Precision nutrition is an emerging area of research combined with what has also been called precision medicine that aims to improve personalised treatment of disease, and precision nutrition is specific to dietary intake. Both develop interventions to prevent or treat chronic diseases based on each person's unique characteristics, such as DNA, race, gender, health history and lifestyle habits.
This is a breakthrough because science is finally understanding that each person is different and may have a different response to specific foods and nutrients, so the best diet for one individual may be very different from the best diet for another. But, apart from improving the treatment of disease, precision nutrition can help you achieve your goals in terms of weight loss, loss of excess body fat or improving your athletic performance.
What I have suggested since I started publishing my health articles is that you listen to your body, see how it reacts to certain practices, certain foods, certain supplements, so that you yourself can determine and structure your dietary programme, diet, or simply how you eat, but also considering your lifestyle and level of physical activity.
I believe that, in a way, when you eat your food or choose a dish from a restaurant menu, you already consider if a food does not suit you, or, on the contrary, you see that it is on the menu, and you feel that this is what you ‘need’ to eat. There, you are intuitively applying precision eating.
Now, before we get into the amount of protein required per day, you will know that I advocate a diverse diet that is primarily plant-based, good quality complete protein, and healthy fat that is part of the preparation of a food or as a component of a salad, for example.
I believe that all foods have a place in nutrition, and I do not think it is appropriate to demonise any of them, not even sugar.
However, the standards that shape our society today induce a mostly sedentary lifestyle where people spend 8 hours or more sitting in an office in front of a computer, feeding themselves with ultra-processed ready-to-eat meals, little time to attend to their physical and emotional health; and managing stress levels that not even deep rest can counteract.
But today I am not going to stage a revolution to fight the system. Once again, I am going to prompt your criteria and provide you with the tools here so that you can determine how much protein your body requires on a daily basis, taking into account your health status, age, lifestyle and level of physical activity.
Remember that protein is one of the macronutrients that make up our diet along with carbohydrates and fats, although I include water as well.
Depending on your precision nutrition or rather, your needs in terms of the amount you require for your age, possible health conditions and level of physical activity, today I present you with the most up-to-date and corroborated information I have had access to regarding the consumption and effect of protein on your body.
In a recent interview by Dr. Rhonda Patrick with Dr. Luc Van Loon, Professor of Exercise Physiology and Nutrition and head of the M3 research group at the Department of Human Biology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, Dr. Van Loon pointed out that
‘Proteins are constantly being synthesised and broken down in the body at a rate of 1-2% per day,
‘Proteins are constantly being synthesised and broken down in the body at a rate of 1-2% per day, which means that every 100 days you practically have new muscle’, and this is true at any age!
But pay attention, because it depends on your activity whether in 100 days that muscle will reflect the body of a trained person, a bodybuilder, a person emaciated by a sedentary lifestyle, or a person weakened by muscle atrophy due to the difficulty of recovering from an injury or ageing.
The World Health Organisation has stated that the minimum intake of protein or amino acids should be at least 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, and this is to maintain a neutral nitrogen balance. However, this requirement does not take into consideration variations such as age, activity level or health status. *
In principle, the body adapts to different variations in protein levels, although the minimum requirement ensures basic body functions, it is worth aiming for optimal levels of amino acid intake as they support the maintenance of muscle health, as well as general health. In this regard,
The minimum daily protein intake requirement, according to the WHO: 0.8 grams per kilogram (0.36 per pound) of body weight.
According to Van Loon, a more realistic requirement: He recommends up to 1.6 g per kilogram (0.6 per pound) of body weight. per kilogram (0.73 per pound) of body weight.
But the benefit is diminishing when exceeding the right amount, Van Loon adds: more than 1.6 gr. Per kilogram (0.73 g per pound) of body weight does not add benefit except in exceptional circumstances (such as recovery from surgery, convalescing elderly people and athletes).
Not Only Muscles are Protein Demanding
According to Van Loon's experiments presented in a 2021 publication, you have a new gut in two days, a new liver in one week, a new brain in 3 weeks and they show substantially higher rates of (basal) protein synthesis than skeletal muscle tissue. These data suggest that these tissues may also possess a high level of plasticity. All this in response to daily protein intake and according to the authors, it remains to be determined whether protein synthesis rates in these tissues can be modulated by external stimuli (such as exercise, for example).
Energy Balance and Protein Requirements According to Health Status and Physical Activity
DIET
If you are dieting or are in a state of calorie deficit, maintaining or slightly increasing protein intake can help preserve muscle mass, this is crucial during weight loss to ensure that the weight lost comes mainly from fat and not muscle. Therefore, where possible, if dieting, intermittent fasting or during convalescence from illness, try to consume the optimal protein requirement per day to encourage muscle retention by compensating for the increased protein breakdown that accompanies lower calorie intake and not replacing it with fat.
PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND SPORTS TRAINING
In the case of endurance, strength and other training, muscle protein synthesis of course increases, but so does the rate of protein breakdown.
However, the net effect favours synthesis, especially when combined with protein intake. Protein intake after exercise would further increase muscle protein synthesis (SPM) and inhibit muscle protein degradation (DPM), favouring muscle adaptation.
As mentioned in previous articles, the main stimuli for skeletal muscle strengthening are exercise (especially strength) and adequate protein intake.
AGEING
It is not that ageing is inevitable, it is a natural process, but exercise, fasting and intermittent fasting would be useful tools at the level of body restoration and your nutrition, to a large extent, can play a crucial role on delaying or accelerating it. This is one of those cases where precision nutrition is relevant.
Unfortunately, as people age, older adults tend to have a reduced rate of protein synthesis relative to their protein intake compared to younger people and this is what Van Loon calls anabolic resistance.
Typically, 20 grams of good quality protein maximises muscle protein synthesis in young adults, whereas in older adults it is insufficient.
Fortunately, physical activity can mitigate anabolic resistance. According to Van Loon, exercise prior to protein intake improves the MSP response in older adults, suggesting that reduced physical activity, not just age, contributes significantly to anabolic stamina.
In fact, studies of healthy younger and older men where they have been instructed to engage in physical activity, specifically strength training followed by equal protein intake, have confirmed that there is no difference in the positive response in myofibrillar protein synthesis in older men compared to younger men.
Furthermore, this study indicates that exercise prior to protein intake allows greater use of dietary protein-derived amino acids for de Novo muscle protein synthesis in both younger and older men.
How to calculate the daily protein intake for a person who is overweight?
These people should not be guided by the daily protein recommendations according to their current weight but rather according to their ideal weight which takes into account their age, gender and height (Formula, Weight in kilograms = 2.2 x BMI (lean body mass index) + (3.5 x BMI) x (Height in metres minus 1.5) or you can find your ideal weight at this link
Protein distribution per day:
Would distributing protein intake throughout the day affect its absorption?
If you are a young, normal person and do not need to make sure your body is absorbing and assimilating protein, do not have health goals and are not an athlete, you can organise your meals, specifically your protein intake, as you feel best. In other cases, it is advisable to pay attention to this distribution.
According to Dr Van Loon, the distribution of protein throughout the day is crucial to optimise muscle conditioning. One of his studies published in 2023 indicates that consuming 20-25g of protein at each meal ensures multiple anabolic stimuli throughout the day, maximising muscle protein synthesis or MPS and supporting muscle reconditioning. For athletes or individuals with higher protein needs, adding a protein-rich snack before bed can provide an additional anabolic boost, especially after night-time workouts.
There is the other possibility: that you consume a large amount of protein (100 grams vs. 25 grams) after your workout. This option has been shown to provide a more prolonged and robust anabolic response than the option of consuming 25 grams at each meal. The thing is, protein takes time to assimilate, so in an intermittent fasting or one-meal-a-day context it might work, but in general, it is not recommended.
In that sense, ingesting a large volume of protein further increases the net protein balance in the whole body and the rates of synthesis of mixed muscle, myofibrillar, muscle-connective and plasma proteins. Protein intake has negligible impact on whole-body protein degradation rates or amino acid oxidation rates.
Supplementing with amino acid or protein powders
I've said it before, food before supplements. However, with the pace of life we live today, a whey protein is acceptable as it is absorbed quickly and sometimes, it is difficult to wait until you get home because you are hungry, or you may end up eating the first thing you find on the way. So, a good quality whey protein isolate is an alternative.
Also, creatine is a naturally occurring nitrogenous organic acid compound consisting of methionine, arginine and glycine. Creatine is found in many body tissues (e.g. heart, brain, retina), but predominantly (-95%) in skeletal muscle in the form of phosphocreatine or free creatine.
Creatine plays an important role in facilitating the transfer of high-energy phosphates in the production and rapid regeneration of adenosine triphosphate (ATP).
Creatine is quite popular in the athletic environment as it increases performance in repetitive and explosive tasks, such as sprinting and endurance training, and facilitates lean body mass gain. But it also has important cognitive benefits which you can review in my article and video at this link.
As for collagen, it is the joints, tendons, ligaments and skin that benefit most from supplementation and not so much the muscles as such. Remember, however, that muscles are attached to bone through tendons. According to van Loon, physical strength would be linked to the tissue that connects muscle and bone, where the presence of collagen would be more relevant, but more studies are needed to corroborate this.
Growth Hormone and Collagen Synthesis in the Body
Furthermore, growth hormone (GH) plays an important role in stimulating the synthesis of collagen, the main structural protein of various connective tissues.
In this sense, exercise-induced GH release naturally increases growth hormone secretion, which may enhance collagen synthesis.
In addition, the combined effect of exercise and GH can improve the health and function of connective tissues, potentially aiding injury recovery and general tissue maintenance. But human growth hormone stimulation has more scope which you can identify in my article and video at this link.
In conclusion, it is muscle stimulation through physical exercise, accentuated with strength training that triggers the activation of the build-degrade cycle of many systems in your body, including your muscular system. It is precisely this stimulation that induces your body to require protein as the cornerstone for rebuilding and maintaining not only your muscles but other important organs such as your brain and liver.
If you are interested, you can find the formula for approximate amounts of your daily protein intake according to your age, weight and activity level at this link.
*Note: to arrive at the conclusion of nitrogen balance, this is done by considering that the amino acids that make up proteins contain nitrogen. By measuring the balance between nitrogen intake (from protein) and nitrogen excretion (in the urine, mainly as urea), researchers can determine whether a person has a positive, negative or neutral nitrogen balance. But reports in this regard have been inaccurate due to underestimation of food intake and unmeasured nitrogen losses through the skin or breath, for example.