Meal Timing, Protein Timing & Time-Restricted Feeding Strategies For Muscle Gain & Fat Loss: Solosode #491

Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: In this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast. Meal timing, Protein timing and time restricted feeding strategies for muscle gain and fat loss welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity and beyond. Welcome to a special episode of the Boundless Life Podcast. This is the usual weekly or bi weekly or bi monthly, tri monthly, tri weekly, quad weekly, whenever it happens, episode in which it's just me, no guest, talking to you about the latest and the greatest research. These tend to be, and will increasingly be quick, snappy and right to the point without a whole lot of banter beforehand and not a lot of fluff in between. I just want to give you the good stuff. I will say, however, that I am very excited because I just came back from Washington, dc.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:05]: I got probably one of the most interesting emails of my life. The President requests the pleasure of your company for remarks on MAHA to be held at the White House. And so there I found myself at the White House to listen in and participate in the Make America Healthy Again Commission report presented to President Trump Chairman chaired by Robert F. Kennedy. That Commission has released its first official report called the MAHA Report Making Our Children Healthy Again, which if I'm doing the math properly, is abbreviated moca. The MAHA MOCHA Report. None of these acronyms are that great, to be honest with you. Like, MAHA doesn't really roll off the tongue very well.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:49]: Frankly, MAGA doesn't either. Making Our Children Healthy Again. MOCHA, a sweet, chocolatey diabetic drink served at coffee shops, might not be the best acronym, but I digress. At least we're working on making a difference here in people's lives. The report really held up a pretty concerning mirror to a nation in health crisis. Namely, it reported how over 40% of the children in the US suffer from at least one chronic illness. 75% of our nation's youth are ineligible for military service due to obesity, mental illness and poor physical health. Suicide, anxiety, developmental disorders and autoimmunity are all rising at breakneck speeds. You can google or actually google, I'll put it in the show notes.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:33]: BenGreenfieldLife.com/ 491 the actual report which identified four drivers of the crisis. Number one was ultra processed foods which now comprise this shocked me to hear that 70% of the average child's daily calories are from ultra processed foods which are kind of engineered for addiction and stripped of nutrients and have a lot of harmful additives in them. And then second thing was environmental toxicity, Right? Lots of things that you hear people talking about nowadays, Endocrine disruptors and microplastics and the chemical soup that our kids live in. And the report does name how the FDA and EPA may have failed to protect us in scenarios like this because of potential financial interest. Not that that would ever happen, But a little bit of commerce supported in replacement for health concerns, digital entrapment and a sedentary life. Nine plus non school hours a day on screens in our kids these days. Kids these days, Geez, I used to wear barbed wire on my feet, my bare feet. And walk uphill both ways to school in the snow.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:40]: I'm just kidding. I was homeschooled. I rolled out of bed. That's about all I did. But kids have a huge amount of screen time these days. And so movement has eroded, sleep has eroded, community involvement has eroded. And so we see this surge in depression and loneline and despair and then finally over medicalization. Big word.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:58]: But the idea of numbing a lot of these problems with pharmaceuticals is also an increasingly concerning issue. That is the meat of the MAHA report. And it was an honor, you know, it was concerning to be in that room, but also an honor to see and witness that we're actually putting our foot down and making changes. And, you know, my whole take on this is I'm probably not on the farthest, far right of this movement. I am a libertarian capitalist who believes that companies should, for the most part, be allowed to operate how they wish and put into their foods what they wish. And if they do a bad job of that and people die and get sick, then that company will eventually go out of business because people figure out that that company is not doing a great job. However, because there is so much deception in advertising, there are in many cases, children whose lives and health are at stake, who do not have ability to be able to understand and participate in commerce in the same way as an adult, and in many cases are being fed by the adults shopping for them in a system that is geared towards pushing and making many of these unhealthy foods more affordable. I do think that a little bit of extra coloring of some of the companies, specifically the food and pharmaceutical companies contributing to this crisis is necessary.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:23]: I also think that in some cases, with the MAHA movement, there have been fish fried, so to speak, that might not be the biggest fish to fry. What I mean by that, I think that I'd rather see a very Large focus based on calorie control and moving more than I would like to see focused on say like a food coloring or an artificial sweetener. Look like if I have a client and I want to help them lose weight, I would actually rather see them drinking like an apple flavored electrolyte beverage with natural flavors and maybe some sucralose and even God forbid, some FD&C red whatchamacallit than I would them eating 400 calories of apples a day. I realize that's a shocker, but obviously in an ideal scenario they're just eating one apple a day. What I'm saying is that I think that caloric overcompensation is even more of a concerning issue. That then some of the trace like colors and chemicals and the process used to isolate natural flavors and some of these things that I think are grasping at straws compared to the bigger issue of people eating too much and not moving enough. So I would like to see a much greater focus placed upon that. I would love to support wherever I can and I'm trying to do so.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:41]: And so that's what I was doing in Washington D.C. during about the maybe 1.7 times of the year that you'll actually find me wearing a suit. All right, moving on. As promised, I wanted to talk about some very interesting studies lately in the field of time restricted feeding. A lot of them have come out and of course the way that we eat is important, the amount that we eat is important, but the time that we eat is also important. So a recent study entitled, brace yourself: The Effects of Time Restricted Eating on Actigraphy-Derived Sleep Parameters, Post Hoc Analysis of a Randomized Isocaloric Feeding Study. That is a mouthful, pun intended. But basically this was looking at whether time restricted eating helped or hurt sleep or didn't have any effect. Like if you actually eat during a compressed feeding window.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:30]: So this was a 12 week trial in people who had obesity or pre diabetes or type 2 diabetes. So what they did was they had a time restricted feeding group that was only allowed to eat from 8:00am to 6:00PM and 80% of their calories needed to be eaten by 1:00PM all right, so they're having breakfast, lunch, light dinner and they weren't snacking after 6PM and they weren't snacking including like sugar and cream in the coffee or an orange mocha frappuccino before 8am in the control group, people got to eat kind of like what we call ad libitum from 8am till midnight. And at least 50% of their calories were to be eaten after 5PM, which is pretty common. People have a big ass dinner because they've been working all day. And then they measured their sleep using a wrist worn device. Right? So not super high tech laboratory sleep, or they call it plasmography, but a wrist worn device. They found that total sleep time increased by, and this was shocking to me, 55 minutes in the time restricted eating group. And look, while I'm not one of those Brian Johnson's finish your last meal by 11am Type of guys, this one got me thinking, gosh, that's not that difficult, right? Eat 80% of your calories by 1PM So a really good, nutritious, calorically dense breakfast and lunch.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:52]: Don't eat a whole lot for dinner and finish dinner by six and that could buy you 55 minutes of good quality extra sleep. That is great to know and I think it should make us all think about our snacking and our eating habits and how we stack the calories that we consume during the day. And then another paper came out and this one was a systematic review and meta analysis of randomized clinical trials comparing time restricted eating with and without calorie restriction for weight loss. So now we're looking at weight loss and specifically what this means is that they wanted to know if two groups ate the same number of calories, or at least both groups didn't intentionally cut calories and just ate whatever they wanted. But one group ate all those calories during a certain period of time during the day and the other group just got to eat whenever they wanted with no mealtime restrictions. Would there be an advantage of one group versus the other? So what they found was that even when both groups. This defies the law of physics, what I'm about to tell you. When both groups ate the same amount of calories, the group that did time restricted feeding and the intervention duration in this meta analysis ranged from three weeks up to 12 months.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:15]: And the time restricted feeding ranged from four hours eating only between 12 and 4PM for example, to 12 hours eating between 6AM and 6PM. The folks who had some type of mindful time restricted eating actually had decreased weight, decreased fat mass, in some case decreased fat free mass, meaning they even lost some muscle. Which is something good to know more than diets without meal time and restrictions. Meaning that if you eat 2000 calories a day and you say I'm going to eat those 2,000 calories a day between let's say 10AM and 6PM and your friend says I'm going to eat 2,000 calories a day, but whenever I want, including a midnight snack. The person who eats during that time restricted feeding window winds up doing a better job with weight control. So I would imagine that part of this might be some type of change in metabolic rate, something possibly related to the circadian rhythmicity benefits that we just learned about of time restricted feeding. But the long story short is that what we learned from both of these newer studies and meta analyses is that waking up and having a certain period of time during which you're eating and a certain period of time where calories are forbidden from your gaping maw is generally a good idea. What does that look like for me, I tend to have breakfast at about 9:45 or 10:00AM leading up to that point, if I've had a workout I will usually have a shot of ketones and sometimes some amino acids, both of which are relatively non insulinogenic, meaning they aren't going to cause much of a glucose spike, much of an insulin spike, or rip me out of a fasted esque state.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:01]: And then we have dinner late. As a family we usually have dinner around 7 or 7:30. But even with that I'm done eating by about 8:30. So you do the math. Every single day I'm not eating anything. No snacking, no sugar and coffee, no creamer and tea. Nothing between the hours of about 8:30AM and at least 9:30AM so every single day I'm getting a 13 hour intermittent fast and an 11 hour compressed feeding window. And I do that almost every day of the year.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:30]: And it works fine. You get used to it. And honestly, you sleep better for sure if you're not eating. The only time I'll break that is that it turns out that meals are what are called a zeitgeber. They help to align your body to new time zones. So when I'm traveling, if I've crossed multiple time zones, I will actually eat breakfast before the workout rather than work out and have breakfast because that meal helps align my body to a new time zone. So for example, if I normally work out at let's say 8:30AM which is usually when I work out, and then I have breakfast around 9:45AM after my workout. And I've traveled from Washington State to New York State, I will get up in New York state, have like bowl of oatmeal or protein shake or whatever around 7:30 or 8 and then go do my workout and then finish my workout.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:23]: Sometimes I'll have some extra ketones or aminos after the workout and then wait till lunch to eat again. So that's kind of how I do it when I travel to get myself oriented to a new time zone more quickly. Okay, next up, let's talk breakfast. Breakfast, skipping breakfast, timing the impact of breakfast. There was a very interesting, I guess you could call it like a blood sugar hack that came to light in a recent paper entitled The Impact of Breakfast Consumption Timing Versus Breakfast Omission on Post Lunch Glycemia and Insulinemia. This one was an adolescent girl. So, you know, people go into school, do you give your kids breakfast? Do you not give your kids breakfast? What happens if you do or if you don't? So what this was was it was what's called a randomized crossover trial in adolescent girls. Some ate breakfast later in the morning and others ate breakfast earlier in the morning and others skipped breakfast.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:18]: So they had the group of participants eat a standard carbohydrate rich breakfast. We're talking like some oatmeal or some toast and some eggs in the early morning. They had another group do it in the late morning. So the early morning was like 8:30AM the late morning was 10:30AM and then they had a no breakfast group, and then everybody ate a lunch at 12.30PM so it turns out that the group that ate the breakfast, whether it was the late breakfast or the early breakfast, actually wound up having a more favorable glucose response to lunch, meaning they didn't have as big of a rise in blood glucose after lunch. That's actually a phenomenon known in nutrition science as the second meal phenomenon. Meaning if lunch normally spikes your blood sugar and you're a breakfast skipper, the habit of beginning to eat breakfast causes you to have better glycemic control. Well, why would this be the case? The reason that is hypothesized for this is that eating breakfast, rather than skipping breakfast, reduces the blood glucose levels after lunch by reducing free fatty acid levels prior to lunch, increasing your muscle glycogen synthesis after lunch. And this is the case in people with type 2 diabetes, in particular, enhancing the insulin response to lunch.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:39]: So why is this important? It turns out that one of the things a lot of people wearing continuous glucose monitors these days are concerned about is how much the blood sugar is spiking up and down during the day, so called glycemic variability. Well, this might sound paradoxical to what I was just telling you about, about compressed feeding windows, right? Eating only during certain periods of time during the day, but don't get me wrong, a compressed feeding window is different than skipping a meal altogether. And when it comes to breakfast skipping, in many cases, you tend to see a couple of things happen. One is a hypercaloric compensation later on in the day with whatever meal comes after the breakfast that you skipped. So people tend to eat more during lunch and have a bigger blood sugar response to lunch and sometimes even get a little brain foggy later in the day. People tend to see a little bit of disrupted sleep because they're not getting the circadian rhythm benefits of having a meal earlier in the day. And people tend to see more spikes in their blood sugar levels. So what is important to know about this is that if you are tracking your blood glucose and you want more stable blood glucose levels, eat at regular times during the day and compress your feeding window preferably.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:54]: Meaning don't skip breakfast and have a huge lunch and a huge dinner. Don't skip dinner necessarily either. Instead, have, let's say breakfast at 9:30AM, lunch at 1:30PM, dinner at 6:30PM Watch how many calories you eat and don't skip meals. And especially when it comes to breakfast. It appears that not skipping breakfast can allow you to have better control of your blood sugar levels, particularly with lunch. And this actually backs up another randomized crossover study in which they found that when people had porridge with breakfast, porridge must have been a study in the UK versus skipping breakfast. Again, the people who had the carbohydrate rich breakfast had more stable glucose and more stable insulin levels the rest of the morning, all up to post lunch. This is the second study that has come out that kind of backs this up.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:50]: So basically it turns out that for the most part, breakfast skipping is not going to do you many favors. The only time I'll skip breakfast is if it's a real hurried, super stressful day. And my rule in life, because the body does not digest food as well, it has a higher blood sugar level after the meal. If you break this rule, you tend to see a different hormonal response to the meal if you eat in a stressed out state. If I'm in a very stressed out, sympathetically driven state, I will wait until I'm able to be relaxed to eat a meal. And in some cases that results in skipping an actual meal, but that's pretty few and far between. If you find yourself regularly skipping meals because you're stressed out, you should work on the stress. Duh.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:31]: Okay, so another interesting thing, amino acids. Everybody knows I'm huge on amino acids. I also, full disclosure, I own a company and our top selling product Is amino acids. Kion. Kion Essential Amino Acids times 10 over any product we have. People absolutely love them. For muscle recovery, for supporting the gut, for building muscle while keeping the body in a fasted like state. For muscle protein synthesis even when you're not lifting weights.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:01]: For getting the equivalent of a steak without having to digest the steak. I've talked about essential amino acids a lot. Well it turns out that a recent study, because I'm always looking at what's coming out on essential amino acids, I also mainline the crap. So I'm concerned about knowing what's going on with them. Four week randomized control in people with cystic fibrosis. Amino acids fibrosis. If I can talk amino acids. The essential amino acids, namely not branched chain amino acids, which is just in my opinion, fancy overpriced flavored water, but real essential amino acids that mimic the composition of human muscle. They found that amino acids reduced interleukin 6, a pretty major marker of inflammation by this is huge.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:44]: 34% compared to a placebo that did not contain amino acids. That is a key inflammatory marker. And that's very interesting. Now they didn't see a change in C reactive protein. They didn't see a change in a lot of the other physical performance tests that they were putting these people through. I suspect that's probably because they're only getting 4 grams of essential amino acids. To put that in context, I take 20 plus grams per day as do any of my clients, especially those who are trying to build muscle. But anyways, the reduction inflammation from amino acids was very interesting and amino acids are already part of my yo, I'm injured, I need to heal something up.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:22]: Fast stack. But this definitely again reinforces the concept that I'm going to keep using amino acids, especially based on this newer research on inflammation. And Kion aminos are definitely the ones I use because they taste the best and I think they are the best in terms of mimicking most closely the actual amino acid ratio found in human muscle. There's a lot of other great essential amino acid products out there, but we formulated a Kion what I truly believe is the very best ratio and the cleanest and the best tasting the watermelon flavor is amazing by the way. Okay, so next up, protein supplementation. Protein supplementation increases adaptations to low volume intrasession concurrent training and untrained healthy adults. That is a mouthful. So what was this study about? This was a study that looked at a low volume concurrent training program.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:16]: That's a fancy way of saying they combined low Volume, high intensity interval training, like sprinting on a bike for short bursts, with low volume resistance training, which is basically lifting weights, but not for hours and hours and hours. No gym rats allowed. So their goal was to see how that combo plus a protein shake or a placebo non protein shake, impacted fitness in people, particularly people who weren't regular gym guys. So these folks trained twice a week for eight weeks, spending less than two hours total per week, which is, in my opinion, pretty doable. So here's what they found in a nutshell. Both groups got fitter. Everyone improved their VO2 max measurement of cardiovascular fitness and their muscle strength, whether they had the protein or the placebo. But the protein group had much stronger legs, significant increases in leg muscle strength compared to the group that did not have the protein.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:09]: So that's interesting, but let's look at this in a little bit more detail. So VO2 max, how your body use, how well your body uses oxygen during exercise. Superstar marker for heart health and longevity. So they saw a 2.1 milliliter per kilogram per minute increase in VO2 max across both groups. If you were at 40, your VO2 max would go up to 42.1. And that's what you would expect from people doing the type of cardiovascular training that they were doing. But the protein group actually edged out a bit, and they edged out a bit in something that wasn't statistically significant, but I think clinically meaningful value. 1.3 ML per kg per minute.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:50]: Bigger VO2 max gain in the people who had the protein now, in the muscle strength, it was even more impressive. So what they found was both groups got stronger, like I mentioned, but the people who had the protein had really, really much bigger leg strength gains. We're talking 10% more leg strength gains compared to the people who did not have the protein. And that's probably because protein after exercise provides the amino acids that kickstart the MTOR pathway. So you get better muscle protein synthesis, faster recovery. But here's what I think is important. This is why I tell anybody who wants to increase testosterone, improve their endocrine system to lift weights with the legs, because the legs have a high concentration of androgen receptors. And it turns out that prote spikes anabolic hormones, particularly insulin and growth hormone, and that can help with those androgen receptors on the leg responding to the endocrine system to build more muscle.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:53]: So if you don't want toothpick legs, it turns out that having protein, especially if you're just getting into training, is a really good idea. How much did they have? 40 grams post workout. Now, other research, maybe I'll get into this in a second. Suggests that it's not super important that your protein has to come right after the workout, but they did do 40 grams after the workout in this case. So pretty interesting. And again, I think it puts a feather in the cap of prioritizing protein, especially if you're training and especially if you want a little bit of an improvement in your VO2 max or in your leg strength. And then finally, just to talk a little bit more about this whole idea of meal timing and protein timing, I was looking at a recent study called the effects of time of day resistance training on muscle strength, hormonal adaptations and sleep quality during Ramadan fasting. So this was in a group of physically active male Muslims who were following the Ramadan fasting protocol and they were looking at if there was a difference in when they did actually get a chance to eat.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:03]: If training in a fed state, specifically during Ramadan. Ramadan. I'm sorry if I'm not putting the emphasis on the right syllable. I should probably be educated about this. Training in a fed state during Ramadan was more effective than training in a fasting state, specifically for strength adaptations. Now I've said this before, that if you're trying to put on size, get fit, improve cardiovascular fitness, et cetera, the actual meal timing is not that important. It's kind of an old school idea that as soon as you finish working out you gotta like seek out your post workout meal right away. But there are a couple of cases now that I've seen in the literature that would suggest getting your post workout meal times as close as possible to when you finish exercise could be a good idea.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:50]: Number one would be if you are an athlete who's doing two a day workouts or two a day practices or scrimmages, or you have a match later on. Replenishing glycogen via carbohydrate intake as soon as possible after workout, especially with compounds that that might increase the ability of that glycogen to get stored away like caffeine and creatine is a pretty good idea. The other group that seems to benefit quite a bit from not just eating after workout, but potentially eating before work. I mean going into workout not fast would be the group that wants to get as strong as quickly as possible. Now I think there are hacks around this. I like the amino acids hack, for example, or having a quick protein shake and then having a real meal afterwards. But the takeaway message here is if you're training twice a day, definitely eat as soon as possible after the workout. The first workout include carbohydrates and if your number one goal is to get as strong as possible, then make sure that you're not training fasted, meaning you've had a meal before the workout.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:53]: All right you guys, as promised, this was short, this was snappy, this was chock full of some quick takeaway tips for you. I will put the juicy show notes @bengreenfieldlife.com/ 491. Leave your questions, your comments and your feedback over there. I would love to hear if you like these quick episodes where I just give you a whole bunch of information right at once that hopefully makes your life better, your training better, your longevity better, and your better better. All right, thanks so much for listening in. Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield from the Boundless Life and BenGreenfieldLife.com signing out. Have an incredible week to discover even more tips, tricks, hacks and content to become the most complete boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com.

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