Ep. 80: The Best-Ever Protein Explainer featuring Prof. Stuart Phillips and Leslie Beck, RD
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How much protein do you need if you’re trying to lose weight but also retain, or even build, muscle mass? What’s better—plant- or animal-based protein? Why is protein so key in preventing sarcopenia, or age-related decline in strength? And, is it possible to consume too much protein? In a special feature interview with protein expert Stuart Phillips of McMaster University, guest host Leslie Beck, Medcan’s director of food and nutrition and the Globe and Mail’s nutrition columnist, tackles these questions and more. [This episode originally aired in August 2020.]
LINKS
Leslie Beck on Twitter @LeslieBeckRD.
Stuart Phillips on Twitter @mackinprof. And here’s his bio at McMaster University.
Protein Calculators: How much protein do you need each day? Lots of protein calculators are out there. FitnessVolt.com has one that takes into account your weight, height and activity level, and provides you with a range of values. Click here.
Some of Prof. Stuart Phillips best-known authored or co-authored papers:
IOC Consensus Statement: Dietary Supplements and the High-Performance Athlete
The NY Times Well Blog write-up of Phillips’ “boot camp” study that demonstrated the role of high-protein intake in gaining muscle mass while still losing weight.
Prof. Phillips’ 2020 coauthored paper: Of sound mind and body: Exploring the diet-strength interaction in healthy aging.
INSIGHTS
Why do you hear so much about protein compared to other macronutrients? There are a few reasons, Phillips says. First, protein is the most satiating macronutrient—if you eat an equal amount of carbs, fat and protein, it’s the protein that will leave you feeling most satisfied, which means you’ll eat less and it will take longer for you to get hungry again. Second, protein is key to muscle development and strength, and eating protein is important to retaining lean muscle mass while you lose weight. Finally, protein consumption becomes more important as you age because getting enough of it is a key way to fight off sarcopenia, or age-related muscle decline. [Timecode 5:30 in podcast]
If you’re doing resistance training two or three times a week and looking to retain strength while losing fat, you should be aiming to consume between 0.5 to 0.7 grams of protein per day for every pound you weigh—so someone who, for example, weighs 180 pounds should aim for up to 130 grams of protein everyday, divided between your meals. (That breaks down into 43 grams of protein per meal if you’re eating three meals a day.) This can easily be done at dinner with a chicken breast, some broccoli and baked potato, but gets harder if you’re just having a bowl of cereal at breakfast. In that case, Phillips says, “you need to do something to your meal to get up to that level.” [7:10, 18:40]
More is not necessarily better when it comes to protein. According to Phillips’ research, eating more than 0.7 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight per day won’t provide much benefit to anyone besides hardcore bodybuilders. The science suggests the body just can’t absorb any more. The good news is that most people can consume the protein they need simply through their regular eating patterns, without having to supplement protein levels. If you want protein but are really looking to control your calories, then supplements are great, Phillips says. “But if you’re judicious in the way you plan your food and the way you eat, then it’s really easily achievable.” [20:10]
It’s a common belief that we should consume protein before a weight workout, but, as it turns out, there’s no evidence to prove that this is helpful. “The analogy I like to give—and it applies to a lot of things—is that protein makes your muscles become more like a sponge and more able to absorb nutrients,” Phillips says. “So the time when you’re more sensitive to the impact of the nutrition is always post-workout.” Phillips used to believe that it was optimal to consume protein immediately after a workout, and the “anabolic window” for protein consumption is open for about a day after the workout. [21:32]
So when it comes to maintaining muscle mass—which is important for healthy aging—what’s better: plant or animal protein? Well, if you’re active and consuming those 0.6-0.7 grams of protein per pound, it doesn’t really matter. Phillips notes that a lot of animal-sourced protein, like eggs or dairy, tend to be nutrient rich, so when you consume those items you’re also consuming a lot of other nutrients your body needs, like iron or calcium. But so long as you're mindful of where your nutrients are coming from, there’s no reason you can’t follow, say, a vegan diet and still get everything you need. [26:10]
Please subscribe and rate us on your favourite podcast platform. Eat Move Think host Shaun Francis is Medcan’s CEO and chair. Follow him on Twitter @shauncfrancis. Connect with him on LinkedIn. And follow him on Instagram @shauncfrancis. Eat Move Think is produced by Ghost Bureau. Executive producer is Chris Shulgan. Senior producer is Russell Gragg.
Ep. 80: The Best-Ever Protein Explainer
featuring Prof. Stuart Phillips and Leslie Beck, RD
final web transcript
Christopher Shulgan: Hello, Eat Move Think listeners. I'm executive producer Christopher Shulgan, and this is episode 80. It's summertime, the production team is preparing for fall, and so this week we went back into our archives to revisit one of our most popular episodes: "The Best-Ever Protein Explainer" tells you everything you wanted to know about the macronutrient that is so key to so many parts of human metabolism and the strength-building process.
[00:00:38.09]
Christopher Shulgan: It features all your protein answers in one place. How much protein do you need? Do you need more protein when you're trying to build muscle? How much, exactly? What about when you're trying to lose weight, and still trying to hold on to your strength? And what's protein's role in preventing age-related strength declines? One of the academics at the centre of all this research is Stuart Phillips, who believes the official recommended daily allowance of protein is too low to meet the optimal needs for many of us out there. Phillips is our guest today. In addition to being a world authority on protein, he's a kinesiology professor at McMaster University, and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in skeletal muscle health in aging.
[00:01:20.11]
Christopher Shulgan: Sitting in the host chair in this episode is one of the country's best known registered dieticians: Leslie Beck—Medcan's director of food and nutrition, the Globe and Mail's nutrition columnist and the chair of Dietitians of Canada. During their conversation, Beck and Phillips discuss everything you need to know about protein—and, as it turns out, there's a lot.
[00:01:44.03]
Leslie Beck: So hello, Dr. Phillips. Thank you so much for joining me today on Eat Move Think. I am really excited to talk to you. I mean, you are the worldwide authority on the interaction between muscle strength and protein intake. You're an acknowledged expert on how what you put into your mouth affects your athletic performance. I certainly have followed your work. I've written about your research in some of my Globe and Mail columns. And I've also incorporated some of your findings around protein into my nutrition recommendations for clients. So thank you very much for being here today.
[00:02:17.18]
Stuart Phillips: It's my pleasure, Leslie. Thanks for having me on the show.
[00:02:20.16]
Leslie Beck: Protein is so big these days. Actually, I feel that we're a little bit obsessed with protein. It seems to be everywhere. Of course, there's protein shakes and protein bars. I've seen protein bread, protein breakfast cereal. I've even seen protein water, and I have no idea why we need that. We really do seem to be anxious though, about getting enough protein, whether it's for muscle strength, muscle building, losing weight or immune health. But yet, when I work with my clients, and I tell them how much they need to support their goals and how much it takes to eat to get that, often I see that they're already getting more than what they need. But we can get to that later. Start by telling me how you became interested in your area of scientific research.
[00:03:10.13]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah, it's interesting to hear you say that there's a lot of focus on protein because, you know, when I got into exercise science, and I've been at McMaster now for 22 years, and so, you know, back that up another, say, seven or eight years of graduate school work, it was all about carbohydrate, and was all about how carbohydrates were fuelling performance. And I couldn't go to a conference without the keynote speaker talking about something to do with carbohydrates and muscle glycogen and performance.
[00:03:38.18]
Stuart Phillips: And then we sort of switched a little bit and there was a brief sort of obsession with fat and fat loading. And then how could we maximize, you know, fat capacity, oxidation, for example, and then ketogenic diets came around and now we're into protein. So I sort of feel like my macronutrient, which is protein, has come of age, so to speak. So I think my initial fascination with protein really came based on my own sporting background. I was a rugby player at heart. I enjoyed ice hockey, I enjoyed football. The harder you could hit somebody, the more I enjoyed the sport. And we were always talking about, you know, how much protein did you need to do this? How much protein did you need to do that? Back in the days when it was really only Joe Weider that was making protein supplements, and they weren't the best tasting supplements out there. The stuff out there now tastes great actually by comparison. And so it was a fascination for a long time, and one of my master's projects was around looking at protein requirements for athletes. And, you know, really it just started from there.
[00:04:44.07]
Leslie Beck: Okay, that's interesting. So I work with many clients whose goal, among others, is to lose weight. And we know that eating a calorie-reduced diet can cause you to lose muscle along with body fat. And I'm certainly aware of the important role that both resistance training and protein play in helping preserve muscle while you're losing weight. So can you talk a little bit about this? Why is it a bad thing to lose muscle when you're dieting? And how do resistance training and protein factor in?
[00:05:16.21]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah, so we've done a little bit of work in this area. I think the key message is that there's probably sort of what I talk about three big reasons to focus on protein if you're trying to lose weight. The first is, I don't think you get too much disagreement from experts to say that the most satiating macronutrient is protein. So if you ate 50 grams of carbs, 50 grams of fat, 50 grams of protein, you get a satiety response. In other words, a suppression of your appetite with the protein that would make people say, you know, I don't want to eat for a longer period of time. The next biggest thing is that it is the substrate that supports muscle, as you said. People's concern around muscle is that as a metabolically-active component that contributes to resting energy expenditure, which for most people is their biggest energy expenditure in a day, muscle's the one that you want to prop up. In other words, it's hard to gain it, it's much easier to lose it. So if you do lose it because of the caloric deficit that you're in or because you're not doing too much, it's really tough to get it back. And so you've sacrificed a little bit of the tissue that's burning energy on a daily basis.
[00:06:25.16]
Stuart Phillips: And the last part with protein is that something that we call the thermic effect. So in other words, when you put food in your mouth, your energy expenditure goes up, and that's your body's sort of metabolic processes putting away the macronutrients that you've consumed. And the highest what we call thermic effect occurs with protein ingestion. So all of those really add up to say it's a key macronutrient that you want to try and focus on, and that it's muscle that you want to try and preserve in weight loss. But, you know, of the two stimuli that you mentioned, resistance exercise and protein, the most potent of them, you know, to be really honest, is the weightlifting, is the resistance exercise.
[00:07:06.20]
Leslie Beck: Right. And so, for someone who is cutting calories to lose weight, how much resistance training would that take to help them hold onto muscle while they lose body fat?
[00:07:17.03]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not sure I can give you a great answer, but I would think that something every, say, two days or thereabouts would be about right. So if you're doing three sessions a week, if you're splitting it up, if it's a push-pull legs type rotation, or if you're doing whole body work, I'd aim for about at least two but probably better to go for three sessions per week.
[00:07:40.07]
Leslie Beck: Okay. And what about how much protein should someone in that situation be eating each day?
[00:07:46.00]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah, that's an even tougher question. It's dependent on a couple of things. First of all, if you're lean to start with, or if you have a lot of body fat to lose, it depends on the degree of the caloric deficit that you're in. So if you have a lot of body fat, and you've got a lot of body fat to lose in other words, you can probably get away with a little less protein than if somebody's fairly lean. If you're in a really deep energy deficit, like you're really trying to cut weight and lose weight fast, then you probably need to consume more. So it's at about this point that I start to talk about grams of protein per kilo and a lot of people go, "Whoa! You know, that's kind of—you're gonna blow me away here." But so we'll do grams per pound because most people get that. It's probably close to about 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight if you're in a deep caloric deficit or if you're a lean individual, and about 0.5 grams per pound, if you have a slightly higher body fat and you're just trying to gradually lose weight. But both of those would be estimates that would be quite a ways above what the minimum recommendation is, or the RDA.
[00:09:02.13]
Leslie Beck: Right, which is—and now I'm talking in kilos, so you can convert, which is for somebody who's sedentary, 0.8 grams for every kilogram they eat every day.
[00:09:13.14]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah. So it's about 0.8 grams per kilo as you said, which is about 0.3 grams per pound.
[00:09:20.27]
Leslie Beck: Okay.
[00:09:23.05]
Stuart Phillips: Or about 0.35 if you really want to do the math. But I mean, the bottom line is we're talking about intakes, and both of those situations I just gave you that are, in most cases, at least 1.5, or in some cases, at least twice that intake.
[00:09:37.10]
Leslie Beck: Okay. Thank you. So one of your studies that I did write about that I thought was really interesting, is that you concluded actually, you found that it was actually possible to gain muscle mass while cutting back on calories to lose weight to lose body fat. Tell us a little bit about that study and what it takes to be able to do that.
[00:09:59.20]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah, I'll be honest, is that that study and a lot of data leading up to that—wasn't just our data, lots of other people's data as well, changed my tune. I would have told people when I first started teaching at McMaster 20-plus years ago, that that wasn't possible. In other words, is that gaining muscle was really only compatible with being in an energy surplus, and losing fat was only possible while being obviously in an energy deficit. And now losing fat is very difficult unless you're in an energy deficit. You can get small reductions by doing some exercise, but you really need to cut back on your energy intake. Muscle gaining, I would have sworn up and down, you needed to eat more. But as our study showed, and plenty of others as well, you can gain muscle while you're in an energy deficit, and at the same time you can lose fat. I think it's a tougher proposition to gain muscle in that situation, and it certainly wouldn't be an optimal way to gain muscle, but you can do both at the same time. So the study that we performed really did have some young men in a very deep energy deficit, about 40 percent less energy than they required on a daily basis. To put that in some perspective, we held people in that state for four weeks. I think if we had asked them to do week five, they would have rebelled. They didn't enjoy it. All they talked about at the end of the study, it was just about food. It was all about food when they were going to get—you know, it just became an obsession.
[00:11:39.09]
Leslie Beck: So what kind of calorie intake are we talking about?
[00:11:41.23]
Stuart Phillips: So it probably netted out to about 2,200 calories.
[00:11:46.13]
Leslie Beck: Okay.
[00:11:47.29]
Stuart Phillips: Now that might seem like a lot, but these guys on average weighed about 100 kilos, so 220 pounds, and we were asking them to exercise six days a week and do some pretty high intensity work. So if you're a 100 kilo guy and we're cracking the whip to make you exercise six days a week, you probably needed in the neighbourhood of about 3,500 calories as opposed to 2,200 So let's just put it this way, in four weeks they lost 3.8—so I'm just gonna do the quick math, they'd lost 12 pounds of not weight but body fat.
[00:12:25.22]
Leslie Beck: Wow.
[00:12:27.05]
Stuart Phillips: So pretty substantial. But at the same time, the group who consumed the higher protein intake, and so this would be one gram of protein per pound, they were actually able to gain about two pounds of muscle.
[00:12:42.12]
Leslie Beck: Okay. Over the four weeks?
[00:12:45.01]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah, over the four weeks. And I think, you know, when I give that information to people who work with combat sport athletes or aesthetically-oriented, so bodybuilders, they're not surprised. They said, "Yeah, you know, we do that. We cut weight and we retain muscle." And even bodybuilders would tell you that they feel like they gain. Now, they can't tell you for sure that they did, but they feel like they at least retained muscle. So I'm not so sure it came as a big surprise to some people, but the scientific paper received a lot of attention.
[00:13:23.27]
Leslie Beck: Yeah. And I suppose too, in order to—if you are trying to do something like that, and to keep the calories low, and to be eating a lot more protein to gain muscle, you're going to have to rely on things like protein powders, you know, to keep your calorie intake down.
[00:13:38.18]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah, you really hit the nail right on the head. You can't really afford to give away protein calories to foods that have calories from other things. So if you're saying, I'm going to do it all with chicken breasts, then okay, you're going to eat a lot of chicken breasts, but you're going to get a lot of other things along with it. So we really had to manipulate the protein intake using protein shakes.
[00:14:01.12]
Leslie Beck: Okay. So this study, I mean, the regime was pretty intense, as you mentioned. Let's talk for a moment about everyday folks. First of all, I mean, how much muscle can women and men expect to gain by doing, say, resistance training three times a week? And the reason I'm asking you this is because I'll often have a client in my office who they've started working with me, they've got a calorie-reduced meal plan, and they've started personal training as well. So they come in in three weeks, and their weight hasn't changed, despite following the plan, supposedly. So the response I often get is, "Well, it must be the personal training I'm doing. I've gained muscle weight. That's why the scale isn't budging." So let's talk a bit about that.
[00:14:44.15]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah. So I think that there's a lot of people who talk numbers out in the personal training world, and then there's what we've seen in the lab. And so I'll talk science, and then I'll give you a little bit of what I think are examples out there that are often held up as usual, that I think are more unusual. So the science would suggest, you know, the biggest sort of gains in muscle we've ever seen in a period of, let's say 12 or 16 weeks of weightlifting, and this is supervised, heavy, you know, we're cracking the whip on these people, we're really pushing them hard, might be about 10 or 12 pounds. And that would be unusual.
[00:15:35.04]
Leslie Beck: Okay.
[00:15:36.19]
Stuart Phillips: On average, a man would probably gain about three pounds in that same period of time, you get some people that just, you can call them genetic freaks, or call them whatever you want, outliers, but—and that's the way they are. Similarly, we get a lot of people who come in, and we put them through very high-end scientific tests, and they gain nothing. Like, they just cannot gain muscle. They—hard gainers they're called in the bodybuilding literature, they get a lot stronger, but they don't gain muscle. Women, as a proportion of the muscle that they have, and this just sort of blows the myth away is that they can gain muscle, too. They're never going to gain the same as men, but relative to what they started with. So women are down here relative to men, they all go up proportionately about the same amount. And so it's really not a testosterone-driven process, which I know flies in the face of a lot of just people's opinions, I think. So from that standpoint, we've seen women that gain on average, you know, maybe about two and a half pounds in that same period of time.
[00:16:48.08]
Leslie Beck: Over 10 to 12.
[00:16:49.25]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah, but relative to what they started with. Remember, they had lower muscle than the men. It's the same sort of increase percentage-wise. But I've seen women who gain more muscle than our low-gaining men as an example. So I do think that you can find just genetically-talented individuals, if that's the right thing, a few standard deviations away from the norm, who they just, for whatever reason, they gain muscle like it's nobody's business. And they can lose body fat, they can manipulate their body composition. And so you can very much get people who net on the scale would lose no weight. They would gain some muscle, they would lose some fat. The only real way to test that is to come to us and to use this pretty sophisticated gear that we've got to detect these types of changes.
[00:17:42.22]
Stuart Phillips: The other way is, "Gee, my clothes fit a lot differently. I look different in the mirror." And people are able to—you know, they can say things fit different. My pants are looser, my shoulders are broader, and that's the outward sort of manifestation of what we're seeing in some pretty sophisticated equipment. But we've done about, I would say probably close to 20 training studies now including men and women, a lot less with women, I'll admit. And we've seen these things. So I'm beginning over the years now to accumulate this opinion that there are just people who outperform the norm, and people who really just don't do much on a muscle perspective. And that's the way things go.
[00:18:32.13]
Leslie Beck: Now in terms of people who are doing resistance training two maybe three times a week, many of our clients we see twice a week is pretty common, just to stay healthy, to stay strong, etc. and not trying to lose weight. What's the consensus on how much protein those types of people should be eating each day?
[00:18:54.15]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah, so I think the number that we push around is about twice the RDA. So if you want it in grams per kilo, it's about 1.6 grams per kilo per day. Grams per pound, it's probably closer to about 0.6-0.7 grams per pound.
[00:19:13.02]
Leslie Beck: So if you're aiming for 1.6 grams of protein for every kilogram you weigh each day, for somebody who weighs, for example, 180 pounds, that translates into 130 grams of protein per day. If you eat three meals a day, you're going to want about 43 grams of protein at each meal. If you eat four times a day, about 33 grams of protein per meal.
[00:19:38.12]
Stuart Phillips: 43 is—I mean, if you sat down to a chicken breast and you had some baked potato and some broccoli, you'd be getting probably around 40 to 50 grams. So you're in that sweet spot. But if you sit down to your breakfast, and it's just Frosted Flakes, some milk and a glass of orange juice or a cup of coffee, then the only thing that contains protein is the milk. And a cup of milk contains only eight grams of protein. So you need to do something to your breakfast meal to get you up to that level.
[00:20:11.14]
Leslie Beck: Is there sort of a ceiling to that, whereby you consume more, more is not better, more you don't get any extra benefit from?
[00:20:19.11]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah. And that's the number 1.6. That's sort of where it comes from. We did a large systematic review, meta-analysis of a bunch of studies, and we plotted essentially a dose response. And the point at which that thing plateaus in terms of you just can't really put more protein in the muscle that's there is about 1.6. The upper end of our estimate was closer to one gram per pound, the sort of nuclear, you know, that's the bodybuilders' recipe at 2.2 grams per kilo.
[00:20:52.05]
Leslie Beck: Right. And some of that is achievable through food, too. By just food, not necessarily supplements.
[00:20:59.05]
Stuart Phillips: Oh, no. Absolutely. Like, it doesn't require supplements. And, you know, we've done a lot of work with supplements and my take really is, supplements are a tremendous—when I talk to athletes and even, you know, people like myself, mere mortals, it's a convenience issue, I think more than anything else. And so if you would like to have protein and just get the protein calories, then supplements are great. But if you're judicious in the way you plan your food and the way you eat then it's really easily achievable with food.
[00:21:32.12]
Leslie Beck: A lot of people think they need to consume protein before they start their weight workout. But you haven't seen evidence that this is helpful, have you?
[00:21:41.04]
Stuart Phillips: No, we haven't. The analogy I like to give, and it applies to a lot of things, is that the workout makes your muscle more sensitive. It makes your muscle become sort of more like a sponge to be able to absorb nutrients. And so the time when you're more sensitive to the impact of the nutrition affecting your workout is always post-workout. So there's probably a time before exercise where you would see some carryover to post exercise. It takes a while to digest protein, for example. But for the most part, I tell people to focus—when it comes to protein at least—on post-exercise nutrition.
[00:22:20.05]
Leslie Beck: So post-exercise protein is important. How much and how soon after your workout?
[00:22:26.22]
Stuart Phillips: How soon after? 10 years ago I would have said, you know, immediately you need it. That's when your muscle is at its spongiest, if that's the right way to say it. We now know that that's not correct. This post-exercise, so-called anabolic window is open for a long time, probably a whole day, in fact.
[00:22:47.24]
Leslie Beck: Really?
[00:22:49.18]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah. So unlike carbohydrates, which sort of have to be replenished fairly quickly, protein anytime that you're consuming it after you've worked out for probably about a day, you get a pretty good anabolic response. How much? I would probably—you know, the pragmatic person in me says, "Well, how many times are you going to eat in a day?" And we think that you can probably go up to about four meals at most and still get the benefits. So if you take 1.6 and that's your limit, divide it by four, it's 0.4 grams per kilo per eating occasion or meal, call it whatever you want. So if you were coming to me and saying, "I want to stand on the podium in Tokyo next summer," I'd say that's what you should be aiming for in just about every meal. And if you tell me, "Hey, I'm just training for strength, I want to—" you know, I try and hit that in every meal I do. So that's what I do. I'm not going to get on the podium in Tokyo, but I think it's not a bad way to try and aim.
[00:23:55.25]
Leslie Beck: So we've been talking about strength, strength athletes, strength workouts. What about protein for endurance athletes, someone who's training, running a marathon, doing a triathlon?
[00:24:05.08]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah, this is an interesting area. And it's one that when I first started doing the work that I did, the first study I did was actually in protein requirements in endurance athletes, not resistance athletes. And it really came from a good friend, colleague and mentor of mine, a guy named Mark Tarnopolsky who did some work, really early work showing that using nitrogen balance, that's the traditional—you got to measure every protein going in and everything coming out as well. Delightful studies to conduct, you can imagine. And he showed that protein requirements for endurance athletes were actually a little bit greater than resistance-trained athletes. And it really, I think, shook a lot of people up. They were sort of saying, "Why is that the case? They're not gaining muscle."
[00:24:50.01]
Stuart Phillips: But one of the things that people maybe don't realize is that when you're burning energy for endurance exercise, a small proportion of that is coming from protein. And while it might be only a small proportion, a small proportion of a large energy expenditure is going to add up to be more protein than you need in a given day. So for the most part I want to say—and I'm just relying on some other people's data here, that you probably require the same sort of intake. So about 1.6, maybe even greater. And the more work that you're doing, from an energy expenditure standpoint, you could sort of dial that up. The pragmatic part of that recommendation is still, if you are at about even 15 percent of a big energy expenditure in a day, let's say 4,000 calories, you're going to hit that per body weight target that we talked about, no problem.
[00:25:49.08]
Leslie Beck: Right. Right. That makes sense.
[00:25:51.06]
Stuart Phillips: Just because you're eating a lot of food.
[00:25:52.21]
Leslie Beck: Eating a lot of food. Exactly. Okay.
[00:25:55.07]
Stuart Phillips: Most people, unless they're doing something dietarily a little bit strange, but if they're just eating, you know, regular, hey, I like to—then they're going to hit those sort of targets, because that's what they need to maintain their weight anyway.
[00:26:11.27]
Leslie Beck: So let's shift to healthy aging now. You've co-authored a new paper that's just been published in the journal Frontiers, and it's titled "Of Sound Mind and Body: Exploring the Diet-Strength Interaction in Healthy Aging". This seems like maybe a little bit of a departure for you. So how did this topic come about?
[00:26:31.23]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah. Well, so like I said, I've been at McMaster now for 20 years. Academics start their career a little later. So you do the math. Research becomes me-search, I'm getting older. So I think—and I'm the director of a research centre at McMaster. The average age of the people that come in and perform exercise on a daily basis is about 72. And there's been a watershed in terms of our understanding of what successful aging is, and what it means to be independent and age well. And one of the big factors is the retention of muscle, and really the retention of muscle to be able to do your activities of daily living, to be mobile, to be able to do the things that you want to do. And most people's description of healthy aging now—I'm not so sure my parents would have the same one, but involves being active into your eighth, ninth, if you're up there, tenth decade. And I'd applaud that as a goal for anybody.
[00:27:42.16]
Stuart Phillips: And I think that strength and muscle are really a key component of that. So the mind interaction comes really from the aspect of maintaining what most people would call a good quality of life. And we think that mobility and then hence brought back strength are key parts of that. The better example is to say to somebody, is to put pictures in front of an older person and say, "Pick the pictures that somebody in this picture is aging in a healthy fashion." It's somebody who's walking. It's always usually somebody who's—they're laughing. That to me indicates that they're having a good time. Oftentimes, it's people in locations that are identifiable as being outside of Canada. Not as easy to do during a pandemic, I'll admit. But so that to me means travel. So you have the means and the ability to be mobile. And then usually it's people being not super active, I'm not talking about running races, but getting down on the floor, if that's the right way to say it and playing with their grandkids.
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Leslie Beck: Right. Yeah.
[00:29:00.18]
Stuart Phillips: And that's tough to do if you can't help yourself out of a chair.
[00:29:06.05]
Leslie Beck: And that's because you lose muscle.
[00:29:08.14]
Stuart Phillips: Exactly. And that process is, you know, I think 5-10 years ago, if you said sarcopenia, most people would shake their heads. Sarcopenia? But now they're beginning to understand. So sarcopenia is the age-related loss of muscle mass, and something that probably a decade or two ago, most clinicians and most geriatricians would say, that's an inevitable part of aging. And I think now people are beginning to understand the interaction between protein and particularly resistance exercise and being strong, and what roles they play in the retention of muscle as people get older, and then enjoy the qualities of life and be able to do all the things that they want to do.
[00:29:54.09]
Leslie Beck: So protein when it comes to, let's say, older adults, we know they should be eating more protein than the official RDA or dietary allowance, which is we talked about earlier 0.8 grams of protein for every kilogram you weigh. I guess a couple questions: Is there a consensus now? I've read ranges of how much protein older adults should be eating each day. And define for me as well, how old is an older adult? When do you become an older adult? At what age?
[00:30:24.12]
Stuart Phillips: Well, I'll answer the last question first. So aging this year starts at 55. Next year, it's 56. And the year after it's 57. Now that's not a personal reflection, but that's just how I see it. I'm being facetious. No, I mean, it's a great question. You know, when is a younger person older that they—probably I think the question is, should be concerned about their loss of strength or their loss of muscle? We think it starts probably for a lot of people in earnest that you could measure, somewhere in their 40s. And so that's when people—I don't know when it really happened for me, but you begin to form—and I did—I was really fortunate to get on a podcast one time and be on stage with Hal Johnson from Body Break fame.
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Leslie Beck: Oh, right. I remember Hal.
[00:31:20.11]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah. Well, he's a guy who's aged well. And I said to him, you know, when does aging start? He goes, "I don't know. Who cares, you know?" And he said—but he had a concept that I thought was really good, and it was about forming a picture of yourself in the future, and what you wanted that person to be able to do. And, you know, he showed a video of his dad who I think was in his 80s and was still out golfing three or four times a week, and would walk the course, wouldn't take a cart. And, you know, that was his way of aging well, and it's the vision of your future you. So maybe some time in your 40s, you begin to get a sense of like, "Hmm, I can't do things that I did in my 30s, or definitely couldn't do in my 20s." And there we get examples of superhumans who defy it all the time. Tom Brady, there's probably a few kicking around the NHL that are pushing 40. Jaromir Jágr was a great example. But, you know, for most people, you begin to sense that things are starting to curve downwards. And that's probably when I would say that if you haven't already, it would be a good time to think about correcting what you weren't or aren't doing. Much easier to slow the decline than it is to get on the decline and then try and bend the curve upwards, if you're seeing what I'm saying there. So, if in your 60s you make the decision—and it's never too late—it's going to be harder than it was if you made the decision to begin this stuff in your 50s, and likewise in your 40s. Better that you do it all the time, and then you just—the curve is like this instead of like this, you know? So you've got a steeper curve for somebody who doesn't exercise. So I think that that's probably when aging starts. But as I said, you know, every year I push it back.
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Leslie Beck: And what about—resistance training, of course, is important. What about the protein intake for so-called older adults?
[00:33:33.21]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah. So I don't know if there's a consensus. I think there's a growing group of people like us who believe it's higher. I don't know that that's ever going to make the RDA change, and I know that that disappoints a lot of people. But I think that we're going to have to do some better longer-term studies to show what the impact of protein is than we've done currently. But the consensus I think, in a larger group of individuals is the protein requirements are higher, bona fide higher in older people. So I still come back to this at minimum 1.2, trying to hit that 1.6 level.
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Leslie Beck: Right. You know, we've been talking a lot about how much protein—and certainly that's important—but when you eat your protein during the day. Timing, we're learning that's important, too. And a lot of people that I see when I meet people for the first time, I analyze their diets, get the majority of their protein at the end of the day at dinner, and they may get very little at breakfast, and some people may only get a little bit at lunch as well. Tell us why that's not a good idea.
[00:34:45.08]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah, I think, you know, coming back to the concept that you can't store protein, you need to use it in the time in which it's ingested and the levels of the building blocks in your blood are higher. It really, I think, bears consideration that if that's the case, and you get it all in one big meal at the end of the day, your body simply can't put all of that protein to use in building muscle, as an example. As you said most people doing what they're told this heart-healthy breakfast, lots of fibre, and I'm not going to say it's a bad thing, but it tends to be lower, the lowest meal in protein in terms of content in a given day. And as you said, probably not much more at lunch. So a better strategy would be to try and get protein from the dinner meal, like, don't eat as much then and take some of that and try and focus it in the breakfast and the lunchtime meals.
[00:35:43.10]
Stuart Phillips: And a lot of people will say, you know, so should I be eating eggs? Should I be doing—you know, and there's lots of strategies. My go-to for a higher-protein breakfast is, in the last few years anyways, always been Greek style yogurt. And great food, almost a superfood if you read some of the other benefits of yogurt, but higher-protein, fermented probiotics, all of these sorts of things, dairy protein, good for you from lots of other standpoints as well. But if eggs are your thing, I don't have a problem with eggs. You know, a glass of milk. I'm less keen on, you know, people saying, "Oh, I'm going to eat sausage and bacon for breakfast." Okay. Once a week, no problem. Twice a week, all right. Every day in my books, probably not a great idea. But try to distribute that protein evenly across the day. So if you were to imagine that you would get a rise in all of these building blocks for muscle at even points throughout the day rather than a little bit at breakfast, a little bit more at lunch, and then a massive amount at the end of the day. And that really goes beyond your body's capacity to be able to store those things in muscle.
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Leslie Beck: So when it comes then to maintaining our muscle strength, our muscle mass, slowing down age-related loss, what's better: animal or plant protein?
[00:37:10.11]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah. Great question. So there's probably two answers to the question. One is that everybody has a choice, and I realize that a lot of people are making choices to consume more plant-based proteins based on ethical and environmental issues, which I'm not fully equipped to speak to. But let's say that you make that choice, and what I would say is, I think that's a very healthy choice to make. It would be wrong for me to disagree with vegan or lower plant or animal-based protein consumption. Whatever the reason for you making that choice is if it's a health-based choice as well. I probably would have said 10 years ago that I think that there's a strategic advantage to animal protein. The data that we're generating now, and not just our lab, but many others, is probably showing that I think plant-based proteins, so long as you're getting close to that 1.6 level, it doesn't matter whether they come from plants or animals.
[00:38:16.21]
Leslie Beck: Okay.
[00:38:18.09]
Stuart Phillips: I do think the other side of that is to say that a lot of animal-sourced protein, so if we talk about eggs, we talk about meat and we talk about dairy, are very what we call nutrient-dense sources of protein. In other words, they come along with other nutrients that you're going to need anyway, that if you increase your consumption of those sources of protein, you're going to meet your targets for iron, you're going to meet your targets for folate, for zinc, for calcium. Dairy, in Canada anyway, because it's fortified, you're going to meet it for vitamin D as well. So, you know, there's some other considerations, but it's the—to quote Michael Pollan, it's the omnivore's dilemma. I eat both. I don't eat a lot of one or the other. I try and follow a little bit of the pragmatic advice, and there's probably some strategic advantage to increasing your fruit and vegetable intake for most average Canadians anyway, since most people get around two and a half servings of fruits and vegetables, which is also not a good thing.
[00:39:23.18]
Leslie Beck: That's right, yeah. No, I would argue though that, you know, many plant-based foods, if we're talking beans and lentils, I mean, yes, you're not getting the calcium like you are in dairy, but your folate, B vitamins, iron, I mean, it is possible for people who are eating a well-planned plant-based diet to to meet the requirements for most nutrients.
[00:39:43.17]
Stuart Phillips: Absolutely. No problem. I think one of the things with following an all-vegan diet, and a lot of people when they make the—if they make the switch, is just about you have to be a little bit more judicious about how you plan your food choices. I don't think you're going to hit all of your nutrient requirements unless you take a little step back and say, "Okay, I still do have to follow this complementation issue around grains and legumes," which a lot of people sort of go, "No, that's not a big deal."
[00:40:16.13]
Leslie Beck: Well, let's talk about that. Because everything I've read around that is—I do get that. I mean, that came out back in the 1970s, from a book "Diet For A Small Planet," I think. And the author really said that in order to get all of your essential amino acids, you did have to combine certain plant foods together. But my understanding is, since then we've really learned that as long as you are eating a variety of plant-based foods over the course of the day, you'll get the amino acids your body needs.
[00:40:46.25]
Stuart Phillips: Yeah. So I think that that's probably true. I think if you really want to drill down and go to the fine details, you still do need—like if you're eating all beans, or if you're eating all legumes, and you're not eating grains, you're not going to do well. And I'll give you my anthropological answer, and so not tremendously science-based, but no matter where you go in the world, so if you go to the South American continent, if you go to Asia, if you go to India, a lot of these places are—they're not particularly food-rich environments. Animal protein is in shorter supply. And they have all figured it out. It's red beans and rice in the Caribbean. It's black beans and corn in South America. It's tofu and rice in China. And it's lentils and rice in India. That at some point, it was beneficial to consume those two protein sources together. And I'm not saying in the same meal, that doesn't necessarily appear to be the case, although it's probably a little bit better to do that. But to your point, something happened in history where people who were just bean eaters or just rice eaters, a plague came upon them, and they didn't survive. And so people have figured this out.
[00:41:59.15]
Leslie Beck: That's interesting.
[00:42:01.12]
Stuart Phillips: It must be an evolutionary pressure, or how do those patterns of eating, you know, they dominate world culture across so many countries that you figure there has to be some teleological advantage to that. Now I'm probably going to upset some people by talking that way, but it seems to me that there's something that people have figured out. But I think to your point, now with a much greater diversity of plant-based proteins that are available, people can probably be not as judicious about beans and rice together all the time. And as you say, if they're consuming a variety of them that they're going to be fine.
[00:42:41.26]
Leslie Beck: What are the consequences of eating too much protein?
[00:42:46.03]
Stuart Phillips: So two big ones that people like to push, both of which have now been shown to be mythical, one is that protein will cause your bones to dissolve. It's what's called the acid-ash hypothesis. Protein makes your blood acidic, causes your bones to leach calcium. It's not true. And the one that I think most people point to is the relationship between protein and kidney function. We've done some work in that area. Again, we cannot find any link between the two. And I think that it's not just my word you should take for it. The Institute of Medicine and the WHO both agree that the link between more protein and the chances of kidney failure, renal failure, there's no association. If you have renal issues, then high protein is probably not a good idea.
[00:43:39.00]
Leslie Beck: I would say if you're eating more protein than you need, and you're already getting the calories you need, perhaps over time, could gain a little bit of body fat. Is that fair to say?
[00:43:48.13]
Stuart Phillips: That's another one as well. It's harder to turn protein into fat, but I mean, if you're just eating a lot of food and you're gaining weight, and it's not muscle, never a good idea. So for sure.
[00:44:00.25]
Leslie Beck: Well, that's it for me. Thank you so much, Dr. Phillips, for your time. This has been really amazing. I know our listeners are going to find this really fascinating. I certainly did. So thank you again.
[00:44:13.17]
Stuart Phillips: It was my pleasure, Leslie. Thanks for having me on the show, like I said.
[00:44:23.17]
Christopher Shulgan: That was Leslie Beck, Medcan director of food and nutrition, in conversation with protein expert Stuart Phillips, a kinesiology professor at McMaster University. You can find both of them on social media Leslie's at @lesliebeckrd on Twitter, and Stu is @mackinprof. We'll post links and an episode transcript online at EatMoveThinkpodcast.com.
[00:44:46.20]
Christopher Shulgan: Eat Move Think is produced by Ghost Bureau. I'm executive producer Christopher Shulgan. Senior producer is Russell Gragg. Associate producer is Patricia Karounos. Social media and strategy support is from Chantel Guertin, Andrew Imecs and Campbell MacKinnon.
[00:45:02.07]
Christopher Shulgan: Remember to rate and subscribe to Eat Move Think on your favourite podcast platform. Follow our host Shuan Francis on Twitter and Instagram @ShaunCFrancis—that's Shaun with a U—and Medcan @Medcanlivewell. We'll be back soon with a new episode examining the latest in health and wellness.
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