now say you're a bodybuilder who has impaired kidney function and wants to protect his kidneys while he continues to grow what you may consider doing [Music] good afternoon friends in this video i'm going to continue on my previous video about how protein affects our health in this video we're going to talk about some practical outcomes of the research on protein and its relation to our health but before we talk about that please subscribe to the channel if you're not already like the video and comment on the video to help the channel's growth now let's get
started first of all let's review what we learned last time we learned that there has been a lot of studies on on caloric restriction restricting people's calories by about 40 percent or rather mostly animals calories by about 40 percent there's also been studies on protein restriction restricting total protein consumption by about 40 percent there's also been studies restricting certain amino acids in protein like the essential amino acids or the branched chain amino acids and all these studies have sort of revealed that let's talk about two pathways one pathway is our growth pathways being affected by
protein and the other is our metabolic health the growth path we want to talk about is mtor mtor is activated by dietary methionine dietary leucine dietary arginine dietary glutamine and it is potentially inactivated by high dosed gliatara glycine gly the high dose dietary glycine this is the kind of stuff by the way that i do constantly on videos and i constantly have to edit but i think i'll leave this one in here so you guys can see this ridiculousness anyway let's continue so that's how these amino acids activate the growth pathway on the other hand
this metabolic health pathway uh governed by gcn2 is activated in situations of low methionine uh potentially of higher glycine also by mimicking low methionine but also by low isoleucine and valine the branched chain amino acids or by low tryptophan and threonine this is a review of the mechanisms from the last video first what are the basic practical outcomes of this if somebody wanted to live a very long life would they crush mtor all the time well if you crush mtor all the time some of your organ maintenance pathways like maintaining your brain size or maintaining
your heart function will be inhibited so some public speakers on health like peter artea or rhonda patrick have theorized that cycling growth periods with repair periods where you have low protein and low calories in the repair periods and high protein or high calories or both in the growth periods may be better for health generally speaking if mtor is always crushed cancer is limited or minimized cancer risk is minimized but you might be more likely to develop heart disease potentially although the high protein diets seem to worsen heart disease but you may be able to develop
heart disease or atrophy of the heart over time especially in elder age and you may develop atrophy of the brain these are the two considerations some people have commented on my post recently saying oh but the high protein diets are very important for muscle size in aging or bone mineral density just as a side note let's talk about it really quickly here why high protein diets are helpful for muscle size or why that's important is because the more muscle you have if you're not diligent about your diet and you over consume glucose to the point
where you have nowhere to put the glucose because you're hectic and you don't plan your diet in that case your muscle can hold the glucose so it's sort of a sink for excess glucose so it limits your ability to develop hyperglycemia which is damaging to your health so it basically is a buffer against diabetes having higher muscle on the other hand bone mineral density is much more driven by vitamin k supplementation vitamin sorry magnesium supplementation vitamin d supplementation then it is actually by weight lifting or protein consumption in my opinion and even if it were
bone mineral density is not directly something that's killing people rather the importance of protein is about that organ maintenance issue the mtor being necessary to maintain the health of organs in fact if you crush mtor really totally which i've done before through fasting and using rapamycin you can end up slightly depressed and if you crush emptor in the brain you will end up depressed and you will have a less functional brain even acutely so there's reasons to cycle or balance emptor personally my opinion is it's probably better to cycle it on a daily basis than
it is to cycle it seasonally and if you were to cycle it seasonally i would rather think about inhibiting it every so often rather than keeping it inhibited and activating it every so often why because mtor needs to be activated for a period of time for cells to fully develop from stem cells to be differentiated and proliferated it doesn't work if you just activate mtor for a week or so i just know this personally because i study the brain mostly i know about the biology of neurons and these neurons in their development need consistently activated
mtor to be able to develop fully so the way i would look at it is rather inhibiting mtor for periods of time so that cellular repair processes that work opposingly to mtor like fgf21 but also like amp kinase and other pathways those get activated that's the way i would look at it but how does it work functionally to reduce m2 how would you do that to reduce enter from what we learned earlier you would reduce the most effective ways are to reduce methionine and leucine lowering glutamine or arginine may also lower mtor but i think
the most effective way is to lower your consumption of methionine or leucine and also to add supplemental high-dose glycine how can you do this practically well a vegan diet a ketogenic diet or a low protein diet will all inhibit mtor somewhat i think that a total really very strong inhibition all the time may not be ideal as i mentioned earlier on the other hand about the metabolic health how can you improve the activity of fgf21 well it's hard to individually remove amino acids from your diet if you reduce your consumption of animal proteins you'll have
much less leucine and methionine specifically you'll have less methionine which seems to have an effect on the and maybe also the brass chain amino acids in general but these will have an effect on fgf21 so basically not consuming a lot of uh animal proteins but you can also do this through your supplements so for example you can avoid supplementing with essential amino acids they contain tryptophan and threonine therefore limiting your ability to access the most powerful way to upregulate fgf21 in fact you should probably never supplement with essential amino acids as opposed to a total
protein or as opposed to leucine it just doesn't make sense in general um so you can avoid that to get rid of threonine or tryptophan you can also avoid supplementing with bcaas to avoid getting isoleucine you want a higher leucine to isoleucine ratio to raise fgf21 so you would never supplement with that either so these are some ways to make this practical now in reality do i think fgf21s upregulation is the most potent way to improve metabolic function probably not but we'll get into that in later examples in this video now how do the mechanisms
that we discuss in the previous video affect what we know about health and pharmacology let's first start with drugs there are drugs that mimic a low protein diet affecting longevity of animals the first of which you've heard a lot in the last video called rapamycin rapamycin for example topically on humans can reduce the symptoms of aging in skin in rodents rapamycin extends life in dogs right which are now being studied for rapamycin's effect on life rapamycin's short-term rapamycin treatment impacts dogs cardiac function improves their heart function and now there's a long-term study being done on
how it affects their lifespan because dogs live a bit longer than rodents so it's a bit harder to study now rapamycin doesn't completely inhibit m torque one the complex one and it also in it's not very selective for m torque 1. it also inhibits m torque 2. for this reason now i'll mention here a little bit off topic the right dosing of rapamycin won't inhibit m2 oh sorry yeah won't inhibit mtorq2 if you dose it at say for example five milligrams once a month even five milligrams once a week there's a human study which i
won't get into here but that amount does not seem to reduce m torque 2. more than that does seem to reduce m torque 2 expression in humans which is not desirable so there are ways to get around this but because it's not selective and because it doesn't fully inactivate m torque one there are analogs of rapamycin under development called rapologs for use later potentially in humans you guys have also heard of another drug called metformin metformin activates the amp kinase pathway but also inhibits mtor now like rapamycin metformin both improves the health span which means
the quantity of healthy living in rodents as well as extends their lifespan that means both of these drugs make rodents that are in elder age appear like they're younger so you guys have to keep this in mind when you're thinking about protein aging you some people like well when i'm very old at 80 i don't care anyway you're gonna feel like you're 80 when you're 60 from the high protein diets that's the problem there anyway metformin is currently being studied for the first time in the history of american studies as a drug just to extend
life not as a drug to treat a disease it's called the tame trial it's led in part by near barzillai who has a great book which you should check out i'll probably put it over here now you may have heard of rapamycin metformin affecting mtor but you may not have heard that the diabetes drugs sglt2 inhibitors and glp-1 agonists both inhibit mtor in some contexts and raise the expression of fgf21 that hormone that improves our metabolism in fact another drug i take that i've also talked about on the channel a lot ezetimibe also probably weekly
inhibits mtor and other drugs that i'm very fond of like the mood stabilizers lithium which will eventually cause kidney failure at high doses so we don't take that but sodium vaporwave which is much healthier these two drugs also potently increase the expression of fibroblast growth factor 21 fgf21 in the brain so a lot of these healthful drugs that we know about are modulating these exact pathways that we were talking about in the last video in fact these drugs uh a lot of their effect on our longevity is determined by these protein sensing pathways by in
specifically mimicking a non-fed state in us allowing these protective pathways to be activated and the growth pathways to be inactivated also the supplements that we think of being generally healthy modulate mtor and fgf21 for example resveratrol egcg from green tea curcumin um what else am i thinking of organo sulfur compounds from garlic as well as sulforaphane from cruciferous vegetables as well as berberine all inactivate emptor on the other hand other supplements like taurine for example activate fgf21 in fact curcumin both inactivates mtor and activates fgf21 and the supplement that i recommend in my anti-inflammatory stack
the alpha lipoic acid supplement not only by the way can reduce total cholesterol but also up regulates fgf21 alphalopoic acid seems to have some weak but uh desirable metabolic effects in general next let's consider how these principles are also used in the diets that are known to be the most healthful first of all caloric restriction as we know caloric restriction lowers mtor partially through lowering our consumption of proteins but protein restriction also extends life and some kinds of protein restriction like methionine restriction do this as well ketogenic diets extend life in rodents partially thought to
be due to their lower inclusion of protein in their diets partially through this reduction of protein ketogenic diets in humans lower igf-1 levels or sorry lower mtor expression next let's talk about if you remember from our first video nutrient restriction through certain times so time restricted eating which was popularized by sachin panda highly recommend this book the circadian quote time restricted eating extends the life of some species of animals and thought to be partially due to an encouragement of autophagy during the day autophagy being that consumption of proteins which would be inhibited by the consumption
of protein of our cells if we consume protein our body doesn't need to consume other proteins from the body so it inhibits autophagy so time restricted eating is thought to extend life in some species partially because of its reduced protein consumption during certain times of the day periodic fasting is shown to replicate uh the conditions of caloric restriction in rodents and to reduce the symptoms of aging in humans it's also shown to reduce igf-1 levels it seems to be that periodic fasting which means fasting for a few days thought to be between three to seven
days maybe every few months or every month this is periodic fasting what it does is cause basically a delayed if the person's in the right state so if somebody's on steroids and growth hormone it might not do this but if somebody's on a in a normal environment because steroids and growth hormone activate mtor also if somebody's in a normal environment and fast forward about five days or so they get reduced they get a change in their blood markers for about a week and a half to two weeks afterwards which we think indicates reduced mtor expression
so it can replicate that cyclical reduction in mtor expression that i said earlier may be the best course of action and finally even the green zone diets which were so popularized in the last couple of decades are also low protein so for example the okinawan diet has about 10 percent of its calories from protein which is on the lower end of the scale the uh mediterranean diet also has a lower protein content and specifically about 20 to 30 percent reduced content of methionine and leucine in its diet in fact the mediterranean diet has about 50
to 60 percent less animal protein than the western diet this is thought to be one of the reasons the mediterranean diet seems to extend life although i believe separately that the genetics of people living in the mediterranean is one of the reasons they live so long but this hasn't been studied specifically in these studies examining the mediterranean diet's effects on longevity unfortunately by the way this would be a great study if somebody's interested in doing it next let's take some practical conclusions just to show you guys how you can apply this information say you were
jay leno and you want to eat the western diet for the rest of your life you want to eat pizza burgers and that's sort of all you want to eat what could you do to mimic the low protein diet's effects on your health well first of all you could fast for example once a month a periodic fast say for three days but on the first day you could use five milligrams of rapamycin to quickly inhibit mtor and so therefore you could go through a cellular repair pathway once a month for example you could also obviously
do cardiovascular exercise which has the same impact sort of activating the amp kinase nutrient sensing pathway and inactivating mtor when it's certain kinds of aerobic exercise but you could also take drugs to mimic these effects long term not just once a month with rapamycin you could take metformin you could take empagliflozin or canagloflozin all your lung you could take a zetamide as well and there are also other drugs that have similar valuable effects you could also supplement with a high glycine content in your diet you could supplement with glycine several times a day to reduce
the methionine to mimic a low methionine diet you could also supplement with selenium which has growth restricting properties like some of the other supplements that we discussed and you could supplement with those other supplements there's so many of them like resveratrol berberine uh curcumin and so on now say you're a bodybuilder who has impaired kidney function and wants to protect his kidneys while he continues to grow what you may consider doing is never supplementing with protein it's clear from empirical experience you can ask chad nichols or anybody that's very very knowledgeable well there's nobody like
chad nichols but from from experience you can ask the top coaches in bodybuilding real meat and particularly some portion of red meat seems to yield the best results what i would think is it's much better for you to consume the majority of your protein from your diet and also to be able to then limit the protein that you consume by adding some supplemental leucine with every protein containing meal so if you consume like five grams of leucine with every protein containing meal you know you've activated mtor you don't really have to rely on the protein
for that now you can actually use the protein as a building block like lane norton or greg ducett would tell you to do so you could lower your protein consumption in totality but consume that leucine you would certainly never consume eaas or bcaas if you wanted to protect your kidneys while getting the most signaling and the lowest protein that you need so that's how i would go about it if you had concerns about your kidneys but wanted to grow as much as possible now what if you wanted to improve your metabolic health as a super
heavyweight strength athlete or bodybuilder that is that has emptor activated all the time as you guys have seen these athletes often are insulin resistant i believe this is one of the reasons for their visceral fat in their abdomens from the research we just discussed you could go through cycles of lowering your amino acid consumption lowering your protein in your diet and raising maybe just leucine because it has good effects on on you know lean tissue retention and fat reduces fat deposition and so on but you're basically trying to reduce isoleucine valine tryptophan and threonine in
your diet so you would lower total protein consumption and consume some leucine that's the way to go about that but in my opinion that's not the best way to improve your insulin sensitivity to be honest with you fgf21 may be very valuable but i think the most valuable thing is actually to get rid of visceral fat so an a sudden period of periodic fasting like i described in my video called how to shrink your waist check that out i think that's a much more valuable and efficient way for these people to regain insulin sensitivity even
though i described the fgf21 pathway and how it's used extensively i think that's more useful for people that are not competitive athletes and don't have to be that efficient they can know that a low protein diet may be better for their metabolic health in the long term for an athlete i think fasting sparingly is very efficient at uh um rejuvenating the insulin sensitivity of the person i don't know which word to use but the point is fasting is more efficient i think there so i would rather fast than do this complex amino acid modulation thing
to upregulate fgf21 what if you're a bodybuilder that's a vegan what would you want to do knowing what we just learned well you would probably want to supplement with leucine and potentially also with glutamine and arginine to make sure you activate emptor you may need to supplement with other things like choline and b vitamins to make sure you're healthy but these three amino acids should be enough to fully activate mtor for you then you only really have to worry about amino acids for building blocks as opposed to this nutrient sensing pathway because otherwise as a
vegan you're missing essentially meat eaters are compared to you sort of like people who take steroids they have a special part of their life that activates mtor unless you get your leucine and to a lesser degree arginine and glutamine you're not going to have that ability to compete with them to the same level finally what if you wanted to have good skin but wanted to live very long what you might do is have a vegan diet or low protein diet and potentially supplement with collagen proteins i have noticed and others have noticed that collagen peptides
seem to particularly improve the visible health of skin you might also want to consider adding rapamycin topically to the skin that you're particularly concerned about you may be able to rejuvenate your skin there just by modulating these growth pathways so these are some examples of how you can use this information in your own life i hope they were helpful next let's take some takeaways regarding supplements what could we know about supplementation from what we just learned well first of all we know that bcaas are probably not ideal leucine is the most important bcaa for mtor
activation and other amino acids are useful for your health as building blocks why would you isolate leucine with isoleucine so you can never change the ratio of leucine to isoleucine which is the most important thing we discovered about branched chain amino acids what i'm trying to say here is when you supplement bcaas you don't get the full nutritional value of a supplemental whey protein but you do get isoleucine which we know worsens metabolic health particularly so i would never use a bcaa the second thing is an essential amino acid why would i use the nine
essential amino acids altogether instead of a protein supplement there isn't really a reason i would but taking the eas i necessarily get a certain ratio of amino acids and i ensure that i get tryptophan and threonine there thereby inhibiting the activity of fgf21 so eas and bcaas are probably not that useful as supplements but on the other hand we learned that leucine is a very useful supplement we learned that glycine is a very useful supplement we learned that arginine arginine for other reasons is also useful but we won't get into that here and glutamine also
for other reasons both may be very useful supplements so there are some outcomes in terms of our supplement choice for the future and finally should supplement formulators make an emptor inactivating product that contains for example glycine selenium curcumin so on should they make an emptor activating product that contains methionine and leucine so that for example vegans can get methionine methionine leucine arginine glutamine these are some questions that should be left to supplement formulators in the future i think there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of amino acid supplementation and combined products anyway friends
i hope this video was a bit more practical and helpful for you and help to put things into perspective in the next video on this subject i'm just gonna go through in a relaxed form just answering your questions from instagram on the subject of protein hopefully clarifying any remaining misunderstandings that come from my inability to communicate very well but thank you so much for your patience friends see you again tomorrow morning [Music] you
