Protein & exercise: The secrets of healthy aging?

23:45But also because it's slightly easier to investigate. People forget that a lot of what we know about muscle metabolism is because we can directly sample muscle tissue from healthy people and we can measure all these things. Sample means cut out, does it? It does. Lovely. You can't sample my muscle tissue today. Thank you, Ben. No problem. I didn't bring a needle with me today to do it. Okay, good. Maybe next time. If you told me it was a clinical study, I'd let you do it anyway. I'm totally up for every clinical study, but okay. But it is harder to do those things in, for instance, bone tissue or other tissues where it is more invasive to sample those.

24:19Got it. But protein is, just to understand, because I think I sort of grew up with the idea of bone as somehow being like a sort of inert, almost stone-like substance, but protein plays a role in bone health? Yeah, it's one of the things that's been realized relatively recently, or not realized, but appreciated, is that the turnover rates of protein in bone, heart, even brain is always occurring. And it's still extracting amino acids, the building blocks of protein, from the protein in our diet. it. So we're not just replacing muscle proteins with what we eat. We are replacing proteins across all these other organ tissues as well.

24:53And they also similarly respond to exercise. We know less about how they adapt to every meal than we do muscle tissue, but we do know that they're influencing it. Absolutely. And this helps explain why healthy diet is important for bone health. We're particularly talking here, obviously, about menopause, but more broadly. Absolutely. Last question before we want to talk more about how this ties into aging and things like this, But is there a maximum amount of protein that actually our bodies can absorb? Or is this a myth? This was one of the real hot topics maybe 10, 15 years ago. And there were some really nice studies that kind of, I think, do give us some quite clear answers.

25:33And sometimes I think it's about how you phrase the question. If you say, is there a maximum amount of protein that we can absorb? Probably not. We will absorb everything that goes into the gut to some extent. It might just take longer. It might be slower if we have a lot. But how much we absorb versus how much we use metabolically is a different question. So if we imagine that we take in a very large meal containing, let's say we have a really large steak, lots of protein in it, it might sit at various levels of the gut for several hours, but ultimately we'll absorb a set amount of the amino acids in that protein and we will use those for metabolism over time.

26:11Another way of asking it is, is there a maximal amount of protein that we can use to stimulate muscle growth, for example. And that became something that was then investigated with sort of systematic approaches using state-of-the-art techniques to look at muscle tissue itself. So there's a study from Stu Phillips' lab, I forget the date now, but Dan Moore was the first author, and he looked at gradations of ingestion of egg protein. And what he did there is, I think it was 20 grams, you could see there was a maximal response of muscle tissue in terms of this building up the synthesis response we're talking about.

26:43And this was either at rest or post-exercise. If you had 40 grams of protein, you've still absorbed it. It's just not being used to build up muscle tissue. You've reached a plateau there. And actually what you use then is more of the protein is just oxidized. It's used as energy and generally disposed of. So just like extra calories. Extra calories, exactly. And disposed of might mean just eventually stored as fat in your body as well, right? Like just not necessarily disposed of. This is what I discovered from Christopher a few months ago. Absolutely. Ultimately, if you're having excess calories of any macronutrient, you've only really got one place to store them, and that's in fat tissue.

27:18Protein can only really be stored in very, very minute amounts in this synthetic response of tissues after eating, and there's no other way of storing protein. So yes, disposed of. That study's also been repeated several times with different proteins, and it's a similar story, which is once you go above 20 grams in a meal, you're not getting any extra muscle building response. The only caveat I would give to that is there's one study recently that showed that you might be able to use a little bit more for muscle building if some of these laboratory-based experiments that only use single leg exercise are using whole body exercise, where all of a sudden you're increasing the protein demands of the muscle across the body rather than just one leg.

27:59So there is some suggestion there that it might be a little bit higher than 20, but there will always be a maximal limit that we can use. And can we talk about those numbers just for a minute? Because we had so many questions around this. And what I understood from this podcast we did a few months ago is there's a sort of recommended daily amount of protein. I think it was about sort of 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. And that for most people, this was probably sufficient. Is that your view also? So but then how does that change for people who are maybe doing a lot of exercise, really trying to build up muscle?

28:35And how does that fit with the amount per meal? You just sort of mentioned this sort of 20 grams per meal, because it seems like, well, if you're eating three meals a day, that's sort of capping you at 60. That still feels way less than when I went to the gym and spoke to my trainer. I think he was like more like two grams per kilogram or something that I was supposed to be eating in order to like maximize the benefit of this new amazing buff jonathan which if you see me you see it hasn't really entirely delivered so i think there's lots of questions and i think this pushes people to eat a lot of foods as a result so i think it's really important and like what are the facts what does the science say okay um so the 0.8 grams per kilogram body mass is is a recommended daily amount without going into the too much detail on that that's that's broadly the amount we should eat to remain in something called nitrogen balance.

29:25So that's taking in a similar amount of nitrogen, which is the only place we take that in is within protein, and excreting the same amount of nitrogen. So that's balance. So basically retaining our tissue as it is. That's derived from nitrogen balance studies, which is by necessity a whole body level. So it's encompassing all the tissues of our body. And it's by definition encompassing the majority of the population. So it's a very good benchmark amount that we should have to remain healthy. The difference there, when we're talking about a recommended daily amount for health, is it's kind of a minimum requirement to maintain health.

30:01When we're talking about exercise, what we're generally talking about is trying to optimize something like an adaptive response to exercise. An adaptive response means? With the most obvious example to use here is if, the example you've just said, you're going to the gym, the trainer's trying to give you exercises to try and increase your muscle mass. So you're saying you need to increase your protein. That's a different question to whether or not this is protein for health. This is trying to, or general health across the body. This is, will having more protein increase the amount of muscle tissue I have?

30:29So that's really a slightly different question. It's almost like an optimal versus a minimal requirement for health. When we do this, then we can look at whether or not broadly just consuming more protein is beneficial, even before we look at the amount per meal or the timing. And the answer to that is, I'll perhaps start with the answer and then explain where we've come to this answer is, it does, having more than the RDA does increase the amount of muscle mass we can gain while training, but it's a relatively small amount. The majority of muscle that we gain is a direct result of the exercise and adequate protein in our diet.

31:04We can add a little bit on top of that by actually increasing our protein intake. So the first part of that message is, if you're not training hard at the gym, your RDA is just fine, I think you're saying. if you are training hard or it doesn't have to be just in the gym, I guess, like you could be out walking miles, you want to get yourself stronger and fitter. I think you're saying you probably do want to be higher. How much higher? Because I think this is where a lot of us have been told these numbers, which are hugely higher, causing us to worry about having enough protein. Give us the truth, Ben.

31:34I'll start with the resistance training because there's some clearer answers on this front. Some nice systematic review and meta-analysis type approaches that encompass lots of the studies in this field have generally arrived at a fairly similar conclusion, which is always reassuring in science when different groups come to the same conclusion. But really, if you push up from that 0.8 grams per kilogram body mass per day up to 1 or 1.2 all the way up to 1.6, you generally get slightly better outcomes in terms of gains of muscle mass and strength. Beyond 1.6, there seems to be a plateau where no additional benefits are available.

32:12A kind of breakpoint analysis will show you that. So really, I would say you can find a lot of recent papers now that will generally agree that about 1.6 grams per kilo is going to give you the maximal benefit that you can expect from additional protein in the diet on top of training per se. The answer when we want to actually refer to something that's different than just gaining muscle, But for instance, what we discussed before, the reconditioning of muscle tissue with, for instance, more endurance-based exercise is a little bit more complicated. Similar to lots of things, endurance athletes, they use a lot of energy.

32:45So they consume more food. So they automatically consume more protein. It may well be that it's rather similar. The nitrogen balance studies do suggest that endurance exercise pushes up the requirements of protein close to 1.6 or even higher just because of the additional caloric use. You still use some of that protein while doing exercise. But I think this is quite an exciting area that's going on now because there's a lot of people using more modern approaches to actually look at whether or not the requirement for protein during exercise and the requirement of protein to push adaptations associated with endurance exercise in the muscle, making it more energy efficient, can actually benefit from that additional protein.

33:24I would say that's a less clear answer than I can give you on the 1.6 for resistance training. So I think that's a really important point. This came up in a previous podcast, I think was looking at American and British data and suggested, you know, the RD8, like the recommended amount is this 0.8 per kilo. Actually, on average, everybody is eating double this of protein already. So that would sort of take you to this 1.6 level, which would suggest that, you know, when I went into the gym, I'm probably already eating all the protein I need for actually building muscles, never mind holding it still.

33:58Is that right? Do you think people need to worry about adding more protein? take me as sort of as this example you know in your mid 40s doing this i think the vast majority probably don't need to worry if they're undertaking exercise and they're eating sufficient food they're probably eating sufficient protein they will be above the 0.8 what we're really talking about is trying to maximize adaptations for people who are really concerned with squeezing out that that last percentage of every exercise bout and that really brings us to when it might be advantageous because eating 1.4 or 1.5 grams per kilo is not too difficult if you're eating two and a half, 3 ,000 calories, which a lot of young exercises already are.

34:38It is a lot harder if you're trying to, for instance, reduce the calories that you're consuming in your diet for weight loss, or you can't consume as many calories because you've got a reduced appetite or illness or inactivity, because then your overall energy intake decreases, which of course then resultantly means your protein intake decreases without particular attention to that macronutrient. And can we talk about that? Because I think we had a lot of questions around sort of aging people, I think very interested, right, in maintaining that health span that you were talking about at the beginning.

35:10And I think we all know that sort of our muscle mass, right, the amount of muscles sort of tends to decline as we get older to the point when, you know, we've had guests here talking about, like, you just can't get out of your chair. And at that point, all these bad health things happen. I guess two questions. Why does the muscles decline? Because that doesn't seem obvious. And you mentioned at the beginning that older people may find it more difficult to get protein in as well. So could you just explain what's going on there? And I guess, therefore, as we're thinking about either ourselves or maybe relatives, how should we be thinking about nutrition and protein as we get later into our lives?

35:54I think aging is probably a really interesting model to discuss when some of the aspects that we've perhaps said take care of themselves with protein and younger people is far more important to consider. So we lose muscle tissue as we get older. We generally call this sarcopenia. A nice way of thinking about sarcopenia, and it goes back to the quality of muscle that we discussed earlier, is on a population basis, We tend to remain a relatively stable weight as we get older. I feel like despite all my best efforts, we all naturally put on a little bit of weight over time. You don't see that, Ben?

36:27It fluctuates over time. But if you look across decades, for instance, what the bigger factor is, what comprises the weight that we are. So we lose muscle tissue and gain fat tissue. So it's an undesirable shift in composition. And that's often called sarcopenic obesity. So you might get somebody that's not particularly, hasn't put on a lot of absolute weight, but they've actually put on a lot of fat, but they've lost the muscle. And this is what we talk about when we get less functional, less metabolically healthy, because they've just got more fat to muscle ratio. There was a suggestion put forward by a paper from Cuthbertson, Mike Rennie's lab, to show that something called anabolic resistance to protein.

37:06So this was the idea that when we have a protein meal, as we get older, we don't respond quite as effectively to it as when we were younger. So the good way of viewing that would be if we have a piece of chicken and an older person, a younger person has it, more of that piece of chicken becomes the muscle tissue of the younger person than would be the case if it was the older person. So this is like a very slight reduction. It's not like I'm suddenly only able to get half as much out of a protein bar or something as somebody who's 30. Exactly. It's a really insidious response. And it basically results in the kind of what we classically see as the frail older person in their 70s or 80s.

37:46That process probably started when they were more like 35 or 40. It's just happening much more slowly. And one reason that has been suggested is this anabolic resistance to protein intake. But the important question about that is whether or not there's anything that can be done about it. Because, of course, we all know that we're probably going to get frail as we get older. Tell us the answer. Well, my answer is always there is something we can do about it, because otherwise, which is what underpins how exercise and nutrition can ultimately help us live healthier lives. Regrettably, there is some inevitability about the decay of the human body with age.

38:21Ben looks very young, by the way, for those who listen on the podcast. So he says that, but it's very hard to feel he can really feel it in his heart because he's clearly evidence for the good exercise and the good nutrition. You'd have to verify that with my wife, whether the nutrition's good at home. So some studies have demonstrated that an older person can simply consume more protein within a meal, and then they can actually increase their response to a protein intake. So we discussed before about 20 grams being a maximum for a kind of muscle building response in a younger individual. It's been shown a few times now that that is higher in older adults.

38:56So you could probably benefit from 25 or 30 grams of protein, whereas the younger person wouldn't benefit from it. And how, because there's two parts to this, I think, right? So one is that you may well just not be doing as much exercise as you're older than certainly you were probably when, you know, I'm thinking about my 15 year old who's currently at this point where there's a lot of exercise in his day, which is already not true for me unless I make it happen. And then there's also, I think you're saying sort of declining appetite. so you're just eating less food is it a combination of the two that is leading to sort of this loss of muscle and can you fix it just by eating more protein or do you have to lead with the more exercise and then the nutrition is on on top it's a great question i mean in some respects some people have tried to take the the real extreme stance of saying we We don't decay because we get older.

39:52We decay because we get less active because, of course, the two go hand in hand, as you have just pointed out. And we can certainly, this anabolic resistance that I speak of, which we can detect just in populations that are 30 years apart, we can detect in two, three or four days if we just immobilize the leg of a healthy individual. So what I mean by that is if we measure the anabolic response, the muscle building response to a meal in a young, healthy individual who has walked around with one leg in a cast for a few days and the other leg not. So we isolate the variable of activity, nothing to do with age.

40:28We see anabolic resistance straight away in every individual we look at. And just to make sure that I've understood that anabolic resistance, I mean, like somehow the leg that was in this cast just can't use this protein successfully compared to the other leg that's still been walking around. Precisely. We actually showed a few years ago that from a meal of 20 grams of protein, 40 % less was used by the immobile leg compared to the mobile leg. So coming back, I guess, to my question, can you fix this just by eating more protein or really you need to exercise and the protein is secondary? The exercise still becomes paramount.

41:04So the other thing that an older person can do is perform a bout of exercise. And performing a bout of exercise basically sensitizes the muscle to the amino acids, the protein in the diet. So it makes muscle respond a little bit more youthfully, if you like. but we can also then go a broad picture back, look cross-sectionally at older people who are more active, older people who consume more protein, older people who do both. And we can say, yes, generally these cohorts of older people lose muscle tissue at a slightly lower rate than those that don't exercise or consume sufficient protein. However, the regretful bit that I said at the beginning is they are still losing muscle tissue.

41:42And if I tried to pin you to the ground, which I I know scientists hate to do with that really all the day. And you were saying like, I want to make sure that I don't have this muscle loss because it's really going to affect the health that you were describing in my brain, in my heart and all the rest of it. I mean, is this 80 % exercise and 20 % making sure I'm getting enough protein? Is it 50 feet? How much of those two should I be worrying about as I think now about like my action? Somebody's listening and saying, what do I need to do? Is it to go and eat more chicken or is it to like go for a walk?

42:15I would say it's 80 % upwards on the physical activity side. We see that the consuming protein becomes less and less effective as we become less and less active. In fact, when we immobilize people, we struggle to pick up the benefits of protein. I'd love therefore to come on to sort of this question about where you get your protein. And I think that we're living currently in this environment where there's this enormous amount of advertising about ultra processed foods that have all of this protein. And I was thinking about, you know, those bars that say 10 grams of protein added or people thinking about, I need to have like some sort of shake with whey powder in it in order to get the protein that I need.

42:56I think everything that we've learned through this podcast makes me feel very negative about those sorts of foods, but they do have lots of protein in it, right? So very high levels compared to most foods. How would you think about them? There's an argument to say if you want to get every single percent out of your workout at the more elite level, that it might make a difference. The exact protein that you have following exercise, you might get slightly more out of it. If we step back slightly and look at all the protein that we consume across a day, this tends to pale into insignificance compared to just getting sufficient protein for your goals, whether that's training or whether that's living a healthy life as we get older.

43:38an important point of view there would be is the pragmatic view though because we've just discussed older people maybe have a slightly increased requirement for protein for muscle health but that's concomitant or in parallel with the idea that they might eat less or find it harder to eat more so there's a role then for how much protein is just available in foods so something like chicken it might not just be that chicken protein is great or whey protein is great it's just got quite a lot of protein in it and if you want to get the same amount of protein from broccoli, you've got to eat a lot of broccoli to get that same amount of protein.

44:10So there's a level of convenience and practicality to something like a supplement that might be far more important than the actual protein that happens to be in it, for example, being particularly magic. There's a bit on both sides there, Ben. Let's say I'm listening to this. I'm just thinking about my actionably what I should do. Maybe take me as an example. So I'm going to the gym three times a week. I'm lifting some heavy weights. I'm told that's good for me to help maintain all the health things that you're describing. I've sort of came away from the last conversation that we had about protein thinking, I really don't need to worry about protein.

44:47That's not really a problem. I need to make sure that I'm eating a really good, healthy diet and it's balanced and that's going to give me all that I need. And that therefore, the sort of these protein shakes that I had when I first started doing this definitely don't make sense would you agree with that or you're actually saying well actually maybe i need to worry a bit more if i'm i'm doing that about whether i'm getting enough protein no i don't think you i mean if if if you take the example you give let's let's take a real textbook example you're exercising you're working you're using uh two and a half thousand calories a day you're consuming two and a half thousand calories a day the protein comprises 15 to 20 percent of that you're probably getting sufficient protein i suppose the situation changes if you're trying to cut down your calories, you want to have 1500 calories a day.

45:30You want sufficient protein to support the adaptations of the exercise, but you don't want excess calories. You'll then be seeking protein dense foods. This is like, I want to look incredibly buff for my next Hollywood movie. So I need to have all my muscles and like 7 % body fat. That's your, I'm looking forward to being asked to be in that next Hollywood movie. Somehow I haven't had the invitation yet. It could be that, or it could also equivalently just be wanting to lose weight for health reasons, but wanting to retain some muscle tissue for health reasons as well. So there's an element there of just wanting to make sure protein doesn't drop at the same time as calories do drop.

46:05Things like protein shakes or protein containing foods become just a feasible strategy for not having a full meal, but having the same protein. It's not necessary if you're having sufficient protein, the additional gains from that are probably so small as if they are there that most people wouldn't notice. I think the interesting element there is if you want to replace something like meat proteins with non-meat proteins. I'd love to talk about, because I think one side is the ultra-processed. I don't think many people listening to all of these podcasts will be very excited about that. Lots of people are really interested to understand plant versus animal protein.

46:43You're talking about whey, right? That comes ultimately from dairy, doesn't it? So what does the science say about plant versus animal? We had lots of questions around this. Again, if I go back to the traditional literature, some very nice studies, these laboratory controlled studies that have looked at the hours following exercise, compared originally the muscle building following about of exercise in conjunction with the consumption of dairy proteins, so whey and casein, and generally compared that to soy protein. Soy protein was generally lower in some of the essential amino acids that we think are important in muscle building.

47:20And in line with that, they showed a lower muscle building response. Largely following these studies, there was the narrative, therefore, that if you want to go to a gym and build as much muscle as possible, then you've got to stick with animal proteins. And I think that we've probably moved from that narrative now in the current literature because we now have studies on more divergent protein sources from plant origin. So rather than just eating this one plant from protein, you're now saying like lots of different plants with lots of different mixes of amino acids. Exactly. Because one of the main criticisms of a plant protein would be that it might be lower.

47:54You can use the word deficient, but at least lower in key amino acids. That's definitely true. The question is how consequential that is when we think that we actually multiple plant-based proteins from different sources, complementary proteins. If we again, coming back to the idea that we are getting sufficient protein. The studies more recently now looking at that more consequential question, which is if I'm getting sufficient protein and training, does it matter where it comes from, generally show no, it doesn't matter. We recently published a paper this year demonstrating that people training five times a week, very, very hard, intense training for 10 weeks.

48:29They gained about two and a half kilos of muscle tissue. Half of them were obtaining most of their protein from animal sources, half from plant-based sources. There was no difference at all. And that was the goal of the study was to drive the biggest adaption to the biggest amount of muscle tissue we could gain in a relatively short period of time as we could and give them the optimal diet with animal protein and everything that people say and then see if that was impaired, if we made them virtually exclusively vegan for that time and it didn't impair it. So that's how, and it's also in line with papers from other groups, such that the only caveat I would say there is in all the papers so far, that is people having sufficient protein.

49:12And assuming, because I think, you know, we talked a bit about some of this sort of particular issues around aging, but we all know that most people's issue is not that they're not eating enough food, right? It's that they're eating too much of the wrong sorts of food, because that's the environment we live in. Was there anything special about the sorts of plants that they were eating in this study that you did? Yeah, I mean, we hinged that to using fungal-derived proteins, mycoproteins, mainly because we'd used those proteins before. And we demonstrated that they were, under the more controlled laboratory environments that we've discussed, they were as anabolic as animal proteins.

49:48So they're a kind of controlled agriculture, really, with benefits in terms of sustainability in the same way that people want benefits on the plant-based proteins and these other various aspects. The caveat I always give to this work is it's just a bit harder to feed somebody on relatively high protein diets when you take away animal proteins. When we talked earlier about easily consuming 1.2, 1.4 grams, if you actually look at the diet diaries of people that do that, a big proportion is coming from dairy and meat. So when you do take those out, you perhaps have to be a little bit more cognizant of where that's going to come from and then selecting protein sources that can actually fulfill that.

50:24That makes a lot of sense. And I think there's a lot of people listening who may have really cut back meat in their diet, but are actually still having quite a bit of dairy. And that definitely describes my diet, for example. And it's clearly what you're saying. That's really quite easy. If you go to being vegan and you're cutting out all of dairy, then I think it's sort of raising the bar and making sure you're having this healthy, balanced diet. And I know that there'll be lots of people listening saying, I have this fantastic diet doing that. You sort of have to be a bit more thoughtful, am I right in saying that in order to make sure you're getting the right protein?

50:52I think so. I think it's kind of inescapable. You've got to be more thoughtful. But I think what we and others are shown in those kind of papers is it's eminently achievable. Amazing. We were following up on exactly what sort of fermented mushrooms you can have, because I think if Tim was listening, he's got all the things he's going to love, plants, fermentation, all the rest of it. Ben, there's many more things that I could ask, but I think we're definitely at time. I'd love to try and do a quick summary of what we covered. And please, you know, let me know if I've got anything wrong as I run through it, if that's okay.

51:27Absolutely. Brilliant. So I think we started by just saying exercise is incredibly important. And there's just this new emerging evidence about how it affects all parts of our health. I was particularly excited to hear about this, that it may even affect your risk of dementia. It's not just about your cardiovascular health and things like this. Muscles are a really big part of this. And it's interesting that such a thing as a healthy or an unhealthy muscle, it's not just how big it is, which was completely news to me. And if you can get to these healthier muscles, actually, they're really going to support you by, for example, reducing these blood sugar spikes, being able to sort of balance your body out more.

52:03They're constantly replacing themselves. I think you said like 1 % to 2 % of the muscle is basically turning over. And if we exercise, we actually increase that. So that's even more. So we need to keep eating this protein just to maintain our muscles. And then we need to eat even more if we want to get more muscle, which will probably support that exercise and the health. Most people don't need to worry about having enough protein, that the 0.8 grams per kilogram is sort of what you need for balance. Now, if you're trying to put on more weight, and that could be like my 15-year-old son, who just frankly is putting on that because he's growing, but also wants to get stronger.

52:40Or somebody saying, you know, I really need to get fitter. Maybe I'm the person you described who's seen their weight stay fairly stable, but actually over time that, you know, the muscle has gone down and the fat has gone up, then it needs to be higher. And you said it does depend the sort of exercise you're doing. You said for resistance training, so this is sort of like the weights and the strength that I think we've spoken with Javier and others being really great for your health. Probably 1.6 grams per kilo is really the top. So once you go above that, it doesn't matter anymore. Might be a bit higher for endurance, not sure.

53:13And again, most people are getting this. And I think the two people that you described you need to think about is one is as you're getting older and getting relatively late, I think, in your life you're describing, you'll find it harder to absorb this protein. You may also just be eating smaller amounts. So it can be a problem to look at. And yet in all of these cases fundamentally it's the exercise is 80 % of this. The nutrition is the 20 % that you're putting around in terms of the muscle control and all the rest of it. Then final couple of things, you definitely killed a few myths. Don't worry.

53:50There's this anabolic window of when you eat after exercising, don't worry about it. It doesn't matter if you have to delay. And I was just thinking about our ancestors going out for a hunt and killing an antelope and thinking, yeah, they probably didn't eat the antelope straight off to clean, did they? They worked out harder than I've ever done. And presumably they went back and they made a fire and they cooked it. So it sort of makes sense that actually we're designed to be able to wait. And then finally, we talked about what sort of food you should eat. You don't need to eat these protein shakes and things like this.

54:23And that actually, interestingly, you've just done this brand new study that showed when you had people exercising really hard and putting on a lot of muscle. Actually, you could feed them an entirely plant-based diet, and they were able to put on the same very high amount of muscle as animal. With the proviso that if you are eating no dairy, it probably is a bit harder in that situation to get all of the protein that you need. So you can get it to work as a vegan, but it's clearly like a higher bar than if you're having some cheese or whatever it is in your diet, where I think you were saying it was pretty easy.

55:01Remarkably precise and concise summary. I wish I could do it so succumbly. Well, that's because I don't understand anything more than what you've just described to me. Ben, I thought that was fantastic. Thank you so much for coming in. I am sure we will have a whole host of follow-on questions after this. So I hope we can get you back again in the future. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Wonderful. Thank you, Ben. Bye-bye. Goodbye. Thank you, Ben, for joining me on Zoe's Science and Nutrition today. If you want to understand how to support your body with the best foods for whatever exercise you're doing, then you may want to try Zoe's Personalized Nutrition Program to improve your health.

55:38You can get 10 % off by going to joinzoe.com slash podcast. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe's Science and Nutrition is produced by Yellow Hewins Martin, Richard Willen, and Alex Jones here at Zoe. See you next time.

56:01As you can imagine, hosting this podcast, running Zoe, juggling family life, it all keeps me pretty busy. So I try as best I can to stay energized and show up well in all those parts of my life by fueling my body with the right food, by exercising, and by adding a scoop of Daily 30 to my meals every day. If you haven't heard of Daily 30 yet, it's the gut supplement designed by our gut health scientists here at Zoe. It's made of over 30 high-quality, hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi, and different types of fiber. Better yet, it contains ingredients that support gut health, digestion, and energy, which is ideal for packed calendars and busy lives.

56:44Simply add one scoop a day to any meal for an extra boost of fiber and plant diversity. and because it tastes delicious on just about anything and adds a satisfying crunch, it quite quickly slots into your life, becoming a daily healthy habit you'll always have time for. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. So order yours today at zoe.com slash daily 30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.