Osteoporosis vs Sarcopenia – what is the real threat to your health as you age? Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger attempt to answer this question by breaking down why sarcopenia, the lesser-known “muscle-wasting disease,” might be even more concerning than osteoporosis. They share practical tips you can easily try today to maintain strength and vitality, from increasing protein intake to simple movement strategies. Tune in to learn how staying active and making intentional lifestyle changes can help you age with confidence and resilience. Do not let sarcopenia sneak up on you – take control of your lifestyle now!
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Osteoporosis Is OVER-RATED!!! Osteoporosis Vs Sarcopenia
Welcome folks to the show.
It is a wonderful day to be a chiropractor.
Osteoporosis Is Overrated
It is. Saw some really great people and just some amazing stuff. The theme for me, I don’t know what prompted it, it’s been osteoporosis is not the disease you want. Osteoporosis is overrated.
I agree.
I’m just going to say it. People are going to be like, “Wait osteoporosis is bad.” Like it is. The problem with osteoporosis is by the time you have it, it’s too late. The real problem is something that no one has heard about. I asked every patient who should be familiar with this word. I don’t think I was when I went through chiropractic school. I don’t know about you, but sarcopenia is the word of the day.
No, not at all.
For those who aren’t familiar with this word, it is muscle wasting as we age.
It sounds scary, the word itself. It’s like you have sarcopenia and you’re like, “No.” Honestly, it is.
It’s very scary.
That’s one of the reasons people are not doing as well as they could be doing in their older years. There are lots of reasons for this too. I think we’re going to go over some.
I think we should because one of the interesting thing, I have had several discussions about this, like the one young lady who spurred on the conversation. She was having a hard time just getting down. Again, I had my patients lay face down on the table, but she was having a hard time groaning as she was getting on the table. She’s doing great. Her head’s on straight. She’s feeling so much better, but just that little motion, and she’s a farmer.
She’s moving and shaking all day long.
She should be. The problem is she’s not as strong as she should be. The reality is sarcopenia happens in reality, probably at the age of 35 is when it starts, because, at the age of 35, we start having a harder time building muscle in our bodies. If we’re not actively doing something to stay strong, we are going to have problems. You follow that down the line to a different patient whose mother broke her other hip and needs an implant that was actually longer than the first one that they did, mom has to wait for that to heal before she can start PT.
Those PTs are itching to get someone into rehab as soon as possible but if you are physically not strong enough to handle that because of sarcopenia, now you have more problems. We’ve talked about in the past, you break your hip once and you have a very high likelihood of not lasting a year, especially in your older years, past 65 basically, you’re in that category that it’s going to be a problem.
I see Instagram posts or videos on people who are in their 80s and they’re running up and down the stairs.
They’re deadlifting.
Difference Between Active Aging And Decline
They’re doing jumping jacks. They’re doing weightlifting. I go, “What’s the difference between those people? Is it genetics? I mean, that could be a component but I think the difference is they made an effort.
You make the conscious choice early that you’re not going to fall into that trap of old age. You’re not going to be hunched over like this, not able to breathe. No, you’ve got to make these choices early in life. Maybe early in life end up being at 50 and you realize, “Wait a second, what have I been doing wrong?” Now I start setting the tone and the stage in the right direction.
The video I watched was the lady with 74 when she realized she didn’t want to be what all of her friends were being was just sitting around a table talking about what was wrong with them and what doctors they saw that week. She wanted to do something different. She started going to the gym. She got a trainer. She started working out almost every day. Now that, I mean, like it was some dedication and this was like a ten-year progress and she was in her 80s and I was blown away. She’s doing things that I’m doing in the gym and I’m like, “Dang girl.”
Exactly. Here’s the thing we could say, “Why don’t we just give old people steroids so they don’t have sarcopenia like juice up and then hit the gym?”
Sounds good.
One of the things that we know about some of these bodybuilders that do juice up and do use steroids, they oftentimes will get so strong so fast, the muscle will actually grow significantly and then the bone either breaks that it’s attached to or the tendon completely pulls out of the bone, what they call an avulsion fracture because the muscle outpaced the development of the bone. There’s our solution to osteoporosis. We take care of the sarcopenia. We take care of making sure we’re slowly making strength gains a couple of times a week. We’re talking 2, 3 times a week, maybe up to an hour, but really you only need about 30 minutes of dedicated work to make these changes and make this progression. With time, the sarcopenia will stop being a problem.
I just want to define based on, I’ll do the NIH definition of sarcopenia just so everyone knows, a musculoskeletal disease, I don’t know if I believe that, which muscle mass strength, and performance are significantly compromised with age. Sarcopenia most commonly affects elderly and sedentary populations and patients who have comorbidities that affect the musculoskeletal system or impair physical activities. The Wikipedia, which we know is always true, it says the rate of muscle loss is dependent on exercise level, nutrition, comorbidities, and other factors. Exercise level is pretty important there.
In fact, it’s probably the most important. You start looking at people who are in this space, who are training people, who are looking at the literature, your Peter Attia, your Mike Mutzel, your Thomas DeLauer, they’re looking at all of this stuff. Basically, everything is saying, be active. Be physically active and lift heavy things. For the 60-year-old woman who’s reading and saying, “I’m 5’4 and 110 pounds wet.” Don’t worry about bulking. You never will. It’s physically not possible without significant steroids.
You can, it doesn’t need to be bulk. If we look at a picture, a cross-section of sarcopenia of like somebody’s like a muscle, and somebody who has muscle and then there’s a muscle, there’s the bone and then there’s fat around it and then there’s skin. Somebody with sarcopenia, there is the bone in there and then the muscle is tiny and then we’ve got the fat around it and then the skin. What it is, is it’s not like you could be tiny, what we call skinny fat and skinny fat is that you still have a high body fat percentage, but you don’t look overweight. That’s because a lot of times of the sarcopenia is happening.
Why Sarcopenia Affects Younger Generations Too
This continues to become a problem because as they said, sedentary, is not limited to the age population, what we would consider senior citizens, it is more and more in today’s population of 20s and 30-year-olds who are not getting out, they’re not being active, they’re not doing the things that they’re supposed to be doing.
I bring it all the way back to the kids. Let me talk about the kids today. The kids today sit in front of computers. They do their work. They sit in front of computers. They play video games. They don’t go outside. Maybe your kids do. Obviously, everybody’s kids are different, but the vast majority of them are not going outside.
We would go outside and not come back until we either heard a bell or the streetlights came on. That’s how we grew up is we were outside and getting into trouble. These kids, they don’t do that and so they are not active. I mean, I was itching, I was like a latchkey kid. Once my parents got home from work, I was allowed to go play. I would be out until I was in trouble and I had to come back for dinner. In the summer times, they didn’t even know where I was.
I’ll be honest, I’m a mom. When my kids were little, I knew where they were at every moment but I still encouraged them to go out and play with their friends and go into the woods and get into trouble and build a fort and all those things. It still wasn’t the percentage that I was. My kids do sit in front of a computer screen quite a bit. I mean, we do work out, but they could probably work out more. I’m worried about my children who are already set up for sarcopenia and they’re only fifteen. It’s hard. We have to get the kids moving.
It is. Actually what might be what’s curious is just by being physically active is one thing. You being physically active is a good role model for them. Even if your mom decided that she was going to start working out as well, that would actually set genes in the girls, what we call epigenetics, that would actually set them so that they would be more physically active longer, healthier, and their children would also be healthy in that same direction. It is really interesting. It’s a matter of setting the stage and moving in the right direction. Probably the other thing that prompted me to think about this is I went and got my in-body test for my body or for my muscle mass, my fat mass and all of that.
For the past month, I’d been running a pseudo experiment. I’ve added a little bit of rice to my diet and I’ve been adding essential amino acids to my protein shakes, which I maybe have 2 or 3 a week. I’m not like, this isn’t a regular thing, but I’ve been up 10 pounds for the past month for my normal. I’ve been normally 190. I’m sitting at 200 almost every day. I’m like, oh, except my calipers say that it’s staying steady 10 millimeters, maybe even nine if I really pinch hard. The interesting thing is I’m actually up two pounds of muscle and down body fat. It’s definitely going in the right direction. Something is working the way it’s supposed to.
Are you saying you need a little bit of carb is what you’re saying?
I don’t know. I just said I added a little bit of carb because I wanted some rice.
I think you need a little bit of carbs.
I’m still doing mostly keto carnivore, but every now and then.
Until you had honey, you had a whole bunch of honey the other weekend. No, it’s not. It is sugar. Don’t start with me.
It is made by bees.
It’s a carnivore.
It’s sort of carnivore, it’s not a carnivore.
It’s paleo, it’s not a carnivore.
Big honey has me pushing honey for the carnivore diet. There are so many ingredients in honey.
Carbs are not 100% the enemy.
No.
The carbs that have been introduced into the human diet over the last 50 years are the enemy though.
Yes. The process colors, and the process grains.
Yeah, the enriched wheat, the enriched rice, the enriched crap. We talked about that last time or two times ago and how that can be affecting connective tissues, which scared the shnikes out of me. I have talked to a few of my patients with connective tissue disorders about that. They were all like, “Really?” I was like, “Yeah.” I gave them some resources so they could start doing some of their research. I love the fact that you could eat a little bit more carbs, not a lot, I know it was not a lot, a little bit, and you actually gained a little bit more muscle.
It makes sense because that probably means I’m storing more glycogen in my muscle. Workouts have been a little bit easier and stronger, more consistent between different rep schemes. I’m running a 6, 7, 8 rep scheme right now, and my 7 and my 8 rep schemes, if I’m on a good day and I feel strong are comparable to the six rep days as far as volume. Sometimes you have that in you and sometimes you don’t. It’s curious. You try to push for 25,000 pounds of volume in a session. It’s funny how doing it with 6 reps versus 7 reps versus 8 reps, just hires you out. It doesn’t sound like a lot of difference, but it is.
It is.
It really is. I don’t know if the carbs are helping significantly. Like I finished up the bag that I had the other day and I haven’t had it for two days.
What you’re saying is it’s a tiny portion of what you’re eating but the vast majority of people who follow the standard American diet for years, the vast majority was the grains because that was the bottom of the pyramid. Again, we’ve talked about how that pyramid is completely wrong and disgusting what they did to all of us. Now let’s talk about someone who has sarcopenia. This person is already in it. They can feel their muscles are wasted away. They have trouble getting up. They cannot get up out of a chair without pushing up. If you told them to get down on the floor, they’d say, “I cannot get down. I won’t be able to get back up.”
The first thing they’ve got to do is learn how to walk again. Treat it like you are a young child relearning how to do all these activities. The weather has been pretty beautiful lately around the Midwest. Get out there and go for a walk and as long as it’s not I see on the sidewalks, bundle up and go for a walk. The more you get out there on the regular, the better off you’re going to be. Just walking.
Walking in and of itself will do tons of benefits. Plus if you do it right after a meal, you get all of the benefits of building leg strength that you might not have ordinarily have done. That leg strength when we get to a point where you might have to have hip surgery or have some hip problems or a hip replacement, you can get into rehab sooner. The PTs know who’s going to survive and who’s not based upon how fast you get in there.
Encouraging Movement To Overcome Pain
If it takes you a while to get into their rehab, they might not be able to help you at all which is really scary when you think about it because they are really good at getting people back on their feet, strong. That’s their job. That’s what they’re aiming to do. The first thing you got to do now before there’s a problem, is get up and walk. Now you’re getting up and walking, it’s like, “I can walk for a while.” Good. You’ve got a mile in, you’ve got two miles in, you’ve got three miles in, whatever it is. Now add some weight.
Question. I just bought for myself a weighted vest because when I go for a walk, because I don’t run anymore. My knees don’t like it. My body doesn’t like the Jocelyn.
Jason caught you. Don’t worry about it.
I don’t run. If you see me run too because something is chasing me, but I bought a weighted vest and it’s either 25 or 30. I cannot remember which one I picked. I don’t recommend somebody starting with that if you haven’t been working out like you don’t need to do it but would you recommend somebody who is now good at walking, adding like a 5 or a 10-pound vest?
I would just start with a couple of handweights. If we’re talking someone who’s having problems just getting out of the chair and you’re able to walk 5 to 10 pounds. Something that you can comfortably carry, do you want to carry five pounds in both hands or do you want to carry 10 pounds in one hand and then switch hands back and forth?
Why I would say that would be maybe a better option is because grip strength is an issue, which will help you if you’re like a farmer carrying, which means right down by your side, a weight. The other thing is you can take that weight that you’re carrying on your side, and if your fingers are getting tired, you can actually bring it up and then hold it up. You’re getting that weight up. You’re still carrying the weight. It’s just a different way to carry it. You are not working on the grip strength.
There are three places that I would say that I focus on. There’s the suitcase or farmer’s carry where your hand and the fist holding the weight should be right behind your thigh, buttock area, just right behind. You’re not putting it way behind your back, but you’re putting it just behind your leg as you’re walking because that’ll help pull that shoulder back a little bit and you’re in the rack position, which is up here.
Although if you’re drifting on, you could do it double handed too.
You could do two hands. You could also do it overhead in the waiter’s walk.
That one’s hard but you could totally do it.
That one’s really hard. I would start with the waiters, bring it down to the rack, bring it down to your side, switch sides, and just do that.
If someone has arthritis though and their hands are hurting. Do you think a vest might be a good investment for them? A weighted vest?
I think you need to do both. I think I would do a hand weight before I would do a vest. I’ll come back to why. If the arthritis is there, as you get everything else stronger, so will the hands. Some of that arthritis will actually feel better because you’re getting strength in. The strength in the movement will override the pain reception in the brain so that you say, “When I do this, I feel good.”
That’s a really good point right there. Let’s talk about that because where pain is felt when some people say, “It’s all in your head.” Yes. Pain is in your head because that is where the receptors send signals to but lack of movement if I have a broken arm and I have my arm in a cast, and then when I take it out of the cast 4 or 6 weeks later, “It hurts so much.” Like just to bend my arm, because movement is what keeps things, first of all, mobile and all this stuff, but lack of movement in joints actually increases the likelihood of pain. It takes a long time for the pain receptors to get died down again. What are your thoughts on that whole situation?
What you’re doing is you start moving in general. Pain fibers are some of the slowest signals in the body. I cannot remember what the speed is, but it’s relatively slow whereas when you start moving, if you get up and like, we’re coupling this with walking. We are already experiencing movement and nerve proprioception, all the feedback mechanisms are very fast. Actually, there’s a gate mechanism theory that they talk about in neuroscience that basically says they run parallel, but the motion will close out the pain gate category.
Your body can learn to ignore the pain. This is why runners get that runner high going on because they’re running and running oftentimes through pain but they have all that motion that is overriding what they call the pain gate again. You’re basically closing the gate, as it were, to the pain reception and overriding it with the motion perception.
One of the hardest things when you are in chronic pain is to make yourself move.
Yes.
One of the best things you can do if you treat it like even a medication is to get up and move, even if it’s just going to the mailbox and back and forth.
Especially going outside because it changes your state. If you’re cooped up inside all day long, your state is like, “I’m just in the same place and I’m depressed.” Just go outside. I mean, touch grass, literally touch the grass. As silly as that sounds, there’s research out there that supports getting outside barefoot on the grass and grounding, which may do something. It’s funny that it’s something that simple.
Going outside changes your state. If you are cooped up inside all day long, you will get depressed. Go out and touch grass.
Getting sun exposure. They are now coming back around saying, “Wait a second, sun exposure is actually good for us. There are so many benefits beyond just vitamin D production that we don’t haven’t even fully explored yet that are important. We can go on and on about not using sunscreens because of the benzophenones and some of the chemicals.” Anything with a benzo in it, just think that’s cancer-causing because it is.
What about a benzodiazepine? I don’t even know about that. I’m going to look that up while we’re talking.
Anything benzene maybe, not benzo. Quite honestly, I don’t know how much difference chemically there are between the two. I’m not crazy about them. Benzenes. That’s the one I’m looking for. I know I said Benzo.
That was why I was like, “Hmm.” When I think of Benzo’s, I think of Xanax and stuff like that.
In any case, I’m not thinking those are any good either.
They’re not, but I don’t think there are rings in those. I’m looking at Klonopin and yep, there are benzene rings.
In any case, I would just get out of the mood. When would I introduce a vest and I’m with you? I love my vest.
I just got one. I’m so excited.
It makes the walk so much more fun. My concern with the vest comes twofold. One, you and I are both a little bit nutty and we’re going to say, “Let’s get the heavy vest.” I honestly wish I might pick up a couple of lighter plates just to switch out so that I can go on a longer walk because I find I’m good at about 30 minutes, which is about for me, 1.4 miles for the trip that I’m doing.
What do you typically keep in your vest when you’re using the vest?
I’ve got about 28 pounds.
I think the reason I got the heavy vest is because sometimes I don’t have time for a 45-minute walk or an hour walk. I just want to take a twenty-minute walk, but I want it to like count.
Exactly. Quite honestly, let’s be honest, you’ve got a bigger frame than I do. That 30 pounds, percentage-wise.
I don’t think you should talk about my frame.
I know. Let’s back up. What I am finding is when I go on a 30-minute walk, which gets into the 2 to 3-mile range, my low back is a little bit hotter than I like.
I’ve noticed that too.
It’s a bit of a concern. I’m thinking I’m going to keep my walk is going to be limited to that 1.4, 30-minute walk. Some days I want to go on a long walk.
I’m just going to bring my kids with me and then I switch the best of them when I’m tired of it.
That’s the other thing, if you’re happy with your block around your house and you can just walk around, you’re doing laps.
You can drop it off if you need to.
That way and then keep walking because sometimes that’s all you need to do is just keep on walking.
When you take a vest off and you’ve been walking all of a sudden, you’re like, “I’m just floating. It feels so good.”
It feels good. It feels really good. I’m not sure for myself what I’m feeling in that low back. Again, I don’t ever feel low back stuff, generally speaking, that’s not self-inflicted. I don’t know how much of it is the vest, which is definitely going to build muscle just fast because your body says, “Look, you’re carrying this many pounds. You are now 230 pounds instead of 200 pounds.” Your metabolism is going to naturally go up.
This is the issue with people who are on The Biggest Loser when they were told to metabolically, their metabolism is higher than yours or mine at a healthy body weight. What’s curious is if you just starve someone and don’t give them the calories they need, what that does is actually drop their metabolism so they cannot burn body fat. It’s this really ugly cycle so you need to know how to approach it, which is why we’ve talked about focusing on more protein in the diet.
If you starve someone and do not give them the calories they need, their metabolism will drop and cannot burn body fat.
Nutrition And Protein Requirements For Aging
That’s the next thing I wanted to bring up. If someone is fighting sarcopenia and they’re trying to avoid that muscle wasting as they’re getting older, we’ve been taught so much about carbs, fat, and protein. Some people don’t even know what a protein versus a carb is. Real quick, let’s talk about what a protein is because that’s what we’re going to be probably focusing on.
In the simplest form, all meat that is coming from an animal is protein. That’s the simplest version. your beef, your pigs, your chickens, your sheep, lamb, what else? Those are the big ones.
Dogs, cats.
I mean, if you’re into that.
I’m not.
I’m not either.
Yes, animals. Fish and all of the things. As we get older, especially women will tell me, and men too, is that they’re just not as hungry. They cannot eat a lot at the time, that stuff. Again, your body’s trying to tell you that you might not need it but if you become more active, you actually get more hungry.
Yeah, and you will. I’m not doing a bunch of protein shakes, but there’s a bunch of good proteins out there. I would definitely spend a little bit extra. Jocko Willink is more than happy to sponsor us with Jocko Molk because I really do like that. I do use now protein as well. What I found really interesting to give an extra boost to all of this was essential amino acids. I just use a straight powder from Bulk Supplements. They can also sponsor us.
We use a lot of their stuff.
We do but a straight essential amino acids, not the branch chain. There were some thoughts that the branch chains make the difference, but adding more essential amino acids to your protein shake does a bunch of things. Now, bear in mind, I am taking straight amino acids and I would consider myself hardcore when it comes to this stuff. Amino acids, I’ve had shoes that didn’t taste as bad. Let’s just put it.
Let’s talk real quick. Somebody who has no idea what a protein is. Protein is animals. Protein is these strands or things that are connected. It’s an amino acid, which is like a part of a protein you think about and another part of a protein comes together, two amino acids, now we’ve got a protein. They come together and then they fold in different ways and that becomes a protein. When we talk about protein, that’s that whole folded thing.
Another name that will pop up, is because they’re using it in conjunction with collagen protein, but collagen peptides are very much the same thing. It’s just it’s a different buzzword to get you to buy their product.
I like it.
It’s good.
I’m going to tell you ever since I’ve been taking my collagen for the last six months, my fingernails are so wonderful. They were cracking. Am I just getting old because I am getting older? I was like, I’m just getting old. I was like, “What do I know helps?” I was like, “I’ve heard collagen helps. I’ve heard other vitamins.” I just started every morning with my tea. I put a scoop of collagen powder in and it takes a while for things to grow out, but I can tell you is like, these are the best nails of my life. They were so good.
How’s your hair been?
It’s great. My hair grows better.
I’m waiting for mine to grow better.
I’m waiting for yours too. They say your joints are supposed to feel better. I don’t know if they do or not.
How much protein are you using volume-wise?
How much collagen?
Yes.
I can tell you how many grams of protein are in there. It’s 19.
Quadruple that.
I’m not going to, it’s too expensive.
Get it from Great Lakes for the eight-pound bag. It’s worth it.
Really?
It’s worth it.
Great Lakes.
I don’t ache at all from my workouts other than I’m like, “I can feel my arms. I did a workout the other day.”
Great Lakes is the name.
Great Lakes Collagen, they can also sponsor us.
Is that on the Zon or is that on their website?
That’s on their website. Great Lakes Collagen is out there. They’re based out of Chicago. I am convinced Great Lakes collagen supplies a lot of collagen to all the other collagen companies.
Chicago has a big collagen thing, the vital proteins, I think. It’s like there’s a manufacturing plant there. Is it the Great Lakes?
Probably coming from the Great Lakes.
It might be Great Lakes.
This is why my background in engineering, I’ve been around the business enough that I look at things and I’m like, “What makes yours better than theirs? Like why is the standard process a better vitamin?” The standard process grows a lot of the food that then gets converted into their vitamins. They’re doing that on property, not all of it, but a lot of it. Now foods has a complete laboratory.
They’ve probably got one of the most extensive laboratories in the world checking to make sure that everything that they are ordering that’s on the label is at the same quality that they’re going to put on the label. You’ve got certain companies that are doing the work. Great Lakes Collagen has been around forever and they have been sourcing animal hides from, I believe it’s Peru or Brazil. No, it’s Peru. It’s on the it’s on the west coast of South America. They’ve been making collagen. They ship it in 30 and 55-gallon drums. I thought about buying a 30-gallon drum just to have it, just to do it once. That would probably last us a year.
It looks like the Great Lakes collagen, if you buy the eight-pound bag is slightly less than I’m paying currently.
It’s a good deal. It’s a good bag. I transfer it to a different container because it’s easier to work with when that container empties.
How many grams? They say their supplement is two tablespoons in a serving. Usually, I do four tablespoons of my collagen, which would be a preference.
I’m at eight because I use one of the scoops from my now protein that seems to just hit the nose. My brain wasn’t thinking straight the other week and I was actually doing two scoops of that. I was probably doing more closer to
That’s about 40 grams, 50 grams of collagen protein, I should say, the peptides.
This comes back to the stuff we’ve discussed in the past about glycine. Glycine being the most abundant amino acid in collagen, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that we are not consuming enough glycine, or that there are people who need significantly more glycine to be healthy. You can get glycine separately, which is great because glycine tastes like sugar. You can throw it in your smoothie for an extra sweetening boost, or you can just add more collagen.
We’ve talked about to avoid sarcopenia or to start recovering from it because I do think that there is some recovery possible.
Yes, and before we leave protein, you should try to eat your body weight in grams and protein a day, especially if you are over 50 because the research used to say, “You don’t need as much protein as you get older.” No, in fact, it’s quite the opposite. You need more protein now as we get older because what is probably happening at the age of 35, when they say you cannot build muscle as much is the mechanism to build muscle isn’t working as efficiently and you need more protein to continue building muscle. This is why you should add in the collagen. This is why you should add in essential amino acids, the extra stuff that is already loose and unbound that the body is ready to make work and get you back into a stronger standpoint.
If someone has problems digesting protein, which does happen as we age. For some people because of lack of a lot of times stomach acid and years of taking stomach acid reducers, that’s not great for you. this is just me thinking outside of the box there. If you took collagen and you took free amino acids, part of the breakdown has already happened. It’s like, if I eat like a chicken wing like I was eating before, and there’s some collagen on there, and there’s protein, and there’s fat, and delicious buffalo sauce.
That has it all and it’s all combined. It’s all part of it. My stomach has to break down some of those bonds before my body can then continue to digest in the small intestine. If we take some of those, it’s possible that we could be getting even better nutrition, especially if you have trouble digesting protein.
At the very least kickstart the process better so that you can move stuff through.
If I were the person, let’s say I weighed 130 pounds, and I wanted to do the 130 grams of protein, could I count some of the grams even though collagen is not a component?
I wouldn’t.
You wouldn’t count it.
I don’t count my collagen grams towards my daily. Now I might count them to my daily calories if I’m in a cut. That’s different but I really don’t because I think it is different. One of the things that they have been discussing is whether or not we should be looking at protein calories as a caloric knee, as we’ve been counting calories for everything else, or separate that out into a different category.
I’m leaning towards, we need to separate it out into a different category and not be so uptight about calories at that point in time. For me, if I want to push at least 200 grams of protein, at the very least, I’m not counting the collagen protein, I’m focusing on my beef, I’m focusing on my eggs, I’m focusing on my bacon, that’s it. Everything else, the collagen protein, that’s an added bonus.
That is skin and joint health is where I think of that as. I would have that in two different categories and the collagen is extra. The amino acids or the essential amino acids are extra. In fact, some days I even say, “I’ll take the protein shake.” I’m like, “This was just for fun.” I count it, but I recognize that it’s probably more a fun drink than the necessary calories I needed to keep strong and stay strong.
Some studies have said that you cannot absorb more than 20, 30, 40, there are different ones, absorb protein per meal and there are lots of others that don’t. What are your feelings on that?
There’s actually really good evidence that it doesn’t. In fact, Tim Ferriss back when he published his four-hour body years ago, found that there were women in France that would eat one meal a day, but it was a big high-protein meal, and they were not suffering from any sarcopenia at all. The thought was that you can only do that much. I think the math didn’t work out. Now we see people who are doing a hundred grams in a meal at a sitting and doing that twice a day. They are not wasting that protein, the protein isn’t having problems.
I used to think, I used to think that I couldn’t eat that much in a meal but then I just calculated, because if I ate a steak, I typically eat my whole steak, I don’t break it into two stakes or anything. I’ll just eat a whole steak. I measured it last night, two nights ago, whenever it was. It was about 68 grams of protein based on my calculations. That was just the steak I ate. I ate a couple of other things too. That’s a good amount of protein for a meal.
It is. I would like to see it more at 130 for myself, but I had stew meat for lunch and I think it could have been a pound, but they normally package it about a pound and a half, almost two pounds.
A lot of times a pound and a half.
I went through it.
There’s some fat.
There wasn’t any fat in this stew meat, but my intent was I’ll eat some of it. I said, “I’ll eat some more.” I was done with it. That worked out that way. When I had a chuck roast the other day, and it was probably a four-pound chuck roast, I had one piece that I just didn’t get to until Wednesday or something like that. Every now and then I hold back, it was only a three-pound chuck roast. I can dream that it was a four-pound chuck roast that I ate in one sitting.
Sounds like meat sweats to me.
It was good.
I’ve also seen online some people utilizing egg white protein as a protein source. If there are powdered egg whites, you can actually cook with them too.
Buy good stuff. Do not buy the cheapest egg white protein or egg protein because you will have no friends.
Stinky?
You will be very stinky.
Really?
Yes. It is absolutely some of the nastiest stuff I’ve had out there. There are good egg protein powders out there. I’m not a big fan of pure egg-white approaches.
No, I don’t either.
There’s so much nutrition. There’s a lot of protein in the egg white, but there are so much vitamins in the yolk that that’s really where you want to get as much of that.
You might as well eat the whole egg.
Eat the whole egg.
An egg is approximately, and they’re different sizes, approximately six grams of protein per egg.
It’s 6, or 7 grams, depending upon how big they are. They are fantastic. I mean, every time that I’ve taken a break from eggs, and every now and then I will.
You get tired of them after so long.
I don’t get it.
I do. I’ve been like, I’ve had eggs for six meals in a row. I got to stop.
I cannot do them in a row. I’ll do beef for lunch and then my eggs for dinner. In fact, that’ll be dinner tonight. What’s interesting is eggs are a complete protein. Your body can absorb them. In fact, on the protein absorbability scale, eggs are higher than a100% because they’re that good. Whenever they were saying, “How much can you absorb? Eggs were better than that.”
People are better off just eating eggs. Eating eggs, even the junk, and I’m going to call it junk at the grocery stores. If that’s what you can afford, if that’s what you can get, it is still better nutrition, especially protein-wise than anything else. I personally separate the yolks out and I like a runny yolk I don’t know where I came across this. Maybe I need to go back and do some research to see if this actually pans out but by cooking the whites and leaving the yolks runny, your body’s able to digest it better because the whites cooked are easier to digest, but the yolks just warmed up and more liquidy. That’s where you get the nutrition.
Cooking the egg white and leaving the yolk running will help you digest it better and get the most nutrition.
How Assisted Living Affects Nutritional Quality
Thanks. That’s how I like my eggs anyway. There you go. There was something else about protein that I want to talk about, but I think those are the big ones. You need to be making sure you’re eating enough protein because so many people, who are getting into the sarcopenia state, they’re not eating enough protein as it is. In fact, I was talking with one of my patients who is thinking about getting into assisted living only because she’s tired of making her own meals. I’m just like this is a catch-22. Yeah, she’ll have prepared meals, but how many of those prepared meals are not going to be healthy?
100%.
Think about things like the food pyramid or the plate and the advisory panels that do these things and make policy for school lunch programs, for assisted living homes, for prisons, they are putting food together based upon the food pyramid, the food plate where they’re not getting enough protein and they are having problems health-wise, sometimes mentally, sometimes physical and emotional outbursts that do not serve them in the longterm. This is bad. This is problematic. We’ve got kids who are ADHD on school lunch programs. At least they’re getting fed. Are they and to what detriment? The more you can cook for yourself, and it doesn’t have to be expensive, it doesn’t have to be fancy. What I didn’t share with you when we came down to visit last time?
What?
I did not share with you the jerky that I made. I know.
I’m so hurt.
I feel bad about that because it’s really good. I made the jerky out of round and round roasts are just not fun to chew on but round roast jerky is amazing. I figured out how to cut it right so that it falls apart as you’re chewing on it. Again, that’s a very inexpensive cut. Is it hard to make it turn into jerky? Not really. You could do it if you’ve got an oven.
I make jerky in my oven. I’m going to do that this weekend. Thanks for reminding me.
Good job. There are so many things that you can with cheaper cuts of meat that you can get the protein that you need.
Let’s wrap it up. Sarcopenia, muscle wasting. We don’t want that as we age. We want to keep our muscles or as much as we possibly can. You can recover from it.
If we let sarcopenia go down its natural route, osteoporosis, broken hips, and early death are right there.
When we talk about as chiropractors about getting to the root cause of things, we’re talking about this being the root cause versus osteoporosis being the problem. That’s a symptom of this already being a problem. Eating more protein, your body weight in grams. Protein is an animal source of things most of the time. You can get it in other places, but it’s animal meat and eggs and some dairy stuff.
Movement. Go for a walk.
Once you’re good at movement, add weight to that movement.
As soon as you can. You might be like I’ve been walking around this block for three days. Feel good about that. Add the weight. Here’s the nice thing. Take one weight. Doesn’t have to be too heavy.
It could be a big water bottle or two big water bottles. If you’re like, “I don’t have a weight.” You have plenty of things that weigh things in your house.
Even just carrying that bottle will be, and you drink the whole thing on the walk, now you’ve utilized it, you put it into your body, which will metabolize the water, and you’ve made your walk lighter as you went down for your path. You can add a weight. You can do laps around your house. You can do go to a point, come back, drop the weights off, and walk some more if the weight gets too heavy.
Pick the weights back up. You can cycle through it.
Do it after a meal.
When you said that, that was not just what you were talking about building the muscles, but if you did have carbohydrates in your meal, you would reduce your spike of your blood sugar and that is so much healthier. People who work out or do some movement after they eat live longer.
People who work out or do some sort of movement after they eat live longer.
Again, we’re talking about going for a walk for five minutes, one direction, turning around. It can be that simple after a meal. If you did that after three meals a day, that’s 30 minutes of walking. If you could find another 20, 30 throughout the day. Again, it doesn’t have to be complicated and doesn’t have to be all in a row, just do it. You’ll be so much better in no time flat.
Yes. do it through the pain. It’s not going to feel good when you first start doing it. No pain, no gain.
Let’s talk about some of the drugs that they use for osteoporosis real quick. The patient’s mother that broke her hip was on Fosamax.
That’s the most common one right now.
A problem with Fosamax is it will sometimes put down bone and cause a little bit of a spike apparently. She broke her hip at that spot.
There are some studies that are showing that taking those drugs will actually cause you to be more likely to break a hip when you fall which is the opposite effect that you actually want because it puts down low-quality bone.
The way the bone is laid down is what they call a matrix. It’s not just one solid piece. It’s a bunch of interlocking pieces inside. If you’ve been watching any of these videos about 3D printing, especially when they do something solid or as they’re building something that will be solid, not necessarily solid, but it needs extra support structures. They add little matrix pieces in there to give it strength before it gets to the point that it has the intrinsic strength that it needs. Again, go watch a 3D printing video.
Those are fun to watch.
They really are. One of the things that when you’re thinking about that if you’re doing 3D printing, and this is actually a really good example in relative and probably what Fosamax is doing, is it’s laying down a structure that is very straight. It’s not allowing for this matrix to build properly. When you do this with a 3D printed material, it’s very easy to break that material because it doesn’t have the intrinsic strength to other than the plastic melting to itself. It can break along seams a little bit easier. It’s not a complete analogy, it’s not exactly what Fosamax is doing.
It’s not the same exact thing, but it makes the bones more brittle, even though if we did a scan on them, they would look like they were more solid, they’re more brittle, and they’re easier to break.
That does no good for anybody with the intent of trying to get stronger bones. Again, what makes bones stronger, what makes hips stronger, get up and move. Get up and walk, and we are designed as human beings to walk as much as possible. If you cannot get up and walk, if you’re in a wheelchair, grab some weights and start lifting them overhead. Just a little bit. Again, 5, 10 pounds, work your way up. It takes time.
I was convinced that I could lift 62 pounds, 63 pound weights. I think there’s 63. Either way, overhead for reps and I had to actually back off to 24, to 55 and 53 kilograms, 53 pounds, 24 kilograms, bells, because I didn’t have the strength or the endurance for the volume that I wanted to do. I’m just running this program until I hit the end of it. I’m going to start over with the heavier weights and say, “How, let’s see how far I can go with this now.”
Just don’t blow out your shoulder because you need it for practice.
I do.
Final Thoughts
If you don’t use it, you lose it.
That’s very much. That’s exactly what it is.
We all need to start using it more and I will continue to help support my patients in that. Speaking of patients, where can they find you, Dr. Schurger?
I am at Keystone Chiropractic in Springfield, Illinois, KeystoneChiroSPI.com.
I’m in St. Louis, Missouri. I am on the West side at PrecisionChiropracticSTL.com and you can find me on all socials. If you have a chance, like, subscribe, share this show because this information is so important to share with your friends. We would love a little five-star review, don’t you think?
I’d be happy with a four-star review telling us that, “Doc, you’re wrong about this.” I mean, they’re going to give you five stars.
That’s true.
They’ll give you four stars and I get one.
That sounds good.
That sounds right. That seems about right.
Adds to five. We will catch you next time on the show. Take care.
Have a great evening, folks.
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