AMA #40: Body composition, protein, time-restricted feeding, fasting, DEXA scans, and more

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome to a sneak peek, Ask Me Anything, or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
Welcome to Ask Me Anything episode number 40 I'm once again joined by Nick Stenson. In today's episode, we talk about how to interpret Dexa scans. We've had a lot of questions about this. I've talked about it on and off in various podcasts, both my own and being a guest on a few other podcasts. So we decided to go through this in the exact way that we go through with our patients. So what are the four things that a Dexa scan tells us, and how do we interpret each of these things? We then go through, I think, about four patient case studies, each of which is illustrative. Again, the likelihood that you will find something of yourself in at least one of these is very high, and I think justifies going through all of them. We then talk about protein because one of the things that comes out of interpreting the Dexa scans is how do we assess a person's lean tissue and what we need to do about it. So then answer a whole bunch of questions that came in about protein.
How much do you need, when do you need it, how should it be divided throughout the day? We then close the discussion out with a revisit of time-restricted feeding. I've made some comments in the past, I think most recently on the Strong Convictions Loosely Held episode where I talk about my changing views on TRF. And I wouldn't say it's that I'm saying that one should never do TRF, but I have a much more nuanced view of it today than I did five years ago.
And I go through both the recent New England Journal of Medicine paper that came out earlier this year that generated a lot of controversy and then add a lot more color to it, including a discussion about circadian rhythm and the relationship of food on the ability to sleep and even some brain health stuff. So if you're a subscriber and want to watch the full video of this podcast, you can find it on the show notes page.
And if you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of the video on our YouTube page. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number four.

**Nick Stenson** (2:27)
Peter, welcome to another AMA. How are you doing?

**Peter Attia** (2:36)
Doing very well. Excited to talk about this stuff today.

**Nick Stenson** (2:39)
Awesome. I don't know if you noticed, but I saw your Instagram post today on Maui Newly Venison. So I wore my Access to Your Institute shirt.

**Peter Attia** (2:47)
I wondered if that was a coincidence, but...

**Nick Stenson** (2:49)
The accidental experts.

**Peter Attia** (2:51)
Love that story.

**Nick Stenson** (2:52)
So, for today's AMA, it's not going to be on exercise like the past two have been. We're going to stick to that, although I'm sure some of what we'll talk about will tie in a little bit to exercise, but what we're going to do is we just kind of gathered a ton of questions all around basically body composition in one way or another. So we're going to start by looking at DEXA scans. This is a topic that has come up a lot in AMAs recently, especially the bone health AMA.
And we've gotten a lot of feedback from listeners who they're like, hey, I went and got my DEXA results. I'm trying to understand what they mean. How should I think about them? What matters? What doesn't? So we kind of compiled those and we're going to do a deeper dive into that, including looking at some real life patient case studies. So what we had is the team pulled specific patients that you have and we thought were kind of good overarching studies that kind of show people how they can think about this and then also what changes need to be made based on those results. So kind of not only how to understand the DEXA, but then how you apply that to your life.
And then from there, we're going to do some follow up questions that mainly came from the Strong Convictions Loosely Held podcast and really around your comments on protein consumption and really how you get as much protein in throughout the day as you want to. And then also some follow up questions on your comments regarding your views on time restricted feeding. So if it all goes to according to plan, we'll wrap all that, but I think it will all kind of fit together because I think a lot of what we'll talk about in the protein time restricted feeding will play off what we learn in the DEXA.