The Peter Attia Drive
#369 ‒ Rethinking protein needs for performance, muscle preservation, and longevity, and the mental and physical benefits of creatine supplementation and sauna use | Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D.
20 Oct 2025
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Hey everyone, welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen.
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Rhonda, returning for her third conversation on The Drive, is a scientist, health educator, and host of Found My Fitness podcast. Her work focuses on the intersection of nutrition, aging, and disease prevention, and she is widely recognized for bringing clarity to complex topics in health science.
This is part two of a deep dive on protein, but we expand into other topics like creatine supplementation and sauna use. In this episode, we discuss why the RDA for protein is too low and why a new minimum at at least 50% more than the RDA is needed to avoid negative protein balance.
The distinction between minimum, optimal, and high protein intake and how activity level and aging can affect requirements. Anabolic resistance, what it is, why inactivity drives it, and how resistance training restores sensitivity. The role of protein in preventing frailty and sarcopenia and the quality of life implications in aging.
evidence on protein intake during pregnancy, adolescence, weight loss, and while using GLP-1 agonists, addressing the concerns about mTOR, cancer risk, and reconciling protein intake with longevity research, the case for creatine, how it enhances strength and endurance performance, its overlooked benefits for cognition and brain health, and why dosing above 5 grams per day may be necessary,
practical guidelines on dosing formulation and the populations who may benefit most for example vegetarians older adults young athletes older athletes the science of sauna use revisiting the mechanisms especially as they pertain to cardiovascular adaptations and heat shock proteins dementia risk and cardiovascular disease reduction
and best practices for temperature, duration, and frequency, how to weigh infrared versus traditional dry saunas, and why going hotter isn't always better. I really enjoyed this discussion with Rhonda, and I'm truly hopeful that this is the last time I need to do a podcast in a very long time that addresses some of the controversy surrounding protein intake.
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Chapter 2: Why is the current protein RDA considered insufficient?
Therefore, if we even get near the edge where we are not getting sufficient intake of amino acids, we don't have a buffer. We don't have a rainy day fund that we can dip into. We immediately start to catabolize or break down muscle.
Now, I don't think we have to make the case that that's a bad idea, but for the sake of completeness, we should state there is not really a single scenario I can think of that is clinically relevant where it would be desirable to give up muscle mass. Maybe if you're Mr. Olympia, you can sacrifice muscle mass.
But for you and me, and I think everybody listening to us, giving up muscle mass because we are falling short on our protein intake would be a strategic error and an unforced error.
Exactly. For short-term and long-term health. I think that's pretty clear. And that's where this RDA not being enough is a very important point. So let me go back to this isotope tracer studies.
Multiple studies, okay, multiple studies, as you know, have shown... And we'll link to these in the show notes, by the way, just so that people can go and actually look at the papers as opposed to reading about it on social media.
Sounds good. Multiple of these papers have shown that really going up to more like 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight per day is what is needed to prevent people, us, adults, from being in this negative protein balance. That's quite a bit more than the 0.8 grams.
50% more.
Right. It's 50% more.
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Chapter 3: How does anabolic resistance affect protein needs as we age?
So like most of the studies done, isotope tracer studies are between 30 to 50% more. So that's really important because if we look at the actual protein intakes of adults, these are nutritional surveys that are done. Of course, they're all flawed. We can talk about it. I mean, we all know the flaws of questionnaires, but let's just talk about what we think people are actually taking in.
Adults are mostly taking in, all adults are taking in about 0.9 grams per kilogram body weight per day of protein. So pretty close to what that RDA is, not what it should be. Older adults, if we look at the gender, male versus female, males are taking in about 0.9 grams per kilogram body weight. Females are taking in 0.8.
They're really just hitting that, what we call RDA, which now we have established is not enough. The RDA is not enough to basically be in a net protein balance. So that's really important. And that's essentially telling us that most adults are walking around without being in steady state protein balance.
Chapter 4: What are the implications of protein intake on muscle preservation?
So here's an interesting question, Rhonda. So we know the rates at which muscle mass, skeletal mass are declining by decade in an aging population. Is there any way we can estimate? I'm guessing the answer is no, but on the off chance you would know. So anyway, we can estimate what percent of that decay is simply being driven by insufficient amino acid consumption versus other factors.
Other factors would be anabolic resistance associated with aging. Other factors would be anabolic resistance associated with sedentary behavior. Other factors would be lack of sufficient resistance training. There are many factors that explain clearly the fact that as a person goes from 50 to 60 to 70, on average, they're losing muscle mass.
But it would be interesting to consider how much of that is explained by the fact that they are also barely skirting the minimum amount of nitrogen that they need, and in many cases, falling below it.
Right. So to answer your question, I don't know that there's a direct way to do that. But I do know that there are studies that have shown that when older adults, so older adults that are really more susceptible to the things that you were saying, like anabolic resistance, where your muscle tissue is not as sensitive to amino acids, mostly because of physical inactivity, which increases with age.
But when older adults take in 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight per day of protein, it nearly eliminates some of the age-related muscle loss that happens. So I think that is some evidence to support what you were saying in that if you just increase your protein intake... By 50% to this minimum, what the RDA should be, 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight per day.
I think that's pretty much what most all the experts agree. It's time to change that RDA to that number, the minimal amount that you need per day. If older adults just do that, they're actually preventing a lot of the age-related loss in muscle that occurs.
And we also know that older women, if they take in that amount of 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight per day, they're 30% less likely to have frailty in old age, which is also very important.
So I think that's pretty good evidence that it's clear that just increasing your protein intake by 50% is really important for aging, for our muscle health, and also is getting us out of that net negative state that we're in.
So step one is we should move the floor from 0.8 to 1.2.
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Chapter 5: What examples illustrate the relationship between body size and lifespan?
The larger an animal is, the longer it lives. And it's a pretty straight line. In fact, we should find a good example of it and link to it in the show notes. But there are always animals that punch above and below their weight. So there are animals that fall off that line either too high. So these are animals that live much longer than you would expect based on their body size.
And there are animals that punch well below their body weight. They live much shorter than they should based on their body weight. Well, it turns out two interesting examples are mice and humans. Mice live on average two years. I forget the exact number. They should be living close to four or five years, I think, based on the longevity quotient line. So they are punching well below their weight.
And humans, we live 80 years. We should probably be 40, according to the data.
Chapter 6: How does rapamycin affect longevity in humans versus animals?
By the way, we did live 40 years until modern medicine came along. So maybe we were totally on the curve correctly until medicine 2.0 came around at the turn of the last century and basically over five generations doubled our lifespan. Eric argues, I think this is a very interesting argument, rapamycin disproportionately works well in animals that are below the longevity quotient.
So that's why it works so reproducibly in mice. But he argues it might not have any effect in humans because we've already captured so much of our genetic potential in terms of lifespan now that the idea that Rapa would give us an extra 15% of life, he feels is just kind of hard to imagine. And again, it's a theoretical argument.
It's super interesting, but I'd never heard it in relation to the longevity quotient before. And I thought it was very much worth pondering.
Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I've also seen data with rapamycin given to people that were undergoing resistance training and it like blunted, obviously, some of the muscle protein synthesis as would be expected. I don't remember the dose of rapamycin. It wasn't super, super high.
Chapter 7: What are the cognitive benefits of creatine supplementation?
But to me, that was like enough to be like, well...
Yeah. And then the question, of course, is, is there a way around that? Is there a way where you could intermittently dose it? You just take it once, you time it so that it's not in proximity to a bout of resistance training by a couple of days or something like that. But yeah, there's a lot there. Great expression I heard recently, which is mice usually lie. Monkeys sometimes lie.
It's humans we care about. That was just fantastic.
Well, to get back to the mTOR story, I think that recent study, I don't know, it was in the last couple of years it came out. It was the animal study where they gave mice 25 grams of protein and mTOR was activated in macrophages.
Chapter 8: How does sauna use impact cardiovascular and brain health?
And it was like this whole story was pieced together about... 25 grams of protein? Sorry, maybe it was the equivalent dose.
It was the human equivalent dose. I was like, wow, they're eating their body weight.
The human equivalent dose was 25 grams, yeah. But it was essentially like arguing that atherosclerosis was being caused by protein. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, for one, we know atherosclerosis, the bigger story there is not protein. But again, it comes down to this whole activating mTOR in systemic circulation versus the leucine going to the muscle because you're physically active.
And keep in mind, those transporters, the leucine transporters, they're pretty sensitive for quite a while. I mean, you're talking about at least 24 hours, maybe even longer, but definitely 24 hours.
I think the mice atherosclerosis studies are very dangerous. We have to be very careful. They have a very different lipoprotein system than we do. They evolved in a totally different manner than we did. The amount of protein they require is totally different from us. So I'm always really wary when I see these studies that are using the mouse model of atherosclerosis.
I understand why we do it, because it's much easier and cheaper than looking at primates. And obviously, we can't do these studies in humans. You can find a lot of things in mice when it comes to atherosclerosis that don't seem to matter whatsoever in human biology. I would chalk this up to one of those examples.
So then there you have it. I mean, that's a lot of the controversy around protein being bad for you and activating mTORs coming from that study. And then there's countless studies on cancer increasing with IGF-1 and mTOR. And again, same deal where IGF-1 exercise is causing IGF-1 to go into the brain, to go into muscle.
People also don't appreciate how short the half-life of IGF-1 is. It's a staggeringly short half-life molecule. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's insanely short half-life. What's the half-life? When administered systemically, it's on the order of minutes.
Okay.
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