Rhonda Patrick

Are we ready to recommend more than the recommended daily allowance?

And there's several of these out there.

This is just one.

And essentially, if you have the time and the willingness to go into the scientific literature and actually read something for yourself or listen to The Drive or listen to my podcast and the actual experts talking about it, what you will hear or what you will learn is that a lot of the studies that were done to determine this phenomenon

RDA were flawed.

They were called nitrogen balance studies.

And for many reasons, they're flawed.

I don't want to get into all the technical reasons, but for one, what they are doing is measuring the amount of nitrogen that is excreted in urine after you are metabolizing protein.

And some of the flaws that are, I would say, the most important here are that different types of foods that have protein in them have different nitrogen to protein ratios.

They're collecting urine, in which the case is that it's an incomplete collection.

I mean, like when you pee in one of those cups, you don't get all the urine.

It's incomplete collection.

Yes, exactly.

We lose nitrogen through other means.

And so essentially the signal to noise ratio is pretty low.

Ultimately, what countless experts have now agreed upon is that the protein for the RDA has been underestimated because of those reasons.

And there have been new studies that have been done.

These have been like more stable isotope studies.

The major isotope that's used is the L13 carbon labeling phenylalanine.

in which case these studies take a small cohort of people, give them a known amount of protein with that isotope tracer, and then that tracer is oxidized when it's metabolized, and that's measured through breath.