Preserving Your Muscles as You Age

Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast

Dr. Eric Berg

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this podcast, we’re going to talk about preventing muscle loss due to aging. At around age 50, women go through menopause which causes hormonal changes. Men experience hormonal changes around age 60.

As you age and your hormones change, you can become deficient in skeletal muscle. This is known as sarcopenia. Around 40% of your metabolism is related to your muscles, so this can have detrimental effects.

In women, estrogen decreases with age, but progesterone drops even lower. Without progesterone, you end up with a lot of problems from estrogen.

Cholesterol is a building block for steroid hormones, like testosterone and estrogen, which directly affect your muscles. This is why low-cholesterol and low-fat diets can cause muscle loss. Coincidentally, this is why you see muscle damage and diseases associated with statin drugs.

Here are 6 ways to protect and support your hormones to help prevent muscle loss as you age:

1. Infrared light can increase melatonin. Sunlight, fire, and candles all provide infrared light.

2. Regular, consistent, resistance exercise is the most potent stimulator of muscle building.

3. Ensure adequate intake of high-quality animal protein. Aim for .8 to 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight each day.

4. Consume plenty of cholesterol from meat and dairy.

5. Try pregnenolone supplements. Start out with 30 mg per day for women and 100 mg for men.

Pregnenolone is a precursor for important hormones related to muscle building.

6. DHEA is a precursor for hormones that help build muscle. Try 25 mg for women and 100 mg for men.

DATA:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6122168/

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Let's talk about how to salvage your muscles as you get older.
0:05.0	Both men and women. When women hit the age of 50, they go through this
0:10.4	process, this change called menopause. and when they go through menopause
0:14.4	you have all sorts of changes in their hormones which I'm going to cover.
0:18.0	Men start developing more hormonal changes more when they're 60. Now what I'm primarily going to
0:24.1	focus in on with these hormones is the relationship between what happens to
0:28.5	one's muscles, okay? The term for this is called sarcopina. The Latin word for sarcopenea means basically poverty of the flesh.
0:38.5	You're deficient in skeletal muscle. And this relates to just getting older. As we all are
0:46.4	aging, including myself, I'm going to be 59, which is very weird because I don't
0:52.2	feel 59. So of course I'm doing a deep dive in this to preserve my muscles as long as possible.
0:57.0	Why is this important? Because as we age and we lose our muscles we lose a lot of our metabolism. Now this is not just related to
1:07.2	your metabolic rate, the speed of which your ability to burn fat or your capacity to burn
1:11.5	fat, but also all the other things that are connected with metabolism
1:16.2	as well. You have a lot of mitochondria in your muscles, right? So if you're losing your muscles,
1:19.7	you're going to lose a lot of your mitochondria, the energy factors of the body.
1:22.6	And roughly as we get older, we lose between 1 and 2 percent of our muscles each year.
1:27.4	As far as the percentage of our metabolism related to muscle, it's roughly about 40 40% so it's pretty significant.
1:33.6	Let's start with females in estrogen.
1:36.4	estrogen does decrease as you get older.
1:39.2	It goes down a certain curve, but this other hormone, progestrone tanks even lower, almost to the point
1:48.8	where it's almost zero.
1:50.0	So if we don't have any progestrone, we get a lot of problems with estrogen.
	...

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