Dr. Layne Norton

That's like saying you build a house and it's a storage form of wood.

Yeah, I guess you can tear the house down and get wood out of it, but that's not why you build the house.

And so because of that, there appears to be kind of a maximal, well,

New study out of Van Loon's lab has kind of challenged this.

But in terms of muscle protein synthesis, it appears that it kind of caps out at a certain level on a per meal basis.

And so if you're older, let me back up.

For younger people, 10 grams of protein probably still does stimulate protein synthesis.

But as you get older, you probably need closer to 20, 30, maybe even 40 grams, depending on your own lean mass and the source of protein that you're consuming.

But, you know, it really, protein quality, distribution, that stuff matters more the lower your protein intake is overall.

The more you consume on a daily basis, the less all that other stuff matters.

Your daily intake is by far the biggest lever to pull.

And so what I'll tell people is like, hey, if you're, if for whatever reason you can only get it in one meal and you can still get enough total protein, I mean, I don't think it's ideal, but it's better than not getting enough total protein, right?

And I think some of the problems with this research literature as well is when you're looking at protein synthesis, you're only looking at one side of the equation.

You're not looking at muscle protein degradation, which is really hard to measure.

In fact, it's so hard to measure that

protein researchers out there please uh don't get too mad at me saying this uh because i was one of you but we just kind of do this and we go la la la la we just kind of follow muscle protein synthesis because degradation is so hard to measure because if you're measuring synthesis you're using an isotopic label and you're just you're looking at incorporation into the tissue versus the precursor pool and then you have a very simple calculation that you can come up with a rate

With degradation, it's much more difficult because you're looking at the dilution of that label from amino acids flexing out of a tissue.

Much more difficult to measure.

And to my knowledge, it's almost impossible to measure synthesis, degradation, and it's very hard to measure those two at the same time.

And