Paul Saladino· MD
how do you think someone can best support their muscles nutritionally like what do we need to put in our bodies to support this organ well I want to uh frame this uh I don't know if I've ever told you this story did I ever tell you about some of the the research that I did when I was at wasu no where these Concepts came from I'm going to frame it for you because it actually piggybacks lovely uh off of what you're saying I did two years of geriatric training and I actually didn't want to do it the deal was I mean no surprise right end of life very depressing working in the hospital you know it right you did for a period of time before you did Psychiatry you did Cardiology and it is not a beautiful place to be it is heart-wrenching I wanted to go back so I didn't undergraduate in nutritional sciences and then I wanted to go back and do a fellowship in nutrition in order to do a fellowship in nutritional sciences and not just have it be medical I had to get funding the way that I was going to get funding was I agreed to be a geriatric fellow so I had a dual role as a geriatric fellow which is an individual who takes care of individuals over the age of 65 my role transitioned through nursing homes on the weekend dementia clinics um paliative care which is end of life and so on very a stroke word just all of it very very very depressing in the evenings and the early mornings I did obesity medicine research and one of the studies that we were working on at the time was looking at body composition and brain volume this one participant we'll just call her Betty She is the picture of the majority of 50 some year old women that we see today she was a mom of three she had cycled through years of losing the same 10 to 20 pounds the medical community had given the advice to eat less exercise more do Weight Watchers continue to restrict your calories when we imaged her brain her brain looked like the beginning of an Alzheimer's brain and it was at that moment I felt I mean you know how it is there's always a one patient that you really connect with and you just love and you don't want to see anything I mean you feel that way about all your patients but there was this just she pulled at a a heartstring and we failed her uh we failed her the medical community had failed her she had done everything that she was told to do she ate less she exercised more and in the process over and over year after year she totally destroyed her skeletal muscle her body fat was easily 35% with very little skeletal muscle she had issues with blood sugar regulation insulin triglycerides all of the things that you would imagine were to happen the thing is is no one had given her any advice to improve her skeletal muscle which is at the core of these issues skeletal muscle is is just the focal point to do resistance training and to improve the quality and nutrient density of her food with high quality proteins and I feel that we just totally destroyed her life and then I started to think what is the one thing that all these sick patients have in common and quite frankly it wasn't obesity it wasn't that they were overfat these patients with dementia and these patients with other disease processes what they had was they didn't have enough skeletal muscle they had unhealthy skeletal muscle and that's where muscle Centric medicine came from uh I just wanted to share that because it it really does piggyback to what you're saying is number one framing why is skeletal muscle so important and we've completely missed the boat and in fact we don't even measure it directly by the way when you get a dexa dexa is body fat percentage you're lacking you're laughing because you know exactly what I'm talking about and you can recognize that we've built a foundation of information and knowledge on the shoulders of things that are surrogate markers and when you do that inevitably there is going to be a shift a change in Paradigm when we begin to directly measure this tissue which is actually what