Nutritional Revolution Podcast

The Protein Playbook: Dr. David Church Explains Muscle Health for Athletes

• Season 6 • Episode 170

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In episode #170 we spoke with researcher Dr. David Church about:

  • The crucial role of muscle protein synthesis in endurance athletes
  • The role of essential amino acids on muscle growth and recovery
  • The impact of sleep deprivation on muscle recovery and performance.

Dr. David Church, the Director of the Center for Translational Research in Aging & Longevity at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, College of Medicine. Dr. Church obtained his bachelor’s degree in exercise science and biochemistry from DePauw University where he played football and baseball. He was an athletic performance intern at Baylor University where he studied exercise and nutritional biochemistry. He obtained his PhD from the University of Central Florida with a focus on enhancing human performance through exercise and nutrition and completed his post-doctoral fellowship in stable-isotope tracer methodology under the mentorship of Drs. Robert R. Wolfe and Arny Ferrando. He has led multiple trials investigating energy restriction in healthy and clinical populations including two active trials on individuals prescribed GLP-1RA’s. He has been recognized for his work with the Nutrition Research Achievement Award from the National Strength and Conditioning Society, the Vernon Young International Award for Amino Acid Research from the American Society for Nutrition, and a Fellow of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.

Please note that this podcast is created strictly for educational purposes and should never be used for medical diagnosis or treatment.

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Hello everybody and welcome back to the Nutritional Revolution podcast. Today we have for you guys, Dr. David Church, the director of the Center for Translational Research in Aging and Longevity at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, College of Medicine. Dr. Church obtained his bachelor's degree in exercise science and biochemistry from DePaul University, where he also played varsity football and baseball. Following this, he was an athletic performance intern at Baylor University, where he also studied exercise and nutritional biochemistry. and he obtained his PhD from the University of Central Florida with a focus on how to enhance human performance through exercise and nutrition. Dr. Church completed his postdoctoral fellowship in stable isotope tracer methodology under the mentorship of Dr. Robert R. Wolfe and and he has led multiple trials investigating energy restriction in healthy and clinical populations, including two active trials on individuals prescribed GLP-1 RAs. and his work is being utilized by the Department of Defense Combat Feeding Directorate to augment warfighter ration components. He has been recognized by the field for his work in human metabolism with a Nutrition Research Achievement Award from the National Strength and Conditioning Society and the Vernon Young International Award for Amino Acid Research from the American Society for Nutrition and a fellow of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. Enjoy the episode, you guys. This was a really fun one. Hello everybody and welcome back to the pod. We have for you guys Dr. David Church and we're gonna learn all things about protein today. I'm super stoked. Thank you so much for joining us, David. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'll do my best to educate you guys. We're gonna learn all kinds of good nuggets. Where are you zooming in from today? Yeah, I'm at the University of Arkansas for medical sciences. So we're in Little Rock, Arkansas. okay I'm gonna have you break down your two truths and a lie for me. All right, yeah, so I need to give you three statements. So the first one is I grew up on a corn and soybean farm. The second one is I got a 2.49 GPA my freshman year. And then the third one would be I was a long distance runner during my schooling years. Which if you guys could see me on the screen, that might be a better three statements to end things. and if you're listening in your headphones. There will be video of any of our listeners want to check out. It's going to go on YouTube. So check that out. look the stature of I'm in the Clydesdale division. You know what mean? All right, so the two truths and the lie. I'm gonna go with, I'm kinda thinking, the 2.94 GPA thing is real, I really wanna hear all about that. I kind of, I think I'm going to go with that as the lie, the 2.94 GPA, but don't tell me the answer. You will get into it. So for our listeners, I got to attend a webinar that David presented and I thought it was just fascinating. There were so many good nuggets in there. I thought immediately we have to have him on the Nutritional Revolution podcast So in the seminar I saw, you were breaking down kind of like the mass amount of literature out there around protein and proteins effects primarily on muscle and hypertrophy, I believe, and what was gonna give someone the most bang for their buck and maybe what would give them the least bang for their buck and what situations kind of impact uh muscle hypertrophy. Yes. I think one of the key things to help set the stage for the podcast today is that, particularly for that talk, a lot of it was about a measure called muscle protein synthesis. And it's a nice measure because we can talk about all those different things that I think we're going to probably get into today. But when people hear that word, they do typically think of hypertrophy. Mm. And it can mean that, but context around what we're studying is important. So if you have someone that is a Clydesdale like me, and they're, and they're lifting weights and we have an increase in muscle protein synthesis, we have pretty strong data to show us that that's like actin and myosin and things that would actually cause myofibular hypertrophy or, you know, hypertrophy of the muscle. But we can still see upregulation in like in protein synthesis. in more endurance-based activities. And when we break out those sort of fractions that we see is we see like the mitochondrial fraction has a huge upregulation of protein synthesis. when you read these studies, it's important to understand the context and nuances we all know, but just because it's the word muscle protein synthesis, and that's what the data is around, that doesn't mean it's purely like a strength-based, power-based sport need. Endurance sport athletes need increases in muscle protein synthesis as well, because I like to define it as the process by which we can actively measure the remodeling of the muscle. Right? you know, think of like a, I have kids, that's these drawings up here and we love Legos, which is great. And we build the Legos. And so, you know, if they decide that they need room for the dog, right, we got to tear those Legos apart. That's your individual amino acids. Mm-hmm. got to build a little new section for the dog to go in there and we build, so we put the Lego blocks on top. That's protein synthesis. In that case, it got bigger. Maybe they want their house to stay the same, but they want different room sizes, right? So you may not get a change in the size of Lego house. We might get different cellular structures. So my point is, is however you stress the muscle, it's going to adapt accordingly. So muscle protein synthesis being upregulated is still important for endurance athletes. I think that's really good to break down because I think there is a bit of confusion just around protein dosing in endurance and why they need that much and they think it's gonna increase like their muscle size. But like you're saying the mitochondrial proteins are a protein and those are the energy powerhouse. So we need those. um Can you before we get into all the protein Steph, what got you excited about studying protein or researching protein and getting into this nitty gritty here? Yeah, I'm actually like an exercise dork. Like, I always make jokes with people that like, I'm really an exercise, I'm exercise trained, but I like masquerade as a nutrition researcher. So, but it's lucky, like when you're studying muscle, it's very sensitive to both. So I'm very fortunate that I get to dabble both in exercise and like protein, and I've done some glucose work too. So it's nice to to play in kind of both sandboxes. um And but I always like to point out the exercise piece because it's kind of like really important to highlight like why I got into the field. And so, you know, I got lucky. started, you know, I played sports as a kid. I might have worked on a place where you did a lot of manual labor. I don't know. um And in seventh grade, had a friend that said, come on the weight room. And I got in the weight room and I was really like, had a good coach that taught me like really, really good form, Coach Ron Price. And so it just kind of, just loved it. just, just something I did. I'd always played sports, but then I really got interested in the weight room and it made me better. And I just liked that process. And so I just like dove in deep. remember sports illustrated had like Larry Fitzgerald's workout program where like there was like an EAS advertisement for like what Brian Erlach I'm dating myself with these people. You know, when he was doing training, I still have those because I took them out of the magazine and I put them in. So I just realized that in early age, like that like my God given like stature was probably not going to make me a professional athlete, right? Or I should say the lack of it. And so was like, well, I gotta like, if I'm gonna get there, like I wanted to get there. I need to like know what I'm doing. I need to train smarter. I need to do everything I can. And part of that was nutrition. And, you know, then you I went to undergrad and, and I went to, you know, kinesiology degree and biochemistry together. So once you like It was interesting, the biochemistry, once I started taking biochem, my kinesiology grades, my physiology, kinesiology, whatever grades got better. With biochemistry, there's a lot of inherent nutrition work that you're going to study because you're studying, there's a lot of metabolism. And it was the connection between those two. And so from that point forward, it was like kind of like exercise metabolism. I got really interested in And the one of the best ways to measure it in humans is these things called isotope tracers. Mm-hmm. And that's what we really use a lot. And there's only a few labs in the world that do it. And the real world leaders at it were Bob Wolfe and Arnie Ferrando. And I did my masters. was a strength coach at Baylor and I worked in a lab and I really wanted to work in their lab at Galveston, Texas. I thought, I'll never be good enough to do that. Like on there, just, you know, it's just one of those things where you kind of look at the lay of the land, like I'm not, yeah, they needed someone better. So I'm gonna do my PhD somewhere else. And then ironically, the last year, my PhD, I got an email. and it was forwarded on from Dr. Ferrando himself and said, we're looking for a postdoc to do isotope tracer work and like warfighter ration development. And I was like, yeah, that sounds good. And so I interviewed, they brought me on and what's funny is like, they make this joke. I know my place, but they make this joke. Now I'm their boss. So it's been this like really fun journey to, know, something I always wanted to do and I wanted to work for them and they don't really work for me. uh I get to, it's like a unit we work together. So, uh, yeah, I mean, that's kind of my story of how I got into this. just kind of had a general passion and interest down this route and then like opportunity arose and I went for it. You know? So yeah, that's a lot of Cool. Well, that's the best way for it to happen, right? When someone's passionate about something. mean, you really invest yourself and you're truly, yeah, you're truly passionate about what we're going to talk about today. So um we can start kind of with total daily protein as one of our kind big kind of jumping off points here. So if we think about kind of the recommended targets for protein, which we might want to dive into what those are. Is there any suggestion or maybe you can share with us the literature that dives into protein distribution throughout the course of day and impact or not that may or may not have? Right. And I'll do my best to keep as many of the references more towards the endurance side of things. but I'll pull in other sources when necessary. I think, you know, like using the boulders and pebbles analogy and you can do whatever you want. But I really like this idea of like, there's this glass jar, the boulders fill up a large space, but you can keep adding things in there. Mm-hmm. Like you can fill it up with smaller rocks and you can fill it. And it's like, it can keep being filled up to get that like 100 % max, but like what's filling up the majority of the space is probably these large boulders, right? And total daily protein to take is one of them. And we have nice data from Dan Moore's group where they've looked at like whole body protein balance. And for those that don't know, whole body protein balance is kind of indicative of protein requirements, how much we might need. Mm-hmm. at it in endurance athletes. And this is why I like to point out the idea of that protein turnover, you know, like that muscle piece I talked in the beginning about something's being stimulated. They found that those individuals that were pretty well-trained endurance athletes need like 1.85 grams per kilogram of body weight. of protein a day. So we round that like to 1.9, you know, for most of us, we're going to say two. And what's interesting is that amount relates quite well to the amount that they also did resistance train, highly trained resistance train people. obviously, bodybuilders, powerlifters, and they found similar amounts. So it's this really interesting thing. I love those two studies because it's the same lab, same methodology. And so it's a really nice comparison that almost validates some of gym folklore of a gram a pound. Because they both, now these are very, very highly active populations. And so in that case, you get up to almost 1.92 grams per kilogram for these really active endurance athletes. And so right there, right, if we assume someone's like for easy math, because I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but like there's 75 kilos, right? And we just want to do the few grams. So you need 150 grams of protein. Well, right there, you know, I mean, I could do that in a sitting, but for many people, like their appetite's kind of like sort of solve that problem. So I would say, you know, figure out how much you need. Everyone wants like a rocket science answer. Mm. know, refractory period of muscle. so if it's, you know, I need to eat every four hours. And first off, that's not true anymore. That is not science. There's reason it came about, but that is not how that works anymore. You know, I would just back into it from like, okay, well, I need to get 150 grams a day. That seems to be where like max is out. What works for my schedule? And we know this because we've seen... There's studies that have looked at like time-restricted feeding patterns, right, which would be the most egregious form of like a skewed intake, right? We're only getting our protein in eight hours and this other group's getting it over 14. And they did it over a 10-day period and they found no differences in the amount of muscle protein that was generated. It's eight versus 12-hour period. And some people, I think some people really like this idea of this balanced intake. And I think if you're really trying to squeeze out that 0.1%, yeah, it probably matters. But, you know, like most of us aren't there. And so it's really freeing. Like I got a busy life. You know, like I was here in the morning at 0600 and then I had to run back at the kids to school, came back, you know, like when I got home, the kids was like, oh, I totally forgot to have my breakfast ready. So it's no big deal. I get it in later. So it's freeing in that regard. I think when it's like any 150 grams in a day, can I do five meals of 30? All right. Yeah, that works for you. Go for it. If you need three meals of 50. Yeah. I mean, that works as well. So I just think that You know, that's how I, you don't need a rocket science answer. And I think the two grams per kilogram with the, or I mean, technically 1.85, but rounded up, right? It's a nice number to remember. um Yeah, I think that's one of the big boulders. um The other stuff I think from that, if you don't mind me just leading right to it is I always make the joke of like, don't live like a freshman. And maybe I'm like indicating my life too there. um But like, you know, it comes like get some sleep, you know, sleep get, and I'll dive into these pieces, but I like to kind of get some sleep, you know, maybe not too much binge drinking, you know, uh food, you know, like, it's amazing. So I got into the way I was like, I used to love the whole like different types of protein and how we attribute it and like the farther like the older I'm getting, maybe I'm just like, giving up, I don't know. But more the more I get an appreciation for the fundamentals of what really matters. And so a good example is sleep. If you really want to go on TRT, because it's so popular nowadays, just go have a kid, don't sleep for two days, go get your T-tilt levels tested, and then you're going to have to repeat it. No problem. I guarantee you they're not going to sleep again the next week. I'm telling you, and interestingly, males are more affected by this sleep deprivation from a muscle standpoint than the women. that sleep 24 hours of sleep deprivation, total deprivation. So no sleep will, there's reports showing that men will get hypogonadal. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a very potent stressor. So, you know, like if you're pulling that all nighter, yeah, it's not gonna be good for your muscle health. In fairness, I don't think that's how a lot of people work. I think a lot of people are more like a sleep restriction model. So you're talking four to six hours. We don't have a great sort of definition, like we don't have a defining point on this, but We do have studies showing eight hours of sleep versus four hours of sleep. And by the way, should say total sleep deprivation, not only does it do all that, but it totally suppresses the anabolic response to feeding. But then if we go to that sleep restriction piece where it's more like four hours, we do see that if we only get four hours, it reduces that muscle protein synthetic response over the course of a week. We have ways of measuring this over a week, which is a long period of time for that type of measurement. It reduces it compared to eight hours. But what's interesting, And it makes a lot of sense, right? Cause I always say research is me search, which is how I really got into this. I'm sure I stole that from someone that is not a DC original. guarantee you someone said that to me. point I like, yeah, I borrowed it from someone. If you're listening to this apologies, it's a great line. Yeah. Um, but I remember like when I was an undergrad and I would, I'd pull some late nights. um It was always like, go get some exercise. You need to move. It's good for you. Well, it turns out it's good for the muscle too. So this course of a week when they had people do uh sleep restriction, so for eight hours, four hours, they had another group that did just some like interval training, right? To simulate like, okay, if they're not sleeping a lot, they're probably busy. They got to get something in quick, right? Well, that interval training actually helped up regulate the muscle and it brought it back to levels that we see with normal sleep. That was for a week, right? So we know we can run that. always, that's I tell myself. So now this is how I guide it. but I know I got a rough week going on. If you can see the bags under my eyes, I'm like, well, I can run this program for about a week. After that, don't know. might be sacrificing something. So it'd be great to see it taken out longer. So we know total daily protein take, good one. Total sleep deprivation, sometimes it happens, but not a great way to go. Sleep restriction, um to come down half, think about 50 % of your normal sleep. also is going to suppress it. But if you can exercise, the exercise is strong enough stimulus to overcome that at least. So I think those are important. uh Alcohol is a brutal one. uh Now, I always get asked this, I've presented this in like undergraduate courses, like, what if you think a beer is a good post workout drink? I'm like, we don't have data on a beer, right? The only data is a key caveat. It may be fine. The study we have from PAR, It's great. It's great paper. She actually did some of the time restricted feeding stuff too, but they did they simulated binge drinking. So it's 12 plus or minus two drinks. They got it. Yeah, they got after it. That's like millennial sort of college days, right? You know, anyway, and it just totally it reduced the muscle protein synthetic response like 25 % to both exercise and protein. Now, the protein did increase it more than carbs would, right? So if you're go, know, like, cause they worked out, then they had to meet a meal and they simulated the drinking while they're eating the meal and everything. So we do, we did see that the protein at least made it higher than like a very carbohydrate laden meal, but it still did not get up to the level of what you would get if you didn't drink at all, right? If you had just exercise, protein, no drink. So that, again, kind of just a single day study, but. kind of intuitively makes sense, right? That if you're drink heavily, 12 drinks a day, yeah, you probably got bigger problems in your muscle. So, and then the last one that I think often gets overlooked and is certainly probably the most relevant, I mean, those are relevant, but it's really important in what the majority of listeners are doing with endurance exercises called calories. There's a great study, I always forget, it's from one of the Scandinavian countries, Ah, shoot. It's all right. Oxfeldt is, I believe, the lead author on it. I might be dealing with the last name wrong because I'm just a kid from Indiana. Again, a hint on my two truths and a lie. My mouth works like a midwesterner. But they did a really cool study where they took well-trained female athletes, endurance trained, and they had high energy availability. And then they crossed them over to low energy availability. And they looked at muscle across the 10-day period in that high and low energy period. and what was quite interesting was they kept protein the same. There was that 100 grams in both periods. So this was not a protein effect, right? This was totally, they brought them in and they reduced calories by 50%. And they reduced the calories by 50 % by taking away the fat and the carbohydrate, but they left protein at the same. And 100 grams and these people, know, they weren't protein deprived, you know, it's not like they were big guy, peak women, would say. And, um and what we, what they saw was a very very strong reduction in the amount of muscle protein being made in response to the training, because they're training them at the same time. you know, just so the right thought, you know, again, is very potent. So just to like highlight that, like really like calories, sleep, no binge drinking and total daily protein intake and that, you know, I really think those four factors are probably going to fill up the majority of that sort of, um you know, uh like bottle or whatever you're talking about, if you're trying to fill it all the way up, I really think that that's like your major thing. The only one I'm missing there, and I would assume it's inherent to your listeners, would be exercise. And so like with an older adult, we'd be talking more about just trying to get them to be physically active maybe, but it's along a continuum. So with your population, I'm assuming it's occurring, but if it was a population that was a more sedentary, then you would definitely be like, you get you physically active and then... After physical activity, you want to progress on a plate, a structured exercise. And so I would always like to say like structured exercise is what we're saying when we mean like exercise is a primary driver. But if we can't get like some sort of structured exercise and we can just get people walking more, that is a huge win. And it will. Promote it. Cause there's a good study from degrees, which is from Stu's lab, where they did a 14 day reduction, step reduction, they see a loss of sort of the anabolic potential of the muscle just in 14 days or reducing steps. So Yeah, so, you know, So just in that 14 day period, they saw a reduced like anabolic potential. So the physical activity piece is a really large component. But like I said, with your listener group, I'm assuming they probably got that box check and it's probably not something they're lacking. Not that they'd be lacking the other things, but these things right here are generally like those big boulders. And I feel like they fill up the majority of it. And I know I ran through those quickly. So by all means, if you got like, I'm sure you guys follow the question. I have some questions. So um the hypo gonadal conversation, you mentioned women not being as affected. I'm curious if they did, it sounds like there is some studies on women. Were they looking at the women's testosterone levels as well? They did, they did measure it. Obviously it doesn't start as high. So it doesn't have as fall, but it's amazing. I always make this joke cause we did a lot of DOD work for my postdoc. So there's a lot of this sort of like sex based differences you kind of look at because you know, our, our, our military is a mixed sex military. Right. And so it's just one of those things that if you're a physiologist, you already know this because whether it's the military or it's sport, we're very interested in sex differences and You all are just way more resilient, it seems like, than we are when it comes to this stuff, you know? I don't have a great, I mean, I have some thoughts as to why, but I don't really want to dive into it on this podcast. We'd be here for way too long. But uh it's just kind of was another one of those like feather in the cap moments for me where I'm like, this is why they live longer. You know, like they just, they just, physiologically they're way more resilient. uh Yeah. And again, they, wasn't necessarily good for them either. for women. Right. I wouldn't recommend like, I can get away with it. It wasn't quite like that. just it was a really large drop in testo in the men. The women had to decrease in the muscle protein synthesis as well. But you had it seemed to affect them in more. And that was a subgroup of a small study. So it's not like something you can run to the moon about. It's just pretty interesting caveat there that makes for that sort of like that joke about like just again, the physiological resilience that seems to be over those types of things. You know, I think it's why you all give birth and we don't. You can stay up late feeding babies and yeah. Not even that, telling you, if it was up to us, the species would have died out long ago. You know what I mean? It's just, I've been in the know a couple times for that. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. It does make me think though, from the male perspective, mean, you certainly see a lot more like male firefighters and then also, guess, like shift workers and nurse. mean, you people are long hours or not sleeping for a chunk of time. Could be across easily both sexes, but my husband's a firefighter, so that's why I think of that. yeah, it is an interesting area. Yeah, you know, I don't have a great answer for you, at least with the firefighters, but I look more at a sleep restriction model consistently. We don't have a great idea of how sort of those mid and those mid, I mean, like midnight hasn't like anywhere in the middle of the night, how those like disturbances in sleep where they're woken up, we don't really know how that would affect it. I would take a guess that it's not going to be good, but I would assume that, you know, It's more of a sleep restriction model there, so it's least overcomeable. You know what mean? Yeah, I know it's... Do you know how like how many points are I forget what the measurement is, but like how how much is testosterone dropping is like 200 points? Yeah, okay. I should have been a little bit more prepared for that. I am aware that there are studies that show that they're hypogonadal. And I mean, it's interesting if you look at, this is three or four years old again, and I don't remember the points. I know that the hypogonadal line, I believe is 200 nanograms per deciliter. The units get tricky. I'm spoiled at this point where I can just draw the line across because it's pre-programmed in my Excel document and I just don't... nice. do know that there was a study like three, four, five years ago where they had operators coming back from deployment and a large portion of them got a lot, large portion of them were hypogonadal as well. And, know, it might've just been to your point, you know, we're discussing it earlier, kind of like a constant disruption of that sleep cycle. But, you know, there's a lot of psychological stress in that. I mean, that's a tough one to unravel there, but yeah, stress, know, especially for, I think we're going to I'm sure it's stressful for women as well. We just don't have a clear biomarker like testosterone in the women like in the men. But I believe that data is probably, you'll probably start seeing a lot more. Yeah, fascinating. um And then regarding the total daily protein, and maybe this will take us into maybe some of the pebble conversation, if someone's hitting their total daily protein, but it's very low in leucine, like they're using all collagen peptides or something like that, um are they still going to have the same effect? Yeah, so collagen is interesting. have a colleague here. It should be great for you to talk to Shaloha Katkotsky. Yeah, she's really, we have a study going on with right now with collagen and we're looking at some of this protein turnover stuff but non-muscle tissue. So she's right with us. She's not trying to think it's something about the muscle itself, but it does seem like it might have some effects in terms of the joint level where it makes the joints feel better. yeah. there are some systematic reviews out there that when they put this together, you have to go for a very long period of time. So it's like some like six months, which is hard for us to do in a lot of university settings. Cause you know, why 12 weeks is the magic number is because that's how long a semester is. Uh, you know, um, but it doesn't give you a long period of time that we are seeing improvements in like the subjective measures of, of, of like, of pain in these joints. uh We're gonna, we're trying to get that a little bit like, we we get in this better like Lego recycling, right? Like it's, well, we may not be getting changes in size, but maybe like pieces of the tendon or the collagen are getting better. um But, and I believe there's some research that it's looked at it from a skin perspective and it seems to be useful for skin. I am not an expert on that. I mean, you could take one look on this video here and know that like, that's not my forte. uh Yeah. Smart, smart husband. Yeah. That's good. I to answer your question, I just think it's fair to like we can't rule out some of these things about collagen yet. And I know it's very popular. So I just try to give that caveat. And in Keith Barr has shown some pretty good effects with it on tendons and ligaments. So again, that's kind of why we're trying to dive into that. But from a muscle perspective, to your question, no, it's not really gonna do anything. And in fairness, the leucine supplementation studies on their own, they don't do anything. so, yeah, I can. uh Leucine is, yeah, I can do it in one sentence, think. Very unacademic to me. Leucine's very good at stimulating muscle protein synthesis, but it will not sustain it. Mmm. So it will start it, but then it runs out. You need the other amino acids to keep it going. So if I only have one type of Lego brick, it's hard for me to make that Lego house. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like you need the one that's got four pieces. I need one that's got two pieces. need, you know, and I definitely want that long one so I don't have to put 45 little ones on there, right? You know? So leucine's really good at starting the process, but it cannot keep it going on its own. So you need to provide all the essential amino acids. in there and I think, know, that's, supplementation gets difficult because it's not necessarily, it can be a boulder, right? Because it can be a part of the total daily protein intake. But I think sometimes it's another one of those things of like, what do we want to worry about, right? The difference between a lot of these protein powders is probably not, I remember when I was a doc student getting on Amazon and like, You know, like looking at the price, this one's got more leucine didn't really got where I'm like, dude, just buy, just buy what you can get. You know, the NSF certified, if you care about that, you know, yeah, move on. So, you know, I, I, and there's studies that have shown that like, and I think this is where we're leading into, like if you take 45 grams in a day of like essential amino acids, you can increase across the day, you increase muscle protein synthesis about 20, 25%. And in work that we've done recently, we've increased total daily protein intake from 0.8, the RDA, to 1.6, so doubled it. And we get about the same change. So what that's telling me is, supplementation gives me the same effect size, but it's probably giving me the same effect size because I'm getting, I'm altering their total daily protein intake through supplementation. And so, you know, then the only... area where it gets, you know, collagen, right? Like we talked about that, but like, you know, versus a whey protein, if you want to target muscle, then like whey protein would be best. Um, like whey protein isolate seems, you know, if you can, if you can do that, that's fine. There's many people that don't want that. They want to plant protein. Fine. You can do, Many of the isolates are showing to be quite good right now, but I think that it's a good spot for like, and I think it's actually really good for endurance. athletes because I actually run more now that I lift like I said, division. I find that, you know, even the whey proteins can like sit on the gut a little bit. You know, like, I'm like splitting hairs here. but they can sit there. like a native way. I don't know if you see a cold processed whey protein that seems to get through me. without feeling like it's sitting in my tummy. But some of the, even the isolates will sit there and kind of like feel like it's just sitting there I don't like that, particularly if I'm running. And that's where I think like the essential amino acid supplement nowadays are really good. People are always like, well, what do think the magic is with essential amino acids? And I'm like, there's no real magic. It's just, it's a lot easier because for a given, like a, I wish I had a scoop. I have one, think somewhere here, but like for a given scoop size, You're just getting more of what drives the muscle. So the essential acids are what's required to turn on that, not only turn on, but maintain that Lego house building process. If I have a scoop like this, it's like. listeners. It's like a tablespoon. Maybe you think fits in there It's 6.58 grams. So kind of like it looks like a creatine scoop almost. It's like, yeah. exactly like your creatine scoop, you're right. So make sure something a little bit bigger than a five gram scoop. So in that scoop, I get five grams of EAs. But if I was to give you as whey protein, getting like, yeah, you're going to get it like 2.3 grams of essential acids, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in that analogy where I gave you where I said you get 45 grams a day, because we've also done this in hip arthroplasty patients and older and heart failure where we've given them these high doses and it works really well. And the reason is, like to get that from food, you need like, you need like 2.5 kilos of lentils. You know, you need two chicken breasts, you know, which again, not a problem for me. uh But if you want to do it from whey protein, which is probably the most concentrated way you could get it through quote unquote food, we could have the debate about whether whey is food or not, but food. You need like four and a half to five kind of standard whey protein scoops You need a hundred you need a little over a hundred grams of whey protein to get it 45 grams of EAs Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's it's it's it's a lot more than people think well, I'll just whey protein I'm like, yeah so the magic for me of the EAs is that you can actually ingest 45 grams of it because it doesn't sit in the gut it doesn't have like a digestive requirement and And it's a volume at which you can actually take that much in. Like you could shove it into one shaker cup and get it all down. You I wouldn't, you could, but I would recommend at least spilling that up into two doses a day, three. I wouldn't do 45 grams at once. em Yeah. I like them. I like them before my workout. em Personally, I feel like I get a better workout and there's some evidence showing that it might be due to like some sort of like there's that central fatigue hypothesis. Mmm. we sort it out and it seems like it can help not to a point that's bad, but a very short term dilution of like tryptophan, which reduces the production of serotonin, which is the feel good hormone, right? Feel good molecule. And that's important, but it also, you know, it'll favor the production of dopamine, which is more of the like kind of get things done molecule. Right. Right. And so like, if you can imagine that during a workout, you know, again, We're getting some data in this and this like to let people have an idea of how long this stuff takes. I said this when I started my postdoc, I said, I felt this feeling when I took these EAs that felt more central mental than anything. And my two mentors who are giants in the field are like, you're out of your mind. uh Seven years later, we finally have data and animals and humans are trying to publish that kind of like, I'm not out here on a limb. Like I'm telling you, it's a sneak peek, so to speak that um that seems that hypothesis seems to hold a bit of weight. you know, to get that before workout with like a any sort of isolate can be difficult. So I like to fill it up and kind of have it during my workout. And I definitely feel like a more quality workout some kind of like, you know, you can imagine if you if you have a little bit more of a dopamine put. Yeah, yeah. So I think I think the key with the EA is I want people leaving this podcast thinking they're like a, you know, a magic bullet. It's just It's a very constant, it's almost a pharmaceutical approach to nutrition where we took like, you know, why is chicken breast so good at making people have big muscles or egg whites, right? Oh, full of essential amino acids. Okay, well let's remove everything but those essential amino acids and put them in a powder and make it somewhat decent. And now they taste better. And so that's the magic, it's really concentrated. I It's just like almost, you know, they've really just diluted it down to like, this is what moves the needle. You can just actually ingest that. If you've ever tried to buy creatine or electrolytes online and wondered, is this actually legit? We got a quick fix. We built a Fullscript dispensary for Nutritional Revolution listeners so you can shop trusted professional grade supplements that ship direct from the manufacturer, no random third party sellers, no sketchy storage. You'll find brands we use with our athletes all the time like Thorne Clean Athlete, Nordic Naturals, Pure Encapsulations, Designs for Health, Designs for Sport, et cetera, and a ton of NSF certified for sport options. Everyone gets 20 % off always, and during promos you can get up to as much as 35 % off, and it's free to create an account. If you set up AutoShip, you'll get an additional 5 % off. Just open up the show notes and tap the full script link to get started. And you mentioned like elderly surgery. Do you think that's applicable as like a immobilized athlete? It's like post-surgery tool. Yeah, absolutely. I would definitely recommend, you know, I have a friend literally that just had a hip. She's 23, 24, had a hip surgery and I just was like, here you go. Here's a bag, you know, get 45 grams in a day. That's the literature. And it's not just our lab that's shown that other labs have shown us. So gives you good confidence, right? That it's not just one group saying it. It's multiple groups. So I think Yeah, I think a 45 gram strategy a day is really good. It bumps a lot of people up to that 1.7, 1.8 gram sort of area. And that might be why it's shown to be effective because a lot of people eat one. And I used to always, you know, there's food frequency questionnaires, there's dietary recalls, it depends when you look at, we get some people that come in at 0.7. You know, I really respect Dr. Heather Leidy at the University of Texas Austin a lot about appetite. She does these meal pack outs where she puts a bunch of food in a cooler, tells them to go eat it, they bring it back. And to me, that's like a really good way to figure out how much people eat, right? Because they've weighed everything, they've given it to them, they bring it back. And so I'm always like, well, we find 0.7 in our food. She's like, she's like a mentor. So when I say that she would chuckle, she hears it. I'm like, we find 0.7. I know in Haynes says like 1.1. I just don't really believe it. Because you know, our food logs always say this. And she's like, look, I give them the food, they bring it back. And it's one. People eat one. Yeah, she finds very consistently people eat like one gram per kilogram. So you can imagine if you put on 45 grams of EAs, you put that out to protein now, you that you probably get them up to that amount. But another thing that's important is that if you look at a growing pig model, some people have confused me for, but it's a very good model of human nutrition. And, and, and they grow best on a diet that's about 50 % essential amino acids. Whoa. Yeah. And I've looked in the literature and people are starting to report it depending on like whether it's a dietary modeling study or what we do like what we would consider controlled feeding. We give them the food, we weigh it, we give them the food, bring it back, we weigh it out, but we're prescribing it versus like in Dr. Leidy's case, she just throws it all in there. What they eat is what they eat. We give, you know, we're answering different questions with that. if you look, it seems like most of the diets fall somewhere between like a 0.35, 0.38 to like maybe a 0.44 on the high end, right? So you can imagine if you're taking just concentrated essential amino acids, maybe you're actually getting people up to that sort of 50%. Again, and you could do it with whey maybe, you know? So yeah, just, I don't, again, I don't want people leaving here thinking that there's a magic behind it. It's just an ability to get like that concentrated source that's really hard to do any other way. And you know, if you're vegetarian or vegan, It checks that box. So it's a great option for vegans and vegetarians. It's a great box. We really have GI distress issues because it's hard to get anything in there. And since it doesn't impact the gut, like it doesn't fill you up, this is to your point, it is actually supplement. And what we find, we found it in the soldiers and we found it in older adults. We can give them a sort of milk based supplement, various different types. They will ingest it. but for every calorie of that supplement we give them, they take a calorie of whole food away. It was a one-to-one exchange. I'm gonna have 250 calories of the supplement, but they eat 250 calories less food. So I call that, that's just replacement nutrition. That's not nutritional nutrition. With the essential amino acids, we've been able to actually get supplemental nutrition because we're not actually causing them. almost the opposite of what most people want, right? We're actually not causing them to feel full. So the magic is simply, it's very concentrated and it doesn't make you feel full. Nice. Okay. Awesome. I want to be mindful of your time. I'm going to, I'm going to, we're going to find out what's coming down the pipeline for you. But first we're going to break down your two truths and a lie. I think we got lots of good nuggets here for our listeners and we'll include article links to, to a lot of the stuff we talked about today. For your two truths and a lie. You said you grew up on a corn and soybean farm. You got a 2.94 GPA your freshman year and you were a long distance runner during your school years. I said the GPA one was a lie. Is that right? Oh, yay. Cool. I did grow up on a corn and soy field. ran cross country in seventh grade because I missed physicals for football. Yeah. So, you know, I finished dead last every race except one. Yeah. But I did the whole year. And I'll tell you what, it was really beneficial. ah I run a lot now. You know, I really do. Yeah. It's again, Clydesdale division. ah And then I did not get a two point for 9 GPA, I a 2.39 GPA. So yeah, I didn't know what I was doing. you know, I just like to point out people, think they think that there's something special about the degrees and there's, there's not even find a way forward. I didn't, I didn't know what I was doing in college. And I sorted it out. I got there. Yeah. And grades don't mean anything. They're dumb. I think no, I think that's really important and valuable because like I I don't know what it was, but like I started a Montessori in my like, you know, young, young years and like, I don't think they'd had grades. And then when I went to like, I think high school, then there was grades and I was like, Whoa, what do we do? Like, how does how does all this work? And what does all this mean? And like, they didn't prep us for that at all. And it was just yeah, so. I totally get that. I entered freshman, I'm one of the first, Highhouse, Dr. Joseph Highhouse, College Writing II He's got a beautiful poem in the Annapolis airport. So he's a great writer. He's a good, and he was a good guy. got, he but I'll never forget sitting there at DePaul University, day one, first class, third floor of the building. He walks in, throws down a sweet and low pack and he goes, what does that represent to you? I. Yeah. I have no idea, man. People put it in their coffee, you know? And so I had this problem with like... Not learning how to learn. knew how to learn, but I didn't really know how to like study. Yeah. Yeah. Like I was like, I know how to learn, but like the kind of the mental, the sort of the mental reps you got to take. And sometimes it sounds dumb. I think college is probably different. I'm getting sort of old. So it's maybe not the same anymore, but you know, back then it was definitely a, you just had to do reps. Sometimes you just had to rep stuff out and get it memorized and find, you know, I learned for me, I had to find a way to like, attach it to something and remember it like D versus L isomers and stuff like that. And so yeah. on flashcards on flashcards. Yes. for me, a lot of it was drawing. Because me and biochemistry and physiology, a lot of it was like pathways. just had visual or, you know, I had a really good ex-phys teacher. And so it was all like, well, here's the data and here's how the body responds with actual data. And here's what the underlying physiology was. And so that was great for me because I was graphing an action potential and at each point on that EMG sort of reading. what's going on, you know, so anyway, yeah. That is, yeah, I'm very visual too. So that I think totally understand that. um OK, well, what's coming down the pipeline for you? Are you presenting at any conferences, any new research you guys are working on? Yeah, we got a lot of stuff that seems like it's taken forever to do. We have some time restricted feeding stuff that'll hopefully become, I mean, these papers, we haven't started writing them or analyzing the data. We did a post menopausal, you know, like preverse post menopausal. It's a really cool physiology. And I think that that'll be really cool when we get it out. We kind of looked at the difference between, you know, more of a plant based versus animal based diet. But again, I think it's very important people hear that where we're interested is we're interested in just It's a great way to get people to eat the same amount of volume of food, but have different essential amino acids in the diet. So we're interested in essential amino acid content. We're not here to argue about plant and animal. It's just a model. That's what people don't understand. ah And we have some GLP-1 stuff coming. Everyone seems really interested in that, but they're ongoing. I mean, those are active studies. So we'll probably see those for another year or so, but I'm trying to... And then some of the stuff... There's gonna be more stuff on essential amino acids and cognition. We've got, we've started to write those papers. So yeah, a lot on the works. It's very busy. Yeah. Well, I'm very excited to, we'll definitely have to have you back on when some of that stuff starts coming out. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Well, this has been so fun and informative. David, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

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Kyla Channell, MS

Host