Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. The weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. You know, it seems like every week I'm getting questions about the one essential building block of a healthy body and that is protein.

So don't you need a lot of protein to build muscle and stay fit and strong as you age? There's certainly a lot of controversy out there about how much protein you got to have, particularly if you get older.

Well, in today's episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast, I'm going to talk all about this critical nutrient, how much of it you need, which proteins to eat, and which to avoid, and what to do if you're a vegan, vegetarian, or a high performance athlete.

So stick around because things are about to get a little controversial.

So first question that I get all the time, Dr. Gundry, how much protein do I need to eat?

So the question of how much protein you need to eat is I think fairly well settled by researchers in longevity like my colleague and friend, Dr. Walter Longo.

And if you've noticed in my books, both the plant paradox and the longevity paradox, I use his formulas to calculate the amount of protein, a normal, what's called a 70 kilogram man, 150 pound man, would usually need to eat.

And it comes down simply put to probably about 20 to 30 grams of protein per day.

Now, what are those figures come from? Well, one of the things that many nutritionists look at and forget is we actually recycle all of the protein that's in the lining of our gut wall.

And we tend to shed most of our gut wall almost daily, at least every other day, all the cells lining our gut wall are kicked out in a new and replaces them.

We don't waste those cells. So we actually eat those cells, mucus that, you know, your runny nose, the mucus in the back of your throat are mucus polysaccharides, their sugar molecules with protein.

And we actually digest that mucus. So we actually have a continuous source of protein within us that can make up for a lot of the protein.

We assume we need on an everyday basis. So that's where these figures come from. Now, I think one of the most striking studies that was done published in 2009 in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, there is a lot of controversy that as you get older, your protein needs may increase.

And even Dr. Longo thinks that maybe after the age of 65 or 70, you should perhaps add more protein to your diet.

My personal feeling about that, which was refuted by this study, is that even if you're elderly, you don't need to consume more protein.

So in this study, they took volunteers of two age groups, young adults and senior citizens, and they had them eat a meal of either 30 grams of lean ground beef, 90% lean ground beef, or a meal of 90 grams of lean ground beef.

And then they actually looked at muscle synthesis, building of muscle. In other words, incorporating that protein into muscle.

And what they found ought to shock everybody who thinks that protein is really, really important. The 30 grams of protein in that meat completely provided for muscle synthesis in both the young and the old.

But the really starting thing was the 90 grams, either in the young or the old, did nothing more for protein synthesis.

Now you have to ask, okay, what happened to the rest of that 60 grams of protein? Well, we don't waste energy, as I've talked about over and over again.

We convert that protein, which we do not need to build muscle. We already met those needs with 30 grams into sugar.

...