A message from Founder and Owner, Coach Tristan Mitchell:
This month we’re talking protein, one of my favorite topics of conversation – more specifically we’re going to talk protein and it’s importance to our muscles. This month’s linked podcast interviews Don Laymen PhD, who coined a term that I love, “muscle centric health” – essentially the healthier we can maintain our muscle the better for our overall health. There are two major focuses for our long-term health, according to Don, our brain and our muscle. If those two are taken care of the there’s a very good chance of a long and healthy life.
Muscle is the most important tissue in our body to maintaining metabolic health, it deeply impacts our glucose and lipid levels because muscle is one of the primarily locations where these energy sources are being utilized. If our muscle is not healthy, our metabolic health suffers, and as we discussed a couple of months ago if our metabolic health is poor then our overall mortality risk factors increase. Another big and obvious factor to how much glucose and lipids we have in our bloodstream at any one time is how many of them we are eating at a meal, for example – chronic over consumption of carbohydrates creates an environment of chronic excess insulin, too much insulin too often is our path to diabetes. However, healthy, and active muscles are one of the best ways we can make sure that whatever excess energy might be present has somewhere to go.
Our bodies are very good at storing fat, if we have eaten excess fat that our body isn’t utilizing for energy then we store it. If we eat excess carbohydrate our body converts that to fat, specifically saturated fat, and stores it as well. So, part of this conversation about metabolic health is simply energy balance but that’s not where our focus is today, or focus is on maximizing muscle health to provide a place for our energy intake to go.
Clearly exercise is a massive part of this equation and healthy muscle is forged in the fire of exertion, we need resistance training to build and maintain healthy muscle tissue. For our muscle tissue to grow in response to training we need adequate protein. Not just the bare minimum either, we need enough protein to go through muscle protein synthesis - a process that allows us to grow and maintain muscle mass.
The RDA (recommended dietary allowance) of protein is 50 grams of protein per day but this number is woefully inadequate to thrive and create, or even adequately maintain, muscle mass as we age. Don Laymen says that we should be aiming for a minimum of 125 total grams for men and 100 grams for women with the goal being to get as close to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight as possible.
Total grams aren’t the only important aspect of our protein strategy, we also need to consider how much protein we are eating per meal. This is because we need enough protein at any one time to signal to our body that there is enough protein available to prioritize the expensive metabolic process that it muscle protein synthesis. That means that spreading out our protein into small amounts throughout the day is not ideal, instead we want to target 30-60g per meal, that 30g minimum is sufficient to support our organ health (which our body prioritizes first) and muscle maintenance. If muscle growth is the goal, then we want bump that number up. There’s debate around how much protein can be adequately used at one time but 60g seems to be the upper limit for most people although there will be individual variability.
The final aspect that we want to take into consideration is protein timing, our prioritization here is first meal and last meal of the day – we want to kick on muscle protein synthesis first thing after we break the overnight fast and before we go to bed and into our overnight fast. It is not paramount that our “fast” breaking meal (breakfast) happen first thing in the morning, it can occur whenever, just prioritize that high protein meal (30g +) whenever you eat breakfast.
If 100-125g or more seems like it’s too much protein, consider this - our body turns over 300g of protein every day, working on maintenance of every tissue in our body. Now this doesn’t mean we need 300g of protein a day because our bodies are good at recycling amino acids but as we age we get less efficient and our response to dietary protein deteriorates. This means we require more protein in our diet, specifically more protein per meal (30-60g!), to elicit the response in the muscle that we want.
Be bullish on your protein intake and reap the rewards of better muscle health! If you have questions on how to improve your protein strategy reach out to us today!
