Dr. Luc (Luke) van Loon

And of course, how I translate it is when you perform physical activity, the muscle is more interested in having enough building blocks than the signaling process because the signaling process has already been fully activated by the exercise.

If I actually understand what you're saying, you're suggesting that the exercise-induced lowering of the leucine threshold is potentially, at least partly, explained by greater leucine influx in the muscle.

Yeah.

That's possible.

I probably would not have seen the study, but it was actually in our papers and I did get already some questions about it from the general media.

If I remember correctly, I think the title of that paper was not that suggestive, but all the follow-up reports on that paper were extremely suggestive and absolutely not in line with the outcome or the results in that study.

So what they did is they provided, if I remember correctly, they provided two meals or two drinks or something with a high protein content and a low protein content in humans.

And then they took blood samples for, I don't know, a few hours after that meal.

And then they actually took the monocytes, I think, so the macrophages in the blood, and they saw that they actually were activated.

They did an in vitro study to see which factor was actually stimulating the mTOR pathway in those macrophages, and that was leucine.

Duh, could have imagined that.

It's with every tissue.

And then they gave a high-protein diet and a low-protein diet to rodents, and they saw also activation of the macrophages, and that was suggestive of them developing atherosclerosis.

But so, first of all, we're not rodents.

And then the few hours of circulating amino acids is not reflective of what happens over days, over 24 hours, over weeks, over months in the development of arteriosclerosis in humans.

So I think that the translation is a little bit over the top, and that's an understatement.

Yeah.

It's with all these things.

High protein is not causing any issues.

High fat is not causing any issues.