How much protein do you need after 60?

The advice most people over sixty are given is to eat lightly. For the heart it is half right. For muscle, the research tells me it is backwards. The reason is a piece of physiology that most nutrition advice has not caught up with.

Aging muscle is less responsive to protein than young muscle. The same meal that sets off a solid building response in a thirty-year-old produces a weaker one at seventy. Researchers call it anabolic resistance, and it has been measured: in one study, older men needed about 0.4 grams of protein per kilogram in a single meal to get the response younger men got from 0.24. The practical consequence is blunt. An older adult needs more protein per pound than a younger one to get the same result, not less.

Two expert groups reviewed the evidence and said so. The PROT-AGE study group and, separately, the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism both concluded that healthy adults over sixty-five need at least 1.0 to 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight a day, that anyone exercising needs more, and that illness pushes it to 1.2 to 1.5. The figure printed on packaging, 0.8 grams per kilogram, was set for the population as a whole and is below all of those. PROT-AGE added a second point that matters as much as the first: 25 to 30 grams at each meal, rather than a little at breakfast and a pile at dinner.

Meanwhile the appetite shrinks, the cooking gets harder, and the advice is to eat less. The requirement goes up while the intake goes down, and the muscle quietly disappears in the gap. That process has a name, sarcopenia, and I watched it turn into a walker, then a fall, then a broken hip, in patients for forty years.

So the number I use for anyone over sixty is 0.8 grams per pound of bodyweight, every day, lifting or not, with at least 30 grams at each of four eating occasions. If you are carrying a lot of extra weight, use your goal weight, or the number gets silly. For a 160-pound person that is about 128 grams a day, which sounds heroic until you split it: 32 grams is one ordinary chicken breast, or a cup and a half of plain Greek yogurt with a spoon of seeds, or a can of sardines with a cup of lentils. Four normal things, spread over a normal day.

Why four occasions rather than one big dinner: in the one direct comparison, the same daily protein eaten evenly across three meals produced a muscle-building rate over twenty-four hours about a quarter higher than the same total skewed toward dinner. Eight people, one day, a synthesis rate rather than muscle measured over months, so it is the reason for the rule rather than proof of the result. But past sixty the size of each meal matters more than the daily total, and if you are eating less overall, protein is the last thing to cut.

None of it works without load. Muscle responds to real demand at any age; the classic study put nursing-home residents in their nineties on eight weeks of strength training and their leg strength rose by about 170 percent. What changes after sixty is recovery, which takes longer, and technique, which matters more. If you have kidney disease, the protein number is a conversation with the physician who manages it, not a rule from a book. Chapter six of The LP3 Diet has the number worked through for three different people, and chapter eight has the training that goes with it.