Ep. #648: Says You! Protein and Longevity, Collagen Supplementation, and Gun Laws

Hello and welcome to Muscle for Life. I’m your host, Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today. Now, I’ve written and recorded a lot of evidence-based stuff over the years on just about everything you can imagine relating to building muscle, losing fat. And getting healthy. I’ve also worked with thousands and thousands of men and women of all ages and circumstances and helped them get into the best shape of their life.

But that does not mean you should just blindly swallow everything I say, because let’s face it, nobody is always right about everything, and especially in fields like diet and exercise, which are always. Thanks to the efforts of honest and hardworking researchers and thought leaders, and that’s why I’m always happy to hear from people who disagree with me, especially when they have good arguments and evidence to back up their assertions.

Sometimes I can’t quite get on board with their positions, but sometimes I end up learning something and either way, I always appreciate the discussion and that gave. The idea for this series of podcast episodes, which I call says you, where I publicly address things that people disagree with me on, and I share my perspective.

It’s kind of like a spicier q and a. So what I do is every couple of weeks I ask people who follow me on Instagram at Muscle Life Fitness, please follow me what they disagree with me on, and then I pick a few of the more common or interesting contentions to address here on the podcast. So if there’s something that you disagree with me on, and it can be related to diet, exercise.

Supplementation business, lifestyle. I don’t care anything. Go follow me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness and look for my saysyou story that I put up every couple of weeks where I solicit content for these episodes. Or just shoot me an email, [email protected]. Alright, so here is what I’ll be tackling in today’s episode.

You recommend too much protein and meat in general to be healthy. Blue zones. Don’t eat much meat and don’t need much protein. That is from Amy ddot from Instagram, and then collagen supplementation is more beneficial than you acknowledge. This is from Duke. Duke, oh seven. From Instagram and all gun laws are an infringement from long shot 1792, again from Instagram.

Also, if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my v i P one-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages. All circumstances, lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible.

And we can do the same for you. We make getting fitter, leaner, and stronger. Paint by numbers simple by carefully managing. Every aspect of your training and your diet for you. Basically, we take out all of the guesswork, so all you have to do is follow the plan and watch your body change day after day, week after week and month after month.

What’s more, we’ve found that people are often missing just one or two crucial pieces of the. And I’d bet a shiny shackle. It’s the same with you. You’re probably doing a lot of things right, but dollars to donuts, there’s something you’re not doing correctly or at all that’s giving you the most grief.

Maybe it’s your calories or your macros. Maybe it’s your exercise selection. Maybe it’s your food choices. Maybe you’re not progressively overloading your muscles, or maybe it’s something else and whatever it is. Here’s what’s important. Once you identify those one or two things you’re missing, once you figure it out, that’s when everything finally clicks.

That’s when you start making serious progress, and that’s exactly what we do for our clients. To learn more, head over to www.buy legion.com. That’s b y legion.com/. V I p and schedule your free consultation call, which by the way is not a high pressure sales call. It’s really just a discovery call where we get to know you better and see if you’re a good fit for the service.

And if you’re not for any reason, we will be able to share resources that’ll point you in the right direction. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, and if you also want to finally stop spinning your wheels and make more progress in the next. Then you did in the last few years.

Check out my VIP coaching [email protected] legion.com/v. Okay, let’s start at the top with the first challenge from Amy d dot over from Instagram. And she says that I recommend too much protein and too much meat in general to be healthy. And she also mentions that people in the blue zone areas of the world don’t eat.

Much meat and they don’t eat much protein. And it’s true that compared to the average American people living in the blue zones do tend to eat less protein and they tend to live longer. And that of course, is a good indication of strong health. If you are unhealthy, you do not live as long as you would if you were healthy.

That isn’t to say, however, that these people are healthier because they eat less protein. This is a. Case of correlation and not causation. There are many different factors that can account for the disparity in longevity between blues owners and people in other countries. You have cultural differences, you have social differences.

For example, in comparison to the average American people living in Blue zones are generally more active. That is hugely important. They generally report less stress. They feel they have a greater purpose in life. They eat less food in. and certainly less processed meat or highly processed meat and carbs.

Unlike US Americans who generally love highly processed foods, these people also eat more fruits and vegetables than the average American does. They drink alcohol more judiciously, more moderately. They have a strong sense of community and they tend to place more emphasis on. Strong family relationships in particular.

And so when you consider all that, it is obviously wrong to latch onto protein and meat intake as the key things that are driving these positive outcomes. It is very clear when you review the research on these people in more detail that there aren’t many reasons they live so well. And I would argue that a lower protein intake is not one of them.

I would argue that they would do. Better on average if they ate more protein, not less. And the reason for that is all the research we have on the benefits of high protein dieting, which beats low protein dieting in just about every meaningful way. For example, studies show that you preserve more muscle when you follow a high protein diet, and that is particularly important as.

Older because the slow degenerative loss of muscle that’s associated with aging known as sarcopenia is debilitative and even life-threatening, because research shows that the more muscle you lose as you age, the more likely you are to die of various causes related to injury and disease. And on the flip side, the more muscle you have, ta.

Older, the less likely you are to get badly hurt or badly sick. And that’s to say nothing of the improvement in quality of life because the more muscle you have as you get older, the stronger your body is going to be functional, your body is going to be, which is going to allow you to do all kinds of things that you will still want to do, like go to the gym for.

Now coming back to high protein dieting, not only is a high protein diet important for building and retaining muscle at any age, research shows that as we get older, our body’s ability to process protein declines. And so we actually need more protein to obtain similar effects as when we were younger. So when we were younger, we may be able to maximize muscle growth with, let’s say, Eight grams of protein per pound of body weight per day.

However, when we get older, let’s say 50 plus, just to put a a number to it that may need to become one gram per pound of body weight per day to maximize muscle and strength gain, and the same would go for muscle retention. There is less research that I am aware of on the bare minimum amount of protein required to just maintain the muscle mass we have, especially among US resistance trained people.

However, let’s say it’s in the range of 0.6 to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day. If we are anywhere up to maybe 40 to 50 years old, and then as we get older, that may become 0.8 to one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. Again, Optimize muscle retention. Another major benefit of high protein dieting with a lot of evidence behind it is its effects on appetite.

You feel more satiated, you feel fuller after meals that include a fair amount of protein, and that of course, helps you regulate your food intake and prevent overeating because you are just generally less hungry when you. Enough protein when you eat a high protein diet, and that is also important at any age, but particularly as we get older, because the negative consequences associated with being overweight and especially obese are magnified as time goes on.

When we are in our twenties and thirties, we can get away with being too fat. Aside from aesthetic, there may be no immediate or obvious negative side effects or downsides to carrying around too much body fat when we are younger. But as we get older, we lose our aura of invincibility and the details start to matter more.

And body fatness is a major. So if our goal is to maintain a healthy body fat level as we get older, and to put numbers to that, let’s say somewhere around 15% in men and 25% in women is totally fine. Could be a bit higher as well, could be a bit lower, but not higher than 20% in men and 30% in women.

Then we wanna make sure we can control our calorie intake and we’re gonna wanna be able to do that intuitively. We’re gonna wanna be able to do that listening to our body’s natural. Cues for hunger and fullness. We are not going to want to have to plan and track and measure every food we eat and every calorie we eat at all times.

At least. Most of us don’t want to do that. And if we want to keep our bodies appetite of signals, so to speak, as clean and clear as possible, if we want to keep the noise to a bare minimum, then we. To eat enough protein and enough means a lot by the average person’s standards because the average person eats very little protein.

They eat a low protein diet. And speaking about appetite and body composition, studies show that you will lose more fat when you are restricting your calories by eating enough protein, and you may also experience fewer unpleasant side effects. Associa. Dieting, like mood disturbance, stress fatigue, and just general diet dissatisfaction.

Now, one reason low protein dieting is popular in some longevity circles among people who are primarily interested in increasing longevity is the claim that it actually will speed up aging by increasing the production of insulin-like growth hormone igf. And other chemical messengers in the body that increase tissue growth, oxidative stress and cellular damage.

And by restricting protein intake, the story goes, we can decrease those unwanted side effects and we can reduce wear and tear in the body and we can lower our risk for disease and dysfunction. And I don’t wanna get off on too much of a tangent here and spend too much time talking about protein. But the long story short is, it’s a nice theory, but research suggests it’s probably wrong because the hypotheses are based mostly on animal research and mice research.

And while humans and mice do. Share many similar biological mechanisms. We are not big rodents as the scientists like to say, and this is particularly true with metabolic activities because mice burn way more calories per pound of body weight than us humans, about seven times more to be. Precise. And of course the faster the metabolism, then the more cellular damage that accumulates.

And mice then theoretically could stand to benefit from protein restriction more than we can because their metabolisms run so, Quickly. And as far as human research goes, there are no long-term studies on how restricting protein intake may affect lifespan in humans. But the research we do have, the data that we do have suggests that there isn’t much benefit to be had.

There was a study that was conducted by scientists at Texas a and m University, and they concluded based on the data that we currently have, if you were to reduce your protein intake to the absolute minimum, Required to maintain health, which is about 12% of your daily calories at age 18. And if you kept it there for the rest of your life, you may be able to increase your lifespan by about three years.

Three years? Yeah. Not very exciting. What’s more the researchers didn’t take into account in this study? The fact that low protein dieting is associated with many negative side effects. The things have already talked about muscle loss, bone fractures, frailty, and those things pose a considerable threat to longevity.

So I think that you could reasonably argue that low protein dieting to increase longevity is stepping over dollars to pick up dimes. Okay, so much for my thoughts on high versus low protein intake. Let’s move on to the next point, which is collagen supplementation is more beneficial than you acknowledge.

And this was from Duke, duke oh seven over on Instagram, and I think he is referring to my position on collagen protein supplementing with collagen protein. And there is a big difference between collagen protein and the collagen that is in my joint supplement, fortify, for example, ENA. Type two collagen.

So collagen protein is trash tear protein. That’s my criticism of it. Why are we supplementing with protein? Why are we eating protein primarily to get essential amino acids? Right? The amino acids that our body cannot create cannot synthesize from other substances that we must get from our diet. And because we are a bunch of meatheads, we particularly care about leucine, the essential amino acid leucine the one that directly stimulates muscle growth.

When we eat protein, we want to make sure that it. Abundance of essential amino acids, and we want to make sure that it has a high bioavailability that our body can actually absorb and use most of the protein that the food contains. And ideally, it would also contain a lot of leucine in particular. Now while collagen protein is easy to digest and while it is well-absorbed by the body, its amino acid profile is severely lacking in essential amino acids.

In particular, the three primary amino acids in collagen protein are glycine, proline, and hydroxyproline, none of which are essential amino acids or are required or even really helpful. Muscle building and collagen is about 2.7%. Leucine by weight, which is low Beef protein, for example, is around 8% leucine by weight, and whey protein is about 10% leucine by weight.

And so that alone is reason enough, at least for me to skip collagen protein. That is why Legion does not sell collagen protein, for example. There’s just no reason to use it over. Whey or casing or soy. If you’re a woman and if you’re a man, you can probably use soy without any negative side effects as well.

However, some men do see an increase in estrogen when they eat soy protein regularly, so that’s why I tell guys to skip soy. And if you want to go with something plant-based, just go with rice protein or pea protein, or ideally a combination of rice and pea protein and let’s see. Protein can be okay. It is the lowest quality milk derived protein supplement that you’re gonna find out there.

So it’s often used by shady companies who want to keep their costs as low as possible and provide the lowest quality product possible. Of course not claiming that, but that’s usually why milk protein is used. However, milk protein isolate is viable for our purposes. Uh, egg protein is as well, although it is probably still super expensive.

I stopped looking some time ago. And so with all of these options that are tasty and that contain a lot of essential amino acids and a lot of leucine, again, why choose collagen protein, some people would say, because it will also make you look prettier. It will improve the look of your hair, skin, and nails, and there isn’t much in the way of clinical evidence of this.

There is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence. However, what collagen protein marketers will not tell you is any benefits that people. Have experienced, and I do understand there are people out there who will say, no, trust me. Here, here are pictures. You can look before and after one month of supplementing with collagen protein, here’s how my skin looked, or here is how my nails looked or how they felt, or my hair, and here’s how they looked.

Or felt after, and there is a clear difference. I acknowledge that. However, it is almost certainly due to the glycine because there is evidence that glycine can have these types of effects. And the neat thing about glycine is it is very cheap. You can buy it in bulk on Amazon, for example, and it’s tasty, it’s sweet, so you can mix it into your daily protein shake, your whey protein shake, for example, if you.

Oh, and something else neat about glycine is it can improve sleep quality and it can also decrease the negative side effects associated with under sleeping. If you take a couple of grams, about 30 minutes for bed, then you may see benefits there as well. So that is my main criticism of collagen supplementation.

It is collagen protein in particular. I should also mention that type one collagen doesn’t seem to have any benefits, but type two collagen, which is the type of collagen that makes up the cartilage in our. Joints is a very useful supplement and that’s why it is included in legion’s, joint supplement, fortify.

And basically what it does is it reduces an autoimmune response that can occur in the body that eats away at joint cartilage, which then can cause arthritis over time. It teaches the body to stop attacking cartilage, and the mechanism is kind of neat. It kind of works like a vaccine by supplementing with a small amount every day your body.

To recognize it as benign, to stop attacking it, and therefore that extends to the joints, to the cartilage and your joints because again, they are comprised of type two collagen. And if you wanna learn more about that, just head over to legion athletics.com, go to our store, go to the product Fortify, which is our joint support product, and then find undenatured type two collagen on the product page in the ingredients breakdown section and read about.

If you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my v i p one-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages and circumstances lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible. And we can do the same for you.

All right. Let’s now move on to the final point for this episode, which is all gun laws are an infringement, and this comes from long shot 1792 over on Instagram. And anyone familiar with my political views, which are hard to classify, I am often asked if I consider myself conservative or liberal or libertarian or something else, and I don’t have a great answer.

I would say that my views are. Eclectic tapestry, if you will, of paleo conservatism and classical liberalism and fully explaining that would require an entire episode unto itself. But I digress. Point being, I have made it clear on my Instagram where I share spicy memes that I am very amendment. But in this case, I disagree.

I do not. Any of our rights are absolute take. The First Amendment, for example, we get to say a lot of things, but we don’t get to yell fire in a crowded theater. We don’t get to divulge state secrets that would endanger American lives or take the Fourth Amendment, for example. The government certainly has the right to forcibly enter our home if they have.

That we have committed a crime or that we are in the process of committing a crime and so forth. And that logic applies to guns because while the Second Amendment absolutely affirms our right US civilians, not just police and soldiers and militia to own guns, it is not an unlimited, right? So for example, it makes sense that people who have been deemed mentally ill or people who have.

Felonies or violent misdemeanors should not be allowed to own guns, and this is already the case by the way, although it is probably not consistently or equitably enforced. The laws are on the books. And just to drive this point home, let’s take it to its logical extreme, despite what some libertarians.

Have you believe it makes sense to bar us civilians from owning nukes, for example, and it probably makes sense to have some kind of vetting process for owning explosives. I mean, even the founding fathers, including George Washington, temporarily disarmed some of the men responsible for Shay’s rebellion shortly after the American Revolution.

And this was a short-lived rebellion against what some people believed to be unfair economic conditions in Massachusetts. And so based on the reasoning I just shared with you, I disagree with the statement that all gun laws are an infringement. However, where I do agree with long shot 1792 is that many of these so-called common sense gun laws, Are infringements on our Second Amendment rights, and to understand why I think that you have to first understand what the real meaning of the Second Amendment is because it is not about guaranteeing our right to hunt deer or to collect antique muskets.

And while it is partly about the right to defend ourselves from criminals, the primary reason. James Madison and the other founders signed. The Second Amendment into law was to enable Americans to defend themselves against a tyrannical government. That is why the Second Amendment exists. Its main purpose was to ensure that we would have the means to prevent a corrupt, oppressive government from an acting unconstitutional policies and infringing on our many other rights, such as our right to free speech and our.

To a speedy trial and so forth. And I should also mention that the founders believed that to accomplish that, best American civilians should have access to similar weapons as the military. And of course that just makes logical sense. If all we were allowed to own today was, let’s say, Flint lock pistols, how afraid of us do you think a tyrannical.

Would be, how much of a threat would we really pose to the standing armies, for example? That said, should we be able to head on down to Walmart and pick up some grenades and some rocket launchers? And should multimillionaires and billionaires be able to amass a fleet of. Tanks and fighter jets. Yeah, most people would agree that society would probably be better off if such ordinance was not available to us.

Civilians, and you can also reasonably argue they don’t need stuff like that to win against a modern military and to deter authoritarianism, especially if you are skilled in guerrilla warfare. Now, what about semi-automatic pistols and rifles? Should we be allowed to own those? And by the way, if you are not familiar with guns in AR 15, as scary as it might look, and as it might sound even to some people, at least it is a semi-automatic rifle, one trigger pole.

One bullet. The primary differences between the AR 15 and the Glock pistol is you can shoot a lot more accurately with the AR 15 if you are trained with it, and you can shoot deadlier ammo from it and carry around more of that ammunition in a magazine. . And so then should we be allowed to own that type of weapon and should we be allowed to own a semi-automatic pistol?

Some people say, no, we should only be allowed to own hunting rifles and antique relics. Old stuff. The flint lock pistols, for example, and many of the gun laws. That politicians have proposed, have been designed to restrict our access to certain types of firearms or just firearms generally, and many of them have been very unconstitutional.

For example, the National Firearms Act of 1934 applied a $200 tax to short barreled rifles and shotguns, silencers and machine guns. So machine gun means fully automatic. You can hold down the trigger and shoot a bunch of bullets, and $200 doesn’t sound like a lot, but that was about $4,000 in today’s money.

And the reason the government did that is the Roosevelt administration wasn’t able to ban those weapons outright and those accessories in the case of a silencer. So they just decided to. Cost of owning them so high that most people couldn’t afford them. But then of course, you just had gangsters like Al Capone, who could still buy them legally, and you had other people like John Dillinger who would just steal them from the government.

Another example is the assault weapons ban of 1994 that outlawed the most common kind of rifle in the United States, the AR 15, which actually isn’t any more deadly than other modern semi-automatic rifles and is. Much less powerful than a hunting rifle. A hunting rifle shoots, or can shoot much deadlier ammunition than an AR 15 ironically.

And then you have legislation that can seem logical at first glance, like red flag laws that can also be problematic to use a trendy term. So in case you don’t know, red flag. Or more accurately known as gun violence. Restraining orders are laws that allow someone, such as the police or a neighbor, to petition the court to temporarily deny someone access to firearms if they are deemed to pose a danger to themselves or to others.

And if the court agrees, then the person is required to surrender their weapons that they do have, if they. To the police or police officers can actually just come and take the weapons by force and that restriction can remain in place for however long the court decides. And it can also be renewed at the end of the initial period.

And while that definitely can sound like a good idea and can be useful, In certain cases, and it can work if it’s executed properly. It also opens the door to obvious abuses. What if an angry ex-girlfriend wants to get back at her ex-boyfriend by claiming that he is an abusive, violent psycho or vice versa?

What if a disgruntled or vindictive cop decides to get back at someone who wronged him by having. Firearms taken away. And what if the government decides to declare anyone guilty of hate speech, a violent criminal? Don’t think that can’t happen. We are moving in that direction. I mean, right now you have a lot of people in mainstream circles claiming that words are equal to violence.

The wrong words are equal to physical violence as far as the injury they inflict. And some people are even saying that silence is literal. Violence is just as bad as committing violence against people. And then if a court were to agree with these people, if we were to take that phenomenon to its logical extreme, and you have a court that says, yes, you’re right, theoretically we could be disarmed for saying words that other people don’t like that upset other people.

Or by not saying the words they want us to say by not openly proclaiming the. Right ideology. So essentially in their current form, red flag laws give the government a huge amount of power. It’s almost like a loophole around the Second Amendment to disarm us, and it gives us citizens a little recourse to get our guns and our right to own guns.

Back. And so those are a few examples of infringements of the Second Amendment, and there are many others. I would say most of the gun laws proposed by politicians over the last 100 years or so are outright encroachments on the Second Amendment. Not all, but certainly many, and maybe even. So I will end this one where we began and say that claiming that all gun laws are infringements of our second amendment right is kind of like saying that all taxes are theft.

Maybe it’s well-intentioned, but it is also an oversimplification that stems from a legitimate grievance but doesn’t hold up to logical scrutiny obviously. A functional government and society needs to collect taxes, and that process is usually plagued by corruption. Very true malfeasance. Very true graft.

Very true. And it’s understandable why so many of us resent. Paying taxes and resent paying more taxes. But we also enjoy many benefits on the personal and societal level that have been paid for with taxes and that continue to be paid for with taxes. So for my part, while I agree with us individuals using the tax system legally to reduce the amount of taxes that we have to pay, and particularly income taxes, I don’t agree.

For example, mega corporations like Google, employing armies of accountants and lawyers to figure out very creative ways to move money around and to effectively pay no taxes whatsoever. So while I do not agree with most people who point to multimillionaires and billionaires and say they’re not paying their fair share because he only paid.

17% income tax on his 92 million of income, and that’s not a fair share. I think those people are generally ignorant and are hypocrites, and that is just as important. I think many of those people would do exactly the same thing if they were in the shoes of the multimillionaire or the billionaire. And it is also ironic when you consider the amount of taxes in absolute numbers, not relative numbers.

Because many of these wealthy people who are accused by the peanut gallery of not paying their fair share are paying more taxes in absolute terms in a single year than their detractors will pay in their entire lifetime. . And so anyway, my point is when I hear someone claiming that someone else is not paying their fair share of taxes, I immediately assume that envy is the real problem here, not systemic wealth inequality.

However, when mega corporations like Google Pay 0% taxes or close to 0% taxes on billions of dollars of profits, that is not paying their fair share. That is actually. Playing fair. It is cheating the game, and that is not a victimless crime. By the way. We are all the victims of such crimes because governments love to spend money and they love to spend more and more money.

And while they wish that they could just print it all, they do have to balance that with taxes. And so they do have to continue raising taxes to continue spending more. And when you have mega corporations not contributing the way that they should be according to the rules of the game, where does that money come from?

Oh, that’s right. It comes from us. The suckers who have to play by the rules. Alright, my lovely Muscle for life, family. That’s all I have for you today in this episode of Says You. I hope you liked it. And here’s a little quick preview of what I have coming next. I have a monologue on eating and training during your menstrual.

I have an interview I did with Pat Flynn on Religion. I have a best of muscle for life coming as well as another q and a and I am going to be doing one q and a per week going forward because those episodes always do really well and many people have requested that I do more. All right. Well, that’s it for this episode.

I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don’t mind doing me a favor, please do leave a quick review on iTunes or. Wherever you’re listening to me from, in whichever app you’re listening to me in, because that not only convinces people that they should check out the show, it also increases search visibility, and thus, it helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier, and happier as well.

And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any new stuff. And if you didn’t like something about the show, please do shoot me an email at mike muscle for life.com. Just muscle f o r life.com and share your thoughts on how I can do this better.

I read everything myself, and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, even if it. Criticism, I’m open to it and of course you can email me if you have positive feedback as well, or if you have questions really relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email.

That is the best way to get ahold of me, Mike, at multiple life.com. And that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.