Is protein supplementation effective for muscle gains in older adults?
Protein ingestion provides the building blocks for skeletal muscle. Therefore, protein supplementation is a popular strategy among athletes. Protein supplementation is indeed effective to increase muscle mass gains in healthy young subjects.
Older adults lose muscle mass as they age. Therefore, training and protein ingestion may be important to slow down age-related muscle loss.
This study from our lab investigated the effects of protein supplementation after each training session and every night prior to sleep on muscle mass gains during 12 weeks of resistance training in active elderly men.
They supplemented with 20 g whey protein (high quality fast-digesting protein) with an extra gram of leucine added (the amino acid that is most anabolic).
The elderly subjects gained on average 1.3 kg of lean mass and lost fat mass during the 12-week training. However, protein supplementation did not increase muscle mass gains during the training period.
This may sound surprising, but a recent meta-analysis (an analysis of all data on the topic) concluded that protein supplementation is not effective to increase muscle mass gains in older adults. So why does protein supplementation appear to be less effective in older adults compared to younger subjects?
A possible explanation is that older adults are less responsive to anabolic stimuli such as protein compared to younger subjects. Older adults need more protein in a meal to maximize muscle protein synthesis. Therefore, it is possible a positive effect of protein supplementation in older adults can only be observed when larger amounts of protein are supplemented.
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