My MB Alex breakdown is supported by Helix sleep. Bring is in the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it. Spring allergens means you need more sleep, but there are a ton of factors that can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times. We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about five years now and I have been sleeping so much better. Jonathan and also our kids love their Helix mattresses and all of those issues, night sweats, back pain, motion transfer, those things are significantly better with a Helix mattress. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door, which is so much fun with free shipping in the US. They have a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty plus they're happy with Helix guarantee. Rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free customer first experience designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Go to helixleap.com slash break down for 27% off site wide. That's helixleap.com slash break breakdown for 27% off site wide. helixleap.com slash breakdown. Shhh. Shhh. Shhh. Shhh. Hi, I'm Miami-Elect. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to part two of our conversation with Scientist and Health Educator, Dr. Rhonda Patrick. Make sure to follow us on Miami-Elect'salix breakdown at substack for never before seen clips and episodes and also some fun behind the scene stuff including from today's episode. As a reminder Dr. Rhonda Patrick is a scientist and health educator recognized for leadership in nutrition, aging, and disease prevention, specialist in omega-3 fatty acids, mitochondrial metabolism. We're gonna talk about so many different aspects of nutrition and also things that you can avoid to keep yourself optimally healthy in part two of our conversation with Dr. Ronda Patrick. Break it down. I have a question as someone who happens to be vegan, but I think it's a question that everybody wants to have your answer on. What's up with protein?

Like, are we getting too much, which is what many of us have been told? Like, chill out. Don't worry. Like you're getting protein. There's protein in pasta. There's protein in rice and don't freak out. Then we went through a phase of like John and his body weight in protein. It's twice a day. There was a huge emphasis, especially, I heard it among like men of like all the protein, all the meat, also Ed Criateen, like eat collagen, like be a hunk of protein. What's the story with protein and what is the perspective for women versus men? Is it a similar conversation? I need to know. Yeah, no, it's funny. There's been, you know, in the aging field, which is where I am sort of in. It's also been this thing where for the longest time, well, you don't want too much protein, because that's going to accelerate aging. It's going to increase cancer risk. And, and this is largely done in animal studies, like rodents. And so, and there's lots of mechanism work there.

And so, you know, you're kind of thinking,

oh, well, protein's aging you.

That's because it's activating growth pathways

and that's involved in cancer.

And, you know, so you want to,

you want to kind of dial back on the protein.

This is also animal-based protein, correct?

A lot of these studies were animal-based protein,

because most countries that get enough protein are actually not getting it from animal sources. Yes, so except the United States. Animal-based protein has a high concentration of essential amino acids, particularly lucine, and that is the sort of switch for some of these growth pathways like the M-tore pathway, but also IGF-1. These are both two pathways that are sort of involved in the aging process. So yes, to some degree, that was kind of like animal protein. And then there's like all this human data that was observational data that came out that was looking at all cause mortality, cancer-related mortality, and it looked like, oh, if you ate protein from plants, you had a lower all cause mortality. You had a lower cancer-related mortality compared to the meat eaters. Well, it turns out like after then adjusting and looking at all these other healthier, healthier, unhealthy lifestyle factors, the meat eaters, if they had no unhealthy lifestyle factors, so they weren't overweight, they weren't sedentary, they weren't excessively drinking or smoking, they had the same mortality as the vegan. So when it comes down to, and when you ask me, what about protein? So look, protein is essential. We need protein to make proteins in our body. Everything that we're doing, everything that's going on our bodies from proteins and proteins require amino acids to be made. Our muscle also requires protein as well. And that's probably what most people are thinking about when they think about protein, they think about their muscle. And the RDA for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight. And that is probably where you're hearing a lot of people say we're not getting enough protein. And the reason for that is because when that RDA was set, gosh, how many decades ago, I don't remember, quite a few. Yeah. When that was set, the studies that were were done it has to be close to a century ago I mean no I think it was like oh gosh was it the 30s 40s oh okay yeah um I think I don't know well someone can look that at but um but the point is is that the studies that were done to basically the way that ourDA was determined was, okay, how many amino acids can we lose in a day without going into a negative balance, right? Because we don't actually store amino acids like we store triglycerides, we store fat in the form of triglycerides or we store glucose in the form of glycogen, right? We don't store amino acids. Well, our muscles actually are the biggest storage of them,

right? But you don't want to be breaking down your muscle tissue to get amino acids. And so that was determined based off of 1941. 1941. All right. 1941. So in the middle of World War II, they were like, let's work on this. So basically, the studies that were done were to determine whether or not that was enough.

How much protein you needed to take in to prevent,

like, basically your body from losing more protein. And it turns out that the studies were kind of flawed and the guesses were sort of overestimated. And so more studies have been done recently with newer technologies that have determined actually it's more like 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram body weight,

is what we actually need. That's more. It's more than a 0.8, right? Yes. And so that's kind of like the, I would say the minimal amount of protein. And depending on how active you are, those requirements go up. If you are physically active. If you need the dogs protein, you're leaning into his, I'm already not getting enough today.

Yeah, that's where it goes up.

If you're getting, if you're physically active,

you want to get about between 1.2 to 1.6. It's more like 1.6 grams per kilogram body weight of protein. And that's largely based on studies looking at gaining muscle mass and strength as well. So they've been randomized controlled trials giving people either 1.22, 1.6 kilograms per kilogram body weight of protein, and then looking at muscle mass gains and muscle strength gains. And giving them more protein, along with working out and exercising, it seems like the 1.6 is better. And also, I just want to reiterate, when you say protein because of the society we live in, I automatically

think of like meat, meat, meat, meat, and I think of all the things that are in meat that

a lot of people don't want, but you're not just talking about meat. You're talking about for people who want to eat fish, it could be fish, and there are other ways to get protein and like there are protein powders and things, so it doesn't just have, because like the notion of like eating meat five times a day, right?

Like doesn't sound attractive for many reasons, right?

But that's not the only way that we're talking about getting protein.

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