Preserving Your Muscles as You Age - Dr. Berg

Let's talk about how to salvage your muscles as you get older, both men and women. When women hit the age of 50, they go through this process, this change called menopause. And when they go through menopause, they have all sorts of changes in their hormones, which I'm going to cover. Men start developing more hormonal changes more when they're 60. Now what I'm primarily going to focus in on with these hormones is the relationship between what happens to one's muscles. The term for this is called sarcopenia. The Latin word for sarcopenia means basically poverty of the flesh. You're deficient in skeletal muscle. And this relates to just getting older. As we all are aging, including myself, I'm going to be 59, which is very weird because I don't feel 59. So of course I'm doing a deep dive in this to preserve my muscles as long as possible. Why is this important? Because as we age and we lose our muscles, we lose a lot of our metabolism. Now this is not just related to your metabolic rate, the speed at which your ability to burn fat or your capacity to burn fat, but also all the other things that are connected with metabolism as well. You have a lot of mitochondria in your muscles, right? So if you're losing your muscles, you're going to lose a lot of your mitochondria, the energy factors of the body. And roughly as we get older, we lose between 1 and 2% of our muscles each year. As far as the percentage of our metabolism related to muscle, it's roughly about 40%. So it's pretty significant. Let's start with females and estrogen. Estrogen does decrease as you get older. It goes down a certain curve, but this other hormone, progesterone, tanks even lower, almost to the point where it's almost zero. So if we don't have any progesterone, we get a lot of problems with estrogen. And estrogen, relating to this topic, affects your bone, affects your muscle, your connective tissue, your collagen, your cartilage. And so you start losing this connective tissue underneath the skin and things start sagging and hanging and you start getting wrinkles. Not to mention, estrogen has a function of helping you regenerate and rejuvenate and repair muscle. A lot of women lose their muscle because of this darn estrogen. Now typically men develop ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It's a severe neurodegeneration within your spinal column and other nerves. So men develop this condition, ALS, four times more than females until menopause. Then the ratio is 1 to 1. And what's interesting about progesterone, it's an extremely potent neuroprotector. Interesting. Especially if someone has ALS. Is there any relationship between increasing your cholesterol or decreasing your cholesterol and muscle? Yes, there is. Take a look at statin drugs. What's the biggest side effect of statin drugs? Muscle damage. Muscle diseases. Why? Because you need cholesterol to make these steroid hormones, including testosterone. And so cholesterol is very important as a raw material to help you build muscle. So if you're trying to salvage your muscles, be careful about going on a low-fat diet and also a low-cholesterol diet. And of course, statins, check with your doctor before wanting to come off of that. I'm not telling you to come off of it. And then cholesterol then turns into pregnenolone and DHEA. And pregnenolone, as it decreases, causes an increase, I think it's a compensatory thing, for cortisol. So we get this decrease in DHEA, decrease in pregnenolone, decrease in estrogen, decrease in progesterone, decrease in testosterone, which we all know affects libido as well as muscle physiology, and growth hormone also goes down. And there's another hormone involved that I want to talk about, and that is melatonin. Now when we think about melatonin, we think about the sleep hormone, right? Well, there's two types of melatonin. One is to help induce you going to sleep. The other one, it's a very important protector of the mitochondria, which is, again, in the muscles, right? And as far as how much that melatonin decreases as we age, it decreases by like 10 times. So when we're young, it's very high, when we get older, it gets less and less and less, which could explain why we have a hard time sleeping. In the pituitary, there's two hormones that control the testicle as well as the ovaries. So there's a pathway there. And that would be called luteinizing hormone, and the other one is follicle stimulating hormone. And they're basically a communication from the pituitary down to the gonads to tell the gonads to release its hormones. With a man, as we get older, okay, both of those hormones skyrocket up to like a thousand percent. Now, what you should know about this luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone is that you can suppress it by increasing melatonin. So melatonin keeps those other two hormones in check, which is a really good solution, but the problem is our melatonin is crashed by 10 times. So how do we increase it? It's infrared light. Just being outside, you're going to be exposed to infrared. Over half of the sun's rays is infrared, and also infrared penetrates your skull like two inches into the body, so it can help recharge your cells of melatonin. You can also get infrared from sitting in front of your fireplace or to have candles or even a campfire. What diminishes infrared is artificial lights, LED lights, blue light from all the cell phone, the computer, all that stuff. So now let's talk about how to salvage our muscles as long as possible. This is the formula. You ready for this? Number two, resistance exercise, regular consistent exercise to take your muscles and put them against resistance, whether it's weight training or bands or any type of exercise. You want to start doing that and keep it implemented the rest of your life because exercise is the most potent stimulator of building muscle, muscle synthesis. Number three, animal protein, 0.8 to 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of weight. So I weigh 185 pounds, that comes out to about 84 kilograms, okay? So I should be consuming roughly between 67 to 100 grams of protein. Now it can be a little bit less, it could be a little bit more, but you definitely need more protein because if you're starving yourself of protein, you're not going to be able to salvage your muscles. A lot of people are on this Ozempic medication and one of the main side effects of that is severe muscle loss. So here you are losing all this body fat, but you're also losing a lot of muscle protein. I'm not recommending that as a solution for losing weight. Number four, make sure you have enough cholesterol. You can get that from meats, dairy, butter, things like that. Number five, I would recommend taking pregnenolone, okay? You can get this as a supplement. I would recommend starting out with like 30 milligrams. If you're male, maybe you start off with 100. There's not many side effects from taking this, but this is like a precursor that can give you the raw material to build these other hormones because taking these other hormones is a very complex thing. So you have to know how much to take and then when you take these other hormones like testosterone or estrogen and progesterone, that tends to shut off your ability to produce them even more. So if you take the precursor, it's a much safer way. And I would also recommend taking DHEA. If you're female, take 25 milligrams. If you're male, you can take 100 milligrams. DHEA also helps you build muscle and it's a precursor. Now as far as taking pregnenolone and taking DHEA, you know, I'm not telling you to take this. I mean, you can do these other things, but if you notice you have a loss of muscles, okay, and you want to do something to increase them, then maybe take them, but I'm not recommending everyone just get on these supplements. I think adding the exercise, making sure you have enough cholesterol, making sure you have enough sun for the infrared, I think that would be sufficient for most people. But as you get a little bit older and you start noticing the muscle loss, then you might want to take these other two things. Now, if you have not seen a very popular video on this infrared stimulation to the melatonin, I put this video up right here. Check that out.