Protein Scientist Reveals What to Eat at Night to Lose Stubborn Fat - Dr. Mike Ormsbee

Dr Mike Orby you and your lab have really done some interesting research surrounding the world of protein and visceral fat and a number of other things with protein I want to jump right into that just get into the meat and potatoes of this where I guess I should say yeah I guess just the meat not necessarily the potatoes right um what have you guys been been looking at particularly with visceral fat yeah well it's kind of all areas of of fat all the depot that we look at but visceral is one of those you know

that's the one that we often thinks like tag to health conditions and other issues that um people can get with excessive uh VIs Al out aose tissue um and in our work like we've done work for 20 years now and we've had several different um trials where we have either protein alone or protein with exercise which is usually the most robust response but we're seeing reductions in versal adapost tissue subq tissue glutitis um as long as it's done right you can actually really impact those different Depot so even independent of exercise I mean protein can

can influence this yeah for sure yeah we've seen uh several different studies now where you're looking at um the protein impact alone on what's happening with fat metabolism and and both sides of that so both the liberation of of fat from a fat cell and the oxidation of it so that you would actually be losing or burning fat um and yeah with our with our work and those of others like protein's pretty darn powerful so what exactly even from a mechanistic side I mean audience is pretty pretty Savvy like we can they can hang so

I mean like with regards to even the mechanisms like how is how is protein doing this is it just a um a thermic effect is it like what what's it doing it's probably combination sure I mean the thermic effect is clearly there with the protein feedings but some of the issues around it that it's always so nuanced right there's so many other things involved when you start feeding or or doing exercise trials is other parts of your life's sort of uh just robustly increase in health behavior so we start to get complicated but the protein

side alone I mean there's data where really high loads like 3.3 up to like 4.4 grams per kilo per day protein in very fit individuals and you're seeing either no change or reductions in body fat um with those different trials even I mean obviously even with those amounts of that amount of protein I would imagine other macronutrients are like like how are how are those equated yeah I mean in in that work some of that was from Jose Antonio's um feeding studies and people who are very active or bodybuilders type individuals and so they already

had high protein diets I mean they they're well over 2.2 grams per kg in the control group yeah and they increased the other group to even higher I mean their doses were pretty pretty darn high and they tried to just simply increase that load with protein shakes so that the other macros would stay the same but I'll tell you from experience we've done trials where we weren't doing this in healthy individuals they were uh breast cancer survivors and we gave higher protein Doses and we actually made this mistake because we didn't look at the dietary

intake till the study was over and the satiating effect of protein made it so that the high protein group stopped eating their protein at meals yeah and so by the end of the study the groups are actually equated for protein intake and we had waited too long to do the dietary analysis so we keep learning along the way too in terms of like just how profound that impact is for being satiating and also that thermic effective food that you're getting I put a link down below for 30% off your entire first order with Thrive Market

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you get a free $60 gift with any purchase so go ahead and check them outs in the top line of the description underneath this video from a a fat loss perspective how much separation is there between the different kinds of protein like are there're very clear hey whey protein is going to be less when it comes down to no there's nothing there's nothing that distinct I mean I think it'd be cool if we saw those separations I'm not aware of any data where you have a different type of protein um impacting those tissues differently at

all that's awesome I mean that's a good thing yeah it gives it gives options right a lot of what we do in our lab for better or worse comes out with no difference or you know no drastic change that's exciting but what it does if you flip the way we look at that it's a way to actually um give people recommendations and not be afraid to do things so even if there's no result they can eat more protein they can eat it later at night for example and not have a negative impact um and this

is just another case of that so do you think that a lot of the protein effect when it comes to Fat Loss in general is it just by the sheer fact that people that are eating more protein are probably subbing out other macronutrients because they're just eating more protein or like if all that was independent and you were just looking at increasing protein like all their macronutrients stayed the same you know because if you take someone off the street and you have them meat like 3.3 you know grams per kilo they're probably not going to

have much appetite to actually eat some potatoes or some rice right so does the macronutrient right so that that's part of the deal is like you're GNA in the real world you would end up hopefully having a distribution where the protein stays constant but the percentage of the other macros will drop you know a lot of times with uh the way we think about any of our Foods is these amdrs where you have for proteins 10 to 35% for dietary intake is is the recommendation and Americans eat about 15% and that pretty much hits the

recommendation that's currently available it's 0.8 grams per kg but we want to be higher than that and so when we go up to 2.2 grams per kilo or basically a gram per pound um that's where we can start seeing those those that separation and we see differences in their macronutrient intake they'll start lowering carbs they start lowering fats and there be more satiated so all of those things come together you know it's not it's not magic it's just a big tool a big hammer to use in this in this process of uh weight maintenance or

or body composition change would you would you say like in your experience that you're granted a little bit more slack in the realm of calories if you have more protein in that case yeah yeah yeah for sure I mean I I think anyone who starts to switch to this um uh health conscious way of eating and trying to to Really fit protein in there and their higher fiber intakes and stuff yeah you get a little bit more leeway that's why people who like are are super lean you're like oh I I see you eating all

the time it's like he but look what what I'm eating yeah you know you you can eat a lot of it the the chloric you know load the chloric density and stuff is different so you can actually eat quite a lot of food um but it's not going to be as high calorie foods do you see any difference in the total fat loss of subcutaneous fat versus visceral fat like is a what's the ratio like that you've seen or is it all sort of when fat is lost like an equal percentage generally measurable in such

a sense is the same with yeah I don't know that we can put a percentage on it at this moment I'll tell you the way we ran that study this was with Paul arero at Skidmore college and he was the lead on that study um and and the the first one that I was involved with uh we said about we we fed about 40% protein to our higher protein group and the other group got about 15% protein they also had different exercise regimens because we were comparing like the old School American Heart Association program against

at the time which was the Body for Life program put out you know by Bill Phillips yeah back in the day and um that program included resistance training and some high-intensity um running or or aerobic exercise which was like you probably only 20 minutes a day so it was like a different sort of a program but if you look at just at the protein spread everybody did great on both programs but with the higher protein intake those folks lost significantly more viscer oose tissue and subq fat and we were you know measuring this in all

areas with a full body dexa and then we honed in on visceratio tissue as well yeah I mean it's I think uh with visceral fat it seems to be highly individual too I think there's a lot of other factors that come in with stress and sleep deprivation things like that on on visceral fat so it's probably hard to really equate for all of that stuff yeah and it depends how you're measuring it too I mean we're looking at this with dexa there's people who do it with u MRI which we're not doing currently but I

I think it's just going to continue on this path of showing that u in this case protein is is going to be one of the things that influences that and and I tell you it's better when you exercise with it I would I would say if you're just at the lowest hanging fruit I would increase the your to your protein intake but starting to add in the different types of exercise you know resistance training um different modes that's where you're going to see the biggest impact I think one of the more kind of liberating things

from even the early part of this discussion is that this can be achieved just with a protein shake too it's not like I think people sometimes they're busy you know it's you don't have time to cook up a bunch of ground beef or a steak or something like that sort of a misconception about protein shakes in general like I mean I have no problem adding a couple of way protein shakes in just to get that number up so I think you know when I hear that because it's just so there's so much noise out there

surrounding different types of protein it sounds like at the end of the day protein's kind of protein yeah well for this what we're talking about absolutely um I think there's a couple things to consider uh I think you and I would be very um inclined to add a protein shake but there's definitely people who don't like it they don't like the taste the texture you hear it right I know a lot of folks like and so you can do this with Whole Foods absolutely but it's it's work like you you really have to be thinking

ahead what are you going to have what are your options it's so convenient to throw a shake a packet of protein powder in your bag and off you go you know that's um in our world you better have some convenience or this will never get done so yeah we use shakes all the time but you definitely don't have to do it that way yeah I was going to say like in in a lab setting when you're really trying to increase protein intake are you generally increasing it via shakes just because it's easier for real people

um generally yes but there are certainly different studies where we've done long feeding studies where we're working with a team of dietitians and get everybody's dial in and what they're eating each week and their food but the protein uh in terms of just a powdered shake that we give once twice three times throughout the day it's just so convenient to get someone up 75 grams in our higher protein trials I think you know most of your your work that you're most noted for is surrounding protein timing and and protein feeding particularly at night and this

is an area of it's a lot of kind of contention around it people people get really hung up on timing protein at night should you have protein before bed does it Aid in muscle protein synthesis is the juice worth the squeeze so to speak and this is really I mean this is what you're known for I mean you've talked to Andy galin about this you've this is this is you so what have you found like what does eating protein at night do or not do so let let me back up a little bit because this

story is kind of neat and kind of how this stuff got started we originally got into this around 2010 and I was a new researcher starting at Florida State and we were looking around and I'm thinking man the people who are the most lean that I know eat late at night but then we had this sort of contrasting view with um different TV shows and things weight loss shows where they're saying cut off stop eating at this time stop eating at you know 7 PM or whatever it was um and so that was the initial

question which is so great about my job is like we can see these things and try to answer these in real life um and so we started our first trials looking at uh just that what if we gave wayy casine um a carbohydrate or like a water Placebo and we would give people this and it's important to Define this the way we have done it and the other people in this space is you're feeding this two hours after dinner so it's not your dinner okay it's two hours after dinner and within 30 minutes of going

to sleep okay so it's a very specific time for this and no additional carbohydrates or anything just straight protein the original trials were e 100% whe okay 25 to 30 grams 100% casine um straight carbohydrate so we could calorie match or a water Placebo and so different groups have looked at this like when we were starting this work the only other lab doing this was Luke Van loon's lab overseas and um they do fantastic mechanistic work with muscle protein synthesis which we can get into um our lab is was more on the applied side what's

happening with uh metabolism recovery performance uh and then we've just now sort of getting a lot more into sleep and sleep Dynamics with pre-sleep feeding but when this originally started we were looking at metabolism and so we did this in young men young women older men older women those with obesity those without obesity so we've looked at it from all these different angles and one of the things we found was that feeding before bed of anything carbs way or casine in improved increased morning resting metabolic rate so when we were measuring this in the lab

they had a small uptick compared to having just water so so something was happening happing metabolically we quickly realized that uh we were missing something in this design because I would give you something to take home um you tell me you took it yeah and then you come back in the morning which adds a whole host of issues to this so then we started setting up designs that my graduate students don't love where you would would actually sleep in the lab and so we set up these Cs and these uh sleeping centers where people would

actually sleep over in the lab at the night and um we found similar things either no change or a small uptick in morning metabolism we also measured things like satiety and appetite and from a scale like you know how hungry do you feel um and in all that work the the conclusion they kept coming up was either there's no no change at all or you have a little bit of an increase in metabolism measured by resting metabolic rate and we have a small uptick in satiation or you know satiety in the morning but we were

were wondering that whole time is that good or bad yeah if not hungry in the morning and you're not eating is that is that a good thing for weight maintenance is that a bad thing you know what does it actually do um and so along those uh same times we actually did a study in people that were overweight and we did a acute feeding and and no matter if it was way casing or carbohydrate we saw a negative and the negative to that was that they had a small upt glucose and the glucose put them

into a range in the morning that we weren't really happy with and so we said okay so in certain populations maybe this isn't the right Avenue and so we took that same population instead of doing one night we did four weeks of it and added uh a little bit of resistance training so over those four weeks they simply worked out three times a week with us short full body exercise regimen and when we added exercise to this all of those negative changes went away so the the power of exercise is just huge and it's going

to be the thing driving the momentum of the changes the physiological changes that we're looking for that little bit of protein was perhaps a help um but in all this context two things happen one of them is that we really um were missing what was happening mechanistically um and so we added a technique in order to solve that problem and one of the things that I learned through graduate school is a technique called micro dialysis and this is a technique where we thread a very small probe underneath um your skin into your subcutaneous abdominal atopos

tissue so imagine like pinching your belly fat and a small um catheter prick in there and you remove the needle and just leave a flexible tube underneath the skin yeah and then we can peruse fluid in there so think about saline going into the tissue and then we can collect what's coming out of there so we should collect saline which you put in plus whatever is coming out of the fat cells and so we can measure glycerol which is an indicator of lipolysis in that case and so we said let's put these in and have

people sleep with them so we can measure all night what's happening to Fat metabolism as individuals are asleep and when we did these trials and we started with um um younger men that uh were overweight or obese we had uh We've also done this in young women and fit people and um you know all all types of populations and in our hands every single time uh we see absolutely no difference in fat metabolism if you have 150 160 calories of protein or if you had nothing and so I remember my doc student coming to me

and saying oh my goodness what am I going to do we didn't see anything I can't what this data are terrible blah blah and I'm like no what that does is it shows that you have an option you can eat something before bed and it's not going to increase um you know the the putting on body fat or anything it's not doing anything to the body fat stores at that low calorie level uh and so for us that was kind of eye opening and it helps with some of the instructions we give to people because

in general people aren't eating towards that higher end of protein and so we can say this is a great time to feed to get your total daily protein intake up which is probably the magic it's it's just getting the total daily protein intake to a level that we really want maybe not necessarily that it's right before bed but you're usually home you have access to food it's an easy time to do it it's not going to put on fat it might uptick metabolism so there are some benefits to it um and I think practically um

probably the the most one of the most interesting studies was Luke Van lon's uh study where they did this for 12 weeks with resistance training and pre-sleep protein feeding they had a little carbohydrate in there as well and in an applied aspect the group that had the pre-sleep feeding over those 12 weeks uh in the same mechanism 30 minutes before bed etc those individuals had real outcomes more strength more muscle mass over that period of time now the the criticism was they actually had more protein in their total Day by having the pre-sleep feeding so

it ended up being like 1.9 versus 1.3 and the 1.9 group went out which you'd expect and so the criticism was well if you equated protein it probably wouldn't happen and they said yeah well that's the whole point you have chance to take protein that gets your total daily protein intake to a better level and it's going to help with these applied outcomes so in that sense I think there's um something to it in terms of like having an option it's not going to do anything negatively to Fat metabolism and it's it may help get

you to a level of for total daily protein intake that would help with a little bit with um strength and some of these size um applications that people want what uh did you guys measure like fat oxidation in like the subsequent workout in the morning yeah so we didn't do a workout but we did resting metabolism so we could see if it was how that was changed and it it followed suit with what you'd expect um we when we didn't do micro alysis when we simply fed people in the morning they had this increase in

um uh total uh metabolic rate and then we also looked at RQ which would give us a measure of the fuel use you know kind of rudimentary but you get this the idea for it and and yeah the the having nothing kept RQ low which means a higher fat oxidation and having casine did the same thing it looked like whey and carbohydrate were slightly uptick now none of that was statistically significant but if you look at the numbers and I'm if I'm trying to be hyp specific about something I would in that case caseine sort

of one out in terms of it looked like it stayed just like a placebo absolutely nothing wow in keeping fat metabolism higher that's crazy so yeah because it kind of flies in the face of saying you know the longer that you are in a fasted State the more fat you're gonna burn in a workout in the morning yeah we didn't do the workout part of it but yeah but I mean by looking at I mean how much is really going to change when you if you're looking at resting I know you're sure and I think

it odds what what it does I think practically is it gives people again a chance to choose something that could be beneficial and won't harm them totally and then you have just extra you know options to look at now the criticism again that we get even even now continues because there's still big questions in this space like we don't sleep is like the biggest thing right now that we're looking at a lot of people kept um reviewing our papers or commenting on things we were doing saying what about sleep what about sleep if I eat

and then you have companies that are pushing don't eat before bed we've got data that show uh it's problematic for Sleep Quality and sleep duration and sleep onset and these other things so we did sort of a deep dive into that literature and you know it was it was not as clear-cut as you might think or as you would read about on the uh social media and so we started heavily investing in that space we have a couple of studies going right now and I think probably the biggest thing is that if you have a

very large meal I mean not 150 calories like a meal meal that could be detrimental and there are some data to show that large mixed meals carbs fats proteins everything all together we're not talking about we're talking about a protein dominant food or shake for sure and it's a it's sort of a different beast when you're looking at 150 60 calories versus 600 calories you know in a load and so those are some of the areas that we're trying to look at now is is does the quality of the food matter people always want us

to do like the ice cream and pizza studies you know um and does the quantity matter so if we did like a scaling of 150 300 450 you know and on up at what point does it turn from neutral or no CH or or even positive to a negative impact on sleep or any other health outcome and so those those trials are underway we don't have answers on all that stuff quite yet I mean I suppose a lot of it would depend on like where your standard protein intake is to begin with too right like

if I can speak anecdotally and say like my protein needs aren't met I don't sleep good right so like if you're talking about even just somewhat regular people that just regularly resistance train but maybe they're not Elite athletes I think they would probably find that if they had their protein needs met they might sleep better right like I feel like I'm in for lack of a better term like more of a sympathetic state if I'm like from just taking in protein before bed I think what you're you're trying to say here is like if you're

if you're trying to get more protein in like you probably are doing more good than bad by having some protein before bed I mean the net positive is proba that's sure what it looks like and there's even some things like uh a couple years ago falkenberg put out of paper and it looked at the different types of foods that people are consuming before bed and it looked like if it was protein you actually had a better sleep onset latency meaning the time you get in bed to falling asleep was was shortened which is a good

thing um but if if it was um higher in Sugar higher in carbohydrates then that was reversed and so there's a lot of nuance that still needs to be done and and studies that need to be done to figure out types of foods mixed Foods Because unless it's a protein shake a lot of people don't eat single macronutrients and so you're eating food we've I mean of all the data I've seen a couple of like whole whole food kind of studies we did one with cottage cheese because it's high higher in casing content it was

kind of a neat design so we went to the store we bought off the shelf cottage cheese then I sent that to a company to powder the exact same mixture and so we looked at it as a semi-solid cottage cheese a powder or a placebo to see does the consistency matter digestive load and what's happening with all of that and you know like we've been saying absolutely no difference seriously that was my next question cottage cheese or powdered cottage cheese or a or a placebo in terms of these General outcomes of metabolism we measured sleep

in that one as well um and and so again there's different options it looks like C cheese was fine the thing we're moving into now and some of our newer grants are looking at like Whole Food whole food options um other specific foods that have potential to improve sleep you know higher melatonin and B vitamin content and you know some of these things and and magnesium for example um and so I I feel like there's going to be a movement now in this space where where are we going with it and even specially Foods um

for example there's a way derivative called Alpha lactalbumin have you heard yeah so alphal laac um uh it didn't have much traction it was kind of now it's considered like a new player um in the space but it's been around a long time so it's been in uh like formula for infants because it's a higher concentration in mother's milk interesting and so then now they have um they've figured out a way so they've powdered an infant formula forever now they've fractioned that out and they're selling it to adults yeah and so it has a high

tryptophan um ratio and so because of that the thought is maybe it helps with sleep and so there's been two studies 2020 2021 time frame in rugby players that actually showed Alpha lack versus other types of protein actually had a benefit on sleep um outcomes and so we're replicating that now to see how it works in our lab and we're using um Elite female athletes uh at FSU to figure that out so we're looking at alphal laac ways um some different versions of it in a placebo over over three three nights of feeding interesting so

like where do you think most of the the talk and the hubub surrounding stopping eating a few hours before bed comes from is it mainly just like in the insulin resistance Community where basically I mean because I think it's wildly different between someone that has a healthy metabolism and not perhaps there's sound reasoning I mean if you look at some of the like original studies so like 1993 for example there were some studies that started to come out and like the one that comes to mind um gave 544 calories at three different times and you

had that at either 9:00 a.m. uh 5:00 p.m. or 1: in the morning and they gave the same food at each time and just measured all these metabolic outcomes that came from it and like your response to that food was far worse at 1 in the morning than it was at 9: in the morning so you there are like we know it's not you're slowing down you're going to have a natural reduction in metabolic rate for example you're heading to sleep you also handle glucose worse at that time than earlier in the day and so

if you think about that be like yeah why would I eat before bed yeah and again I think there's two bigger things to consider one's like we're not talking about meals here we're talking about 30 minutes before bed a snack a protein snack really um but in a whole food sense it does look like there's some worse outcomes the other area are night shift workers uh those individuals there's a lot of data here with if you're eating through the night and late at night you have worst metabolic outcomes but then that's confounded by what are

your choices late at night if you're a night shift worker not bringing foods with you um so that you know sort of plays into that and then people that have um conditions like where they eat most of their calories um very late in the evening it's all a whole slew of data in that space too that all have negative outcomes so I think people see that they get a little nervous about um eating late we also there's other data also like clearly if you eat a lot of your calories later in the day your chance

uh association with being obese is higher yeah and BMI changes and these other things but again I think in a normal healthy individual this is a different story story we're also talking about a small calorie load and I think between those things you really have um an opportunity to feed that could be beneficial in the way we're speaking about it as opposed to a giant uh fast food meal yeah you know right before bed and I think historically people that probably load calories in the evening are probably not making the best decisions like so I'm

sure that large data is kind of skewed right it's like you look especially a metabolically unhealthy person or something you know they're really not eating much throughout the day and then they're emotionally fatigued by the end of the day and the choices they're making at the end of the day are not exactly you know like you said we're talking 150 160 calories of a essentially a single macronutrient we're not talking about a meal here whereas if you probably look observationally at most things like people that eat a lot of calories at night are probably eating

crap no doubt now there's another area I want to talk about though and this is your um audience who are athletic or very Physically Active um from all the data I've been describing in this this space the best outcomes and there's some data with like professional soccer players for example um if you exercise in the evening and pair that with pre-sleep feeding those outcomes are generally positive okay now just to play Devils I I actually have a study that flies in the face of that out of my own lap but in general that's what we're

seeing if you exercise in the morning and do pre sleep feeding it looks like it's a little bit less important okay for some of these outcomes so that's something to consider the other one's for athletes like if you're if a high if you're a high level athlete many times you have games at night yeah or if you're a working individual and you've got kids and your only time to do this is late at night you're setting yourself up for a situation where if you don't eat you could be impaired tomorrow for sure you have to

think about the next workout or the next practice or the next game in these examples and so like for example if if you work out hard tonight and you also want to work out tomorrow morning you should probably eat after your workout so there are so many nuances to this um and so the blanket statement of don't eat before bed then I'm you know I always comment on these things I'm like well what what time of day are you exercising what's your total food intake for sure do you have um low energy availability and you

you need to have more food at this period of time do you practice again tomorrow morning you know what is the time frame for all this so I I feel like the the Nuance gets lost which is common um but I think the general message needs to be much more clear which is a small at least at this point protein dominant Min food that's 150 to 200 calories is either going to do nothing or would give you a benefit yeah it's I mean the a little bit of a digression but I'm curious if you've seen

any of this as far as performance the next day what do you find to be more important the overall calorie load that you end up getting in the day prior or the protein load um in a one-off scenario probably the calorie load for sure um but let me tell you about the one of these studies that that sort of I think would highlight this a little bit so uh professional soccer players um they had a evening game and then after the game they gave 40 grams of protein or a a placebo and when they did

that they then measured performance in two ways one was a counter movement jump one was a reactive strength index which is like jumping off of a a heightened box and then being told with a force plate on the ground spend as little time on the ground as possible like how quickly can you jump off of that and if you had that 40 G bis those three nights after the game you came back to Baseline uh much faster than the other group and so in a real sense in a real game in real athletes that study

showed that there was a benefit now not every study shows that but that was one that was really interesting to to look at in terms of outcomes we might measure from this and so you know maybe we don't see it in maximal strength maybe we don't see it in some of these more whole body movements but in something like reaction yeah uh or you know this these counter movement jumps or whatever that that might be where you pick up some of these performance benefits yeah and if you're if you're seeing it in reaction you're probably

having subtle differences that you're not realizing in neuromuscular control and things like that right it's like those little that makes a difference when you're trying to flirt with injury you know you're like doing doing deadlifts and you're at risk of uh you blowing out your back and it's like all about proper activation you know these subtle things that you may not really think about but it makes a difference in terms of the recovery let let me give you a good example so we had a really cool study where we were looking at uh athletes that

were competing in Ultram man Florida so that is a three-day Triathlon so like on Friday they do a 10K swim and like a 95 mile bike ride and then they go to sleep wake up start again and they bike um a very long way like 180 miles or something and then on Sunday they go to sleep wake up on Sunday run a double Marathon so this is all over three days and it's not continuous so your time stops when you finish on Friday and starts again the next morning to add to your time yeah and

so in this case if you're finishing late and you don't eat and pay attention to what you're going to eat because you're finishing at night and you have to start again at 6:00 am. you will not complete that race yeah and so those athletes and people who have things like that like it's not about pre-sleep feeding being good bad or other you have to do it you will not finished the race in that type of a scenario yeah that's wild I mean I think that sometimes the the like the the glucose crowd and the low

glucose crowd which is is so loud sometimes that it overshadows some of this really important stuff right it's like I think it's wildly different I mean have you have you looked at people with insulin resistance in sort of this fashion and how having like so because let me back up for a second in that in the the pre-bed feeding there was what did the glucose group like like what did the carbohydrate group look like that was different from the protein group because you gave one group that was how many 30 grams yeah the original studies

were 30 they um now the recommendation is 40 and 40 gram Bolis seems to be um primarily because you're you're trying to sustain a height in muscle protein synthesis for a longer period of time like seven eight hours most of the day time feeding studies are like measuring for maybe three or four hours so it's a it's a larger bolus at that period of time um I'm sorry what was the question was uh like you know what did you really see like how much of a difference was there between the glucose group and the protein

group yeah so um it depends on the metric we are looking at and what other people have done in their designs um in our original studies the RQ value so fat oxidation and this wasn't statistically significant but if you had the carbohydrates or the way you were slightly higher in RQ meaning less fat oxidation so that was a difference between casine um there's been several studies now looking at specifically muscle protein synthesis and doesn't seem to be a difference between whey and casine by the way just so your audience knows they can choose whichever one

they like for that outcome and in the other sides of that um we some of them don't give a carbohydrate Placebo they just give a water Placebo so it's hard to compare what that's actually doing um in the Sleep outcomes so far carbohydrates in a lower dose we're talking 30 40 Bolis here um a gr bis no difference in sleep outcomes and we started this me this whole deal with uh not talking about sleep and then the reviewers like hey how they sleep and I'm like I don't know we got to add that to the

next study so then we started doing surveys and then that got to be not robust enough and then we started doing trackers and so that's really why these new studies we're doing are are um the first time we've designed them with the primary outcome of sleep and instead of a secondary or tertiary outcome yeah um for those I'd imagine that that wildly depends on the the person's metabolic status I mean really it's like I would imagine subjective sleep was probably decent with the glucose group just because sleep onset might be good just because you you

know that's kind of the old school thing was hey a little a little uh you know hypoglycemia and a little drop right before bed might help you fall asleep faster so maybe you're getting more that first three four hours of deep sleep and then your REM is disrupted but you're not going to measure that with a whoop really you know it's kind of hard to get that solid data oh for sure yeah I think there's you have to have like polygraphy and some of these other techniques that are available cpg and things that are coming

out now um but I don't know I think uh overall the like the metabolic outcomes I would still favor to have the protein dominant food the recovery items I would do the soccer data looked like it was protein being different from carbohydrate with um there those two specific outcomes for Muscle Recovery RSI and counter movement jump so there is something happening yeah um I don't know if it's enough to matter to normal people but for highend athletes it might yeah and you would need the carbohydrates for other things so yeah it's just really what are

you looking at it for for sure and I think a lot of it split in hairs but with the with the cottage cheese was it full fat cottage cheese or were you guys using a low fat to try to bring the F it was a lowfat cotage cheese yeah and that was a that was a neat study that other people have done pre-sleep work with uh milk just like your mother told you um in the those studies no difference in any marker at all overnight or in the morning and again does that mean it's bad

no that means it's not doing anything and if you're hungry have a glass of milk yeah and gets your protein totals up your total calories up if you're an athlete that's that could be necessary one area that we have looked at that wasn't in um people with glucose control issues but we started to use different products before bed so our first one was a chocolate milk and we looked in the morning at endurance performance the second study we did in that space was looking at a product called um Yukan superstarch which is traditionally pitched to

people with um glucose issues right it's like a cylic Dexter kind of thing uh kind of they hydrother thermally modify um the carbohydrates and it keeps insulin extremely low it's like a small drip of glucose into the system and it was originally developed in a medical space which is for people with glycogen storage disease and I love how performance nutrition goes clinical to sports and sports goes Sports back to clinical it's like really kind of an exciting place to be in and it's ever evolving but we did several studies with those products so the first

one we did was that chocolate milk one and the thought was this if you don't need to wake up early to run your race instead you can have this before bed to sort of top off your stores or whatever does that help with GI does that help with more a little more sleep you don't have to wake up earlier to eat these types of things and it didn't it didn't do much it increased carbohydrate oxidation in the morning so theoretically maybe you got run at the higher end of things but it it didn't turn out

to be a performance difference and then we started in this ukan Superstar space um and we did several studies during the day with it in performance which we can get into if you want but we used it at night because we thought that slow drip of glucose may be enough to keep um glycogen a and and blood glucose a little bit higher in the morning so they could run a a 10K or 5K or whatever it is faster in the morning um and again we did not see that we didn't see any change in performance

outcomes doing it in that particular way and it was either probably a dosing structure I'd love to try with a higher dose or maybe try it in a sport where you don't have access to being able to eat maybe like long swimming or something where getting Foods in are a little bit more difficult um because you know in running you can go buy an aid station so the practicality becomes an issue but we're trying to crack this n from different ways and see you know is there a product or food or a combination of things

or training status where um this would be potentially optimal but you know again I feel like I'm saying it over over but the way that we get there is you got an option you don't have to be hungry if you want to eat but just make a wise choice at that time it's either going to not harm you or increase your total daily protein intake which would be a benefit it could increase your total calorie intake so if you're someone who suffers from Lei or Reds or something then you have an opportunity to sort of

boost your total calorie intake it might help with performance um and nothing so far has shown a detriment eating and feeding the way we're talking about I'd be curious what it does to uh like even CK level the next day right like what is it doing to for overall recovery from a subsequent workout well we did that one so one of the cool ones we did was we were finally looking at a vegetarian based protein um and so this was led by Pat saraso a former doctoral student of mine and it was his dissertation and

um he was looking at a rice and pea combination protein in order to match the amino acid profiles and it was powdered so it was a shake and then we looked at that against whey um hydrolysate and whey isolate and a and a placebo then we took uh middle-aged men who were active individuals and put them through a kind of a grueling Ecentric only um ex leg extension leg flexion Series so 150 reps each leg of Ecentric only so to damage on purpose and then we tracked all the inflammatory markers and some performance metrics over

the next 72 hours so he'd come back in each morning for some of these things so one um in this population and with that protocol that was very damaging and so nobody came back to normal in a typical time frame from any of the blood biomarkers and there was no difference between any of the proteins that we used interesting so we either damaged them so bad that nothing came back and it was a little bit too hard so maybe that was the problem uh or dosing was different or just it doesn't matter choose the protein

you want yeah or I mean if you start looking at it over the longer term you know then when is it going to start I I would have you seen anything on like obviously we're talking a lot of like kind of acute protein load but what what about longer term is there some data on that like maybe over the course of a couple weeks or a month yeah the the two there's only like two or three studies that I'm aware of on that so the original ones were way back in 96 and that was a

longer term feeding of a higher carbohydrate higher protein or a higher fat diet for over time and they all they they just measured um sleeping metabolic rate okay and if you had the higher protein um diet over over a longer period of time you just kind of your metabolism sort of hummed a little bit higher while you were asleep got it all right so so that I don't you got to interpret it how you want for is that good bad or indiffer I guess if it's weight maintenance or something perhaps that's a good thing yeah

um so that was one of those the other one was that one I described which was 12 weeks of pre-sleep feeding from Luke Van lon's lab that showed some of the benefits that were good but no one's really done it longer than that um continuously but you know in the body world and the physique competitor World a lot of people will wake up purposely to have food yeah or a protein shake and so that's always a study that I've wanted to run was what's the difference between just taking it before bed and sleeping or waking

up at 3 in the morning and pounding a protein shake and going back to bed for sure um because that disruption in sleep may be something I I don't know we've that's never been done but I I think that would be a real practical thing for that athlete yeah I mean if someone's that just fluxing in a different capacity because they have lot of muscle mass like I find if like if I'm under calori or under protein like my sleep is crap right and it's like so someone like that with a like a bodybuilder that

has a large amount of muscle mass I mean their BMR is so high anyway right they might be a little bit of an anomaly where they can get up in the middle of the night and do that it might actually help their sleep you know uh you know Stan eering he talks about how he keeps uh a sandwich and a protein shake on his nightstand he's hilarious I mean he's just gigantic anyway so he's just such a but he's that was his that was his solution when I was going through about of insomnia he's like

Thomas got to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a protein shake 60 grams like just have it on your nightstand he's like when I get up to pee hell no no so it's that was one more thing that was taking it was taking me like eight minutes to Chow that down you know it wasn't like I could just like so by then I'm awake oh goodness yeah I mean um I was speaking with uh Darren Willoughby who's a researcher who is also an enormous individual and he he was saying that he would do

that just keep a shake right there in the bathroom and then if he got up to use the restroom and just down it goes uh or he walks in and pulls the leftovers out and eats them in the middle of the night yeah dude it works for some people especially like I said when you have that much Mas well uh Dr Mike where can everyone find you man uh I'm trying to not be so hidden but there are some places um so just Mike Ormsby is the place to go for Instagram or um X or

whatever to to find out what we're doing we also have a lab account at FSU ISM that is a a place to see what the lab is up to but yeah follow those things we've got um new content coming out we've got studied designs we've got kind of behind the scenes look at a real active um Lab at The Institute of Sports sciences and Medicine um cool little place to visit nice man thanks brother thanks