One of the Top Experts in the world on protein joins us to talk about why athletes need protein and whether we’re getting too much or too little.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Trevor Connor: Hello and welcome to Fast Talk your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host, Trevor Connor, here with Coach Julie Young. A recent ranking of the top trends in nutrition put a desire for more protein. Among the top three things that consumers care about is being driven by popular influencers, claiming that we need up to four times the RDA for protein for both health and performance, and has led food manufacturers, including sports nutrition companies, figure out how to get more protein on their labels.
Even in endurance sports where the focus has been carbohydrates, carbohydrates, carbohydrates, athletes are starting to ask if they’re getting enough protein in their diet. It’s a big flip considering it was only a few years ago that endurance athletes were concerned about eating too much protein because they might put on too much muscle mass.
And nutritionists were claiming that a lower protein diet was needed, both for longevity and to protect our kidneys. Dr. Phillips, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Canada has been studying protein for close to 28 years. He was one of the first to say that the RDA for protein of 0.7 grams per kilogram was too low.
The recommendation was based on nitrogen balance studies, and Phillips showed that the many rules of amino acids go beyond just nitrogen balance after champion for more protein for decades. It’s a little ironic that he’s now the one saying we’ve gone too far. Few know as much as him about the impact of protein on our muscles, how amino acids are processed by our bodies, and what sources of protein are best on today’s show.
He’s joined by Dr. Dana Liss, a Canadian registered dietician who focuses on performance nutrition, FODMAPs, and has done her own research on the impact of protein on connective tissues. Together, they’ll talk with us about why we need protein, and more importantly, why the recommendations need to be changed.
The science around protein gives a lot of contradictory recommendations, and they help guide us on what to trust. We’ll then shift our focus to the protein needs of endurance athletes, particularly for the amino acid leucine, and how protein impacts our health and longevity. Finally, we’ll talk about the importance of getting protein from natural sources and whether animal-based or plant-based protein is better.
Along with our primary guests, we’ll hear thoughts from a few regulars on the show, including Legendary Bike Fitter Dr. Andy Pruitt, the Tri Doc podcast host, Dr. Jeff Sanko, co-founder of Bio Modem, a company that helps people learn to walk through robotic gait training. Dr. Ray Browning and founder of the Met Pro Nutrition coaching platform, Angelo Poey, who will share their thoughts on the impact of protein on our performance and health.
So get your mega shake or maybe just a good piece of chicken, and let’s make you fast. Well, Julie, we have three Canadians on this episode. Are you feeling ganged up on?
[00:02:44] Julie Young: Totally outnumbered.
[00:02:46] Trevor Connor: My biggest regret is we don’t have Chris here, our other co-host. He made fun of me on almost every episode for being Canadian.
So I would’ve loved to have had him here so we could gang up on him.
[00:02:57] Julie Young: Redemption.
[00:02:58] Trevor Connor: It would’ve been nice. But Dr. Phillips, I mean, I have to express how excited we are to have you on the episode ’cause you are a legend and. I admit I kind of wanted to do a gotcha for this episode. I took this great course a while back on protein, and one of the things I loved in that course was we talked a lot about the RDAs and how the RDAs have kind of missed the mark.
And really, you can’t just look at protein in its use for synthesis or amino acids in the use for synthesis, but they have a lot of other roles. And I remember this paper from this class. I’m like, I’m gonna bring this and I’m gonna hit them with this, and I’m gonna shock ’em. This will be great. And I pulled the paper out last night and guess who the author was?
Stuart m Phillips Diet, dietary protein for Athletes from Requirements to Metabolic Advantage. Yeah, that title sounds vaguely familiar. That’s a 2006 paper. I don’t wanna date you at all here, but Oh yeah. So some time ago. Yeah. But I will say, I mean, that for me was a huge paper. I’ve always remembered this one and that just a small part of the very large body of work you’ve done in protein.
Appreciate that. Yeah. So the reason we really wanted to do this episode, and I wanna hear your take on this, is it does seem protein has become the giant trend. I was actually at a food expo Expo West last March, and all they were talking about is protein that all consumers want is protein and more protein.
And I know some of the influencers out there are now pushing huge amounts of protein every day. So I just wanted to get your take on this and what is behind this trend.
[00:04:33] Stew Phillips: Yeah, it’s a good. Question. I mean, I think that there’s a number of things before the show started, as I said, it’s been about master now for 28 years, been doing research in the protein space for even longer.
When I first started, and particularly in relation to athletes, everything was about carbohydrates. Any meeting that I would go to, the narrative was dominated by how much carbohydrate athletes needed, and it’s still, it’s of course, it’s critically important for performance and everything, but you literally couldn’t get a word in edgewise if it wasn’t.
Talking about carbs, and that probably dominated, I would say the first sort of 12 or 15 years of my career that would be true is that I might speak in a symposium on protein. And we were on a Thursday afternoon at three 30 in a small room, and yeah, people were like, yeah, you’re fine. You’re above the RDA.
You’re good. No problem. And I was like, no, it, it’s actually the RDA is not probably enough and here’s the reason why, and nobody cared. Fast forward to now, I think what has happened is that actually the message that you know myself. People like Don Lehman, Luke Van Loon, people who sort of do a lot of research in this space has come home to roost, and that is that the RDA represents.
So the recommended dietary allowance of 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram body weight per day represents a minimum. And what we’re talking about for most people and athletes in particular would be an optimum. I’ve said this before, but it’s an inherently much more difficult question to talk about.
Optimal intakes than it is to talk about minimal intakes that prevent deficiency. So I always use the example of the amount of vitamin C necessary to prevent scurvy. And then we recognize that some people did better on more vitamin C than was required to prevent deficiency. So they changed the recommendation for vitamin C, but they being the Institute of Medicine and the people who set the DRIs have never gone beyond that.
And I think that’s where everybody else has arrived at the conclusion that lots of us have been hammering on for some time. And now it seems like it’s not just the RDA is insufficient, we need more, but more than more is better. And more than more is betterer. You know, it’s just keeps on going and the benefits keep coming back the more you eat.
And it’s ostensibly that there is no quote unquote upper limit to the benefits. And people go, is that true? And I’m like, no, that’s not true at all. There’s definitely a limit to how much protein you can use and is useful and kind of gives you all the benefits you need, but. The social media world is now taken over the messaging, and it’s kind of the death of expertise in some sense, because all you need is a tan and look good in the right clothes and an opinion, and you’re good to go, and followers equals expertise.
And so. I’m a small voice in the void yelling out. I’m like, more than the RDA is good, but too much more than what I’m saying is not that useful. Yep. So, but I think everybody is in that space now
[00:08:01] Trevor Connor: because you’re seeing that, I heard that Dr. Huberman was recommending over 200 grams of protein per day. Yeah, yeah.
Which, I mean, you’re pushing rabbit starvation at that point, aren’t you?
[00:08:11] Stew Phillips: Oh, well, I don’t know if it’s quite rabbit starvation, but, uh, the Andrew Huberman, the Peter Attias and uh, Joe Rogans of the male psyche as far as protein recommendations are concerned, have pushed us into a range of proteins that I don’t think any of them understand what the research is behind it, to be quite frank with you.
But more than two grams per kilo is, it’s just a total waste of time in terms of what it would bring you in terms of benefits.
[00:08:37] Trevor Connor: Let’s take a second to hear from Dr. Jeff Sanko and Dr. Andy Pruitt on where the high protein trends hurt the most. The wallet.
[00:08:46] Andy Pruitt: With any trend, you can go overboard, right? So calculating the number of grams of protein you need on a given day based on your exercise levels and things, as long as you’re consuming the appropriate amount, I think it will benefit your recovery.
And there are some other supplements that you can take supposedly would help with protein synthesis to help along in muscle repair. So taking too much protein, is it gonna do you No good. Taking the right amount of protein is gonna do you good. Taking too little is harmful.
[00:09:17] Jeff Sankoff: Yeah, I would echo that. I think that especially as we get older, and especially for women, the amounts of protein that have previously been recommended were probably not enough.
And so taking a little bit more protein is not a bad thing. Taking too much protein, the potential harms come to making the kidneys work a little too hard. I haven’t seen any real studies that say that you can actually induce kidney injury or renal failure. So I don’t know if that’s going to become a problem, but you’re basically taking protein that you just don’t need and you can’t incorporate, and so you’re gonna end up just peeing it out.
And so I don’t know how useful that is. Right. With that said, I think that some of the, you know, larger amounts of protein that people are taking, there are some benefits. There’s no question it’s an appetite suppressant. There’s no question. It helps with recovery. It can reduce the amount of fats and carbohydrates that people take in as an alternative fuel source.
So there are benefits to it. I think we’ve gone overboard. I just don’t know that we need to be taking in the gigantic quantities that people are taking. But as for potential harms, not compelled that there are drastic harms out there except to your wallet.
[00:10:27] Trevor Connor: Now out of interest, are you familiar at all with the work of Dr.
Bruce Ames? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Because I actually wrote a little bit about this recently. I found his work fascinating where he talked about, we have these RDAs for vitamins and he used vitamins, refer to vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, ev, kind of everything. But he said, we have these RDAs that give you what he calls survival levels for vitamins, that you need this amount in order to survive.
If you get below that, you’re gonna start having health issues. But he said all these vitamins also actually have a longevity role. That’s harder to track because it takes decades to see the impacts and said that often with a lot of these vitamins and minerals, you need more than the RDA in order for that longevity role to kick in.
Because first they’re gonna serve their survival role and then if you get more, they’ll serve the longevity role. And I’m bringing this up because reading your research, you really paralleled that kind of saying, yeah, the RDAs are gonna give you the minimum you need for just for protein synthesis, but amino acids have a lot of other roles that are really important for health.
And you went into. CVD risk. You went into osteoporosis, you went into all these other factors where amino acids and protein are important, but it might not be a synthesis role.
[00:11:45] Stew Phillips: Yeah, I mean, I think the recognition that’s sort of expanded is when we first determined protein needs, we use nitrogen balance, and nitrogen is the common nuclide that ties all amino acids together.
And so the balance of it determined the necessity to get nitrogen in with nitrogen out, and if you got that, you prevented deficiency. The recognition now has been is that individual amino acids have roles that you know beyond to balance nitrogen. There is a metabolic benefit associated with that leucine being the key one for muscle, for example.
It triggers protein synthesis and levels above RDA, quote unquote protein with respect to leucine give you greater. Muscle protein synthesis, but also other health benefits as well. So I think that there’s an understanding that individual amino acids play specific rules a little bit like vitamins. The common tissue that sort of all of this kind of distills down on is muscle.
And there’s another tissue that’s undergone a bit of a renaissance in terms of people’s understanding of what it means as a essentially important tissue in health. And everybody gets the mobility piece. Then the importance of mobility and the importance of a big sink for blood glucose and the importance of a large contributor to basal metabolic rate and everything else is really, we’ve just underappreciated muscles role and protein is centrally linked to that.
So I think it’s a confluence of understanding protein and we need more, and then understanding muscle. But yeah, the aims analogy with vitamins is very apt. I think it parallels a lot of our increase in understanding about how amino acids work, frankly.
[00:13:33] Trevor Connor: But I mean, you’ve been saying this for what, 20 years longer?
[00:13:36] Stew Phillips: Yeah.
[00:13:37] Trevor Connor: I
[00:13:38] Stew Phillips: once had, as a career ambition to change the RDA and as a younger version of me, I was like, this will be on my epitaph, on my team stone. Steve Phillips helped change the RDA and I don’t think it’s ever gonna change, particularly now, is that the review of the DRI evidence in the recent report that just came out saying we can’t find any evidence that there’s any benefits, so I don’t think the RDA is going to change.
So then mainly the mission becomes one of trying to educate people independently, the large body of evidence. But it still turns into, you know, when you have a scientific debate. How can I not be taken to task? Well, the RDA says, and I’m like, it’s like some sort of defacto argument as if it’s somebody came down from the mountain and had the RDA chiseled on stone.
So I’m like, well, I don’t have the ability to reverse that sort of epiphany of moment, and everybody just reverts to that. Not the least of which is some people who I think, well, let’s just say that’s all they cling to and that’s okay. I don’t have a problem with that, but it’s important to remember that the science is advanced.
And I think that collectively we come a little bit beyond that.
[00:14:50] Trevor Connor: I have to share the story. Going back to that class that I took, it was the professor of that class who introduced me to your work. And by the way, this is my I am not worthy moment. Like I said, I was gonna bring these papers, is uh, this was gonna be my gotcha moment.
And here I’m talking with the gentleman that wrote all this original research that was kind of foundational for me. So just like I said, real pleasure to have you here. I appreciate the comment, but it’s
[00:15:14] Stew Phillips: not just me to be clear, it’s myself and a loud group of others that have sort of made the case. And I just think a lot of people have sort of begun to recognize some of the work that’s being done.
But the message of like, well, some is good, more is better so that the upper limit becomes extraordinarily high and. Without any good reason.
[00:15:35] Trevor Connor: Yeah. But I mean, to quickly finish this story, and I, I guess, how do you get people past this? The professor spent the entire semester introducing us to your work, to all the work showing that the RDAs are, are outdated.
They aren’t sufficient. And at the end of the class, I asked him, so what’s your recommendation? How much protein should he consume? And he goes, 0.7 grams per kilogram. I go, well, that’s the RDA. And he goes, yeah. I’m like, but didn’t you just spend the whole semester telling us that’s wrong? He’s like, but that’s the RDA.
[00:16:02] Stew Phillips: Yeah. So what do you do to push back? I mean, all you do is spend the next 10 or 15 years of your career constantly giving talks and saying that’s not necessarily true, but it’s been a soft sell. Right? I mean, I think, or the earlier version of Stu Phillips kind of railed and proselytized about the RDA and its insufficiency.
Whereas, you know, people have sort of said, oh, well most people eat above the RDA. I’m like, you’re right. They do. They’re like, well, why are we having this discussion? I said, well, why do we have any protein requirements then? Like at all, why bother? Why bother having any intake for any nutrient if everybody eats above it?
And that’s not true, by the way. But the group that I’ve become more interested in as I’ve gotten older is research becomes me, search is aging, and there’s a group of people through lots of reasons, economics, appetite, et cetera, who get. Lower protein intakes and come close to, and even some of them lower than the RDA.
And in that situation, I think that it’s a true disservice to not try and educate those people or their healthcare providers or that sort of thing as to what we think is the optimal intake for quote unquote healthy aging. Successful aging.
[00:17:14] Trevor Connor: Well, to that point, we’ve kind of established the RDAs aren’t enough.
People like Huberman are pushing a huge amount. That’s probably too much. So what is the right amount and why?
[00:17:26] Stew Phillips: Yeah, so if you wanna put a number on it, I think the minimum should be about 1.2. Grams per kilo. And everybody goes, well, people are getting that. And I’m like, yeah, but that’s 50% higher than the target.
And it, it’s not like a small miss. It’s not like 5% or 10%, it’s 50% higher. And I would agree, a lot of people get that sort of intake. No problem. A lot of older people don’t. And I’m talking when people say, what’s older? And I’m like, well, how about people in their fifties and sixties? They’re like, oh, that’s me.
And I’m like,
[00:17:56] Trevor Connor: yeah,
[00:17:56] Stew Phillips: how about that? It’s me too, being frank. And then the upper limit I think sort of stops at about 1.6. So that’s twice the RDA, that’s a 100% miss if you want to frame it in that way. And a lot of people say, oh, a lot of people are getting that. And I, again, I wouldn’t disagree, but then much greater percentage of people, particularly older people.
Are not getting that intake. And that I think is the optimal upper end, and people make cases for larger doses, and I think without any true evidence to support benefits, not the short term benefits, because there’s lots of different sort of types of studies, but the long term outcomes in terms of actual supporting greater muscle mass, supporting greater health and et cetera, and the longevity type effects as well, which again, the narrative has sort of been flipped on its head by a group of people who talk about lower protein being longevity promoting.
[00:18:54] Trevor Connor: I read a study just a couple days ago leading into this that really talked about the potential damage of protein to the microbiome. And was interested in your take on that, but you actually addressed this in some of your research and I’ve seen plenty of researchers as, no, actually it can help the microbiome.
What’s your take?
[00:19:11] Stew Phillips: Yeah. My take is that a lot of the protein, lower protein extends health span slash lifespan, et cetera, and I think health span is really the more important concept for humans as opposed to lifespan. I’ve been trite about this and I’ve thought about it, and I think that most people are keen on living longer, but living better and good health, and not just the absence of disease, but being a good physical health to be physically mobile, independently living is what people are looking at.
Living to 120 and feeling like you’re 120, to me doesn’t seem like a laudable goal, but I digress. I mean, I think the point is that the, the. Animal model systems that are used to demonstrate that low herb protein is better, are not necessarily recapitulate of humans. We don’t live in sterile environments.
We don’t eat sort of mono, whatever you want to call it, mono protein type diets for our entire life. We’ve moved through life stages. We have a lot of other things going on that just you can’t mimic. And whether it’s non-human primates, which are very rarely done, but model systems like short lift mammals, like mice and rats for example.
So just not that I dismiss that work, it’s my question is always how does it translate into human work? And you don’t have obviously human clinical trials. So we need observational data. And from that standpoint, there’s lots of observational data to argue proteins. Good. Protein’s bad, protein’s neutral.
And so then to me, then it becomes, well, it’s a push. So, and there are a lot of other things that I think are better in terms of lifestyle habits, not the least of which is to be physically active. That makes a lot of the effects that you would see with animals in a cage. Kind of mo,
[00:21:09] Trevor Connor: let’s take a minute to hear from Dr.
Ray Browning on the impact of protein on the gut and why we can’t forget about fat and carbohydrates.
[00:21:17] Ray Browning: I am not an expert in nutrition and I haven’t really followed it that closely. But I will say that unless the human digestive system has changed in the last 20 or so years, excessive amounts of protein to me always feel misguided.
I think there’s a limit to how much protein your body can effectively utilize, and the stress on the digestive system with excess to protein seems, from what I can recall, relatively high. So it’s probably some learning to do there, but I worry a little bit about most of the energy, well, all of the energy coming to get us from point A to point B is not coming from protein.
So I
[00:21:53] Trevor Connor: mean,
[00:21:54] Ray Browning: it has other functions for sure, you know, and building healthy organs and healthy organ systems and muscle and bone. I totally get it. But in the context of, you know, A to B, we need carbohydrates and
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[00:23:13] Julie Young: If you don’t mind backing up a little bit in terms of where these trends have started. If I could address this to Dr. Liss, along the lines of what Dr.
Phillips had mentioned, just these influencers and we are in this age, we’re bombarded by so much information now, whether that’s social media or the access that people have, I think for those that don’t have background in science, don’t have background in research, they can Google protein, come up with these.
Scientific papers, read them and then just start implementing in absolutes regardless of the nuance of the study. So you’re in a neat position because you’ve had background in research and now you’ve been a sport performance practitioner for several years. So can you help us just kind of based on this conversation that Dr.
Phillips and Trevor have had? I do feel like among all the subjects. Nutrition can create the most confusion. If you could help us understand, like when you read a paper, how do you first understand is it a credible, is it credible science? And then secondly, how do you determine like, is this relevant to what I want to implement?
Yeah,
[00:24:18] Dana Liis: that’s a great question. And yeah, Trevor, when you mentioned sort of the microbiome and protein research, my spidey senses start tingling. I’m like, oh, there’s so much that is missed when you just use the term general microbiome. So with any like research, and if I’m looking at whether it’s somebody doing a quick research summary on YouTube or Instagram, or I’m reading an academic paper and I wanna understand it from like an applied side, I’ll look at the population.
So who studied whose book group is it? Is it animal paper? Is it a disease population? Sometimes we’ll see outcomes from a paper, kind of really cherry picked from a disease population. You’ll see that with some of the nootropics research, is that it’s not necessarily a completely healthy population. It’s a dimensional Alzheimer’s.
So it doesn’t mean I would write it off, but I’d look at the population and try to understand, is that similar enough to me that I can apply some of the findings with protein research? There’s less done in females, but I think we understand there’s not really a lot of difference between recommended doses per kilogram body weight or kilogram lean mass.
So I would look at some of the research for this sort of context. Endurance sport. And understanding is this population, are they, what kind of exercise or loading are they doing, and is it similar to what I’m doing in endurance sport? I try to get my athletes to understand what their training demands are.
Why is their coach designing their training plan like this, and what is the stimulus that they’re trying to adapt to? And then understanding what nutrition is gonna underpin that. So what kind of macronutrients, how much protein is really needed for this period of training or this day, sort of a microcycle.
And understanding that as an endurance athlete, if I’m looking at a study that did more of a heavy hypertrophic training study, I can use some of that information, but it might not be directly applicable to what I’m trying to do with my training at that time point. But I think as a general guideline.
The sort of athletic studies will give you a good range of total protein, but then in terms of how much you’re eating and how you’re timing it, understanding what your training stimulus is and what else your body needs protein for. So it’s gonna need protein for mitochondrial adaptation. So you’re doing different training stimulus to upregulate, mitochondrial biogenesis and get fitter.
That requires protein. Your immune system functions, so if you’re in a big training block, protein plays a big role in, in how your immune system functions and obviously like repair and recovery. So sort of looking at your training and understanding what the goals of your training are. And then we kind of, I think we have a pretty good idea of like general range of protein recommendations per kilogram body weight.
Figuring out sort of how that timing and total amount in the day works for your training schedule and your training structure. I think there’s certain journals I would lean towards more if I was gonna go into sort of the research. So you can Google now and there’s so many different journals I’ve never heard of that are publishing stuff really fast.
I would look towards some of the more reputable journals. So Sport Med, international Journalist, sports, I-J-S-N-E-M, support, nutrition and Exercise Metabolism.
[00:27:35] Trevor Connor: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:35] Dana Liis: But if you’re seeing sort of authors that you’ve never heard of them in the space or they’re, they have nothing else published in the area of protein, probably not a great paper.
People are actually like buying research and. Sticking like their names on papers, just to try to get more publications, to get jobs in different parts of the world. Like there’s a lot of just bad publications. So looking for some of your core groups, McMaster, Liverpool, John Moores, Marick, uc, Davis. So some of those core groups have done a lot of the really.
Bulk of the research over the last 20 years, but if you see kind of like a journal you’ve never heard of, it looks like authors that are never published in that space again, probably not a great paper.
[00:28:21] Stew Phillips: Yeah, I mean, I, I think that there’s a risk of sounding elitist when you say, you know, only trust stuff from Stu or Luke or something like that.
[00:28:29] Dana Liis: Yes, absolutely. Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.
[00:28:31] Stew Phillips: No, no, no, no. But I, I’ll say this, as somebody who’s been, I mean, my currency is training master’s, PhD postdocs, getting stuff published, and I’d say to them, your job is so much more difficult than mine ever was when I started this. When I started, there were like five or six journals, and if you didn’t publish in there, then there was really no other choice.
But there is no barrier, like no barrier at all now to publishing scientific work or studies, and that’s become. Problem because it’s called pay to publish journals or predatory journals and articles and studies that have just, some have never been done. Data’s completely fabricated. Others, there’s undisclosed conflicts of interest with, in particular supplement companies.
Journals are finance by supplement companies. And so what does the research in those journals really mean? But people generically, I, and I’ll put my hand on my heart and say it’s hard, like it’s not easy to interpret all of this stuff, but the asset test is no. Does it sound too good to be true? And Philips rules modified from Ron MA’s rules are, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
If it is too good to be true, it’s probably banned or you need a prescription for it. And rule number three is there are very few exceptions to rules one and two, right? So if it just makes some outlandish claim, I think to Dana’s point, you just need to kinda squint and go, I don’t know. But I agree it, it’s hard, really hard to figure those things out.
Not easy from the late person’s standpoint at all.
[00:30:17] Trevor Connor: So something I wanna ask both of you, because you started to go there of how to make protein recommendations to athletes. What are the needs for athletes? Is it more than the general population? And also, you mentioned this in a lot of your research, the importance of leucine, and it seems like that’s something that a lot of athletes need to focus on, but at the same time, going back to the research and what is the quality research here, I’ve certainly seen claims that the branch chain amino acids seem to be the amino acids that there’s potentially some health issues with if you’re over consuming them.
So. Who’d like to take this first, but I’m, I’m just interested in that athlete perspective and what you’re feeling about le
[00:30:58] Stew Phillips: Yeah, so the cliff notes, if to start out with, there are 20 amino acids, we can make 11 of them, nine are what are considered to be essential. I won’t dally around with conditionally essential.
I think that’s sort of a made up thing. The leucine is one of the nine that we need. There are 20 bricks that you need to make the wall, whether that’s muscle or bone or skin or you name it, any protein containing structure and the nine bricks that you need to get from your diet from the outside. One of them is leucine and it’s one of three branch chain amino acids, so leucine, iso, leucine, and valine.
They are metabolized and utilized almost exclusively in muscle, so they get a special sort of note of attention. The main reason why branch chain supplements. Quote, unquote have stuck around is because of leucine. It’s not because of the other two. Their passengers. Leucine is the trigger. It’s like when that brick shows up, it starts all of the construction of the new wall, of the new essential amino acids to begin.
But to your point, I think Trevor, the branch chain amino acid signature, if you like, is really one that has been associated with the sort of excessive intake of a protein and the downsides of protein, not necessarily the taking in too much, but in people who are quite sedentary. It’s probably associated with issues around metabolic dysfunction.
But I think, and I’ll just hand over to Dana and get her take on this, that exercise is the forgiver of many metabolic sins, right? So if you’re sedentary of hyperlipidemia, hypertriglyceridemia, all of these issues around blood glucose regulation, a lot of that begins to dissipate, if not completely disappear, the more physically active you are.
So not to completely dismiss it if you’re an endurance athlete, resistance trained or mixed sport athlete, but it definitely takes the edge off of the risk side of things.
[00:33:08] Julie Young: Dr. Liss, do you think it’s necessary to have the complete regiment of branch chain amino acids in order for the leucine to do its work?
[00:33:18] Dana Liis: Yeah, and I think on the branch chain piece, there are scenarios where I would recommend adding a branch chain amino acid in a really specific athletic endurance setting. But to help athletes kind of understand how much protein do you need, and then actually apply that in their real life, depending on the sport and the athlete.
But if we’re looking at endurance cycling, understanding sort of what is your total needs from a number? So let’s say you need two grams per kilo. So let’s say you need 150 grams of protein. How do you turn that number into food? So I kind of will start with what an athlete’s usual nutrition patterns are.
What’s your day like? How do you spread out your meals? What do you usually eat on the bike? And start from there in terms of understanding what their meal structure’s like at their food habits, and then building on what their usual habits are and figuring out where there might be a little bit low in protein, where there might be a big window where they’re on a bike for six hours and they’re.
Only taking in carbohydrate and actually taking in some protein on the bike for a, like a long endurance ride is probably a a good idea. So most important thing is, you know, making sure you’re getting your total protein intake. So understanding, okay, if I’m eating breakfast and I’ve got say, oatmeal and some dried fruit, how do I add protein into that meal?
So you might add some Greek yogurt, you might have milk, make your oatmeal with milk, so you can Google and use apps to find out how much protein is in this amount of food, et cetera. But then trying to space it out, making sure all your meals and most of your snacks have an even amount of protein or concentrated in meals.
And a, you might have 10 grams in a snack, but trying to get your like 0.5 grams per kilo for like an endurance athlete and your main meals and snacks. And how you’re doing that is learning a little bit of how much protein is in different foods and making sure that most of the time you have like a high quality, high leucine protein.
Option in your meals, and that’s where sometimes I might recommend a branch chain amino acid. If I have an athlete that’s plant-based and traveling overseas and doesn’t have all their food availability, that’s a scenario where we might throw some branch chain amino acid onto a meal that might be quite limited.
Might be rice and some vegetables. So just trying to top up with a little bit of a higher leucine dose to help ensure that we’re trying to maintain sort of more of an A building or an anabolic state in the body.
[00:35:38] Trevor Connor: Before we dive deeper into how much protein athletes need, let’s hear from Angela Poey, who has worked with a lot of athletes and shares his thoughts on how much protein we really need.
[00:35:49] Angelo Poli: All things considered. I like to err on the side of balance. I’m not a big fan of extremes. Yes, there is some research coming out that is showing particularly in the areas of like muscle hypertrophy, a linear relationship between higher protein. Potentially though there’s a little bit of debate whether or not it’s the higher protein or the increase in caloric intake that’s being added, the benefits.
But really what we wanna do is aim for a balanced approach. Look at what you’re currently getting and if you’re not getting enough that you know, the research suggests, which is 0.7 ish, that area grams per, then you might consider increasing. Here are the major caveats, proteins, value in your diet become exponential.
The lower your total caloric intake. So if you are on a cutting cycle. Then it makes sense to really make sure that you’re not in a deficit when it comes to your protein needs. Your body needs three of the branch chain amino acids, iline, vine, and leucine. And it will get them regardless. So if you don’t get it from dietary proteins, it’s gonna take it from your muscles and that can put you in a catabolic state to a greater degree than you need to be.
So when you’re dieting down a little higher, protein is good. When you are in maintenance or gaining, you may not need as much as these trends that are saying ultra high protein. And back in the seventies and eighties, there was this really obscure supplements in America that very few people had ever heard of.
It was called protein powder. And you know who was buying it bodybuilders. And you know what the manufacturers wanted. They wanted everyone on the planet to buy their product, but not everyone wants to be a bodybuilder. One 10th of 1% less than that, right? So what does everyone want? Well, everyone wants weight loss.
A lot of people want weight loss. So how do they link their product to weight loss? Well, you know, muscle is more metabolically active than fat. Therefore, the research shows that all things being equal, if you have more muscle mass, that helps from a metabolic standpoint. Therefore, weight loss, therefore protein powder.
You see where we’re going with this, and pretty soon every soccer mom in the nation has a tub of, I’m not anti protein powder. I have two different protein powders downstairs right now. But just recognize, follow the money and use common sense. Protein is good, but who stands to benefit from extreme consumption?
If you’re not an enhanced athlete, somebody who’s taking, for example, in the physique community, taking performance enhancing drugs, you probably do not have the protein needs that those individuals need. And by the way, don’t take performance enhancing drugs, kids. So I take a balanced view right down the middle.
But it is interesting. I do like that we’re getting more and more research coming out on this stuff, and we’re always updating our understanding. I think
[00:39:02] Stew Phillips: Trevor, one of the things that would be important to emphasize would be endurance athletes have an increased need for protein because they burn fuel and protein is part of that fuel.
You know, the interesting perspective is that actually endurance athletes probably have greater needs for protein than do resistance trained athletes. Although everybody thinks, well, I’m gaining muscle, or I’m trying to support muscle. But once you’ve gained the muscle, the protein to support it is pretty low.
I think everybody’s forgotten that. I think endurance athletes are a much bigger risk of being. Lower in protein than resistance trained athletes, and much to the chagrin of many bodybuilders who I tell that message to. But because you’re burning fuel and protein, even though it’s not a big contributor, if you’re burning a lot of energy, you’re doing a lot of endurance work, small contributions to a large expenditure.
Dana’s worked with some athletes that are, they’re training. 2, 3, 4 hours a day. Nine, 10. Yeah. So there’s extremes of everything, but I mean even 2, 3, 4 hours compared to mere mortals who go to the gym for 30, 40 minutes. It’s a big difference.
[00:40:12] Trevor Connor: Well, something you touched on earlier that I think is a really important point to repeat is a lot of people have this mistake and notion that basically you eat protein to build muscle mass, and that’s the whole role of protein, but it has so many roles beyond that, any sort of gene expression.
Basically genes just code for protein. So when we talk in this show about the importance of activating pgc, one alpha, mitochondrial biogenesis, that’s all protein based.
[00:40:40] Dana Liis: Yeah. Your enzymes are responsible for kind of all the metabolic things that happen in your body are mostly a hundred percent, not a hundred percent each enzyme, but protein is.
Really an important piece of what all of this metabolic machinery requires to do its work to help you do work on your bike.
[00:40:59] Stew Phillips: As Dr. Liss will tell you too, protein pulls on. What’s that thing between Oh yeah. Like a tendon, which is completely made up or protein, and it’s a news flash for a lot of people.
It pulls on a bone and they go, oh yeah, bone is calcium. And I’m like, but it’s 40% by composition protein. And they’re like, what? And I’m like, well, if it’s a stick of chalk, it would break all the time. Right. So there’s a. Protein collagenous layer to bone, which is extraordinarily important for, its basically ability to be able to withstand high forces, for example.
So protein makes up a large part of your body composition and lots of other metabolic rules.
[00:41:36] Dana Liis: When you’re looking at your power meter and we have our sprinters, that’s definitely a space where we’re looking, we can actually kind of more measure our force generation on the pedal. And that’s exactly what Stu is saying.
That’s bone, muscle, connective tissue, and hopefully higher sprint power output.
[00:41:52] Julie Young: Speaking of that, how important is the combination of collagen and protein in thinking of those tendons? Yeah,
[00:42:00] Dana Liis: and looking at sort of the amino acid makeup? Yeah, it’s, it’s different in terms of if you wanna compare muscle and leucine.
So a lot of our work and what we’re talking about is like. Muscle tissue and the reliance of leucine and the importance of leucine in stimulating muscle protein synthesis or turnover. And with connective tissue sort of glycine is the leucine for connective tissue. So your tendons and ligaments, skin extracellular matrix of the muscle nails.
So glycine is your sort of leucine in the connective tissue or collagen based tissue world. You do get some glycine in a lot of your animal based proteins, but it’s quite low. So that’s when sometimes I’ll work with an athlete to understand if they’re trying to rehab or they have a period in their training where they’re trying to increase the rate of force development.
And so if their training stimulus is sort of focused on power explosive or generating more force, we might incorporate some collagen proteins into their nutrition strategies. To help with the connective tissue adaptation as well.
[00:43:08] Julie Young: I actually did read a neat study about the collagen and the importance of strengthening those tendons and how these athletes didn’t necessarily improve their strength, but it was how the tendon was translating the force.
Exactly. Yep.
[00:43:23] Dana Liis: And I think that’s something too as, as we sort of get older, sometimes it’s harder to recover and harder to avoid it, like reduce injury. Sometimes it’s really hard, but injuries or just kind of the chronic of your knee sort of bothering you, you get like an accumulation of like little niggly things.
And that’s where some of the master’s athletes I work with will kind of look at like connective tissue health and nutrition supporting kind of the maintenance of connective tissue.
[00:43:46] Trevor Connor: And I think that’s a really important point that you brought up. From my understanding. People who are on a vegan or vegetarian diet, particularly vegan, it’s very hard to get adequate leucine from natural food sources.
Correct.
[00:43:58] Dana Liis: You can get it for sure. It takes some diligence in planning for sure. But yeah, you can definitely hit your lucine targets, your protein targets with a plant-based diet. But I’ve definitely seen plant-based diets that are really quite low overall and it just, you have to really dig in and understand, okay, how much do I need?
What does that look like in terms of food? And if you need to get, let’s say, 20 grams of protein from legumes or beans, then you’re gonna need about like two cups or like average size fist, like two fists of that food portion. So. For some athletes, that’s a really great way to make sure they’re getting more energy in.
For other athletes, it’s a lot more energy that you’re taking in to hit that protein target. So I think when sometimes people, like I’ve had athletes that will go plant-based to try to like lose weight. It might not be the best strategy is not, it’s harder to get more protein and then then you’re also having to get a lot more energy and to hit those protein targets.
Not that it’s a bad thing, but just really understanding what your priorities are as an athlete and making decisions around that for your dietary choices.
[00:45:01] Stew Phillips: I think Dana’s point is spot on. Is that on a lower quality diet, like plant-based protein? I think you have to just be diligent about things. I used to worry a lot about plant-based versus animal-based diets.
I worry a lot less about it now. I think that the research that we’ve done in other groups, it would show that with a little bit of planning, you can hit the types of intakes and just remember like exercise is still the big driver of this response. So protein is the bolt-on, it’s the add-on and the thing that makes things good.
But exercise is still the big stimulus for sure.
[00:45:35] Julie Young: Yeah. So for the vegan prior to a workout, how are they getting that leucine in? ’cause I’m thinking about, like you said, oh, just have two cups of beans and I’m thinking about having two cups of beans and going to do an interval session, or going to do a race just doesn’t really pair up.
So what do you suggest in that case?
[00:45:54] Dana Liis: Yeah, in that case, and I don’t work with a lot of vegan athletes, so someone who specializes in that space would probably have a better answer. But I might use like a vegan protein powder, like a mixed rice and pea protein powder,
[00:46:04] Stew Phillips: or a soy drink. I mean, soy, everybody’s forgotten about soy.
[00:46:08] Dana Liis: Everyone’s forgotten about soy even I’ve forgotten about soy. It’s
[00:46:10] Stew Phillips: become bad or something like that. But it’s literally like the best vegan source of protein. I mean, it’s so close to milk. I think that the differences are relatively subtle, but plant-based milks and everything is from soy on down in terms of protein content.
But you can drink something like that before a workout, and all of the amino acids would be around, or because it has. All of the essential amino acids
[00:46:35] Julie Young: and what kind of threshold are you trying to reach with the leucine?
[00:46:38] Stew Phillips: Gimme some money and we’ll come up with an answer.
[00:46:41] Julie Young: Okay.
[00:46:42] Stew Phillips: Now everybody has a number and I’ve heard different numbers get thrown around and it’s sort of like from, I think from somewhere as low as say one gram of leucine, upwards of say two to two and a half.
If you’re older, people have said three or four. I think that discounts some of the exercise effects. So exercise just makes everything much more sensitive to leucine effect. I mean, that’s one of the things that we know happens. So I think then people are putting numbers around. I don’t think anybody has a good answer to it, but some are in the range of at least a gram or a gram and a half to maybe as high as three grams.
But exercise makes that threshold lower. So it again, emphasizing the importance of the exercise and the protein is the layer on top.
[00:47:29] Julie Young: Then for endurance athletes, I always think about that leucine post-workout, and then same for a resistance exercise, but how important is it for endurance athletes, resistance trained athletes to have that leucine prior to the workout?
I think that surprises people
[00:47:47] Dana Liis: sometimes is when I’m looking at, depends on the length of the workout, et cetera, but um, you kinda want those amino acids already floating around and ready to help your recovery and adaptation sooner before and after. But it takes about an hour for those amino acids if it’s like a really highly bioavailable source to get into circulation.
So through your digestion into circulation. So if you already have those building blocks around, it makes sense to have like your pre recovery
[00:48:15] Julie Young: or your protein before and after. And would that be, just to use that as an example, one gram of leucine before the workout, one gram after? Is that what you’re saying?
[00:48:23] Stew Phillips: Yeah. Not to disagree with Dana. Like I have no problems if people want to eat before they work out ’cause that’s what happens in the real world. But I don’t think that the pre-workout, really everything that we know about leucine comes from post-exercise studies. Like you can do a pre or post, I think for the connective tissue that Dana will be much more familiar with because it’s so poorly supplied by blood flow that it’s way more important to get the protein before exercise than after.
But that window, people used to talk about that anabolic window, which was really fashioned around carbohydrate is open. For days. So you’re sensitive to protein for a long time.
[00:49:10] Julie Young: Yeah. I’ve heard that described as a garage door now.
[00:49:13] Stew Phillips: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s Sean Aaron, a good friend of mine in South Carolina.
He calls it the Anabolic garage door. I mean, it’s the anabolic, I don’t know what it is. French Window. It’s open. It’s wide. It’s big, you know, but it’s not that sort of three four hour window that I think we once used to talk about.
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So a place I would love to go to that you’ve touched on a few times is the quality of the protein. And I’m gonna start with my little bit of a bias here. We mentioned studies or research that showed that eating protein can have negative impacts. My experience has been a lot of those studies are using just a supplement and often a low quality protein.
And interestingly, you just brought up soy and said soy is a great source, but there have been some recent studies that shows that a soy protein binds CD 14 on macrophages, which is a receptor for LPS, and that’s a mouthful, but it’s basically kind of fooling the immune system and believing that there’s a bacterial invasion and can actually create some inflammation.
I know in a lot of your recent research you’ve been talking about the importance of the food matrix, not just looking at the protein, but everything that’s in the food. So for example, fiber can mitigate a lot of the negative impacts of consuming protein. Just would love for you to talk a little bit about the quality and the overall food matrix and whether we should be trying to get protein from Whole Food sources, or is supplements just fine?
[00:51:03] Stew Phillips: I’ll let the dietician answer first because, and I think she would give the same answer as me, but what do you think, Dana?
[00:51:10] Dana Liis: Yeah, I would say food first, but not always.
[00:51:12] Stew Phillips: Yeah, I agree. I think the value of Whole Food is, you know, athletes say, well. Should I take a supplement or, or should it just go for food?
And my first question is always, well, how much money do you have in your pocket? Because the food tends to be better value and food gives you other nutrients that you’re gonna need anyway. But as it, uh, I think as Dana appropriately said, it’s not always the answer. Supplements are convenient and the weight supplements are now is once you’ve removed a lot of other things from a lot of proteins, some of the plant-based protein sources that people used to go is such low quality.
It becomes a moot issue. It really does. The supplements are so close to each other in the anabolic effect that they have. So food first. Supplements when convenient.
[00:52:00] Dana Liis: Yeah, I completely agree. It’s kind of comes back to taking what we understand from the research and then applying it to real life and athletes.
When you’re traveling, sometimes you might rely more on supplements to meet your nutrition needs. When you’re at home, you have, you have everything around you, more opportunity to cook and prepare. So I think, yeah, just comes down to what your priorities are at that point in your training schedule, and then the reality of your life.
And sometimes bars and supplements are convenient. I think just making sure that they don’t replace all of your. Protein sources.
[00:52:34] Stew Phillips: But it’s an interesting thing, right? I mean, Nick Bird’s group at Illinois has done a lot of work around, if we took egg white and we just ate egg white, it’s not as good as if you eat the egg white and the yolk that there’s something in the yolk and the food matrix, that’s this things that we don’t understand how the working and that there’s a value to eating the whole egg as opposed to the egg white and cardiovascular risk of the most maligned food in the history of foods, eggs right aside.
But egg yolk is better consumed with the white. And who would’ve thought, if you’d asked me that before I saw those data that, that Nick’s lab generated, I, I would’ve never, ever thought, oh, it’s just protein’s, protein. And then all of a sudden that research came up and I was like, wow, okay. That’s something else.
[00:53:21] Trevor Connor: So have you looked at the role of AVID in there?
[00:53:23] Stew Phillips: I had no idea. I, yeah, it’s great thought. No idea.
[00:53:27] Trevor Connor: So I’ll give you something that you might find interesting. So egg whites are very high in avidan. It’s actually the, has the highest amount of concentration of avidan of any food that we eat. And the issue is that avidan binds very strongly to biotin, which we’re discovering is a very important nutrient in our diet.
And interesting. I did look this up last night. Biotin is necessary for muscle protein synthesis. And just so you know, recent studies looking at biotin deficiency in people, the way they make them biotin deficient is just to feed the mag whites. So I do wonder if that’s some of the impact where you have a lot of biotin in the yolk.
So if you’re just eating the egg white, you’re basically kind of promoting biotin deficiency in your own body, which is important to mitigate. It’s a good thought
[00:54:12] Dana Liis: if you’re only eating egg whites, but you probably hopefully are eating other sources of protein throughout your day.
[00:54:18] Trevor Connor: Yep.
[00:54:19] Dana Liis: But yeah, the bioactives are definitely something that we don’t fully understand.
But you know, are one of our main reasons why we go for Whole Foods first.
[00:54:27] Julie Young: But then wasn’t there a trend a while back where we were not eating the yolk? Yeah. To avoid cholesterol. So it’s just like it comes and it goes.
[00:54:36] Stew Phillips: Well, the yolk contains cholesterol and the narrative for 50 years has been that cholesterol is gonna kill you.
So you’ll laugh at this, but in March, in nutrition month, I don’t do it anymore, but I used to be the director of a community access center right here at the university for 500 community members. The average age of which was about 73. And in March we would have literally would call it, it’s okay to eat an egg week because that entire generation believed that the cholesterol and eggs was literally gonna kill you.
And they’ve gotten off the dirt list, I think now, and there’s like, eggs are okay, but it sort of goes back and forth. It, it really literally in the history of food, I think is the most maligned food out there inappropriately so. So eat the egg yolk, it’s good, but a lot of egg protein is made from egg whites.
It doesn’t incorporate the yolks.
[00:55:29] Trevor Connor: So could shift over a little bit here in one of your most recent reviews. So just this year. You talked about Nutra metabolomics, and we’re talking about the importance of that, and that’s actually more important than just looking at whether it’s a plant-based or an animal-based protein.
Can you talk a little bit to that and who are you talking to? ’cause I’m not sure I wrote
[00:55:49] Stew Phillips: about that, but No, I mean, I think that where we’re going with this is that there is an understanding that in whole Foods, there are things to the phytochemical sort of standpoint that we don’t know what they are.
Right? I mean, food is more than just the sum of its macronutrient compositions. It’s complex matrix interactions with the entire composition of the food. That are probably having effects from an absorption standpoint, from a subsequent metabolism. We’re beginning to get a handle now on the host that we carry around in our microbiome and what those bugs do and how their metabolism affects what happens in us that we’re just beginning to kind of grapple with.
So as an arm of the metabolomics, so we may have put the word in our paper, but nutri metabolomics is essentially the metabolomics of understanding what nutrition does. Yeah. I mean, we put it in probably because it’s an area that requires future study, but I think it’s just understanding the complex. So the matrix that is food as opposed to individual purified supplements, which are convenient and fine, but we’ve made mistakes on supplements in the past.
Vitamin A used to be, we would give people mega doses of it, and then we found that it enhanced instead of suppressed the risk of lung cancer. Lutein and lots of other supplements were purified and shown to have no effect, and the idea is that actually in a food, they’re much more available and do different things than they do in isolation.
So hence the food first message. Still very, very pragmatic.
[00:57:40] Dana Liis: In in the protein space. I think as a practitioner or an athlete and you’re looking at research, we’ll often see a feeding study and then like a measured outcome we’ll measure, like if there’s a performance outcome or if there was a change in lean mass and muscle mass or synthesis rates.
And I think with the metabolomic space, we’re able to kind of measure and understand more of the changes like with proteomics for example, what’s happening from a metabolism perspective that we can’t necessarily measure in a way like outside the body, we’re measuring what pathways are upregulated or downregulated to help us understand what could be happening inside the body that we don’t necessarily see.
So sometimes we’ll read a study that’s, well, there was no change, or it didn’t make a difference in whatever performance outcome you’re measuring, but it’s just hard to measure that outcome. But we’re understanding more with the advances in metabolomics and proteomics. Of what could be upregulated or downregulated or happening.
That we can’t measure with external tools. There was a really nice paper that was published just recently from Liverpool, John Wars, looking at energy deficits. It was like a feeding study looking at an energy deficit and understanding what was happening to connective tissue and. Protein mass, and then also mitochondrial changes, but all through looking at proteomics, so looking at certain groups and clusters that we know are involved in these different pathways.
So I think we’re on the verge of kind of understanding more from that aspect. Those studies are really expensive though.
[00:59:12] Trevor Connor: And I guess the last thing I do want to ask before we move on from this quality discussion and start to wrap things up, you mentioned this before Dr. Phillips, but really a question for both of you is this animal versus plant-based protein.
And you said that you’re not as focused on that anymore, but I did find it interesting in a 2020 review you wrote a posity of strong evidence prevents advocation for diets based exclusively on plant-based protein. So I’m just very interested in the shift in your thinking on this.
[00:59:42] Stew Phillips: Yeah. Last five years.
The research that we’ve done shows that’s not a big issue. So, but you say in 2020 and just appreciate is that 2020 was when the paper appeared. It probably started to get written back in 2019, probably by the time it’s published. But the rate at which we’re discovering things and not necessarily our lap per se, but other labs around, I just don’t think that it’s as big an issue as we once thought.
So what would be your recommendation? Like I’m a died in the wool omnivore. I have no issues with feeding plants or animals, so I do like animal protein and Danny would have a lot more experience than me, but I think. Being vegan, you’ve just gotta be judicious about what you pick. I think being vegetarian, if you’re lacto ovo, I think it’s a cinch, it’s not a problem at all.
But if you’re an omnivore, of course it becomes very easy. But the number of choices that people who want to go more plant-based or flexitarian, I think it doesn’t really give me cause for concern as much as it once did Dr. Liss your take?
[01:00:45] Dana Liis: Yeah. Well, food science has come a long way. I think from an athlete perspective, I will definitely try to ask an athlete, like trying to understand their reason for choosing a plant-based diet or choosing a vegetarian diet, just to kind of understand where they’re coming from and if it’s actually serving them.
In most cases, it’s still with a lot of the food availability and food science, we have all sorts of different vegan. Products. I think the question is how much those products are processed. And for some plant-based athletes, that’s something that they, that may not resonate with them. They may not wanna rely on really highly processed plant-based sausages.
So for example, so there’s a lot more sort of, it’s the kind of a holistic view, but from a amino acid perspective, it’s a lot easier now to hit your targets with food science.
[01:01:34] Julie Young: I just wanted to wrap up the section and go back a little bit in preparation for this episode, reading a study about the protein sources and effect on the gut microbiome.
And Dr. Phillips, you had somewhat alluded to this in that some of these studies, most of these studies are marrying studies, and so we’re not a hundred percent sure how well those translate over to the human, but one of the studies did conclude that the plant-based diet seemed better on the microbiome in terms of function and diversity.
But then what I think about, and Dana, I think a lot about you in terms of all the factors that you’re weighing and balancing and making these decisions that, like for example, you don’t go all in trying to achieve one objective, understanding that it may be at the expense of some other things. So when I think about this, like the animal-based proteins.
Here, kind based on what y’all are saying, they’re kind of easy, they’re packaged, everything’s in them in terms of micronutrients, amino acids, those sorts of things, and then maybe missing some of that with the plant. But then on the other hand, maybe there’s some drawbacks to that animal based protein. So how do you navigate these pros and cons to make the best decision?
Yeah, with
[01:02:49] Dana Liis: them. Gut microbiome, lots of prebiotic fibers. That is something I definitely prioritize in a whole sort of athlete’s nutrition sphere is, yeah, just getting as many different kind of fruits and vegetables as you can in your day, week, month, just because of the sort of all the. Prebiotic fibers and polyphenols.
Those are all basically things that your gut microbiome, different strains really like for different reasons. So trying to like keep your gut microbiome sort of in balance and healthy, definitely like plant-based diet supports that, but with an animal-based or omnivore, it doesn’t necessarily not support it.
It’s just kind of making sure you get that variety of fruits and vegetables in your nutrition intake and decisions. I think breaking down some of these research studies, we’ll read online and we’ll hear somebody say, X plus Y equals Z, and it’s never that. Simple or straightforward. There’s a lot of other contextual factors that I think need to be considered, but then get diluted with social media messages.
So if you’re ever hearing somebody saying, oh, I did this and I felt this way, that’s not good grounds to make a decision whether or not you’re gonna follow that nutrition reason or trend. I think just understanding the context is important. I mean, you’re breaking down some of this information.
[01:04:06] Julie Young: Mm-hmm.
Along those lines, I was thinking about this through the episode. You’ve been in the business of performance nutrition for a bit now. So you’ve worked with these ranges and this evolution of guidelines. Can you anecdotally, in your practice, identify like patterns where you see you can be more effective?
Lean body mass or muscle protein synthesis translating to strength with these increased protein totals? Yeah, absolutely. Like
[01:04:34] Dana Liis: you can kind of look at an athlete’s habits or just kind of conversations you have and pick up on nuances of where little nutrition shifts can help support. There is body composition or training adaptation goals better, but it’s always kind of working from where an athlete is at rather than giving an athlete like a meal plan, starting where they’re at and finding, you know, where we can make little tweaks to better support their
[01:04:59] Trevor Connor: goals.
We focus on the importance of natural protein sources, but let’s hear some thoughts from Dr. Andy Pruitt and Dr. Jeff Soff on what sort of supplements to look for if you’re going to supplement.
[01:05:11] Jeff Sankoff: So one of the things I would say is that anytime you take a supplement, these supplements are unregulated and you never know what you’re actually getting.
So you’re gonna have to pay some amount of money to make sure that you’re getting a certain degree of quality. There was a something that came out in Consumer Reports not too long ago that talked about lead in protein, but that was kind of absurd because they were using a standard for lead that is ridiculously below all of the other accepted worldwide standards.
So you have to be a little bit careful when you look at some of these reports that say, oh, this protein’s so dangerous. The reality is that most of these proteins are probably fine. I would say stay away from things that are really expensive, like pro collagen formulas, like that’s just rubbish. There’s no such thing as a collagen enhancing right formula of protein.
It’s just, it’s protein. So you don’t have to take any collagen specific stuff, just buy the regular stuff. Uh, you know, you can buy if you wanna get some branch chain amino acids, sure it’s more expensive. It’s not really gonna help you all that much. But if you feel better doing it, fine. But if you’re on a tight budget and the protein is making a dent, then regular old whey protein or whatever, your vegetarian source, they’re both just fine.
[01:06:26] Andy Pruitt: And for a protein to be dangerous, the quantity of intake would be enormous.
[01:06:32] Trevor Connor: Well, I hate to say it, I’ve been loving this conversation and protein has been a topic that I have always loved to research, so I could go another couple hours, but I think we have to wind this up. And the last thing that I, I really wanted to ask both of you about is some of the myths about protein.
And I know two of them are this question of whether a high protein is damaging to your kidneys and also if it can cause insulin resistance. But I’m sure you have some other miss you’d love to address as well. So
[01:07:01] Dana Liis: I can hit the kidney one first. Protein is only damaging to your kidneys if you have a preexisting.
Condition or pathology for someone who does not. It’s myth.
[01:07:12] Stew Phillips: Yeah. We need to put that one to rest. Not even the World Health Organization thinks that, and even the Institute of Medicine doesn’t think that it’s such a popular myth. It’s, yeah, it just needs to be laid to rest. Zero evidence, a 60-year-old hypothesis that needs to be put to rest.
[01:07:27] Trevor Connor: Okay, so that one is not nuanced
[01:07:30] Stew Phillips: is what you’re saying.
[01:07:31] Angelo Poli: There we go.
[01:07:33] Stew Phillips: I mean, I think 10, 20 years ago we would be a bit more nuanced in the answer, but I think we’re, we’re at that point now where people say the absence of evidence is an evidence of absence. And I’m like, well, we’ve been waiting 60 years and I’m still not seeing the smoking gun.
So sorry. And reviews to the contrary, people have looked for it, can’t find it. I mean, how much longer do we need to look right. What
[01:07:55] Trevor Connor: about protein and insulin resistance?
[01:07:57] Stew Phillips: So I think that there are a lot of things that probably cause insulin resistance if you were to stack them up, that are much further ahead of protein.
The biggest one is being inactive, right? As soon as you’re inactive, insulin resistance. It doesn’t take, like if we immobilize a muscle, which we do have every now and again, and we put someone on bed rest, they become insulin resistant within a couple of days. So I think that really has the upper hand on what your dietary composition is.
I think there is long-term data to suggest that there may be an association with insulin resistance. Observational, so hence the association, but it’s pretty weak. I mean, there are lots of other things that you could say contribute to insulin resistant before you could pin it on protein per se.
[01:08:42] Trevor Connor: Any other myths that we should be aware of with protein?
[01:08:44] Dana Liis: You had mentioned bone loss.
[01:08:46] Stew Phillips: Yeah, bone, but that’s another one that just needs to go away. It was the acid hypothesis that more protein causes your blood to become acidic. If your blood’s acidic, then that causes calcium to come out of your bone, essentially leached out of your bone. And it was, again, observational people notice people on higher protein diets excreted more calcium, and the real reason for that is that they actually take up more calcium because protein is actually enhances calcium uptake when you’ve got sufficient calcium.
So again, another one that I think has been disproven now time and time again. So yeah, don’t worry about that.
[01:09:23] Trevor Connor: Well, I hate to say it. I think it’s time to wrap it up. Dr. Liss, you’ve been on the show before, but Dr. Phillips, it’s your first time being on the show. So where we always finish up is with our one minute take home.
So we are gonna give all of us one minute to give the message to our listeners that you think is the most important thing for them to take from the show. And Dr. Phillips, since it’s your first time on the show, I’ll give you the choice. Do you wanna go first or do you want to go last? I’ll go last. I’ll
[01:09:51] Stew Phillips: listen to what Dana says and then probably change mine.
So
[01:09:56] Dana Liis: I would say a one minute take home if you’re an endurance athlete, like a lot of your. Audience protein is essential. It’s not optional. And if you need protein in your diet for staying healthy, durable, adapting to training protein does not equal getting bulky or gaining upper body lean mass that you don’t want to be aerodynamic, et cetera.
The training does that. The protein really helps you get the most outta your specific training. If you’re not lifting heavy loads, you’re probably not gonna put on a ton of bulk just from eating protein. Most endurance athletes need more protein than we once thought historically. 1.82 grams per kilogram body weight per day, and even higher on some of your rest days when you’re really trying to maximize your body, recovering, resting, and preparing for the next session.
So to do that, total protein needs during the day and then distributing, trying to distribute that protein throughout your day with 25, 40 grams in your meals and.
[01:10:50] Julie Young: I think for me in prepping for this episode, I was really excited to hear from Dana and of course Dr. Phillips just as experts. And I think one of the most important things that US laypeople can do is better educate ourselves and try to understand how we can critically evaluate the information and understand is it a good source?
If it is a good source, is it, is the information or the conclusions are they actually relevant to us? And understanding that context because of course where an individual is kind of their weak links and where they wanna go in terms of their goals or there’s so much individuality to that. And I think how these totals types, timing, there’s a lot of nuance to that.
So I think it’s really just educating yourself and then understanding like there are some trade offs in trying to balance all those factors to make the best decision. So.
[01:11:39] Trevor Connor: Before I start my take home, I kind of have a take home and a half. Dr. Phillips, again, just wanna do a call out just for the influence you had on getting that message out that the RDAs are outdated and protein is about more than just nitrogen balance.
But my main take home is just going back to, I think it’s really important to be aware of the source of the protein and the foods that you’re getting it through and the foods that you are eating it with. I think that is extraordinarily important. I think from my experience when I read studies that are very negative on protein, often what you’re seeing is A, an isolated protein powder and no consideration of the other foods that the individual or often the mice are eating and the impacts those potentially have on health.
And then it’s somewhat blamed on the protein. So I think source is very important. And to take it even a step further, Dr. Phillips, you kept hammering on this. Looking at somebody eating high protein diet who is sedentary and on a couch, versus somebody eating a high protein diet who is fit and exercising all the time.
They’re dramatically different things. And you gotta be careful about hearing that protein’s bad for you for this or for that. And it’s a study of somebody who isn’t exercising. All these things are a factor. All these things play in and you can’t just look at protein and isolation. But Dr. Phillips really looking forward to hearing your take home.
[01:13:03] Stew Phillips: Well, I’ll come back to one of the messages and I, I think everybody’s take home is sort of, you stole a lot of my thunder, but Whole Foods is the way to go. Basically, you’re gonna get all the nutrition from those foods in terms of all of the other things that you need in your diet, calcium, vitamin D, et cetera, everything.
Supplements are convenient. They’re useful in certain contexts, but the RDA is not the target to aim at. It never was. It was never designed as a target. It’s a deficiency prevention level. I think you can go up to as high as the RDA, and to give you an analogy that I think resonates with a lot of people.
Once you’ve gone to twice the RDA, you’ve squeezed the cloth pretty hard and the water that comes out of the benefit, that comes back pretty much done after that. If you’re a high-end super elite athlete, I could maybe make the recommendation, but if you’re a mere mortal and you’re in the gym even for an hour or a day, five or six days a week, I think that 1.6 hits most of the targets and all the benefit that you would get back.
You’ll see it. Probably more important to cover your energy needs more than you’re worrying about protein per se. So ignore the hype and anybody that talks about greater than sort of 1.6 and two hundred and twenty, thirty, forty, fifty grams, I think that they’re speaking from a position of not really understanding what the science says.
[01:14:24] Trevor Connor: Great take home. And Dr. Phillips, you just discovered the secret of our show. You’ll always wanna go first with the take home ’cause somebody’s gonna steal your thunder.
[01:14:31] Stew Phillips: Yeah. Well I figured that would happen, but I was like, okay, I’ve never really heard what these people say. So, uh, yeah. All good. All good.
[01:14:40] Trevor Connor: Well, thank you to both of you. That was a really fun conversation. Truly appreciated. My pleasure.
[01:14:45] Julie Young: Thank you. And thank you, Dana, for bringing us all together. Oh, no problem.
[01:14:50] Trevor Connor: That was another episode of Fast Talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed in Fast Talk are those of the individual. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast.
Don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube. As always, be sure to leave us a Radian review. To learn more about the episode from show notes to references, visit us@fasttalklabs.com. And to join the conversation on our forum, go to forums.fast talk labs.com for Dr. Stewart Phillips, Dr. Dana Lis, Dr. Andy Pruitt, Dr.
Jeff Soff, Dr. Ray Browning, Angela Polley, and Julie Young. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening.
