Why Protein Isn’t Always Enough: Anabolic Resistance, Obesity, and Protein Efficiency | Dr. Nick Burd

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:00)
Is it ideal to build muscle on a vegan diet? Does protein timing actually matter? And why does gaining muscle seem so hard? Even when you're training consistently and eating enough. Muscle protein synthesis isn't just about what you eat, it's about when you eat it and how your body, the efficiency absorbs it. How your hormones, your gut, and your body composition can change the entire equation. Dr. Nicholas Burd is one of the world's leading experts in muscle metabolism, especially obesity, how age and dietary patterns reshape the body's ability to build and maintain muscle. His research challenges a lot of assumptions that plant-based diets can't support strength, that protein timing doesn't matter, that more protein always equals better results. In today's episode, you'll learn how obesity and aging change your response to protein, whether protein distribution across meals actually matters, why food combinations, not just food sources, can boost muscle protein synthesis, and the truth about plant-based muscle building from a leading scientist who studies it. If you're an athlete or a midlife woman or just someone who wants to age with strength, this episode is for you. Because muscle isn't just about aesthetics, it's your metabolic body armor, and the way you feed it matters more than ever. So if you're eating enough protein, but still not seeing results, the question isn't just how much, it's how well your body is using it. Let's break down what it really takes to make protein work for you with Dr. Nicholas Burd.
Dr. Nicholas Nick Burd. I'm so excited to have you on. I have been following your work for years. That's right. I have like a celebrity sitting here.

**Dr. Nicholas Burd** (2:02)
Yeah. That's me. Yeah, I'm a celebrity. I would say-

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:06)
Corn-fed passion for practical nutrition research, which I have read in your bio. My first question is, what is anabolic resistance?

**Dr. Nicholas Burd** (2:15)
It's just this overarching word where anytime you encounter an anabolic stimuli, so usually exercise or nutrition and your muscle in particular doesn't respond as well. Usually when we're thinking anabolic resistance in the literature, it's anabolic resistance of muscle protein synthesis. Some get mad when you don't put the muscle protein synthesis in front of it because they're like, what are you talking about? Glycogen synthesis? No, we're talking about muscle. So it's always important that we do, yeah, say muscle.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:46)
Is obese muscle more resistant to training?

**Dr. Nicholas Burd** (2:52)
More resistant to like exercise training? Yeah, I mean, you know, so, you know, when we're thinking about this, it's always, always say, you know, there's, I don't always say it. People say this is not, it's in the science, you know, this concept of anabolic resistance, right? Is it real? Is it not? Right? Some would argue in aging, it's isn't real. Your muscle doesn't know whether it's 65, 70, 80 years old. It just knows whether it's been active or not beforehand.
You know, with anabolic resistance of obesity, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about this. And, you know, the obvious solution, yeah, so some of our original work showed that when you feed a big bolus of food protein, so 36 grams of food protein to obese people, overweight people, or young, lean adults, we prefer to use the term healthy weight, so healthy weight adults, we saw that the people with excess fat mass or opacity didn't respond as well, right? So an anabolic resistance, you know, doesn't take an extremely clever individual to think, you know, what's a maneuver that we could do to try to help make better use of that food protein, right? And one of the easiest solutions is exercise, right?

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (4:10)
Yes.

**Dr. Nicholas Burd** (4:11)
And so we did a follow up study, you know, it's easy, you know, we can overcome anabolic resistance of obesity, just do some prior exercise, usually takes care of it with aging as well. So we did that, we ran a study, we just, you know, tried to kickstart the muscle with exercise, and the participants ate that same bolus. And what we noted was that, darn it, they were still in hannibalic resistance, right? So we couldn't kickstart the muscle with prior exercise.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (4:43)
Which would normally work?

**Dr. Nicholas Burd** (4:45)
Normally, like it works for aging. So we were the first to try, in that kind of acute setting, in a beast muscle. Bettina Mittendorfer did some things earlier before I did.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (4:58)
I love Bettina.

**Dr. Nicholas Burd** (4:59)
She's a little tall, but I'll take her. You know, I have a few science heroes. She's one of them, along with Stu, Luke, and Don. These are all individuals who inspired my career.