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See the show notes from "The Peter Attia Drive" podcast here.
1-paragraph summary
Professor Don Layman is a proponent of a "muscle-centric" perspective on health and nutrition. He claims that modern people aren't "over-fat" so much as "under-muscled". Preserving lean muscle mass is crucial to healthy aging, and there are two main levers we can pull to preserve and/or build that muscle mass: dietary protein intake, and resistance training. We need more protein than is typically recommended, as the RDA is basically set up to prevent acute disease and is not ideal for optimal health. High quality protein is both easily digestible, and has optimal amounts of the essential amino acids (especially lysine, leucine, and methionine) to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. With those criteria as a guide, protein from animal sources (meat, eggs, dairy) is most optimal.
Key takeaways
Muscle serves two major functions -- mobility and metabolism.
Muscle is our largest sink for glucose and fatty acid disposal and utilization.
Protein consists of smaller molecules called "amino acids." There are 20 different types of amino acids that we need; of those, 9 are essential (meaning that we need to get them from our diet).
Of those 9 essential amino acids, there are 3 that are crucial for maintaining muscle health -- lysine, leucine, and methionine. These must be sufficiently high in order to trigger muscle protein synthesis.
If you get at least 100 grams of protein per day from animal sources (meat, eggs, dairy), you probably don't need to worry about the amino acid ratios -- those will take care of themselves because animal protein is of such high quality (both in terms of digestibility and amino acid profile).
People on a plant-based diet will need to be more intentional about optimizing their amino acid ratios, and will probably need to consume even more protein to make up for the lower quality protein they are getting.
As we enter adulthood, we grow less sensitive to muscle and protein-building signals, which means that we need to hit a certain threshold of protein at each meal to ensure we trigger muscle protein synthesis. As a general rule, try to get 30-50 grams of protein at each meal (assuming you're eating multiple meals per day).
One of the biggest drawbacks of time-restricted feeding is that it often reduces total protein along with total calorie intake.
Your protein need should NOT be thought of as a percentage of total calories that fluctuates depending on how many calories you're eating. Protein should be a fixed value that remains fixed, no matter if your goal is to lose weight or gain weight.
One of the worst things you can do when you're trying to lose weight is to eat less protein. "We want weight loss, but we don't want people to lose any lean mass."
A good place to start for total daily protein intake is 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Then divide that number by how many meals you eat per day, trying to get roughly equal amounts of protein in each meal (the first and last meals of the day are the most important to get right).
Children are much more sensitive to the anabolic signal of protein, and get a robust muscle building response from much smaller portions of protein (even just 5-10 grams).
Top practical application
Start getting at least 30 (and as much as 50) grams of protein in your first meal of the day. This sets you up well for preserving/building lean muscle mass AND for controlling your food intake the rest of the day, because of the strong satiety signals sent by eating that much protein at once.
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