Why Protein Isn’t Always Enough: Anabolic Resistance, Obesity, and Protein Efficiency | Dr. Nick Burd

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 00:00

Is it ideal to build muscle on a vegan diet? Does protein timing actually matter? And why does gaining muscle seem so hard, even when you're training consistently and eating enough muscle? Protein synthesis isn't just about what you eat. It's about when you eat it, and how your body, the efficiency, absorbs it, how your hormones, your gut and your body composition can change the entire equation. Dr Nicholas Byrd is one of the world's leading experts in muscle metabolism, especially obesity, how age and dietary patterns reshape the body's ability to build and maintain muscle. His research challenges a lot of assumptions that plant based diets can't support strength, that protein timing doesn't matter, that more protein always equals better results. In today's episode, you'll learn how obesity and aging change your response to protein, whether protein distribution across meals actually matters. Why food combinations, not just food sources, can boost muscle protein synthesis, and the truth about plant based muscle building from a leading scientist who studies it, if you're an athlete or a midlife woman or just someone who wants to age with strength, this episode is for you, because muscle isn't just about esthetics, it's your metabolic body armor and the way you feed it matters more than ever. So if you're eating enough protein, but still not seeing results, the question isn't just how much it's how well your body is using it. Let's break down what it really takes to make protein work for you with Dr Nicholas Burd.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 01:52

Dr Nicholas, Nick Burd, I'm so excited to have you on I have been following your work for years. That's right, I have like, a celebrity sitting here.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 02:02

yeah, that's me, yeah, I'm a celebrity.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 02:04

Corn fed, corn fed, passion for practical nutrition research, which I have read in your bio. And my first question is, what is anabolic resistance?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 02:15

It's just, you know, it's this overarching frame word where you know, anytime you encounter anabolic stimuli. So usually exercise, your nutrition, and your muscle in particular, doesn't respond as well. And usually we're thinking anabolic resistance. In the literature, it's anabolic resistance of muscle protein synthesis. And some get mad when you don't put the muscle protein synthesis in front of it, because they're like, What are you talking about? Glycogen synthesis, synthesis? No, we're talking about muscle. So it's always important that we do, yeah, say muscle

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 02:46

Is obese muscle more resistant to training?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 02:52

More resistant to, like, exercise, training. Yeah, I mean, you know, so you know, when we're thinking about this, it's always, always say, you know, there's, I don't always say it. People say this is not, it's in the science, you know, this concept of anabolic resistance, right? Is it real? Is it not? Right? Some would argue an aging it, isn't real. Your muscle doesn't know whether it's 65, 70, 80 years old. It just knows whether it's been active or not beforehand. You know, with anabolic resistance of obesity, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about this, and, you know, the Office solution, yeah, so some of our original work showed that when you feed a big bolus of food protein, so 36 grams of food protein to obese people, overweight people or young lean, lean adults. We prefer to use the term healthy weight. So healthy weight adults, we saw that the people with excess fat mass or adiposity didn't respond as well, right? So in anabolic resistance, no, it doesn't take extremely clever Individual to Think, you know, what's a maneuver that we could do to try to help make better use of that food protein, right? And one of the easiest solutions is exercise, right? Yes, and so we did a follow up study. You know, as easy, you know, we can go overcome anabolic resistance of obesity, just do some prior exercise. Usually takes care of it with aging as well. So we did that. We ran a study we just, you know, tried to kick start the muscle with exercise, and the participants ate that same bolus, and what we noted was that, darn it, they were still an anabolic resistance, right? So we couldn't kick start the muscle with prior exercise, and then...

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 04:43

Which would normally work.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 04:45

Normally, like it works for aging. So we were the first to try, try in that kind of acute setting, in a beast muscle. Bettina Mittendorfer did some things earlier, before I did.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 04:58

But I love Bettina. She's a little tall. But...

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 05:00

Yeah, yeah. She's, yeah, she's, you know, I have a few science heroes. She's one of them, along with Stu, Luc and, you know, don these are all individuals who inspired my career. But the interesting part,so, when we look at anabolic resistance of muscle protein synthesis, right? So what we can do? So usually, a lot of people just look at mixed muscle so in the laboratory, we can take, you know, muscle biopsy and then homogenize it, or smoosh it up, and then, you know, you got some options at that point, right? So you can either just hydrolyze that mixed muscle fraction and look at global protein synthesis, so that's the collective measurement of all the proteins in that muscle, or we can do a fractionation procedure, and this is where it's really important when we're thinking about anabolic resistance. So we can take that piece of muscle, use differential centrifugation, and what we do is we start to separate the the different proteins in that muscle based on their size. So the big, heavy, myofibrillar proteins, we can we can pull out. We can do that with a slow speed spin. And then so we can look at myofibrillar protein synthesis. Then we do some high speed spins and look at mitochondrial protein synthesis. We can look at collagen protein synthesis, and then we can look at sarcoplasmic protein synthesis. And the question is, why it's important? Is all these fractions within muscle, are they experiencing anabolic resistance, right? And even with aging, usually where you see anabolic resistance is more so on that myofibrillar fraction, and the myofibrillar proteins are, you know, like actin, myosin, the things that are important for forming a cross bridge, right? So we need to take actin and myosin, connect actin, form a cross bridge to generate force. So it's those big force producing units within your skeletal muscle. And the interesting part about the myofibrillar fraction is it makes up most of your skeletal muscle proteins. And so it makes sense that it's really generally responsive to exercise and nutrition, because it's the biggest reservoir we have a dietary amino acids in our in our bodies, right? So during times of catabolic stress, we can pull on it, and that's normally where we see anabolic resistance is in that fraction, and that's normally where we see it with obesity. So we didn't see any issues on the mitochondrial fraction, where we saw the problems we're on the myofibrillar fraction, and where I was leading to was that. So we try to kick start the muscle right in the obese muscle, fed and food protein, just thinking like doing prior exercise, we're overcoming anabolic resistance, right? Kick Start the anabolic signaling molecules in there.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 07:34

So you're measuring mTOR?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 07:36

yeah, I always collaborate, yeah. So

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 07:38

You know, this is for the science nerd. So let me frame up this question, okay? Because we have never, believe it or not, we've never talked about, you know, in the studies, and I think that we take it for granted, it just says muscle protein synthesis, or fractional muscle protein synthesis, or myofibular, sure, muscle or protein synthesis, right? But there are multiple components to that tissue,

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 08:02

Sure, yeah, and we can fractionate it and they're each fraction is going to be a little different in terms of how they're responding to nutrition and exercise stimulus. Okay, so keep in mind that somewhat all the fractions are going to be synthesis to food, because they undergo remodeling, right? But you might see a bigger interaction on certain fractions, with food intake, or protein intake, in particular, than others, or maybe, like for the mitochondrial fraction, sometimes it likes a little insulin with the amino acids to to help help that fraction push. But again, in the anabolic resistance we noted with obesity, with that exercise approach. The interesting part of that was, what we saw was that, you know, so we couldn't kick start the myofibrillar fraction. It appeared those amino acids wanted to stay in that sarcoplasmic fraction, right? So we couldn't, for some reason, they're residing in that sarcoplasmic fraction, which is, like, you know, that's where all the anabolic signaling molecules hang out, hangs out, glycolysis, all that stuff. So we want to get them into that myofibrillar fraction, and it's just not, it's just didn't work, right? And it could be a problem with mTOR, right? We don't know a lot with mTOR, which is, you know, for your listeners, is just classically described as the master regulator, of protein synthesis.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 09:23

And I love that you're a teacher, because teaching, that's really why

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 09:26

people are listening. Yeah, it's mammalian target of rapamycin. And so some of the work from Blake Rasmussen, who's that here? He was here? Yeah, he changed. He was at Galveston. Now. He's is in Houston.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 09:39

He's in San Antonio now.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 09:41

Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. So anyway, he did some of the seminal work showing when you you block him torn humans, you sort of shut off the obligatory stimulation of muscle protein synthesis. So eat rapamycin, then you exercise, right? And then it blunts protein synthesis. Eat rapamycin, you exercise, you blunt the feeding, induced rise and muscle protein synthesis. So it appeared to be real important. But you know, when we add, you know, so a lot of people, when they're studying mTOR, right, we just use a generic western blotting approach. So you're just trying to understand whether a protein is adding is getting a phosphate added onto it, right? So when you add a phosphate to a protein based on that technology, we really don't understand it, but we think that protein is going to be activated, right? And so what probably is more realistic, you know, this is some work from Dr. Dan Moore up in Toronto. He's sort of showing the location of mTOR, where it's at in the muscle cell. Really matters, right? So mTOR is normally sprinkled around the muscle cell, and then upon a stimulation, it can move, translocate to particular parts of the membrane, right? So in the case of, you know, when we're trying to overcome anabolic resistance, we'd want to get mTOR up to the sarcolemma, or the outer membrane of a muscle cell, because why that's where all the nutrients are coming in, right? So now we got so we call that the hub, and that's probably one side of anabolic resistance for obese muscle is that we can't get that mTOR up, up to that up to that membrane.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 11:21

Yeah, Healthy Weight, yeah.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 11:21

And that makes a lot of sense. And there are, I definitely want to touch on the there's a handful of mechanisms as to why, sure. And before we do, I want to frame up what I think is so fascinating about your work. And I think the first time that you actually published on obesity and anabolic resistance, it must have been 10 years ago. Was it I'm old? Oh, yeah, but it was. It was so fascinating, because in clinical practice, what I was seeing was that when someone was obese, I couldn't figure out why. I just wasn't seeing that again, this is anecdotal. I was very early on in my career, I couldn't figure out why. It seemed as if they weren't responding the same way. A What did you call it? Healthy lean or...

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 12:07

Healthy Weight individual. And throughout the years, I started thinking a lot about intramuscular adipose tissue, which I am very curious to hear your thoughts on but really, when we think about anabolic resistance, and why I opened with that is ultimately, in order for people to live well, healthy, strong, they obviously need good muscle, not just from mobility and strength, but really from that metabolic perspective, and if they can't maintain it, or there is some challenge with training or nutrition, the opportunity to live well becomes somewhat diminished, and this is where your work comes in for intervention.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 12:50

That's it. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I mean to the point, I mean, you know, I guess I didn't frame that very well in terms of animal resistance, muscle protein synthesis, or, to your point, rather like when you look at obese muscle, the quantities there, right? But you know, what my work is particularly showing and others as well, is that it's really a quality problem, right? So you know, to keep a high, it's really important to live well. Or, you know, aging strong is always also another thing we're concerned with as well, is that to keep high quality muscle mass, we need to ensure it's turning over right. So with obese muscle, the quantity is there, but the quality is poor, right? And it's likely due to multiple factors, mechanistically as well as that enhancement of all that intramuscular adipose cells, as you alluded to. And, yeah, so we need to improve the quality and what, what interventions work, right? We tried to acutely kick start the muscle. It didn't work. But doesn't mean training won't, right? Because, you know, with everything, um, consistency, right? Consistency is key, right? So I can do, you know, during my dissertation with Stu Phillips, we did all that load manipulation, right? High load versus low load, all that good stuff, volume, yeah, issues as well. But as we always say, you know, really the most important variable is consistency, right? Find something you enjoy, that you enjoy going to the gym, and do it right. And that's the most important, I think, with obese muscle, I think the consistency might be, might be the key, even more so.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 14:34

I mean, that's fascinating. And obesity, what 74% are metabolically unhealthy? Yeah? I mean, that's a lot of people, yeah. And when I think about your work, also your upcoming work, I'm curious as to, again, we probably don't know which comes first is if someone has subcutaneous fat, is that the problem, or is it really the level of lipids within and placement and location of lipids within the skeletal muscle. And before you answer, I have to ask you this, because I would love kind of in your to frame it up in totality what you're thinking. But if an individual is obese, and let's say we define that as body fat percentage over, I don't know, 30%

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 15:20

Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, you know, BMI, but it is better to use percent body fat, yeah, or

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 15:25

or BMI. How long does it take for them to be able to recover that tissue, if ever? Right? So, for example, if someone becomes obese or is obese, then they lose weight. At what point do we see? Is there an intramuscular adipose percentage? At what point do they then revert, if at all, or ever? So if the listener is at home thinking, wow, I've been obese my whole life. I've never thought about that. Or they're a kid, maybe kids don't listen to this, but parents do, if that is someone who is newly put on weight fat tissue, where do we think in terms of the spectrum of what is possible for treatment? No,

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 16:05

I mean, that's a good point. I mean, so this is probably within the last six years, this has been something we've been thinking about in terms of when we're recruiting participants. And it's something I don't have the I don't have a great answer for. But how long have they been obese? Right? Is somebody who's just recently become obese, right, different than somebody who's been obese for a prolonged period of time, right? Even adolescent obesity. You know, some of the this is tiptoeing outside my area of expertise. Just, you know, through interactions with colleagues and you know, you know, it all comes back. You know that whole concept of epigenetic regulation, so your DNA is probably getting tagged, right? So it's remembering. So let's say you're as a child, right? You've you put on excess, excess adipose tissue. Now you're putting different tags on your DNA such that it, it remembers that, right? So once you lose that excess adiposity, you're you still remember it, right? That's a lot of pre clinical work. So the rodent work suggests that concept of epigenetic memory.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 17:16

Or, you know, you're gonna say muscle memory, yeah,

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 17:19

that's like, that's also a phrase I've heard muscle memory as well. So, I mean, they use it from a training standpoint too. So a lot of my colleagues tiptoe around that area. You know, in terms of stuff we've done, we try to think about it. I haven't, you know, in terms of a lot of our work is more, you know, we just make sure, and this is just something we've done, trivial. I don't have any evidence to say, least, you know, we're recruiting obese participants, at least for they've been obese for about a year prior. But that's just a trivial number or a trivial duration. I think it's, it's interesting. I mean, it's something you got to think about. Experimentally, we think about it. Whether there's this existence of, you know that epigen or that muscle memory in terms of remembering, hey, you know what I've been you know, my muscles been surrounded with all this excess fat. You know, when I was a young and now, you know, I got old, found the gym, found better nutrition, I lost it, maybe. But there's no denying that at whatever age, nutrition and exercise works. I'm sorry, right? And I Yes, and there's no, you know, I've in this whole concept of responder versus non responder, you know, like we say: There's no such thing as a non responder to nutrition, no such thing as a non responder to exercise. This is a variable responder. Agree with that assertion, but

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 18:40

is that like an obese.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 18:41

Yeah, I would say that just no such thing. I mean, I'm sorry, nobody's not responding to food. You know what? I mean, they I think it's so easy to use that phrasing, but I do believe there's variable response responders, and then as we use more sophisticated analysis to understand, what are these factors underpinning these variable responses, right? So some of our initial look, never you know, this is me. I'm going to get off track. Okay, well, let's keep you back. Okay? Because I'm just saying, like, yeah, we can get back, you know, to that variable responders, but, but

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 19:13

Also muscle protein synthesis. So the muscle protein synthesis, this anabolic response, I don't know if people understand, muscle protein synthesis is somewhat of a proxy. Would you? Would you define it as a proxy for healthy, for muscle, for and for the capacity for turnover, for that No, I mean, what response? Because it's not

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 19:34

Okay. This is, yeah, this is important, you know, I've, I gave a presentation recently, you know, on this concept, and sometimes, scientifically, I just, you know, when you live and breathe something, you just, you don't, you know, you just sort of a given. And so, you know, the first thing to understand is that muscle protein synthesis. So what we study in the laboratory, it's we're studying directly, right? So your, your comment, is it a proxy for something so, so really, what you're interested in? We're thinking about muscle remodeling, right? Exactly, right? Turnover. Okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 20:15

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Dr. Nicholas Burd: 21:51

So two parts of that equation is protein synthesis and protein breakdown. All right, now when you're when you're thinking about which variable to trace to try to predict muscle remodeling, an obese muscle an aging, um, protein synthesis, is A good variable to understand muscle protein remodeling because it's it's just moving the the most, right? So when we're looking at muscle protein remodeling, we really defined it by net protein balance, right? So when you're in a positive state of remodeling, you're in a positive state of net protein balance. And so when you're trying to manipulate that equation, you want, obviously, to either turn on synthesis or minimize breakdown, right? Or whatever combination you want to do. So generally, in, you know, even though we don't think obese people are healthy, per se, but, and, you know, obese, I was almost going to say healthy, healthy obesity.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 22:56

Do you believe there's such a thing?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 22:57

Well, sometimes it's interesting because, you know, we'll study some of these participants who are, it depends what you're looking at, I guess. Because sometimes we'll see somebody who has, who is, who is obese clinically, but yet their glucose tolerance is just, you know, just rock star. You know what I mean, very normal glucose tolerance.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 23:15

Do you look at intramuscular adipose tissue?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 23:18

We have imaging techniques to do it. I prefer, because I think you alluded to this earlier. It's, it's such a dynamic question, right? So the location, the distribution, the size of that lipid droplet, how, how close to the mitochondrial is that lipid droplet? Is it tethered to that mitochondria? Right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 23:39

So it's very complex, yeah.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 23:42

So it's, you can get some of that stuff from advanced imaging, at least visually. But you know,we like difficult actually.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 23:48

And here's the reason I asked, because we're talking about anabolic resistance in obesity, yeah, and that's really defined by BMI or percentage, and over the years, clinically, I think that while we have these definitions based on large populations.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 24:07

Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 24:07

If someone, let's just say in this, and I don't mean to anger anybody who's listening, let's say a 25% body fat that is not healthy for that individual. And then you see that. So they're, you know, again, they whether it's, yeah, I think that just simply stating like that. And that's why I wonder if an individual with various levels of fat within that tissue, which is very dynamic, like you said, plays a role.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 24:39

Yeah, I mean, this is, this is where we think about these variable responders, and this is where we need to do better analysis and stuff we've been doing playing around with collaborators, you know, using these, you know, these soft clustering techniques. And what you can do is take a big data set and then look at different clusters, right? So I think you're, you know. I guess, help frame this. So when you're thinking about, you know, the responsiveness to food, sometimes we look at leucine, right? And this whole concept of how important Leucine is and triggering protein synthesis. And I don't think I finished that thought. So the reason we chase protein synthesis is because it seems to be the biggest driver on net protein balance, right? But, you know, with burn patients, dialysis patients, it's a little harder to to think about that's when breakdown comes, comes into play, and sometimes in rodent models, breakdown is a bigger driver. But when we're thinking about human muscle tissue, protein synthesis seems to be the main driver on that protein balance and on this whole concept of anabolic resistance. So my point being is the fact that we can't trigger a big response on um myofibrillar protein synthesis is a concern because that means there's poor, you know that, like I said, obese muscle. There's a big bulk of it, but the quality of it's quite poor, and it's probably leading to a lot of lot of issues. And like you said, the amount of lipids and how they're interacting with those myofibrillar proteins and mitochondrial proteins are playing a role. But you know, back to this, you know, your whole concept about trying to find, you know this and is important this, you know, we, we like to, you know, not us per se, but everybody across the US this whole precision or personalized nutrition and personalized exercise, right? I see it at McDonald's, yeah, yeah, no. I mean, some people can, some people can't. Just kidding, yeah, I wish I know. I don't know if I go to McDonald's. I think I've been hitting Culvers up a lot. That's from Wisconsin, but we got one in town. Kids love that place. But anyway, what I was trying to allude to is that, you know, so interesting is, you know, when we're thinking about, is somebody responding or not, you know, somebody turning on protein synthesis? Is it, you know, what's driving these variable responses? Is it? Is it 25% body fat? Is it 30% body fat, or is it the ratio of, you know, lean mass to to fat mass, or, you know, or is it somebody with a little higher quality turnover? Are they going to be a little response responsive to somebody who has a lower quality turnover? And they help frame that even more, what I'm saying is some of our work is showing when we use this cluster analysis, and again, to think about leucine and when we eat food, you know this whole concept of this loosing trigger or threshold.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 26:35

Don may have mentioned that one, yeah.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 27:33

Yeah. He likes that one. But you know, what's interesting is what we see a lot of times, it's with older adults. I haven't I checked it out with obesity is that, you know, the leucine threshold is probably more relevant for an older adult with less lean mass. Okay, so you can have an older adult with highly mass; leucine threshold doesn't matter. What's interesting we've even seen, and why is that? Is it because they're I just think they're healthier. But what's interesting, what I was getting after a younger adult with more lean mass, the leucine threshold seems to be perhaps relevant, which is exact opposite of what I would have thought, right? And again, these are just some initial when you just play around with some of the soft clustering analysis, right? So when we talk about anabolic resistance, or we talk about leucine threshold, it's sort of like man, it depends, right? There's characteristics of certain people, and this is where we need to define what. What is the characteristics that are allowing anabolic resistance in obese muscle to be really strong, or what are the characteristics that are making it be less relevant? The same with the leucine threshold. What are the characteristics where that Leucine is really important? Right? The older adults make sense, right? That usually when you have less lean mass, you probably have more, you know greater fat mass, and you're just less sensitive. But the other you know that that concept of a young person with more lean mass seems to be a little more responsive, or might be better. That's, that's crazy fascinating. Yeah, it's crazy too, yeah. And, you know, that's, that's me just, you know, just riffing a little bit and just seeing some initial, you know, analyzes of some of the stuff we're looking at. And that's, that's where we need to be. But to get there, we got to generalize a little bit, which is a lot of my initial studies where we're seeing anabolic resistances. Hey, when we just bring in, you know, 12 to 14 obese adults, which isn't a lot, but using our sophisticated methods, we see that anabolic resistance in particular in the myofibrillar fraction. The next step is, is that anabolic resistance in all obese people? Or what is the characteristics of that obese muscle that's allowing that to be more or less relevant.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 29:44

Fascinating, if you could answer some of those questions that would be, that would be really ground-breaking.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 29:46

Yeah, let's go to McDonald's and we'll come back.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 29:51

We don't really eat, but it is really fascinating because the outcome you know, in anabolic resistance, yeah, is, you know, if you were to say, okay, like, what's the linchpin of how we can move these people forward? Yeah, they have to eat. 50% of Americans are not exercising. And I'm curious, so you, when you were talking about this study that you did, you gave them 36 grams of protein, and they didn't mount a response, yeah?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 30:20

And that was just because, you know, we didn't have the money to do a dose response in obese muscle, and right? And, you know, if you look at older adults, sometimes they need a little more. And a lot of the models we look at correct, right, you see that an older adult might need a little more food protein to initiate a big rise in myofibrillar protein synthesis relative to the younger counterparts. So, you know, I never did a dose response in obese muscle. But you know, what's interesting when we think about this concept, and you know, to go back to Professor Betina Mittendorfer's first work, and you know, she's, she's definitely a thinker, and you know, this is where I sometimes, you know, I would have a tendency to be like, Oh, that's, you know, or some people do when she's talking about the whole concept of protein over-consumption, right? Protein over consumption, and a lot of some of her studies have shown this actually have a negative impact on insulin resistance or insulin sensitivity. And then so I was like, yeah, that's, that's interesting. I think maybe exercise some sort of counteract, probably some of those negative consequences of protein over consumption. I mean, overeating on any macronutrient and not not moving, not moving is not positive, but,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 31:37

And I'd want to define what is protein over I mean, that's, it's just..

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 31:40

Eating above the RDA is what is somewhat arguably

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 31:41

But that's the minimum.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 31:42

Yeah, that's, that's a minimum, you know. And you know, in Western society, you know, when we're bringing in participants, off, off out of, you know, the Midwest areas where I'm from, Illinois, you know, most of the participants are coming in about 1.1 1.2 grams per kg per day. In fact, you know when you try to, if I bring a participant and try to hold them at the protein RDA, it's not happening. Participants are going to find great news protein Yeah, they, you know, we're, we're protein hungry, or just, we have the accessibility of, it's no problem. Yet, you know where the protein RDA is really important in developing nations where, you know, you can help, you know, prevent some of those protein deficiencies.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 32:25

What do you think some of the mechanisms, if we were to think about, you know, I'm really interested in this anabolic resistance, because very few people have studied it the way that you guys are studying it, and have, what are some of the mechanisms of anabolic resistance, and are they different in obesity versus aging? Can we parse those out?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 32:53

Yeah. I guess that's yeah. I got sidetracked a little bit, yeah. So you know, anabolic resistance probably comes in various shapes and forms for one right? So, you know, you and I are probably inducing some level of anabolic resistance when we, you know, through sedentary behavior, when we sit here for a couple hours, right? But the beauty is, we're gonna get up and move around, right? That's the whole concept of exercise snacks, you know, getting up and every 30 minutes to an hour making sure we're doing some movement to sort of ensure that we're not inducing some transient anabolic resistance, all right. So that's, you know, getting rid of that. But when we think about an older adult or older muscle versus obese muscle, and that was sort of my point. So we fed that big bolus, 36 grams. Why? Because in past, we've shown that that's sort of been able to successfully overcome anabolic resistance with aging, right? And so when we saw it with 36 grams in a in our original study that was conducted by Joe Beals, when he's doing my PhD with him, actually, he's at Wash U now too. He's been there for a while with Sam Klein, but the fact we still showed it, I was like, Wow, that's crazy. They're still resistant to that 36 grams of food protein. But when you sit back and think a little more about it, what do we know about an older adult? You know, an older adult? What do they have? They have muscle anabolic resistance, but they also have digestive anabolic resistance, right? So it makes sense when you can sort of one way to overcome that digestive anabolic resistance is maybe, or have they shown, eat more food protein, right? Overcome that digestive anabolic resistance to get enough substrate to the muscle to help robustly stimulate myofibrillar protein synthesis, right? What we know about an obese muscle or obese person, they don't have a problem, they don't have a digestive anabolic resistance, right? So feeding more and more food protein to a to obese adult makes zero sense. Is because there's no issue there. The issues intrinsic to the muscle, right? We got to fix, yeah, we got to fix the muscle, right? And what are some of the problems? Well, you know, the first factor is probably poor capillary supply right there. They're struggling to get the nutrients there, right? The second one is probably, you know, that fact, we can't get mTOR, it's probably caught up in the in the sarcoplasm. I can't get up to that hub very well. So not only can it get up to that hub, this the plasma membrane, but they don't have capillaries there to support it, right? They have all that, you know, that intramuscular fat interfering right with the signals, right? And collectively, all those factors, you know, which comes first, I think you were sort of alluding to earlier. I don't know. Is it the fat that's initiating all these problems? Maybe probably right. It's probably, it's certainly something to do with that. Intramuscular fat is probably the starting the problem, and then it's probably preventing mTOR from getting the from getting there. That's collective with the prolonged sedentary behavior coupled to the low physical activities impacting the capillaries. That's my point with consistency, right? That comes back to my

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 36:14

Talking about consistency, yeah, with the muscle protein synthesis. You guys are measuring that when you say it didn't mount a response, yeah, what? What is it that you're just very simply Sure? What does that mean?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 36:29

So we use, so when we're looking at myofibrillar protein synthesis or what, doesn't matter what fraction we're studying, we use stable isotope methods. So you know, one way to think about that is, everybody, I'm sure your listeners, are familiar with amino acid, right? So amino acid just a building block of muscle protein, right? So what we do is we buy a special amino acid that's been tagged or made heavy, okay, and then we need to introduce that to the participants so we can trace where it's going right through the body. So in those particular studies, we just inserted a catheter in somebody's arm vein, and then we infused that stable isotope tracer. And then, you know, our experiments are long because your your muscle protein isn't building super fast, right? So, you know, we usually our participants in the laboratory for depending on what our measurements are, but anywhere from, you know, eight to 10 hours in a day, right? And so they're just hanging out with us. I'm doing, you know, I'm they love me because I'm such a good comedian. I'm a master of dad jokes. But the they're like, You want me to put a movie on? No, you just want to hear me. I'm your man. But then, over time, so we're introducing that tracer that's been made heavy so it's, it's being incorporated into the muscle. We'll take in muscle biopsies, and then we're just studying how much of that has been incorporated, how much of the tracer we provided has been incorporated into, you know, in our discussion, the Myer fibrillar protein fraction, and then we need to know the availability, and then the time, we can do a calculation on our spreadsheets that gives us a calculation of myofibrillar protein synthesis. And as I alluded to, that's generally a good indicator of the net protein balance equation. And then the subsequent remodeling response we're getting, and I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 38:23

like that you're pointing out that it's remodeling. It's not necessarily growth.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 38:26

Well, yeah, sorry, yeah, I got really distracted. So there's two types of remodeling, right? We I have to write about this all the time. You know, muscle protein synthesis comes in various shapes and sizes, right? It can be hypertrophic remodeling, or it can be non hypertrophic remodeling. Our tools is not a hypertrophic marker. That's where the confusion arises all the time. I sort of just, yeah, it's not a growth marker. That's a remodeling marker, right? Maybe for you, it's, you know, it's a better predictor of growth that sort of goes back to that variable responder. But for me, as you know, clearly, it's not, but I think it's an important

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 38:59

point. Important point. It's an important point because if someone were to look at the literature out there, the majority, and let's say they're not an expert, and they're going because they want to learn more about it, and they like to spend their free time going on PubMed, and it says muscle protein synthesis, and I think in the social media landscape, that's people equate that with growth and hypertrophy. And really, the majority of muscle protein synthesis, 250 to 300 plus grams is really with that turnover. Yeah, it's a remodeling marker. A remodeling marker. Yeah, maybe five grams, potentially a day, like, I don't know, a day max.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 39:41

Well, the point is, is, like when we eat food, what we do, we turn on remodeling, right? Just sitting around eating food without exercise, you're not going to expand your myofibrillar protein pool, but you are remodeling because it's very important. We got to get rid of those old, damaged proteins and replace them with new ones, right? To keep a healthy you. You know, proteomes.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 40:01

And that's the key, yes, the health and the ability to do that fair as an individual ages, potentially, or if they're obese, which, which brings me to this idea of resistance training. In some of your studies, resistance training didn't necessarily boost muscle protein synthesis with obesity the same way that it does in lean individuals.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 40:24

No, and that's sort of what I said the problem was, was that it was getting caught up in that sarcoplasmic fraction, right, instead of getting built into the myofibrillar fraction. So I thought, hey, we can just exercise an obese muscle and, boom, done.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 40:36

I mean it would make sense.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 40:38

Enjoy lake life and do some fishing. Yeah. I got it done. Solved the problem. Thanks. The whole world can say or thank me.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 40:45

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Dr. Nicholas Burd: 42:07

But, no. So the problem was, yeah, it was an acute study. It got caught up in the sarcoplasmic fraction. We couldn't get it built into the myofibrillar fractions. For some odd reason. It's probably related to those. It's an intrinsic problem. We got to fix some of those. We can do about it, consistency with exercise. Easy.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 42:23

Do you think over time? But that's fascinating. So I guess what you're saying is that in one hand, these are very discrete moments in time. Yeah, and that potentially over time, does that tissue, that response, become more attuned to training.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 42:41

What it does is it increases. I mean, for one thing, this is my point. We can, yeah, this is now we're now, we're getting serious here. Gabrielle, now it's time to talk.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 42:51

I'm ready for it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 42:52

This whole, so this is where, what I think is we can make the muscle more the phrasing sometimes I use is efficient, right? So protein efficiency, we can enhance the protein efficiency of our skeletal muscle tissue, and I think we can do the same by using resistance exercise, in particular in an obese muscle. I think consistency with the resistance exercise will help correct some of these problems. Not saying we don't use endurance exercise to help, obviously, but I think resistance exercise is paramount, right? And one reason, when we think endurance exercise, it's a completely different animal than resistance exercise and in terms of how it's impacting efficiency.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 43:33

What is protein efficiency?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 43:35

Good question, you know, how do you define it? Right? I That's another phrase I always use a number of times. What are you talking about? I'm like, What do you mean? Protein efficiency just makes sense definitionally. I mean, I guess I put a definition on this and some of my grants. But essentially, when I'm thinking about protein efficiency, when we consume the same absolute amount. So if we eat 20 grams of food protein, right? If you want, if you're efficient with your food protein, what's going to happen is you're going to get a large incorporation to the myobrillar fraction with minimal oxidative waste, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 44:18

And so that's a good definition. Yes, wrote that here.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 44:20

Oh, yeah, did I? Yeah, maybe. Okay, yeah, probably. And so what I think we can do with resistance exercise is actually increase your protein efficiency. Because why resistance exercise is fundamentally anabolic, right? It's kind of different than what we see with endurance exercise. So what I mean by that, what happens during the so when we do a bout of resistance exercise, right, one thing that happens is, or actually it's very unique. And actually, Professor Wayne Campbell asked me a good question once, and is a very good question, because when we look at resistance exercise, you actually enhance your. Amino acid sensitivity, right? So, for example, if I'm just sitting here and I consume or slug down a protein shake, for example, that protein shake should have about 10 grams of essential amino acids in it, right? To robustly stimulate myofibrillar protein synthesis. The essentials you need, them all, but the essentials are really, really good at turning on or enhancing my protein synthesis after exercise, we need less, right? Why? Because your muscles now turn into a bigger protein sink, right? So you you only need about eight grams of essential amino acids, right? So a lot of people, what's interesting, a lot of people, post exercise, they like to try to eat more and more food protein. But it's like, well, you're actually enhanced acutely. You enhanced it, right? So you need less in the post exercise state than you need in the resting state. And then, based on that notion, I remember Professor Wayne Campbell asked me, So are you telling me that resistance exercise is the only, I think it was actually in a group that is a part of but is resistance exercise the only which was interesting is the only thing we can do to actually lower, you know, the protein RDA, which was which literally, I'm kind of saying that. But no, no, I'm not saying that. You're right. The protein RDA is a prevented deficiency. I'm just saying we don't need as much during the post, the post exercise state right now, let's say, look at a train muscle. What do we get better at doing right? Train muscle, we get better nitrogen turnover, so we're better at using the amino acids are being broke down and putting them back in to the muscle, right? And then what happens when you over consume protein? Well, the thing that happens is that your gut steals more, right? So you get more splanchnic extraction, because it's so used to having that substrate, it makes sense, right? And then what do you do? You you expand the nitrogen pool, the urea pool, and then you up regulate proteolytic enzymes, right? So you know, and and Professor Dan Moore up in Toronto has beautiful work showing that, if you're chronically eating high protein, what happens, you actually elevate your protein requirements because you've just made your muscle less efficient, right? And so exactly, coming back, we're trying to tie this back to obesity. Betina, you know, has the, you know, the some very nice data showing protein over-consumption, eating too much food, protein bite, might be having a negative impact on obese muscle. Okay, exercise probably correcting it, right? Arguably, maybe we can counteract that. But, you know, obese people, what do they need to be? I know protein calories is not a problem, but just energy management, in particular, consistently use resistance exercise correct some of these mechanisms, we have increased protein efficiency. I think, I think, I think that's an easy start.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 47:50

I mean, it sounds like it should be easy and...

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 47:56

Well, this is why behavior is so, yeah, practitioners, now you need to find out to make exercise fun.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 48:02

It is fun.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 48:06

Because I don't have the time to stay in there and just motivate you know.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 48:08

Very fascinating, and it was about this idea of using, you didn't say microbial protease, but I know that you worked on a study that, What was the name of the was it amplify? Do you remember that study? I think that, oh, the proteolytic enzymes, yeah, oh, yeah, you'd mentioned this idea that efficiency is important. Yeah, efficiency is it seems somewhat up to us as to how our behaviors shape, whether we are not wasting what we are consuming. I will piggyback and say we have to eat something, whether we're eating carbs, proteins, fats, one could choose protein again, maybe to support beyond muscle protein synthesis, there are probably many utilizations or uses for those amino acids, like mucin and, you know, from threonine or dopamine, or any of those other things.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 48:13

You said something....

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 48:13

Dad jokes all day long while people are excerising.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 49:00

Yeah, you're talking about, I mean, yeah. I mean, I'm not eating protein in excess to help promote other

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 49:18

remodeling or beyond the minimum.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 49:19

Oh, yeah, I don't think, I think, like I said, I mean, most people my concern with a weightlifter, for some reason, these are just, they're protein hungry. They're just chasing protein everywhere. And which the protein police? Yeah, yeah, I'm not, well, yeah, I always say I'm not the protein police. But usually, you know, if you'd like to eat protein, go for it, but it's endurance athletes. Is where I usually have to be a little more thoughtful, because they're, it's completely different animal versus versus weightlifting. But, you know, so whatever weight lifter wants to eat a lot of food, protein, go for it. I'm not going to tell them not to, but they're, my point is, weightlifting, you can enhance protein efficiency, okay, which

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 49:55

is incredible for someone who doesn't want to ingest a lot of calories or doesn't want to eat a lot of.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 50:00

No. And, you know, back to your point, I think we presented some of this stuff at conferences too. So using proteases, or I had the paper here, I read it. Yeah, we haven't. We followed up some of that work that I think's more interesting. So we did that same thing and older adults. And instead, we fed a mixed meal, okay? And then, you know, one of the objectives with that study is obviously, with older adults, I just sort of said they have digestive anabolic resistance, right? One way they're trying to overcome that is this here, here, grandma and grandpa eat a bunch of food,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 50:33

right? More, which doesn't make sense. I didn't pause you on the digestive anabolic resistance. Can we just take a second there? Sure, when I think about digestive anabolic resistance, if we define anabolic resistance as this decrease, can we say inefficiency for our muscle to respond the way it should? You

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 50:53

mean for muscle anabolic resistance is that? Yes, yeah. I mean, you're just not. You're not eliciting a robust myofibrillar protein, synthetic response, in response to normal animal stimuli, digestive, yeah, it's just where, yeah. I mean, it's when. Yeah, the mechanism under underpinning it or are interesting, a lot of these are being done, and not in vivo models, ex vitro models. But for example, Luc Van Loon has the cool tools, and I, I have the poor man approaches. He uses the dairy milk. I use intrinsically labeled eggs instead of intrinsically labeled milk proteins. But you know, Luc's studies are Luc Van Loon, over in the Netherlands, his studies are cool because what he shows is that an older adult has when you eat, in this case, you know, a lot of his dairy manipulations that they have a reduce, digestion, protein digestion, absorption, kinetics.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 51:54

We see that in practice, yeah, obviously don't do protein,

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 51:57

no, no. But we see Yeah, so he has a, I mean, the best tools. I love that stuff that he does. That's why I went over there and spent some time to learn the techniques. And super expensive. But I admire Luc a lot, like I said, he's one of my science heroes, but he has some he shows, he shows that. And so back to your question, I think is, you know, older adults have satiety issues. So one of the things we were meaning they are hungry less, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, like I said, just trying to get them to eat more and more food. Why it might help, you know, get some more of that substrate into circulation to help give a big push on muscle protein synthesis. It might not be in practice that that reasonable. So we were charged with trying to enhance postprandial nutrient concentrations by using enzyme blends. So not only proteases, but trying to get more glucose, fat, everything in circulation. So can we use an enzyme blend to try to help facilitate nutrient release? And we were somewhat successful. I think.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 53:11

Would you take a microbial protease?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 53:15

Would I personally?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 53:17

If you were older, more mature?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 53:19

Maybe, I don't know, five and up, I'm maybe, I mean, I'm not against it. I just, I'm pretty lazy. I'm not chasing, I'm not chasing lots of anything. I'm literally sitting around. No, I'm lazy in terms of my nutrition. Like I said, I don't I like Luc's phrasing, I don't take my work home with me, but what I recommend it to my grandparents? Yeah, sure, yeah, would I? Would I do it? Yeah, I don't know. I don't think much about when you have kids and everything. It's life's, you know, I'm, trust me, I'm getting enough food protein.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 53:55

What did you guys find? Did it actually? So it's not a published study.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 54:01

It's only been in conference form, abstracts and whatnot.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 54:05

Can you talk about some of it?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 54:06

Yeah so, I mean, it's been at conferences. I can't remember which one

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 54:11

I'll hear. Let me shoot it over to you. Ready? Yeah. Acute, my microbial protease supplementation increases net postprandial plasma amino acid concentrations after pea protein ingestion. Yeah,

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 54:24

that was the pea protein study which, which has been published. Yep, right. This was another study that was with using an actual what I was more interested in was a mixed meal. And this is a study I was telling you about.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 54:34

You are very interested in food matrix. And there's a, again, when we look at the landscape of protein, it's we're not giving tagged, I mean, people aren't eating, yeah, tagged amino acids or

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 54:47

No, well, you don't need to. It's just a tool that we have to understand how metabolically, how they're responding to nutrition exercise. Now, that study was done in younger, younger folks, the one you're referencing with the pea protein, the. Study I was really keen on was the one that's only been published in abstract form. So in that study, they are only objective was trying to enhance the postprandial release of dietary amino acids to pea protein, which is a plant based protein, right? Because, yeah, it's crazy when you a lot of these vegan protein sources, or even Luc has some of these studies, you just don't see a very big push on the postprandial amino acid profiles.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 55:26

Why do you think that is, could you say that again?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 55:29

Um, yeah. Well, with isolated pea protein, it's no. I mean, it's that's different eating that people are, yeah, and that's not a problem there. But I'm saying, when you're eating of an actual meal, right? So a vegan meal that's been designed so, you know, so plant based foods, not saying a supplements, not a food, but, yeah, that's an isolated pea protein. Those are effective. But what's interesting,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 55:52

even with food combinations, because it actually came out of Luc's lab. He looked, I think, at a mixed meal, 40 grams of plant based protein food, like he did a vegan meal and then he did a beef meal, I think, yeah, go and he, no, no, there was just

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 56:08

that was my point in that response, you didn't see much action. You didn't see but then he, but then he followed it up, muscle protein. Remember the follow up study? I don't remember the follow up. So the follow up, yeah, the follow up study they used. So this was in response to, this was an older adults, they used vegan versus animal based meals, so using a different tool, so heavy water, deuterium,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 56:31

yes, how, how much do the but the methods also can certainly seem to, I don't want to say again, this is your area of expertise. It seems as if that you have to choose a method that is well tested and can be replicated, and the right to get that,

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 56:48

Yeah, I mean, that's true with any I mean, what's your you design? The the research question is going to dictate your method, right? You don't, you know, you don't take one method. And because, you know, the beauty is, I trained with the best, and so, you know that's for sure, I can, I can use whatever method makes sense for the research question. So those acute studies that you just described to me, that was substrate-specific work. Okay, so that was using the what I was describing earlier, intravenously. So you buy and I think in that particular study is likely labeled phenylalanine, right in particular, but it was 13 c6, phenylalanine, so that benzine ring on the phenylalanine molecule is heavily labeled, right? So that's a nice, heavy tracer. We like it's stable, stable isotope. People like myself and Don and Luc and all these guys, we like a heavy tracer. It just experimentally, it's nice. It's expensive, but it's nice. All right, okay, okay. So when you're doing those single meal responses, the study you just described to me, that's he used, he used that, right? And so in that setting, in response to a single meal, everything you just said is true. All right. Now the next question Luc had, and I, you know, I had the same question in younger adults, what happens when you remove or take a participant and have them eat their normal dietary pattern, right? So something you're interested in, I think, in his case, one week, and my case was a week for sure, maybe a little longer. So in Luc's study, he did that same study, but instead of looking at a one meal, he looked at multiple meals, right? So when they consumed, I think the protein was at 1.2 grams per kg per day. So that's high, yeah, it's high, yeah. And right? You got to be clever. Well, you got to have dietitians just, you know, designing those vegan meals, right? Do you know the carb load in that? Was it Whole Foods? I mean, I got a good it was Whole Foods. But I, you know, I don't, I can't remember the details, but my point is, in that study, they used deuterium, all right, so literally, what the participants are doing, it's a different tool, because, let's say, you know, you can't have a participant hang out in your laboratory for a week. I mean, you could, but that would be crazy.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 58:57

If you had a metabolic ward...

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 58:58

Yeah, yeah. And the mystery does, but anyway, just it's a lot of stress on a participant. Just infuse them for a week. It's it's not the right tool, but heavy water. Guess what you can do? Participant can come in. You can give them the heavy water, have them take some home with them, and then they can go about their day. You can feed them the food. And then, you know, they can come back and you know, you can take a biopsy at the beginning of the week, and take one at the end of the week, right? And then you can look at protein synthesis in a more free living situation. The problem with the free living situation is that humans are going to be humans, right? It's going to be noisy, right? In terms of so the only thing we can do when we're using heavy water and having the participants leave our laboratory is you can't control for everything, but we can try to monitor it, right? So you look at accelerometers, you try to do as many dietary recalls as you can. These kind of things, constant reminders with phones. But what heavy water does is, participant drinks, literally, water that's been made heavy, right? The hydrogens are heavy. They drink it, and guess what? It's. Clever, because now, instead of infusing the tracer, the human, the participant, is making the tracer for you, so those hydrogens are exchanging with amino acids.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:00:09

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Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:01:41

Lion, right. Making them heavy. In particular, they like to use alanine, because it's real good at accepting hydrogens. And now the participant can go about their day, and then we can take those biopsies and look at one week protein synthesis instead of the single meal response,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:01:56

right? Soundly. And how old were these participants? These are older adults, yeah, and you define that as?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:02:03

I didn't find it as anything. He defined it as, I think they were 70 years old. Yeah, like I said, no difference between and so in an older adult eating a vegan versus versus a animal based dietary pattern. So not just one meal, but multiple meals. He showed no difference, right? And then I have the same data in young adults, right, undergoing resistance exercise. So I think when we're looking at vegan meals per se, there's multiple problems here. You got to look at it when you in the context of a dietary pattern. But in, you know, in the study of my young adults and his studying older adults, those were designed by dietitians, right? And we were and so each meal they were eating were the vegan meals were designed to be protein dense.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:02:56

What about the micronutrients? Because there's a lot of micronutrient deficiencies. And yeah, about women,

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:03:01

Yeah, no, everything you're saying is fair, yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:03:04

How do we account for that? If people choose and again, it's a luxury to be able to not have, um, animal based foods.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:03:11

Yeah, no. I mean, even our dietary patterns, right? They're clever, because if you look at the healthy eating patterns within our USDA, the dietary guidelines recognize that they don't have a vegan dietary pattern. What do they have? They have a vegetarian, healthy eating pattern, yeah? And what do they do? Eat an egg and eat some dairy, right? So they make sure that's one way to correct for it. I don't have, I mean, I'm not a vegan, you know, like I said, I'm not the protein police. If somebody wants to eat vegan, you know? I think, yeah, there are more issues in older adults, but just in the context of muscle remodeling. Like I said, his acute study conflicted with his chronic study, all right? So there was some differential responses there, right? It could be a methods problem. I have 100% faith in the single meals. I love using the substrate-specific stuff versus the deuterium oxide work, the pros and cons, and like I said, but I, if I had to, when I designed my experiments, I try to use the substrate-specific stuff. Not to say that we don't use a D2 O method. It's just different, different questions.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:04:25

What are you really excited about doing? I mean, I have a paper here, or this is a it's not a paper. It's um, it's a proposal.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:04:35

Yeah, oh, yeah. Oh, something I sent over, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:04:39

You sent it over, yeah. So we got, we got, and it's fascinating, and I'm just curious. I don't want to say anything about it. I'm, I would love to hear from you, is there something that you are really excited about?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:04:51

Uh, you know, I get excited about. I love science. Like, I'm, uh, if you look at my career, you probably notice, like. Yeah, I'm all over the place in terms, you know, I'll study dialysis patients. I'll study, we just got a nice grant through the ADA to study some protein requirements for type two diabetics, this obesity related stuff I'm really interested in. I'm interested in the food matrix stuff, you know, I would say, for not having fun. What's the point? You're right, I get excited when I see my students get excited. I love it all. I mean, you told me, I just like the pursuit of a research question, and I do have a tendency to get bored easily. So I like my you know, each student has a little different concept, and each one of them something excited about them all. Like I said, the biggest enjoyment I have is seeing the excitement of of them, right? So the fact whenever, whatever research study, we study, it just to see the students, how pumped out, pumped up they are about it. I like, I mean, I'm a big science nerd. I like mythological questions where I'm doing some stuff with Dan Moore that more methodological, just trying to understand the tool, that kind of stuff excites me. But, you know, the clinical work is interesting, the performance nutrition work is is is interesting. I'm trying to understand some of this endurance exercise, protein requirements, stuff. I don't think we got a good handle on on those aspects. Certainly the obesity related questions you were asking are really important. How can we overcome this obesity, anabolic resistance? I think consistency with resistance exercise is going to be key.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:06:28

Do you think they need a different diet? So for example, you're going to be studying type two diabetes, diabetics with protein. You think the diet or the training recommendations need to be different?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:06:39

I don't know. I mean, again, I mean, we don't have it. I don't have enough data. This is where, like I said, we got to do the studies, and then we got to use more sophisticated analysis to understand it, right? Because there's going to be inherently variable responders. That's just, you know, we're not easy people to understand humans. I mean, you throw over overlay a metabolic disease, it's, it's even more complicated, yeah, and so this is where we got to do these studies. I always say, you know, I'm not the only advocate, you know, we need more, you know. And I'm fortunate enough that we do work together. And instead of some scientists, you know what, they we're all trying to do the same thing, but I hate when we're all trying. We need to have more interdisciplinary, not only interdisciplinary, but just across the field, collaborations, so we can combine our data sets. And I think, you know, most of us are open to it. Some are not, but trying to understand that it depends, right? Like, what you're asking me? I think it depends. I don't know. We need bigger data sets to understand it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:07:45

I have a question for you about and I don't know if you have an answer for this. And this might sound silly, but you know, my husband runs marathons in his spare time. Yeah, he has done Boston, New York. I mean, he didn't train for New York and decided to run it. But, you know, some people make bad decisions. Do you think, and I've seen this within my own body, do you think that glycogen, repletion changes as we age? Yeah, you might not know this answer.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:08:15

Oh, man, um Yeah, the recovery process is what you're thinking about. Oh man.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:08:20

Oh man, just the ability to keep, you know, when you were young, remember University of Illinois, yeah, do you know that there's not much to do there? No, it's just exactly, lots of cornfields. And where did you go? Train? Where do you train when you're down there? Or did, what do you mean? Train the rec center there?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:08:35

Oh, no, we have a no. It's, it's nice. We have a pretty nice research.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:08:41

In order to be able to train and get good recovery. I did. I was much younger, but my muscles were able to stay a lot fuller, a lot longer.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:08:52

Yeah, I know. I mean, I don't think that's my point. When we're studying anabolic resistance, I've only studied muscle. I'm trying to think mechanistically related to the...

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:09:02

Does it make any sense?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:09:03

I mean, I think a lot of times the older adults, like I said, when you look at the physiology, no, I'm older. No, no, I'm not even saying that. I mean, I'm like, I said I was thinking

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:09:12

Like 10 years older than me..

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:09:14

Older adults.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:09:15

I'm just kidding.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:09:15

I was thinking about, you know, when you look at the physiology, you can't, you can't find it. But the antidotes, you know what I mean? Like when we study the muscle, you know, like the Todd and Scott Trappe at the human forms lab at Ball State University, they've got their hands on some really, really old muscle, and they do show the molecular signature seems to change a little bit, but that's only what the oldest of old, right? And you know, the younger folks, I don't know what you know you were talking about. I think your husband, he's he's certainly not in that age range at all. You know, we would see what's becoming more compromised is more like collagen, so the force transfer proteins becomes more compromised. I would say that. But I mean, that's an interesting question. I mean, I. I don't know. Yeah, I haven't seen any data.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:10:05

From a performance standpoint, it doesn't, it doesn't seem...

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:10:06

But I'm saying, but anecdotally, my point is, is like what you I've talked to strength and conditioning professionals, when you look at the physiology, you don't, you don't notice it like you can't find it. Like what you're telling me, you

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:10:16

can't find it. I see it and I hear it.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:10:17

I believe you, but I think we underestimate the integrity of her connective tissues. And, you know, in the ability to, because they don't like to remodel, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:10:29

Very so is it? Is it half of and actually, who is that? Do you, Julia?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:10:36

Keith Barr does a lot if this work, yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:10:38

And he was saying that they don't.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:10:39

UC Davis, yeah. So, I mean, when you, you know muscle, college, bone collagen, it's, it's, it's interesting, it's just like the core of it, right? Doesn't seem to remodel the the outside of it seems to remodel. But like the major force of and I think when you encounter so many insults on that particular tissue, you just, I think it does compromise performance, right? So, I mean, you could have a beautiful myofibrillar protein pool, but if you can't get that force out of the muscle, it's a problem, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:11:03

That is fascinating. We always talk about muscle protein synthesis, probably, or myofibrillar, yeah, protein sentences, because it's fast, yeah, and collagen.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:11:15

Yeah, you just that's so that's my point. We are a system. So I think the issue is that we don't, you know, as you just that tissue just becomes insulted through the years, right? You get all those catabolic insults on it rather, you know, through injury, right? It doesn't like the repair itself. And then, like I said, you just, it's, you just can't function. But, yeah, that's, that's a great question. I mean, I, admittedly, I, I don't study glycogen on a high level. I'll leave that to some of my colleagues, but it's but it isn't interesting point.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:11:46

You do teach on performance. Is there anything that, again, you're not really on social media at all. From feedback from your students. Do you find that there's something that is vastly different from academic perspective versus what someone thinks, whether it's the amount of protein endurance athlete needs or, yeah, anything like that, that would be helpful for the audience.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:12:13

Yeah, all I know is, every time I leave class, for some reason, my students always stand up and just give me a applause. I'm like, not not again. Guys do this again. Um, ah, you know what? You know the dogma, or the, you know the what's, I think Stu Phillips sometimes says the bro science, what's your question is, what's different? Academic, yeah, everything's meaning.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:12:35

What do you find?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:12:38

Well, the big thing we got to counter is, you know, the biggest thing I have to talk about is, you know, what they're really surprised about is the protein requirements between a weightlifter versus an endurance athlete, right? This whole concept of, you know, optimal versus maximal, these kind of concepts, right? And like I said, there's no problem with eating protein in excess. If that's what you want to do, do it. There's for a healthy kidney, it can handle it, right? But my point is, you're creating it's a that's a maximal way to eat, right? If you want to eat maximally, go for it. I don't care. It really impacts me very little, right? If you want to eat optimally....here's some things to think about, right? Because a maximum response is how I view it is, just shovel in as much food protein as you want make. You know, just eliminate anything about requirement, right? Because you just overshot it. And let let your body eliminate the waste, right? So just get high oxidative rates, right? That's fine. You can do that. That's that's great. But guess what? Like I said, your gut now is going to take more of it. You're going to have higher splanchnic extraction. You're going to have an enhancement in your proteolytic enzymes. It's not a problem, per se. But you know, when you go to eat your next meal, let's say not most of us, though, has zero issue of finding food protein in the US. But let's say you've been eating maximally. So you know, 30, 40, grams of food protein per meal. Now you've only encountered 15, right? It's going to be different metabolically than somebody who's been eating 15 to 20 grams of food protein as part of their normal pattern and eating more optimally. Because, you know, I see it all the time, 1.6 grams per kg per day, right? That's, that's the recommendation for weight lifters. I see online all the time, maybe upwards of 2.2 grams of protein per kg per day. But have you ever looked at that confidence interval, that 95% confidence interval? Why not recommend? Why you? Why you going that way? Why Why not go this way as opposed to 1.2 Yeah, or why not eat at the lower end of that confidence interval? Why? Why? I don't know why. Why? Why is the translation by default, eat that way, because you could equally eat this way. That's what that data is telling me. They just looked at the break. You. Point and it came at 1.6 right? So, you know, though, the reason I know why they're doing it because it's easy translation, right? Because, you know they're just adding in eat 1.6 to 2.2 that's an excess, but it's how much easier

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:15:18

What happens. If so, if you give, if you tell someone, let's say we tell someone the opposite? We say, Okay, eat at that low end. If you know, I was looking at the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) using that, and it said 45% of individuals were below the with the um...

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:15:40

The problem with the healthy...Yeah, that's a diet quality scoring system is what you're looking at. The problem with that, it's clamped. You know, how easy if you're eating one point, like I've had participants eat one, you know, 1.0 grams per kg per day. HEI are all the same. But I guess my question is, you'd have to unclamp that scoring system to really understand it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:16:03

But regardless of that, then what if we were to think, okay, how do we design a diet that would be, quote, more optimal? I mean, if 98% of people aren't eating enough fruits and vegetables, and the majority of their diet right now is mostly refined foods, and let's say we reduce protein energy sources.. What do you think they are going to eat?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:16:15

You do food swaps. I mean, you're I mean, why? Why? When we do, when we do a recommendation, it's always eat more food protein instead of trying to manage the plate, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:16:26

It's difficult. I mean, yeah, difficult with patients, for sure.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:16:29

Yeah, it is. So give better management of the plate. I mean, I would argue or do, if that's working, do that. I mean, eat two, 2.2 you know, fill your whole, you know, go the buffet and just fill it up. I really, like I said, I that's just a maximal way to way to eat, right? It really is. You know, and again, from a practitioner standpoint, sometimes it's easier just to make it simple, right? Aim, high, easy translation, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:17:01

But do you worry about, so if the average American eats 300 grams of carbs a day, do you worry about where? You know, I think that the majority of the food we're over consuming is processed.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:17:11

Yeah, of course,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:17:12

Ultra processed.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:17:13

That's more education, you know what I mean. But you think educating people to eat more food proteins the right education?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:17:19

I think we have a lot of work to do.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:17:21

Yeah, I don't think that's eating protein and excess. I don't think is, is the education standpoint, understand, understanding that you know different, you know different foods are, you know, in terms of the protein quality, how they're interacting, it's, it's all education. I mean, just pretending like, you know, people can't learn is crazy. Oh, the reason I do that just for ease of translation, well, that's fine, but why don't I educate them? Then? That's our state. That's our point as a as a but just running around saying you need this much food protein in excess, I'm not saying it's going to hurt them, but that's that's just a crazy recommendation. I just told you, with a weight lifter, you're just, you're just making a system completely inefficient. If you want to make that recommendation, perhaps an endurance athlete.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:18:09

Yeah, right. If I think about muscle health, yeah, the biggest driver would is likely training right, some kind of stimulus, yes, is definitely yeah, whether it's resistance or endurance. With endurance, how should they structure their nutrition?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:18:26

Yeah, I mean, you know, I always the biggest variable, you know, just, just to put this in it. You know, everybody...I come on nutrition podcasts. Sometimes they, you know, they want nutrition. You know, the biggest thing I can say is be consistent with your exercise, right? Find something you do, find something that makes you smile, right? And that's the first thing. I think that's the most important thing we can do as practitioners, is try to identify activities we you know, something we can make somebody be consistent with right? Nutrition is important, don't get me wrong, but that that's a really big piece. Now, you know, a lot of times, you know we're talking to, you know, when I'm talking to athletes and whatnot, that's not, that's not the problem, because they're rather being coached to or as part of their training program, they have to be pretty active. So when we're thinking about an endurance athlete, right? A little different scenario than a weightlifter. They're not fundamentally anabolic. They're really catabolic, right? So, you know what happens when an endurance athlete goes for a run, right? They're running, you know, for what have you, whatever say, 60 minutes, right? Pretty intense. 70% vo two, peak, what have you you know, a lot of times we think protein as an oxidative fuel is non existent, right? It's why we use all these non-protein or cues and everything.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:19:38

So you saw upstairs in my drawer?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:19:47

But protein is, that's a pretty overarching word, right? And even Don's big on this, right? I think I've even heard him say, one who. Yeah, Don has this funny, cool saying that he's like, you know, protein. You know, same protein requirements, like saying a vitamin requirement, right? You eat one. You have them all. Right? It's the same with, you know, if I eat vitamin D, I'm good, but it's, it's not real, right? Same with protein, right? You really got to zoom in and look at different amino acids. And so, you know, some of the interesting ones with endurance exercise, and from any amino acids and metabolism standpoint, right? You got, you got alanine, glutamine, leucine. So if we just focus on that, right. So when an endurance athlete is running right, they might not getting a lot of protein oxidation, but they're getting leucine oxidation right. We're pulling those carbon skeletons out to make acetylcholine, to run them through the Krebs cycle.

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Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:21:55

Right? And then what they do? They stop the extra or they stop exercising, right? So they have all this oxidative amino acid waste that's induced by exercise. Now they need to eat food protein in the post exercise state, right? So they need to, not only that food protein has to do two jobs. It got to replace that leucine oxidative loss, okay, and you also need to provide enough substrate to to support that remodeling response. So our work has shown that if we take, you know, if we take an endurance athlete, have them run for an hour, look at leucine net balance, right? Which oxidation is going to play a factor in that so guess what happens endurance athlete runs, they get into a negative leucine balance, right? So catabolic, we feed them food. We couldn't recover that leucine net balance because that food is fighting two battles. It's has to replace that leucine oxidative loss, and, like I said, provide enough substrate. So now we're trying to think about what strategies can we use for an endurance athlete, because they also got to be concerned about carbohydrate, right? So what strategies can we do to help this endurance athlete recover they're losing that balance, right? So that's some stuff we're working on now. That's some of that stuff's exciting, I guess you're asking me about, yeah, the exciting stuff. How can we manipulate protein timing. How can we manipulate protein source to help recover that a weight lifter is? It's kind of easy, right? A weight lifter can do. They can just work out the point. You know, they should work out, you know, make sure they're getting a lot of type two fiber activation, bulk fiber recruitment. Make sure all your muscles sensitive to substrate, amino acid, substrate, eat something, you know, I always say after weightlifting, you know, what's the best kind of protein to eat? Well, the kind you put in your mouth, right? Whatever you want to put in your mouth, it's going to work. And endurance athletes a little more, it's a little more interesting. In terms of, from a from a meal manipulation standpoint, in my opinion.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:23:51

Do we see differences in muscle protein synthesis because, do they separate the type fibers out, or is it?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:24:11

Luc Van Loon has done some of that - it's a lot of work. I remember I was like, when I was a postdoc, I went over there and I was gun-ho, right? I was like, Luc, I want to do some fiber type specific work. And was just like, No, you don't. You were just was like, No, you don't. You don't want to do that. No, we don't. I mean, I, you know, I'm not the individual synthesis rates and stuff. I think scientifically and for basic sciences, that's great. But I like our because it depends what your it depends on the research question, that's how deep you need to go. Now, is there a particular impairment? You know? I mean that it's just but how does that impact a recommendation that you know is this really depends on what you're trying to accomplish, what tools you're going to use. So I did want to learn it. And in my defense, I was like, Yeah, I want to do some individual synthesizer aids and fiber type specific stuff. That lasted very short. No, you totally wouldn't let me. He's like, No.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:31:32

Do you think that the RDA is a worthy number?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:31:37

No. I mean, I, you know, I like, like I said, Wayne Professor, Wayne Campbell's approach. He his argument is that, and I agree with him 100% like I said, he's, he's also one of the guys I admire in the field. We got to stop beating up on the protein RDA, right? Why? It's sort of, you know, it does what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to prevent a deficiency. It's very good at doing that. You know, we put a lot of pressure on it, in my opinion, like I always view the protein RDA as a starting point right, when they developed it, there was not a lot of information on it. It does what it's supposed to do. It does prevent, it does prevent a protein deficiency, but it wasn't supposed to, in my opinion, ever account for, what about a weightlifter? What about, you know, well, it doesn't, it doesn't supposed to account for older adults or perhaps clinically compromised people. What's it made for? RDA, healthy adults, right? So a healthy adult, what's it going to do? Going to do? Going to prevent a protein deficiency? It's was never made to capsule everything. An older adult, an obese adult, anybody who's weightlifting, anybody who's doing an endurance exercise, right? So I think it does a good job what I was supposed to do. My other issue is that instead of beating up on the RDA experimentally or verbally, I guess we need to test it experimentally, right? Instead, we always, and especially in the exercise physiology field, we always like to test everything in excess, right? And I, you know, I think you know, one of the common numbers is that 1.6 grams per kg per day. And one of the things I always like to say, or they like to test this way, right? They want to keep going in excess. But I'm like, why not test the other the other end? And I think that's important. Who has really tested the protein RDA, from a, you know, from a healthy weightlifting perspective. But who's tested it well?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:33:42

Well, Don did, but he went to 1.6 so don, for years, did some of those first studies. And, you know, I think they're really well done. And he looked at the RDA point eight grams, then he looked at doubling the RDA, which, again, is what you said, a bit higher 1.6 grams. And all of the and they were isocaloric.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:34:01

Yeah, I remember, yeah, that's some old work. I know what you're saying. I mean, it's just yeah, my, I guess my only point is, is that the protein RDA is a starting point. My other thing is, it's hard to find somebody who's eating the protein RDA in my hands are always eating 1.1 to 1.2 my biggest objective is using weightlifting to enhance that protein efficiency. My other argument is that, you know, perhaps if you're doing other modes of exercise, that number might vary a little bit. For example, an endurance athlete, I think they need more or less. I think they need more of food protein than a weight lifter, in terms of an end there, somebody's habitually doing endurance exercise, but we also got to account for what's one aspect of of an endurance athlete? They usually have high caloric intakes, right? So it's not that number they need to be concerned about. Again, I think it's the timing after that initial so if you just got back from a big run, you. You know, I always hear this, this concept of anabolic window, the prolonged nature of it. A weightlifter doesn't need to really worry about some particular anabolic window, but an endurance athlete is probably a little more important for them, not only from a carbohydrate standpoint. We know that's important, but I would argue from a protein intake standpoint too, to help them recover.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:35:10

It's fascinating because we are definitely not hearing about that online. I think that you're hearing that the anabolic window no longer matters unless potentially you're doing maybe exhaustive exercise, or you are lower on the total protein intake.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:35:36

But it never, I mean, it was interesting concept. It never mattered. I mean, the work we've done with Stu in terms of that anabolic window, we've showed it for years, that it's been prolonged. I've never really understood where that concept even derived from. I think it was just, I don't know. I mean, if you wanted to eat something after your weightlifting belt, go for it again. But are there

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:35:56

any other groups so endurance? How long do you think that anabolic window is?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:35:59

No, you gonna make me put a number on it? No, I don't know. I mean, what's a glycogen resynthesis? I mean, it's, you know, it is short. I mean, usually you want to eat within the, you know, the one to two hour window, right? That's what I would have guessed in terms of this leucine balance and it, I don't, I don't know, but I would argue that we need to be able to recover those oxidative losses. So the other concern is make sure that in that post exercise meal, you know, this is probably, well, you know, I advocate a lot for, you know, food first approaches, but food first doesn't mean food only. And sometimes people, you know, that's, it's crazy. You're right. My only point we're using a food first approach is that everybody likes to go to supplements, right? That's where they want to go to that way. But it's like, well, first, you know, think about this. But for an endurance athlete, you know, it's not like I said for them. I think we do. They do need to use something that's rapidly. We need to get those amino acids in circulation quick. Isolated food proteins are going to be the best at it, right? And so, you know, obviously, when you co ingest carbohydrate with even isolated food source, you're going to reduce that acute amplitude of change. So you're going to in terms of the leucine profile and amino acid profile. So I always, I think, you know, we need to test this experimentally. I think having a rapid source of amino acids, carbohydrate blend immediately after that endurance exercise bout will help, and then return to that food, if you can, depending on your training, you know, mode of training, then that's where you can return back to that food, food first approach. But I think that timing of that initial meal is real important for them, right the overall amount they're probably fine on that's my point, because endurance athletes eat plenty of food protein on a daily basis. But where I think they might not be understanding is that that post exercise window for them is probably important to help them recover losing that balance and support.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:38:03

How big do you think that meal has to be? Is it just based on their overall calories? Or Yeah? I mean, 20g of?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:38:11

I mean, we haven't done yeah. I mean, what we need to understand now, we're do some manipulation of sources to see if you know, to see if you know. Again, I usually you know What's always interesting. Whey always got supported as being the best food protein. But when you look, when you look at some of Yves Boirie's work, he's shown that casein right for a weightlifter, most likely is probably not that he studied weightlifting, but arguably, is probably really, you know, do the prolonged nature of some slowly releasing food protein whole foods will do the same. It's probably better to support protein balance throughout a prolonged recovery period, right? But for some reason, the weight lifters really like whey. But really they concentrate, yeah, or Yeah, something that's more prolonged release would probably be better. But for a weight or for an endurance athlete, I think the way or something really fast is going to be really important for them. So physical structure, we can manipulate the food matrix by, uh, you know, Luc has done brilliant work in that area, cooking food, right, mincing up the food, right? Where I've been more interested in is trying to take advantage of the nutrient, nutrient interactions within food to potentiate the use of the dietary amino acids, right, trying to optimize a food, right? So trying to prevent, I think I talked about earlier that, you know, you just eat isolated food protein. You can use whey as an example, right? It's not that interesting because it's just amino acids, right? So what's it do? It goes boom in terms of its post prandial amino acid spike, right? That big spike, you're going to get a lot of amino acids in quite quickly, but you're also going to get a big signal for oxidation, right? Food is kind of cool is because it's it's more prolonged, right? So you're not getting that big leucine oxidative spike in the beginning of the postprandial period within that first two hours. But some of our work has also shown that we can potentiate the use of of the amino acids within a meal. And we showed this by eating, you know, whole eggs versus egg whites, right? So eating whole eggs potentiated the anabolic response more so than eating an isogenic, nitrogenous amount of egg white, right? Which was interesting I did. I thought that was, yeah, well, I remember not to throw Luc Van Loon under the bus. He was like, because this was one of when I got to Illinois, you know, we were doing some carbohydrate co ingestion stuff with him. He's like, you already know, it's not going to make a difference, right? Or we did some fat co ingestion. But the cool stuff with that was what we're doing, we were taking isolated fat and isolated casein, because one of my big missions over with Luc was trying to make casein more anabolic, right? So we were adding, right? We were trying to do different co ingestion strategies. And one of the strategies was, hey, what happens when we add lipids to casein? Can we potentiate the anabolic response? And we couldn't, right? So it was interesting. When we ate a whole egg, we actually were able to potentiate it.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:42:00

Do you think it's because it's because it's not based on the macronutrients? It's based on, say, the the other additional compounds in there?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:42:08

Yeah. So, yeah, that's the million dollar question, right? You always say in that whole egg study, what's in that egg? If I knew that, then I could make a super egg, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:42:18

Isn't there, like, full, not folis, not folistatin, but there's something that they someone sent it to me. It was a compound in the egg that was supposed to be very anabolic.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:42:32

Yeah. I mean, we tried to understand it. We, you know, we tried. We couldn't, we couldn't identify something. And we followed that up with the salmon study, where we fed after weightlifting young adults 20 grams. So I literally, it was funny, I had a salmon flew in because I want a big piece of salmon, right? And so I we butchered it up, and then we sent that piece of salmon. So all the participants had the same salmon, right? So we, we sent that salmon away to get analyzed, and we, we figured out all the cool stuff in salmon. And then what we did was, we re engineered that salmon and an isolated beverage so we had salmon versus isolated nutrients, fascinating. And then, you know, I think I was underpowered, but we saw an effect size. It was trending that way, that salmon potentiated the anabolic response more than eating the same macronutrients in free form. That's incredible, right? Yeah. So I was like, there's probably something with this lipid dense food matrix. And this is more this is more recent work I'm trying to understand. So this was, this was in abstract form. This stuff is under review right now. So one of the things I was interested in was a lipid rich meat matrix, right? So that's an interesting point in that, you know, when I was thinking about that, right? An egg and salmon that was sort of really untouched, really, we didn't process it at all. I mean, it comes right, ready to eat directly, right? But when we're thinking about even a dairy matrix, or even a meat matrix, especially when it's ground right, what do they do? They they sort of, they ground up the meat, and then they add in fat trimmings to try to make it more or less, you know, lipid rich or lean, but I was interested, okay, when we take a lipid dense food matrix, or, yeah, lipids in protein dense food matrix in the form of ground meat, is that going to help the post Exercise, anabolic response, right? Versus a lean source of meat, because our other work suggested that a lipid dense food matrix is really important to help potentiate a weight lifters, myofibrillar protein, synthetic response. What we showed was that actually the lipid rich so the 80% meat. Meat, ground meat. So that's common, right? And there's 80, and then there's, in terms of the 80/20, blend, if you will, that actually impaired the post exercise muscle response compared to the lean source of meat. So isoentrogenous, right? So in this case, eating a lipid dense food matrix made up of ground meat immediately after the exercise boat impaired the anabolic response versus a lean matrix, which is exact contrast to what we showed with the eggs and salmon.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:45:32

Yeah, so, but the same amount, yeah.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:45:35

Everything was isonitrogenous, right? So there's something with that lipid, dense food matrix in the form of a ground meat and again, I think it's because we played around with that matrix, right? It's no longer, right. We manipulate that not, I mean, that's a ground meat matrix, right? In terms of its physical I mean, that's how it comes so interesting, it is interesting. But do you

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:45:57

Think, it's wait, I have to think about this. Is this? Do you think it's because of the the actual grinding, or do you think that it's because it was because that exists essentially in nature, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:46:09

Well, the egg and the salmon, I mean, we directly that was, like, I said unprocessed. The meat was heavily processed, right? So Luc has shown that, like, I said, mincing meat processing, yeah, it is, and it usually helps digestion. Yeah, that's right. And Lucas showed that comparing mixed meat versus a ground steak, right? So this comparison was an 80/20, blend of ground meat versus fascinating, a lean portion piece of ground meat, okay, so isonitrogenous, and then a carbohydrate control. But the so this was post exercise, and sort of goes in the face of what I just said, what I said earlier, that after weightlifting, the kind of protein you eat, you know, the best kind of protein you use, kind you put in your mouth. But in this case, we saw, we saw it blunted the response, okay. And so this was showing me that again, because sometimes people want to argue that, you know, I've had this before in the review process. Well, you already showed a lipid dense food matrix works, but I was That's crazy. I mean, you got to test different food matrices to truly understand it, right? And here's example where a lipid dense food matrix actually blunted the post exercise anabolic response, right? And it's because, you know, like I said, I think depends on the extent of processing that's occurring. I think in this case, you know, in one of the mechanisms behind this, you know, when we look at the, you know, unlike the salmon and or the egg, this whole leucine trigger hypothesis, right, the salmon or the A or the salmon or the egg. Leucine trigger hypothesis didn't matter at all, right? Obviously, with the isolated food sources, you're going to get a bigger leucine spike. But yet, we saw a bigger anabolic response in the the egg and the salmon conditions. But in this case, when we do the correlations between the C max, or the peak leucine concentrations in relation to the anabolic response, there's a strong, strong correlation, right? So the leucine trigger hypothesis mattered for this ground pork situation. Doesn't matter for so it depends on the food, is my point. So there's always this question of, I always get asked, How significant is the leucine trigger hypothesis depends, depends on the food, depends on who you are, depends probably on how much muscle mass you got.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:48:29

It's extraordinary. We've never really talked about it in that kind of detail. Yes. Do you have a hypothesis as to what it could be, or why?

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:48:42

I do, but, you know, maybe we'll save that for another. I can't give you all my tips and tricks. Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:48:53

That is so fascinating.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:48:54

No, I thought it was interesting. I thought, I thought, well, because I'm always advocating, I've been around talking about the food matrix, and this was funny. In this case with the ground pork matrix, I was wrong, right? And my students, I don't know if I mentioned it here on this podcast, but I have some students who are, you know, I'm pretty easygoing, so they just tell me what they feel the other day. They were like, Nick, you've been wrong on your last three hypotheses. Yeah. It makes it fun, right? Yeah. I mean, when you're well, one of the, one of the things I was wrong about was that some of the vegan stuff, because originally I thought an animal based meal was going to be better on the anabolic response than a vegan based meals, right? But in my defense, I did design that study that was recently published in 2017 it just didn't get published till recently, so sort of the environment changed a little bit from here or there. But, yeah, so, I mean, that's, that's something, you know, I always think about, and I wish there was these clean on and off switches, but there's really not, right? I. Them, these precision nutrition notions, especially with performance nutrition, you can give these overarching sort of recommendations, but it really depends. And that's sort of some of the concepts you were making. You know, as a practitioner, it's hard, right? Because each each situation is going to be a little different recommendation. I think you just it's yeah, it's cool. We're getting more information on it, we'll figure it out.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:50:21

Well, I'll be on standby as you continue to get the kinetics of all the food matrix. Yes, there you go. Be here for a while. Okay, yeah. But really, it really is extraordinary, and I think that your work, I'm really excited. I know that you're interested in a lot of the performance. I am fascinated to know over time, if you ever look at this, but the food matrix within OB skeletal muscle.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:50:45

Actually, you'll like this. Actually, yeah, we got, we just completed that study for writing that paper up now. So we to your point, can we use the food matrix as a clinical tool to help overcome anabolic resistance? So take advantage. Because so I didn't really mention it, because it's sort of a byproduct, right of the in terms of the anabolic resistance, all the stuff we're talking about, some of the factors mechanistically, ultimately, those are contributing to inflammation, right chronic, low grade inflammation. So how can we manipulate a food matrix to to take advantage, or try to help modulate some of those mechanisms and help correct animal resistance, yeah, so I didn't mention that work. Yeah. We're, hopefully, my students at home finishing up that manuscript now. So we did, we did. We did address that question recently. Is that a cliffhanger or better be another cliffhanger, yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:51:42

I'm dying to know how we use certain foods, yeah, to overcome that depends. Well. Dr, Nick bird, thank you so much. Happy to be here. It's been fun. It's it's really eye opening. And I think that you, you challenge a lot of scientific thinking, and you challenge yourself. And I think it's really noble.

Dr. Nicholas Burd: 1:52:05

Okay, I appreciate that. Yeah, like I said, Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk to everyone. Yeah, it's always fun.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: 1:52:12

If this episode made you rethink what you thought you knew about obesity and protein good, because building muscle isn't about following trends. It's about understanding your body's real needs and how they change with time, stress and training, whether you're optimizing for strength, body composition, longevity or recovery. Dr Burd's work shows that details matter, timing, quality, distribution, vegan, non vegan, and yes, even the way you pair your foods. If someone you love is doing all the things, quote, right, and still not making progress, send them this episode. It might be the Insight they've been missing. Thank you for being here. See you next time.