How Much Protein Do You Really Need Over 50 Years Old?

How much protein do you really need over 50 years old.

So how much protein do we really need over 50 years old? The answer to that question depends on a lot of variables including how active we are, how much body fat we are carrying and what our goals are. If you are watching this video it is fairly safe to say that you are looking to get in better shape and build some muscle, because we can get fit and build muscle at any age.

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So let’s take a look at the minimum requirements first. The minimum daily recommend intake of protein is .8 grams of protein per kg of body weight per day or .36 grams per pound. Now they did a study with a group of 20 healthy people between the ages of 52 and 70 with half the group eating the minimum recommend amount of protein and the other half had 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight or .68 grams per pound, almost double.

One of the rules in order to be a participant in this study was that they couldn’t be doing regular resistance training. As what they really wanted to find out was if there was any benefit in increasing protein above the minimum requirement for people over 50 who weren’t actively trying to build muscle as our need for protein goes up when we are resistance training.

What they found was after four days the high protein intake resulted in increased rates of muscle protein synthesis which improved the protein balance creating an anabolic response. This anabolic response helps to protect us from muscle loss due to aging and inactivity.

So increasing daily protein to 1.5 grams per kg for non training adults has been shown to offset anabolic resistance which is basically the bodies reduced ability to repair muscle in response to ingesting protein and this happens with age, but what about those of us who are active and hard training?

They compared master triathletes with the average age of 53 to some younger athletes. Their average age was 27. This was a diet controlled study with all participants having their protein being set at 1.6g per kg of body weight per day. Which is only slightly more than what was used in the previous study we talked about with the untrained older adults.

They had them do a half hour downhill run to create muscle damage. Post exercise they were all given a drink containing 20g of protein. Which has been shown to maximally stimulate muscle protein synthesis in young athletes.

Over the next 3 days they continued to train and had their rate of muscle protein synthesis analyzed over this time. The younger athletes recovered faster and the rate of muscle protein synthesis was higher than in the master athletes. But these master athletes were very highly trained. Training a minimum of 10 hours a week. So the conclusion they came to in this study is that this higher level of fitness did not offset the need for higher protein intake in older people.

They referenced some other studies that showed older sedentary adults had an improved muscle protein synthesis single dose response to as much as 40g of protein where younger adults response peaked at 20 grams.

Muscle recovery can take as long as 48 to 72 hours. Which is why daily protein intake is important.

This study hypothesized that the master athletes might have recovered better with a greater protein intake.

Based on these two studies I think it is safe to say that we should be keeping our protein intake over 1.6 grams per kg of bodyweight or .72 grams per pound. Which is still under the traditional bodybuilding rule of thumb of a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight.

I would actually like to move away from using bodyweight as the basis for figuring out how much protein we need. For if we take two men with the exact same lean body mass, but one man is at 15% body fat and the other is at 25% body fat. Based on body weight the man with 25% body fat would be needlessly eating more protein. Which is why I would rather use percentage of over all calories insuring we have enough calories available for all our nutritional needs. I would recommend that we keep our protein intake towards the upper end of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering And Medicine’s recommendation which would make 30 to 35% of our diet being protein.

Study comparing over 50 athletes to young; https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/fulltext/2016/08000/Lower_Integrated_Muscle_Protein_Synthesis_in.22.aspx

https://journals.lww.com/acsm-essr/fulltext/2013/07000/Anabolic_Resistance_of_Muscle_Protein_Synthesis.6.aspx#O3-6-4

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