How to Prevent Muscle Loss As You Age: The Protein-Forward Diet | Live Your DNA

Hey this is Alan with another episode of Live Your DNA. Today we're going to talk about your protein need. Now this is important to everybody, our protein need. We all are going to suffer from a condition called sarcopenia as we get older. It's a subtle thing that happens in our body to everybody where we lose the ability to assimilate protein that's in our blood or the amino acids that are in our blood. We lose the ability to assimilate them into muscle tissue. It's kind of like our muscles forget that those amino acids were really important to them and they let them bypass and if we have a protein weight gene that is not functioning correctly then we'll tend to gain body mass. Those proteins can get stored as body fat through a process called glyconeogenesis. So our body is now perceiving our protein intake as being excessive to our genetics and so there's things that we can do. We can intervene. Now sarcopenia is a very interesting disease because sarcopenia, this loss of lean muscle mass, is to be thought to be only associated with people that were older. By older I mean you know 70, 80, 90 years old where we see that they're not as strong as they used to be. They don't have the mobility that they used to have and they're losing some cognitive ability. There's a study done in a university from 2008 to 2013 where they looked at protein habits and they saw that as people got older they tend to eat less protein and then these diseases become more prominent. Actually as we get older we should be monitoring and trying to hit a protein goal every day. As a matter of fact I talk to people about having what's called a protein forward diet. In other words you would make protein, you would center your diet around your protein intake. The reason that I like that is because sarcopenia, this subtle change in our metabolism where we're no longer recognizing protein for lean muscle mass use, we're just taking in these amino acids and our body is then having to decide if they're excess and excrete them or if it's going to store them somewhere. This sarcopenia can start as early as in our late 40s, 45 to 50. We can start this process depending on our level of activity. So people that are less active are more likely to have sarcopenia at a younger age and it can be more exacerbated or more evident as they get older. They tend to lose their mobility and one of the things we see with this is they lose their, I'm gonna say their vim for life. They just they don't want to do anything because they don't have the strength, they don't have the mobility and they have this decline in available lean muscle mass to power those things. So a protein forward diet would be taking your body weight. If you know your weight in kilos, somewhere between 1.6 and 2 grams per kilo of body weight per day. If you know your weight in pounds, we would talk about your lean body weight. So we'd have to deduct your body fat. That means finding out your BMI, which is a really easy calculation. You can do it. It's essentially, take your height and your weight and divide those and you get this percentage. It'll tell you. You can go online and you can look up a BMI, it's called Body Mass Indicator and it will do it for you. Just put in your height weight and it'll give you a number. If you're a man, that number should be under, definitely under 27. If you're a woman, it should be under 30, somewhere in that range. If you want to be really healthy, you would take those ranges down even further. If you want to be super healthy as a man, you'd want that range to be somewhere in 11 to 18 percent. If you're a woman, you'd want it to be somewhere 19 to 23, 24 percent. Women naturally have more fat in their skin, so we have to account for that. Men don't have that. That's why we get wrinkly as old guys and women tend to stay less wrinkly, more soft and generally. But sarcopenia is this subtle thing that happens in our body where we lose our strength, we lose our endurance, we lose our vim and vigor for life because we don't have the energy, we don't have the muscle mass to actually support the activities that we used to do. Once again, this can happen at a much younger age than we thought it could before. So sarcopenia is easy to resolve. One of the things we would want to do then is make sure that our amino acid receptor sites are active and we do that through the use of essential amino acids. So 5 grams of essential amino acids per day has been clinically shown to reactivate the receptor sites for muscle protein, for protein uptake or amino acid uptake into our muscles. So that becomes a really good part of a dietary program and then having this protein forward diet where we would look at our body weight and we would have this goal to meet that minimum sort of requirement of protein per day and have that spread throughout the day. Now for women generally speaking, it's better to protein load in the morning and taper off in the evening. For men it's a little different, we can kind of have more protein throughout the day, just changes in our hormones are different. Men actually have testosterone all of their life where women lose their estrogen progesterone. Men recycle testosterone every 24 hours so they have testosterone levels all their life and we can actually help with our lean body mask by monitoring our testosterone, having our testosterone checked and making sure it's in a good range to enable lean body mask. Actually in the clinic where I attend, they also check testosterone levels in women now that are over the age of 60 and 65, 70 because they see a decline in their testosterone levels. Yes women, you do have some testosterone. When we see a decline in your testosterone, we are going to definitely see a decline in lean muscle mass, strength, endurance, mobility, etc. So these things that we associate with old age are actually preventable if we become familiar with our need for protein and one of the best ways to do that is to have a genetic test and check those genes for our protein body's ability to absorb and utilize protein, check our protein weight response, then we can also look at your fat genes and see if something like a carnivore or keto diet is appropriate for you or if you need something that's a little broader in range or a little different than eating two meals a day or one meal a day or something that you might see recommended that might not be the best for your genetics. So having a genetic test really is something that gives you control, vast amounts of control over what you would do as an intervention at no matter what age you have your genetic test, you can still intervene and make changes to your long-term health outcomes. Years ago we did a clinical trial on women that were all over the age of 80 and we showed that we literally could change their bone structure, so the osteopenia, osteoporosis that is prevalent in women at that age, not so prevalent in men because there's not that many men that live to those later dates, but in women we did this study in women and just a small amount of exercise we'd see an immediate sort of response in their lean muscle mass as well as the bones that we were checking for osteopenia, osteoporosis and could we stop it or reverse it and we found that there's ways to do that. So there are, it doesn't matter what age we are we can intervene and we can absolutely live a better lifestyle or lifespan if we are aware of our protein need and we focus through our diet making protein the center of our diet moving forward. So I hope you've enjoyed this, if you have any comments please put them below. I read all the comments and I answer to them individually and look forward to meeting you someday when you have your genetic test and we can go through your results together. We can do that now through an app if you like or we can go through it as a consultation but you'll find in the inscription below there is a link to DNA Power, Total Power Genetic Test which is the one that I use and most familiar with, someone I like because it's the easiest for us to use. Anyway, you have a great day and we'll talk again soon. Bye for now.