yeah well let's let's talk a little bit about so the protein intake and you you're talking about
people giving pushback you know they're you know the there there definitely are animal studies that
have looked at you know caloric restriction and protein restriction and its effect on
how lab rodents live and how healthy they live and um i i just i think that
as you and i have talked off off camera um you know there's there's a lot of different
types of people that are in different life stages we've got obese people like sedentary that could
probably benefit from caloric restriction we've got young healthy active physically active people
that are probably needing more protein intake we've got the older people that are battling
sarcopenia that probably need more protein intake um and then we have the whole fasting community
community so i mean it's like i've had a lot of fasting experts on the podcast as you know and
and i think what what needs to what a better job it needs to be done is basically just talking
about the audience talking about okay who who are we speaking to here with this specific thing we're
talking about right because it's important there's different people in different stages of life
and then um i think also with some of the protein restriction as well it's
very similar and and i've listened to some of the things that you've talked about with
you know extrapolating data from lab animals specifically on caloric restriction and dietary
restriction protein restriction to humans um may be a little murky because of something called this
disuse and disease that humans are just so susceptible to so can you talk a little
bit about it because it makes so much sense yeah i i mean the writer's statement i think
and the the disclaimer right at the start is to say tremendous amount of respect for the science
of the people that do the studies around caloric restriction protein restriction etc most of it is
done as you mentioned in in lab animals mostly small rodents so usually mice or rats sometimes
and you know i think one of the things that's important to to to point out
is when we've compared primates head to head so this is in caloric restriction arguably the most
robust model of survival extending life span the data is actually conflicting it's only been done
obviously in two different locations and so if you were a primate you know in one location you you
did better than primates in the other but the net result was it actually didn't extend lifespan so
that sort of makes you think okay maybe there's it's not as clear-cut as you might think obviously
small rodents they're mammals so the extrapolation to us is often done drug companies do it all the
time i understand i think the thing that i focus on the most is around there's a caged animal
that has a lives in a very controlled environment and food is you know there is no fluctuation in
food it sort of held it here or here because it's given or taken away from the animal so
you know choice is taken away from the animal the human beings are notoriously sometimes
great sometimes not so much at making and you know these animals aren't exposed to a lot of
the same stressors so one of the concepts that we um and it was something in reading
a good friend of mine doug padden jones who you know sadly passed away really early in his life
pointed out at these catabolic crises that we have and for him it meant a period of hospitalization
and during this defen this event the de facto treatment in hospital is you go into bed rest
and we've known for years that you know putting people in bed rest and you can ask any clinician
it's a bad situation you're not using your muscles everything because you become instantly sedentary
obviously and it it would exacerbate a lot of other issues if you went into the bed rest with
type 2 diabetes you were overweight you etc etc so these events you can appreciate bed rest in a
catabolic crisis if you've got a hospital event is yeah that's going to be bad i get that so we sort
of said well dial it back a little bit maybe you get flu and you're an older person you get some
respiratory distress you go into hospital for a few days you're on oxygen uh but you're now
you're fine to be released from the hospital but you go home and convalesce for two weeks so this
is a disuse event relatively speaking but you're okay but you sit around for two weeks and we think
as you get older even those types of events are a disuse event that we think precipitates an issue
and i was fond of saying that well you know this happens every year in uh well happens everywhere
people get the flu and i said but there's maybe a uniquely if not canadian but northern u.s
phenomenon that when it's freezing cold outside you also as an older person you don't go outside
you don't want to shovel your snow you could slip you could you know so and clinicians would
say yeah but you know how often does that happen then covet comes along and i said happens a lot
so i feel a little bit of vindication i said this is a relevant model um and what happens is if you
can imagine somebody's they're already going down because sarcopenia is happening when they have a
disuse event they they bend the curve dramatically so there's an accelerated rate of muscle loss and
what happens when you're younger you go down but you're able to bounce back up at some point and
this is universally i think understood by clinicians is that an older person that has that
event like that is actually now on a different downward trajectory so they've actually hopped
you know they've accelerated the loss that they have with aging to a fairly large degree the best
you know way to explain it to people is to say you put somebody up in space because there's
no gravity that's effectively disused because you can't really generate any force with your
muscles and we know that you know six months or a year spending up at the space station is about
10 to 15 years of skeletal and muscle aging and it's tough to get back in fact most of those
astronauts i'd be willing to bet don't get much of that back when they come even down to earth
so that's the price you pay for a little bit of weightlessness for about six months to a year wow
uh yeah that's incredible about the astronauts but just speaking to like what you were saying
with the disuse and disease again it makes a lot of sense because laboratory rodents are
not really exposed to that they're in these little sterile environments or you know so
you know i think you know again at the end of the day just to kind of get this i think to make it
clear to people listening here today you know i i still do think there are benefits to different
types of intermittent fasting for different people and whether we're talking about someone that's
obese and overweight um you know being having a form of caloric deficit which can be achieved
a lot of ways including probably the best i mean like exercise if exercise is probably
the cornerstone of health span right i mean like that's absolutely i think we agree there yeah but
but also like there's different types of fasting you know there's a constant color restriction like
we're just talking about um but there's also just not eating two to three hours before bed sure and
that's something that i think most people can benefit from honestly because you're you know
you're not that as insulin sensitive later in the evening and it's nice to have a period where you
do have some rest yeah digestion and everything so lots of types of fasting and uh you know that all
gets lost again when we just kind of talk about it in this big umbrella kind of type of generalism
you