that they're now gaining a half a kilogram of lean mass every day, three and a half kgs per week, 15 kgs per month.

45:24
There's no practical way that that has ever happened in any experiment ever. And so we know it's simply not true. And so now we've got an issue of, is the experiment such an extreme experiment that it's disrupted metabolism so much that it's not getting oxidized normally? Or is his method, his isotope method of trying to...

45:50
deduce oxidation from blood changes, simply not adequate for the task. Generally, when we talk about oxidation, we measure CO2 release, which he didn't do. What he measured was an isotope dilution in the blood, and I think that method's not adequate for the task. So anyway, so those were the discussions we had, which were great fun. Yeah, yeah. It's an experiment that is interesting, it's extreme.

46:20
which is interesting, but it has almost no practical application. It basically does that a young male who takes on a lot of resistance exercise can group a lot more protein into a single meal and use it and doesn't have to distribute it across a lot of little meals. I think that takeaway message is fine. But the fact that he

46:48
used young males who were untrained, did a single ballot of exercise to exhaustion, four different exercises, maximum exertion to failure, and then gave a massive dose of casein. I think everything about it is just so unusual. It's hard to decide what it really means to anything else. If he really wants to...

47:16
prove his distribution theory, the experiment he should have run was his 100 grams at breakfast versus 33 at 0, 4, and 8. That would be 100 grams distributed. If he gets the exact same outcomes, he could conclude they're no different. But what he ran was a substandard level of

47:45
outrageously high amount, you know, 100 grams, 80 grams of casein. The two numbers are just too far apart. And so had he titrated it and looked at that 35 or 45 or 55 grams of casein, then you might be able to make some other, yeah, you'd be able to look at the actual changes. The exact same lab, the Van Loon lab.

48:14
if you use that same milk protein and do it in breakfast after exercise, 15, it increases to 30 grams and it plateaus by 45. Okay. So is there a difference between 45 and 100? Based on their own data, we would say no. So that's not an unlimited response. That's a very limited response. Yeah. I mean, the 25, if you look at the data in the paper...

48:43
The difference between 25 grams and 100 grams was about a 30% increase in protein synthesis. But if it was unlimited, it should be four times. Yeah. A hundred, four times 25, but he only got a 25 to 30% increase. That's the same thing as he would have gotten with 45 grams. Yeah. And as a scientist, did he appreciate the discussion?

49:09
Was he like open to the feedback? I think it was a great research discussion. And one of the things I hope people take away from it is that research is a process and that good researchers can have disagreements about interpretation of data. And I think it was a very collegial conversation. We definitely view it somewhat differently, but when I ask him,

49:39
you know, do you really think this translates into a take-home message that everyone should have 100 grams of protein, have all of their daily protein in the first meal of the day, and they're gonna gain massive amounts of lean body mass? He said, absolutely not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, he knows that's not true. So, you know, we have to decide on what the points really are, you know, I think casein's a very interesting protein.

50:09
Here again, we disagree. He thinks protein, he thinks that using a lot of the isolated proteins, which are very easily digested, is kind of misleading, that whey protein to some extent is misleading because it's versus having complete meals where you have fiber and things like that. And so he has a basic argument that, well, maybe casein is a better representative. I've done a lot of research with whey and casein.

50:38
and soy and wheat and eggs in complete diets with fiber and fat. And we find that the only one that's odd is the casein. So he thinks it might be more representative. I think it's probably the least representative protein out there. Yeah. And does that make a difference, Don, to your point on the complete meals? Because you're right that we do not eat. Well, sometimes we have like a protein shake, but

51:05
A lot of the times people are sitting down to eat a chicken salad or to have like ground beef and pasta or whatever. Does that make a difference to the amount of protein that we should be having? We talked about that with Jorn and the reality is that research has not really addressed that yet. We have a few indications that it probably makes a difference, but that type of study really hasn't been done.

51:33
We did a number of those kinds of things in animal studies. We think that all of the protein things we know still show up. They're still true. It may delay the curves a little bit, you know, slows down digestion. Instead of having peaks between 30 and 60 minutes, you might get peaks at 90 or later. And that's part of Jordan's issue is that, you know, with the casein.

52:02
you know, you don't really get peaks until you're out two, three hours, much slower. So I think that's good to think about. The Van Loon Group actually has a paper in Journal of Nutrition right now where they did a single meal that was basically meat-based, 37 grams of protein versus a plant-based one, 37 grams of protein.

52:28
It was from soy, chickpea, broad beans, and quinoa. Exact same amounts of protein. So it was isoneutrogenous, iso-energetic meals, one that was meat, potatoes, green beans, and the other was sort of a bean cereal bowl type of thing. And what they showed was that with the same protein, the animal-based protein had four times, no, three times the change in plasma amino acids

52:58
50% increase in muscle protein synthesis with the same protein. So that's probably, I mean, that's a combination of protein quality. But since they use 37 grams, they might have covered that, but it's basically an issue of bioavailability. The plant-based proteins, the fiber and everything is just not as digestible. It's not as bioavailability. You get a lot.

53:26
slower and more delayed peak. So again, whole foods will make a difference, but more for plants than anything else. Yeah. And that's interesting because that sort of brings us back to earlier conversation around the, you know, the ability for plant proteins to be digested and absorbed to the same extent. And therefore they have to eat X amount more.

53:53
know, maybe 50% more, I think, is what you said. And that's just going to blow out calories for a lot of people potentially, because, and one of the problems with the health issues that people are sort of grappling with, both individual and population, is overeating and obesity. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like it's- I did a lay talk here at a group just a couple of weeks ago. And one of the things I pointed out is

54:21
If you take the normal beans, if you look at black beans or chickpeas or soybean, if you look at them and you look at the carb to protein ratio, what you're going to find is it's around three to one or higher. And so if you're trying to get to 100 grams of protein with beans, you're going to get 300 grams of carbohydrates. And as we said earlier,

54:48
most people aren't doing enough exercise to handle that calorie load. So the problem, you know, I think beans and legumes are great foods, but what they actually are are great fiber carbohydrate foods. So as opposed to eating wheat and cereals and breads and potatoes, we should be eating beans and legumes and things like that. They're great carbohydrates, great fiber foods.

55:18
but they're not really very good protein foods. As I mentioned earlier, in the United States, we're eating 65% of our protein from animal foods. If we wanted to go down to 50% and replace 15% with beans, we'd probably be healthier. Okay? We'd have a higher fiber diet and we still have enough amino acids to balance it. But if you're going to go down to,

55:47
cut our protein intake by 50% and go down in protein quality, we're going to be unhealthy. So the issue is how do we fit quality foods into the diet? I'm not against plant-based proteins, but I think people need to understand it's not all or nothing. It's not, oh, gee, if I'm going to be healthy, I can only eat plant proteins. No. It's about having your right balance of carbohydrates, fats.

56:16
fiber, protein, et cetera. Yeah, Don, there's a lot of processed soy isolate in a lot of foods on the grocery shelves. Do you have any thoughts around that? From my perspective, you find it in foods that have a lot of other things in them and they are ultra processed foods, right? But they are claiming higher protein, and it is soy isolate. So what are your thoughts?

56:44
Yeah, you know, I think there's a lot of products out there that are claiming protein. You know, I go into a grocery store and I see a loaf of bread claiming three or four or five grams of protein per slice. And I think, so what? You know, that's useless. You know, it's probably only 50% available. It says that on the back. So the only reason you're putting it on the front of the package is somehow to...

57:14
deceive the customer to make it think that it's a protein source. I think that soy protein is used, A, it's relatively cheap, B, you can put it into crisps and things that aren't hydroscopic. So you can put it into a bar. If you put whey protein into a protein bar, it turns into leather fairly quickly. It just dries out.

57:43
manipulated, as you said, processed, highly processed, into forms that don't draw water. So A, it's cheaper, B, it has a better shelf life. It still doesn't change the protein quality. Soy is extremely low in methionine, and it's quite low in lysine, and it's quite low in threonine, and it's very low in tryptophan. So, you know, it doesn't change the quality.

58:12
And frankly, the protein bar that it's in, you know, how's that useful? Is a 15-gram protein bar with soy in it, what's the metabolic purpose of that? Is your purpose satiety? Is it glucose regulation? It's certainly not going to be muscle building. You know, why are you doing that? Is it just calories?

58:42
There's a lot of ways to get calories. Yeah, for sure. And so people are buying these products thinking protein because that's how it's marketed. But in reality, you're not just getting what you think you're getting. Yeah. I mean, is a soy bar that has 12 grams of protein in it and 250 calories, is it frankly better than eating a donut or a bagel? Yeah, good point. You have to really think that through.

59:12
Yeah, for sure. And Don, I want to be respectful of your time, but I do just want, if possible, just some thoughts around the collagen-based protein powders that are actually low-lucine. When I see, because I'm sure that I saw a paper last year that suggested leucine threshold wasn't as important as what we thought. I'm like, well, that's interesting. And then I saw another paper. Again, what age? Yeah, that's a very good point. What age? Yeah.

59:41
It's not very important to a 25-year-old, but it's very important for a 65-year-old. That's true. And also with that, it's probably very important for us over 40 as well, right? Because things are on the decline already. Exactly. And I also saw another paper looking at collagen's effect on muscle protein synthesis, suggesting there was a little bit of an effect. I mean, most of those papers

01:00:10
Again, if you read the methods, they're not giving 40 grams of collagen, or they're not giving 120 grams a day per collagen, which would be, I mean, you'd probably die within a week or so. They're giving 10 grams on top of an adequate diet. Okay, there you go. So basically, they're treating it as a supplement.

01:00:40
Collagen's high in arginine and glycine. If you put 10 grams on top of an adequate diet, can you get a little more protein synthesis? Maybe, but you'd probably get more if you added a glass of milk. Yeah. Okay? So, you know, you really have to think about how they're doing the experiment and how they're trying to make you believe it. I've seen a lot of kind of testimonial stuff.

01:01:09
about collagen, I have yet to see a single paper telling me the mechanism of action. We know that collagen is deficient and it's totally devoid of tryptophan. It has extremely low leucine. It has no lysine. It has no threonine. I mean, it's probably the single worst protein you could ever dream up. Okay? The idea that it helps with connective tissue...

01:01:37
where the main amino acids in it, hydroxyproline, hydroxylysine, can't be used. Once the body hydroxylates the amino acid, it can never be used again. So putting those in the diet is useless. Is there any effect of glycine on something like growth hormone? Possibly, but nobody's shown any data to back that up. So...

01:02:04
As far as I'm concerned, and Stu Phillips and I laugh about this all the time, there's probably no bigger and more useless expenditure of money than buying collagen. Okay. Well, that's pretty definitive. Okay, that's good. Because there are like some delicious protein powders that are made with just collagen. So my advice to people has been you need something else alongside it, like eggs or...

01:02:30
or leftover chicken. If you want to spend money and put 10 grams of collagen on top of your diet that has 120 grams, fine. If you think that's going to help your hair or your skin or something, I don't have a problem with that. But if you think there's some magic to it, you really bought the farm on that one. Well, that settles that. That's awesome.

01:02:56
So Don, like I had, as I said to you, a number of questions which we've covered in the in our conversation, which were around sort of teenagers, which you've mentioned they can get away with, it's a lot less specific for them. Post menopausal and perimenopausal woman, well, we've all fallen into that 40 plus age group where we have to be a bit more mindful. Again, I like, you know, parents and I love to understand that kids need X amount per day.

01:03:24
But it doesn't really, they can get it in snacks. If they have a 10 gram protein bar in the middle of the afternoon, they're gonna grow. They're gonna be pretty, they're fine. Where a 65 year old is gonna get really no benefit, it's just gonna be calories to them. So again, kids are important. I worry about kids in this era of plant-based diets that, you know.

01:03:51
Mothers are thinking that they're somehow doing their kids a favor by giving them almond milk or something for breakfast. I mean, they're creating protein deficiencies simply by giving them high carbs, very low protein types of meals. So I think the issue of plant-based diets requires a lot of consumer education. And the average lay...

01:04:18
people, adults in the United States, don't have the knowledge or the food skills to be plant-based. Although, unfortunately, they've got access to all of the Netflix documentaries that you could possibly dream up, that that's where they're getting their information from. Yeah, yeah. It's very scary to me in terms of what it may do to the adult population. It's like looking back at the food guide pyramid.

01:04:46
Food Guide Pyramid looked like a great idea to a lot of people who worked in cardiovascular area, and you can mark it almost to the day that the Food Guide Pyramid appeared that we got epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and we got no change in heart disease at all. So basically, it was a massive failure in understanding nutrition, and I fear that the plant-based diet's gonna go the same way. Is there...

01:05:15
Should we be having, should we be eating more vegetables? Should we be eating more fruit? Should we have more fiber? 100% yes. Should we be eating more grains? Only if you're gonna have three hours of exercise per day. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Don, to finish up, what do you eat in a day? Remind us, I'm sure I asked you this last time, I just wanna get an update from you. Donuts and cookie, no. No.

01:05:43
You know, I'm pretty careful about my breakfast. I have two main directions that I go. One is a whey-based protein shake, which I put blueberries in because I think it's one of the best of the antioxidant fruits that we can do. So I make a protein shake. And the other is if I have a little more time, I'll do an egg, meat, cheese thing.

01:06:12
Sometimes I'll do it as a scramble with broccoli and mushrooms and green peppers, or other times I'll do it as a sandwich, something like an egg sandwich type of thing. But those are my two things. Lunch, as I've said, I'm not nearly as particular about. I'll do a lot of salads, kind of a chef salad that has meats, but I'm typically going pretty low carb.

01:06:42
calories, so I'm not doing it. You mentioned, by the way, earlier about fasting and it didn't touch on it. The difference between fasting and time-restricted eating. I often practice time-restricted eating and I hesitate to use the word breakfast. I tend to use the word first meal. A lot of times my first meal doesn't happen until 10 or 11 in the morning. So anyway, that dinner.

01:07:11
For me, dinner is still pretty traditional. There's a very clear meat, there's a very clear vegetable section, and a very clear carbohydrate section. And that's, every dinner forms that. And even if it's some sort of a casserole or something, I envision that. What's the percentage? Yeah, yeah. We always tease that when we were doing our weight loss studies,

01:07:40
The subjects that were in the high carb, low protein and low protein, high carb got the same foods. One got spaghetti and meatballs and the other got meatballs and spaghetti. It's just a proportion issue. Totally. And Don, when do you play your tennis? Where? When? I live in Chicago, so tennis is an indoor sport. I see. And is that post breakfast before dinner? Like what's your… Oh, that's interesting.

01:08:09
Yeah, so two days a week, I play at nine in the morning. And so I have coffee and maybe a small amount of granola or something, just a little bit of carbs to get me going. And then immediately after I'll have a 40, 45 gram protein shake. So that probably won't occur till like 11 in the morning. Yeah, yeah, lovely. And then we move on to a chef salad, which sounds fabulous. And I have to say there's something that, you know, when I've been into this in the

01:08:38
You guys do great salads. Almost everywhere I've been, you can find a great salad. Cobb, Chef. Oh, yeah. The lot. Love it. Yeah. The Asian salads, the Greek salads. Yeah, we definitely have a lot of salad approaches in the United States. And that's good. It makes healthy lunches. They're easy to deal with. And if you just sort of can recognize the proportions, we always tell people to learn to recognize.

01:09:06
a one-to-one proportion of protein and carb in your meal. Yeah. If you can recognize that, chances are you're gonna handle things like obesity, diabetes, all of those kinds of things. So that's how we do it. We don't teach people to particularly read labels or count things. We teach them to look at the food and recognize kind of the visual one-to-one relationship. That's so much easier and so much less burdensome and arduous for...

01:09:35
for people basically. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, awesome Don. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I will put links to the papers that we were discussing, including your papers on essential amino acids, the Luke Van Loon paper or the Van Loon papers. And also is it Dr. Gabrielle Lyon's YouTube channel where we'll find this interview coming out? Yeah, it will be on her channel. I...

01:10:04
I don't know how quickly, but I expect in the next week to two. Yeah, nice. So we were talking about, I want to re-listen to it, make sure we did it fairly. But yeah, it should be fun. It was a fun conversation. And I'll just throw out the plug. Gabrielle has a new book out called Forever Strong, which was number three on the New York Times bestseller list.

01:10:28
So it's phenomenal. It kind of talks about all these things that she and I talk about if anybody follows us on You know Twitter or YouTube or wherever we're fairly visible, but it kind of puts it all together Into a very readable lay oriented book. Yeah, and it's I'm so pleased that you mentioned it It's a fabulous book and she did an amazing job. And of course she had one of the best mentors. So

01:10:57
That's, you know, the whole thing is really testament to your work as well. And I think, and she's very, and I hear her talk about that all the time, which is amazing. Yeah, she's, we're great, we're great friends. And hopefully that comes through on the podcasts and everything, you know, we've, we've sort of had this relationship for over 20 years and, you know, we thought people would enjoy being part of it. Yeah, it's well, we do. So thank you so much. It's amazing.

01:11:26
Great. Thank you. Great to see you again. Thanks, Don.

01:11:39
Alrighty, hopefully you enjoyed that and that just furthered your understanding of the importance of protein, one of my favorite topics as you know. But also just really enjoyed the conversation between us. He's just such a great guy. I just feel so honored that he was so gracious to come back onto the podcast. Next week on the show, I speak to two of my favorites, Cliff, Harvey, Darren Ellis, and we have an awesome conversation.

01:12:09
about a range of topics actually, and so I think you're really gonna love it. I'll leave it there, tell you more about that next week. Until next week though, you can catch me over on threads, Instagram and Twitter, @mikkiwilliden, Facebook @mikkiwillidennutrition to my website mikkiwilliden.com and sign up to one of my plans or book a one-on-one call with me. All right team, you have the best week. See you later.