Protein: The Key to Longevity or a Ticking Time Bomb?

A lot of people are not getting enough protein. Higher protein across the board is going to save more lives than it would ever hurt in younger people. On the other hand... So the muscle heads who are having a lot of meat and a protein shake and a protein bar are turning all that into carbs and fats at the end of the day. I feel like this is a huge scam. Yeah. The most controversial area in nutrition longevity today is not carbs, it's not fat, it's protein. Today I will cover protein myths, focus on longevity, autophagy and aging. How much protein does your body truly need? You're about to be surprised. And if you are over 860, this video can save your life. Before the first myth, what is exactly protein? Protein is a macronutrient you receive from food. When you consume this macronutrient, your body digest it into small molecules called amino acids. These small molecules are building blocks that are essential for the body to repair So far, common sense. Protein is a building block. But if our story ends here, then we shall conclude that we need to make sure that we simply get at least enough protein. Basic physics. Or the economics of the body. But it is not so. This leads us to the first myth about protein. In a second, I will show you how I've used this myth to gain 4 pounds of pure muscles in just 4 weeks. Myth number 1 Protein is a simple building block. Would you say that your genes matter? If you said yes, I agree. What about your hormones? Hormones are messengers, chemical messengers, that travel in your blood and tell your entire body what to do. Let me rephrase that because this is super important for today. Your body has 30 trillion cells. And these hormones, they float around in your circulation and tell everyone what to do. So do you agree that these chemicals are powerful? If you said yes, I agree. The mystery though. Who tells your genes and hormones what to do? To a large extent, it's protein. Specifically, how much protein exactly you eat every day. As you will see, variations, even in tiny grams per day, can affect your genes and hormones dramatically. Before I prove it to you, if what I said is the truth, then this means that the question of how much protein you need is not as important as the question which genes and hormones do you want to activate to achieve what you want to gain, to achieve your goal. So let's get back to hormones. Let's start with one of the most powerful hormones in your body. It's called IGF-1. Its initials mean insulin-like growth factor 1. IGF-1 is the active chemical from the growth hormone HGH. Therefore, IGF-1 is the most powerful growth hormone in our bodies. It helps cells to grow. It helps us to build muscle mass and bone mass. And it also helps in rejuvenation. How does protein, how much protein we eat every day, affect IGF-1? I'm quoting from this study. Besides its role as a brick provider for building the organic matrix of skeletal tissues, dietary protein stimulates the production of anabolic bone trophic factor IGF-1. Dietary protein means the protein coming from our diet. So here they refer to the IGF-1 that affects the bone. Bone IGF-1 is a hormone that helps in building bones. Consuming high protein, dietary protein, as they said, tells the body to make more of it. It's not that your bones really need more protein as a building block. It's more that your bones need more instructions to build bones, which comes from this bone IGF-1. And what controls IGF-1 is the protein that you eat. What about IGF-1 that is not related to the bones, but to the entire body, such as the muscles? Is it controlled by protein too? This study measures long-term protein consumption in humans and the effects on IGF-1. The name of the study is effects of calorie or protein restriction on serum, meaning blood, IGF-1 concentration in humans. I'm quoting, Our data provide evidence that protein intake is key determinant of circulating IGF-1 levels in humans. Now, how does protein consumption exactly do that? You see, most of the IGF-1 we have in our blood is produced by the liver, but it's the protein that truly tells your liver what to do. When you eat, your liver counts how much protein you eat and make IGF-1 accordingly. The brain is also involved in this production, but this is a simplified version of it. In conclusion, the first myth is that protein is much more than a building block. The protein you consume acts as a hormone-regulating drug in your body, and you can choose which hormone you want to activate and to which purpose. One purpose is muscle growth. This leads us to the second myth related to muscle building. Myth number two To build muscle mass, you need to eat a lot of protein all the time. It is a common belief in the fitness world that in order to build muscle mass, you need to consume a lot of protein all the time, all year round. This is not true because when you have elevated IGF-1 chronically, you can make your cells and muscles resistant to this IGF-1, reducing the growth signal from IGF-1, leading to a plateau of muscle growth. Let me give you an example. After many experiments on my body I'm gonna share today about protein, I lost a lot of muscle mass. This is me at age 32. Lean, skinny, ugly, not a YouTube channel material at all. Then I decided I need IGF-1 right now. Because it doesn't matter how much exercise you do, if you do not have enough IGF-1, you won't grow muscles, period. Therefore, I needed this IGF-1. And to increase IGF-1, I need to increase my protein intake. I could have increased my protein intake by 30% or 50%, but this time I decided to triple my protein consumption. I increased my daily protein intake from 48 grams to 150 grams. What would happen in my body? You can imagine, it would skyrocket my IGF-1. The result, in 4 weeks only, I gained 8 pounds of pure muscles at age 32, when my testosterone is definitely not in my peak, meaning I did not have the testosterone levels I used to have in my 20s. This is how powerful protein is, when combined with intense exercise. But that's not everything. There is another secret I use. Because it's not just about how much IGF-1 that you have, it's also about the sensitivity of your body and your muscles to IGF-1. Let's hear Dr. Longo on the value of keeping your body very sensitive to IGF-1, how it can affect your body's rejuvenation potential. And I think that might even help, again, keeping the IGF-1 receptors sensitized, so that when you do have the proteins, everything is working very well, everything is getting built correctly. Sensitivity is how well your muscles respond and react to the growth signal coming from IGF-1. The sensitization is going to make things a lot easier. Maybe this is why these women today were gaining muscle mass very easily, just doing 20 minutes a day of exercise. Dr. Longo suggested that low-protein diet or fasting are usually followed by heightened sensitivity of the body to IGF-1, which activates massive rejuvenation potential of the body. This signal works best when you go from low IGF-1 to high IGF-1, meaning from low-protein to high-protein intake. This is the opposite of eating high-protein diet all year round to build muscle mass, which is a common advice in the fitness world. This advice can actually make your muscle resistant to IGF-1, causing your muscle growth to plateau at some point. Does it sound familiar? Has it ever happened to you? So what happens when you shut down IGF-1 production and then increase it? This is exactly what I've done in this experiment. Before the experiment, I was on a low-protein diet, which caused my IGF-1 levels to plummet. What does it mean? It means that my muscles were extremely sensitive to IGF-1 levels. So when I skyrocketed my IGF-1 levels, my muscles were extremely sensitive to it, meaning IGF-1 has a much larger effect in the muscles. So to grow muscles, all I needed to do at this point is to cause sufficient muscle damage by a very intense exercise that is not frequent, and allow the IGF-1 to penetrate into the muscles and make it grow. This is as opposed to constantly elevated IGF-1 that happens when you always eat high-protein diet. So there is a value in cycling here. As you can see, you can play with your protein intake, not only to control IGF-1, but also to control the sensitivity, which can enhance its effect. In this experiment, besides using protein to control IGF-1 and enhancing IGF-1 sensitivity, I followed a complete protocol that is based on maximal IGF-1 activation. What you see here is my complete blueprint library that is based on my 17 years of research. But let's focus right now on protein as a building block. On this row, how much protein does your body really need to function and maintain itself? This leads me to the next myth. Protein myth number three. You don't eat enough protein. I will first qualify this myth to those under age 65. If you're over 65, you can skip this one. Now, let's go to the actual use of protein as a building block. How much does your body need? Let's hear from Dr. Christopher Gardner, who has been researching dietary requirements for over 30 years about how much protein humans require per day. Now, here's an important question for you to think about. When you want to come up with protein recommendations for the country, what would you suggest recommending? Would you recommend the estimated average requirement? Because if everyone in the country got exactly the estimated average requirement, by definition, how many people would be deficient? Half, because it's the average amount. If you only get the average amount, the half of you that are above average, not just intelligently, but from protein requirement, would be deficient. And so when the U.S. comes up with recommended daily allowances for protein, vitamins, and minerals, that should be adequate for 97.5% of the population. They came up with a number that said 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight should meet that. So I have some U.S. data that shows how much protein people eat in the U.S. And it's pretty much double, double the RDA. So Dr. Gardner says that the RDA, the recommended dose of protein per day by the government, is a measly 0.8 grams of protein per kilo of body weight. To convert it into pounds is 0.35 grams of protein per pound. But he says a very interesting thing. He says that the RDA, due to the genetic variations, was designed, on purpose, to put 95% of the population in excess. It actually says that if you eat the RDA, you're probably getting excess protein. But there is even a more interesting point, which is everyone, including vegetarians, eat double the RDA. In essence, Dr. Gardner says that most people eat more than twice what their bodies actually require. Turning this excess protein into sugar, possibly excess fat, and Dr. Longo, who researches protein for disease and longevity, seems to agree on the low-protein strategy. Low protein doesn't mean you're not eating protein. It means that you have to have the 0.35 grams per pound of body weight. So if you weigh 100 pounds, you should have at least 35, 40 grams of proteins per kilogram. I was talking about pounds. So Dr. Longo mentioned the exact same protein requirement. Ron Rosedale, who has been researching the impact of protein on aging, also discussed how much protein he found from his research that we really need. I used to say about a gram of protein per kilogram of lean body mass. In other words, estimate what your mass is without any fat. What I would say now is that everybody should have 0.75, and you can even go lower. Protein content in breast milk is only about one gram per kilo per day. You will never, ever have a higher protein consumption than when you were a fetus. Dr. Rosedale suggests determining protein intake based on lean mass, not weight. Lean body mass means my weight without the excess fat. Because this is the part that really consumes this extra protein, not the fat. Being obese doesn't mean that you need to eat more protein, but having a large muscle mass does. Most importantly, this calculation leads to even a lower protein requirement than the RDA, suggesting that most people only need to eat between 40 to 60 grams of protein per day. You can get all that in just one meal. So is this true? This is all the protein that we actually need? Over the last 17 years, I've been testing that hypothesis on my body. I have been doing two types of tests. First, I measured the impact of my protein consumption on the millimeter on my lean body mass. I counted on the gram my daily protein intake while tracking my lean body mass. Why did I do that? Because the muscles, besides giving us strength, are also a reservoir for protein. And if I ate too little protein, it would mean that my body would extract this protein from the muscles. And that would tell me that my body did not receive enough protein from food. Make sense? Then I did another thing. Measuring urea urine test. Urea is a byproduct of excessive protein conversion into sugar. So it would tell me I consumed too much protein. And when you do this test, what you do is you count exactly your protein for the day and collect what comes out in your urine. If I ate excess protein, it would show up as urea in my urine. And when I did those tests, I've done it without exercise in that day, with exercise, and also in days after exercise, I discovered something amazing I want to show you today. So I've done all of those tests, and you know how much protein my body needs? My body needed only 48 grams of protein per day. Which translates to 0.75 grams per kilo of lean body weight. In just four weeks, I will be releasing the full video, packed with 35 minutes of valuable protein myths and insights. Until then, subscribe and stay alive by following the right data interpretation.