Dr. Luc (Luke) van Loon

So we started thinking about if you give protein in the evening, is it digested while you sleep?

Does this all work while you sleep?

Now, that's difficult because you can't take muscle biopsies when somebody sleeps and not wake the person up.

And you also can't ingest protein while you're sleeping.

So what we did is, and that's when we started doing studies with the older people, the great volunteers, much better than most of the athletes, that they call us.

And then they actually say, look, I was in your lab last year.

Can I come back?

Do you have a new study running?

And then I would say something like, oh, yeah, you can come over.

What we'll do, we'll put a nasogastric tube down your nose, in your guts.

We take a muscle biopsy.

Then we put you to bed in the hospital.

Then at 2 o'clock at night while you're sleeping, we'll tiptoe next to your bed, put 40 grams of protein in your gut, and then wake you up in the morning at 7 o'clock with a muscle biopsy.

And then they respond like, where can I sign up and when can I come over?

So these are cool studies, but they showed that if you give 40 grams of protein in the evening, that protein is digested and absorbed while you sleep because we use that intrinsically labeled protein so we could follow it, and it's actually converted to muscle.

Now, that study was weird because when we published that, that was a nice proof of principle study.

I got a lot of coaches and people calling me, asking me where they could buy those nasogastric tubes.

And I said, like, no, this is a proof of principle study.

Just have a protein-rich snack in the evening.

So just to make that clear, we actually followed that up with an athlete study where we showed that having a protein-rich snack in the evening is digested and absorbed and stimulates muscle protein synthesis overnight.