Building Muscle at 40: What Nobody Tells You

If we can correct our nutrition and we gear it towards skeletal muscle health, then we can change the trajectory of aging. There's only two main ways that we can stimulate skeletal muscle. Exercise and dietary protein. We talk about lifespan. There's also muscle span. Being sedentary is not the opposite of activity. Being sedentary is a disease state in and of itself. Period. End of story. When we increase our dietary protein, skeletal muscle will mount a youthful response because skeletal muscle requires dietary protein. When we think about how we design a diet, we have to recognize a handful of things. Number one, these essential amino acids, primarily leucine, is necessary to trigger muscle protein synthesis. Number two, that aging impairs the efficiency of muscle protein synthesis. >> I see. So, it's a runaway train. If you start getting sarcopenia, if there's obesity and other markers of aging, you're losing muscle quality, aka protein synthesis, and other things. And as a consequence, it makes it harder to increase muscle quality. So you have to short circuit this pretty early. >> Um yes and I would even say that we talk about sarcopenia as a disease of aging but I think that there is a youthful phenotype of sarcopenia. If we define sarcopenia as decreased muscle mass and strength that can easily affect our youth. You know we talk about health span we talk about lifespan. There's also muscle span. And muscle span is this concept that is really about the skeletal muscle health as we age. And there's three primary components to that. That's understanding that skeletal muscle health begins very early on. And we're going to talk about um because I know that there's parents. I have two little kids. So I want to talk about the amount of protein necessary for children of course. And then as we think about this muscle span there is early on, early age where you're laying down the foundation, where you're hopefully training, doing exercise, just doing movement. Being sedentary is a disease state in and of itself. Period. End of story. Being sedentary is not the opposite of activity. Being sedentary is in and of itself a disease of inactivity. Then midlife we have to maintain the tissue. We get a peak muscle mass in our 30s. We get a peak bone mass around the same time. And then that later half of life we have to do everything that we can to maintain that tissue because of this decrease in efficiency of skeletal muscle. So, skeletal muscle as a nutrient- sensing organ can respond like youthful tissue. And the way that it responds like youthful tissue from an amino acid perspective, just thinking about how we eat to maintain that is that when we increase our dietary protein, so older individuals or individual as they age require more protein to then stimulate mTor. So, does that mean instead of eating 30 grams of protein per meal minimum that people older than say 50 60 should eat 40 or 50 g of protein? >> I'd say that that's true. >> Interesting. >> And by the way, skeletal muscle will mount a youthful response. There's um you know this was uh the initial work was out of uh Bob Wolf's lab. He's an icon in the industry of protein. He's one of the can I say grandfathers now. Bob Wolf and Don Layman and these guys, you know, I trained with Dr. Donald Layman. You know, these initial studies that we think about and we take for granted dietary protein. We think, okay, well, the bros have always known this, but we have not. >> And when you are younger, there is a somewhat of a linear response. Let's say a younger individual still growing, we'll just call them 10, 12 years old or my children. uh I have a three and a four and a half year old. They will respond with five grams of dietary protein, 10 grams of dietary protein, 15 grams of dietary protein versus an older individual will not respond at all to that. However, that response can be augmented by increasing the dietary protein at that meal. So, an older individual will respond like an a younger individual by 30 g of protein, 30 to to 50. Later we're going to talk about supplements, but I'm very curious. Is there a place for supplementing leucine and other branch chain amino acids specifically? You know, I always assumed that supplementing with branch chain amino acids was kind of the unique domain of people, you know, post exercise trying to build more muscle, but as you're telling me all this, it seems that adding leucine in powder form to a meal seems like it would be great for muscle health. Is that true? >> I would say that we do not add leucine alone. Okay, >> because leucine isolucine and veene go hand in hand. It would not be advisable to add a single amino acid. The amino acid levels are maintained in the blood by adding more of one would have effects on the other. The way in which I would think about supplementing essential amino acids and or branch chains would be if an individual is choosing to have a lower protein meal. I remember when I was in residency, the food choices were not very good, and maybe I had 2 ounces of fish, which wasn't enough to bring me up to a threshold. That would be a place that I would add in branch chain amino acids or essential amino acids. That would bring someone's amino acid threshold up. But we have to understand everything that we're doing, we should be doing with a purpose. The idea of just sipping on branch chain amino acids or just adding amino acids would be the equivalent of putting a key into a car and trying to turn the car on but not having any additional substrate. So you need the full spectrum of all the amino acids to affect skeletal muscle health. >> Yeah. Well, that's um reassuring to hear because I love the taste of scrambled eggs and steaks and I also like tuna and I also like chicken and I I love all those all those things. And I have to imagine that as you mentioned before there are other things in these quality animal proteins like you mentioned selenium. You mentioned other perhaps essential fatty acids and other vitamins that perhaps have something to do with what the animal ingested during its life that also benefit muscle. Is that true? It is. And the the big standout to me is creatine. We know that creatine at 5 g of creatine will affect skeletal muscle, but 12 gram of creatine affects brain health. And there's a lot of interesting research coming out on creatine and brain health. >> Can you remind me the rough um amounts of creatine and say you mentioned a let's just I mean I must say a 4 and 1/2 ounce steak feels um rather poultry to me. Um, that's probably the size of which is a huge meal to me. >> Right. So, let's say a 6 oz, let's be generous, a 6 oz steak or um four scrambled eggs. I mean, how much creatine are we talking? Eggs don't have much creatine, right? >> Not much. And um and I I was just recently looking at this. The amount of creatine in a pound of steak, you're going to cringe. Is is something like two grams. >> So, it's not very much. >> It's not very much. But when we think about eating foods as in a food matrix, what you're saying is absolutely true that it's interesting. We don't eat single nutrients. While we think about dietary protein as a single nutrient and we think about carbohydrates, but what we really do is we eat mixed meals. When we think about that, the quality of the protein matters from a protein perspective, could you get plant-based proteins and animal-based proteins? And could it be equal? Yes, it could. So, I want to be very clear to say and have a very balanced perspective that we could get all of our dietary protein from plants, from plant-based sources. A few caveats there is that that RDA that I gave you earlier is based only on high quality proteins and that being the minimum to prevent a deficiency. If an individual was plant-based, they would require closer to 1.6 g per kg, a higher amount of total protein if it's coming from plants. That becomes important to understand.

Muscle loss is one of the biggest drivers of aging, weakness, and loss of independence after 40. In this video, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon explains the science of muscle aging (sarcopenia), how protein intake and exercise affect muscle health, and what actually works to maintain strength, mobility, and longevity as you age. Subscribe to RESPIRE for more science-based health tips: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyNaCRf6Aaljcm9ZWARawXw re·spire (verb) – (1) to breathe (2) to recover hope, courage, or strength 🌟🌟🌟 NEW VIDEOS EVERY WEEK 🌟🌟🌟 This video is a condensed and highly edited version of the full 181 minute podcast from @HubermanLab. For more information, watch the full episode (link below) and follow the podcast. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is a board-certified osteopathic physician, founder of Muscle-Centric Medicine, and a New York Times bestselling author known for promoting skeletal muscle as crucial for longevity, disease prevention, and performance. Andrew Huberman is an American neuroscientist and tenured associate professor in the department of neurobiology and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. Podcast Host: Andrew Huberman Podcast Guest: Dr. Gabrielle Lyon YouTube: @HubermanLab Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFcYF_pxLgA&t=26s&pp=ygUNaHViZXJtYW4gbHlvbg%3D%3D Fair Use Disclaimer 1. Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. 2. We do not own the rights to all content. They have, in accordance with fair use, been repurposed with the intent of educating and inspiring others. We must state that in no way, shape or form are we intending to infringe rights of the copyright holder. 3. Content used is strictly for research and education, all under the Fair Use law. #andrewhuberman #hubermanlab #fitness #aginggracefully #longevity #protein #muscle #menshealth #healthtips