Live Well, Age Well

For most of my life I thought of protein as a young man's concern. I started training at twelve. Through my twenties and thirties, protein was about building something — putting on size, recovering from hard sessions, chasing a number in the gym. I naturally thought that as I got older and trained less aggressively, I'd need less of it. That turns out to be backwards. And it's one of the more consequential things I got wrong. The Number Most of Us Are Using Is a Floor, Not a Target If you've ever looked up how much protein you need, you probably found the RDA: 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. For someone at 170 pounds, that's about 62 grams a day. Here's what that number actually means. The RDA was established as the minimum required to prevent deficiency in most healthy adults. It answers the question "how little can I get away with?" — not "how much do I need to thrive?" Those are different questions, and the gap between them widens as our bodies change. What Actually Changes Two things shift, and they compound. Muscle becomes something you maintain Starting somewhere in the fourth decade, adults lose muscle mass gradually and continuously. The decline is slow enough that many people don't notice it happening — they notice the result. The suitcase feels heavier. Getting up off the floor takes a hand on the coffee table. Recovery from a long day takes longer than it used to. This progressive loss of muscle mass and strength has a name — sarcopenia — and it isn't a disease you catch. It's the default trajectory in the absence of enough stimulus and enough protein. Your muscles respond less efficiently to the same protein This is the part I'd never heard of, and it changes what you do about the first one. When you eat protein, your body uses it to build and repair muscle tissue. As we age, that response becomes blunted — the same amount of protein produces less of a building signal than it did twenty years earlier. Researchers call this anabolic resistance. The practical consequence is uncomfortable: at exactly the point where you're losing muscle, your body gets worse at using the raw material to replace it. The counterintuitive part Many of us quietly eat less protein as we get older. Appetite softens, meals get smaller, meat feels heavier than it used to. Meanwhile the requirement is going up. So How Much Do You Actually Need? Expert groups that have looked specifically at protein needs in later life — among them the PROT-AGE study group — recommend intakes meaningfully above the RDA. Generally in the range of 1.0 to 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight per day for healthy adults, and higher for those training hard or recovering from illness. Those recommendations were written with older adults in mind. But the shift they are responding to does not switch on at sixty-five. It is gradual, and it begins decades earlier — which makes this less a line to cross than a direction to start moving in. Translated into pounds, that's roughly 0.45 to 0.55 grams per pound. Body weight RDA minimum Recommended range as we age 140 lb ~51g ~63–77g 170 lb ~62g ~77–94g 200 lb ~90–110g ~90–110g The gap between those two columns is the thing worth noticing. For a lot of people it's twenty to thirty grams a day — not a wholesale diet change, but not nothing either. One note before we go further: if you have kidney disease or any condition where protein intake is medically managed, these general figures don't apply to you. That's a conversation for your doctor, not a blog post. The Part Almost Nobody Gets Right Here's where the advice usually stops — hit your daily number. But total intake is only half the story. Your body doesn't bank protein. It can't take a large evening intake and apply it retroactively to a morning that had none. Muscle protein synthesis is triggered meal by meal, and each meal needs to clear a threshold to trigger it at all. Which means how you distribute protein across the day matters as much as the total. Many of us eat backwards. Toast or coffee for breakfast. Something light at lunch. Then most of the day's protein arrives at dinner, when the body can only use so much at once. A more useful pattern is roughly even distribution — a meaningful amount of protein at each of three or four points in the day, rather than one large delivery at the end of it. Because of anabolic resistance, the per-meal threshold also rises as we age. A serving that would have triggered a full response at thirty may not at sixty. That's an argument for a bit more at each meal, not just more overall. Quality: Not All Protein Signals Equally Protein is made of amino acids. Nine of them are essential — your body can't make them, so they have to come from food. One in particular, leucine, acts as something close to a switch. It's the amino acid most directly associated with triggering muscle protein synthesis. A protein source rich in leucine sends a stronger signal than one that isn't. This is where plant protein gets unfairly dismissed, and where the picture is more interesting than the usual argument allows. Pea protein contains all nine essential amino acids — it's a complete protein, which many plant sources aren't. And in a twelve-week randomized controlled trial comparing pea protein to whey during resistance training, muscle thickness gains were statistically equivalent between the two groups. The researchers concluded that pea protein could serve as an alternative to whey-based products. That doesn't make them identical. Whey is somewhat higher in leucine per gram and digests faster. But the outcome data over a real training period is closer than many people assume, and the gap narrows further at adequate doses. We'll take that comparison apart properly later in the series. For now, the useful conclusion is simpler than the debate: complete plant protein works. Where This Gets Practical Twenty to thirty extra grams a day sounds like a lot until you break it down. It's one additional protein-forward moment in your day, most days. Some ways that looks in practice: Add protein to breakfast if it's currently coffee and something beige. For many of us this is the highest-leverage change available. Make the mid-morning or mid-afternoon gap a protein moment rather than a carbohydrate one. Same calories, different signal. Anchor each meal around a protein source before deciding what goes with it. Around training, protein before or after the session supports recovery. The total across the day still matters more than hitting a precise window. What We Made, and Why 12 Grams Every LAST Bar has twelve grams of complete plant protein, led by pea protein — all nine essential amino acids, plus iron and arginine. Twelve isn't an accident, and it isn't a maximum. It's the amount that fits into a bar that still tastes like food rather than a supplement, alongside eight to nine grams of prebiotic fiber and zero added sugar. We could have pushed the protein number higher. The bar would have been drier, chalkier, and harder to want. The point isn't that one bar meets your daily requirement. It doesn't. The point is that it closes the gaps — mid-morning, mid-afternoon, before or after a workout, the drive home, the airport — that many of us fill with something offering no protein at all. That's the whole design philosophy: not a meal replacement, but a better version of a moment you're already having. Whichever gap you're trying to close, a box of twelve is the practical way to do it — one decision, ready whenever the moment shows up. Shop LAST Bars The Short Version The RDA is a floor to prevent deficiency, not a target for aging well. Muscle declines gradually from midlife, and your body gets less efficient at using protein at the same time. Recommended intake for healthy adults as we age runs meaningfully above the RDA — roughly 0.45 to 0.55 grams per pound. Distribution matters. Three or four protein moments beat one large dinner. Breakfast is where many of us have the most room to improve. Complete plant protein works. Pea protein contains all nine essential amino acids. Next in the series: the nutrient almost everyone under-eats — fiber, your gut, and why the source matters more than the number. Sources Bauer et al., PROT-AGE Study Group — Evidence-Based Recommendations for Optimal Dietary Protein Intake in Older People, Journal of the American Medical Directors Association Babault et al. — Pea proteins oral supplementation promotes muscle thickness gains during resistance training, Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition National Institute on Aging — Age-related muscle loss and physical function (nia.nih.gov) Institute of Medicine — Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids Wall et al. — Anabolic resistance of muscle protein synthesis with aging, Nutrition Reviews Banaszek et al. — The Effects of Whey vs. Pea Protein on Physical Adaptations Following 8 Weeks of High-Intensity Functional Training, Sports This article is general information, not medical or dietary advice. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This post is part of the Resetting Normal Series. Read the full series: Part 1: Resetting Normal · Part 2: What's Actually in Your Protein Bar · Part 3: Protein and Muscle as We Age Here's to aging well… Cheers! — JoelFounder, Five Plus Protein

Last week I wrote about the moment in the grocery aisle — the one where you turn something over, read the back, and quietly decide it's fine. This is the follow-up. If you're going to read the back, it helps to know what you're looking at. None of this is complicated. It took me about thirty years to learn because I wasn't paying attention, not because it's hard. You can pick most of it up in the next ten minutes. I'll walk you through our own label along the way, including the two ingredients people ask us about most. The Front Is Marketing. The Back Is the Truth. Everything on the front of a package is a choice someone made to sell you something. High protein. Low sugar. All natural. Clean. Some of those words have legal definitions. Some don't. The ingredient list and the nutrition panel are different. Those are regulated, standardized, and difficult to dress up. So, the first habit is simply this: flip it over before you read the front. Once you've seen the back, the front stops working on you. Ingredients Are Listed by Weight — and That Tells You Everything This is the single most useful thing on any package, and many people don’t know this, I didn’t. Ingredients appear in descending order by weight. Whatever is listed first, there's the most of. Whatever is near the end, there's very little of. Which means you can tell what a product actually is in about three seconds. If a bar leads with a syrup or a sugar, it's a candy bar with protein added. If it leads with a nut butter, a protein source, or a fiber, it's built on food. One thing to keep in mind so you don't over-read it: potent ingredients belong near the end. Spices and botanicals — cinnamon, turmeric, ginger — are effective at small volumes, and a teaspoon of turmeric weighs almost nothing next to a nut butter. Seeing them low on a list is normal and expected. The tell isn't where the spices land. It's where the bulk ingredients land. If a package sells you on one thing and the ingredient list is mostly something else, that's the gap worth noticing. Try this on your next bar Read only the first three ingredients. Ignore everything else for a moment. Those three make up most of what you're about to eat. If they aren't things you'd want to eat on purpose, the rest of the list won't save it. The Two Sugar Lines The nutrition panel gives you two separate numbers. Total Sugars, and beneath it, Includes Added Sugars. Most guidance tells you to check added sugar. That's good advice as far as it goes. Added sugar is sugar that was put in during processing, and less of it is better. But it isn't the whole picture. A bar sweetened entirely with dates, fruit concentrate, or juice concentrate can honestly print 0g added sugar on its panel — because technically, none was added. The fruit was already sweet. Meanwhile that same bar might carry fifteen or more grams of total sugar. Your bloodstream doesn't know the difference. Concentrated fruit sugar behaves a great deal like any other sugar once it's in you. The fiber and structure that would have slowed it down in a whole date are largely gone by the time it's a paste in a bar. So, check both lines. Added sugar tells you about the manufacturer's intent. Total sugar tells you what your body is going to deal with. This matters more as we age. Repeated glucose spikes contribute to glycation — a process where sugar molecules bind to proteins in the body and gradually stiffen tissue over time. One bar is not a big deal, but you don’t want to make a habit out of it. What Isn't There Matters As Much As What Is I had been trained for years to look for grams of protein and little else. I didn't even know what was missing. Most protein bars deliver protein and then stop. That's the whole job. Which is fine, as far as it goes — but it means a lot of what you're eating is doing one thing and nothing else. Three things worth looking for: Fiber Roughly ninety-five percent of adults don't meet daily fiber recommendations. A bar with two grams isn't moving that needle. Eight or nine grams is about the practical ceiling for a single serving — enough to make a real dent in the daily gap, and about as much as most people want at one time. Significantly more than that in one sitting tends to produce more discomfort than benefit. Check whether the fiber comes from a named source — chicory root, oat fiber, acacia — or whether it just appears as a number on the panel. The source matters, and I’ll come back to why. One practical note if you're coming from a low-fiber diet: give it a few days. Going from very little fiber to eight or nine grams in a sitting can feel like a lot at first. That usually settles within a week as your gut adjusts. Functional ingredients Look for whether anything in the list is doing more than one job. Cinnamon, turmeric, ginger, cacao, and similar botanicals have each been studied for antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. They also happen to taste like something. Most bars contain none of these. Not fewer than others — none. That's worth noticing, because it means the bar is contributing calories and protein and nothing else. Fat source Nuts, seeds, coconut, and MCT oil are meaningfully different from palm oil or generic vegetable oil. The label will tell you which. The Sweetener Section — Where It Gets Confusing This is the part of a label that trips up almost everyone, including people who read labels carefully. It's also where our own panel needs a minute of explanation, so I'll do both at once. Sugar alcohols are not one thing Maltitol, sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol, erythritol, and glycerin are all classified as sugar alcohols — polyols. They get grouped under a single line on the nutrition panel. But they behave very differently once you eat them, and treating them as one category is where most label advice goes wrong. The difference is absorption. Sorbitol, maltitol, and mannitol are poorly absorbed in the small intestine. Whatever isn't absorbed continues into the colon, where gut bacteria ferment it. That fermentation is what produces the gas, bloating, and discomfort an hour after eating a "healthy" bar. The FDA takes this seriously enough that products containing sorbitol or mannitol are required to carry a warning that excess consumption may have a laxative effect. Glycerin behaves differently. It's readily and completely absorbed in the small intestine, which means it never reaches the colon to ferment. That's why no laxative warning is required for it. Our bars list three to four grams of sugar alcohol on the panel, and all of it is vegetable glycerin — plant-derived, vegan, and there to keep a low-sugar bar soft instead of hard and chalky. The FDA requires it to be declared as a sugar alcohol. It just doesn't act like the ones that cause trouble. If you want the longer version, we wrote a whole post on it: The Sugar Alcohol on Our Label Isn't That Kind. "The Sugar Alcohol on Our Label Isn't That Kind"  Stevia and monk fruit Both are plant-derived, zero-calorie, and don't produce a glucose response. They can taste distinctly sweet in a way some people dislike, but they don't carry the digestive issues that the fermentable polyols do. IMO syrup — fifth on our list Isomalto-oligosaccharide, made here from tapioca. It sits fifth on our ingredient list, which means there's a meaningful amount of it, and by now you know to ask what it's doing there. Two answers. It's the binder — without it, there is no bar. Not a worse bar. No bar. It's what holds a low-sugar, high-fiber formulation together in something you'd actually want to eat. And it's well tolerated. IMO has been recognized as safe by the FDA since 2008, and because most of it is absorbed before reaching the colon, it causes noticeably less gas and bloating than most fiber ingredients. Reported tolerance issues start well above thirty grams a day. There are a few grams in a bar. Here's the part worth knowing, and it's the reason I'm spending words on it: the FDA does not count IMO as dietary fiber. A manufacturer petitioned to have it added to the approved fiber list and was turned down. Some bars still market it as prebiotic fiber anyway. We can't, and we don't. Which is exactly why the eight to nine grams of fiber on our panel is chicory root inulin — an FDA-recognized dietary fiber — and not IMO inflating the number. IMO's carbohydrates are counted as carbohydrates, where they belong. When you see a bar advertising twenty grams of fiber, this is the first thing worth checking, and that is a LOT of fiber. The Question No Label Can Answer Everything above is useful. None of it is the last word. The real test is how you feel two hours later. Steady, or crashed. Comfortable, or bloated. Actually satisfied, or hungry again and slightly annoyed about it. A panel can tell you what went in. Only you can tell what it did. I ignored that signal for too long because the label said the right things, and the label was never the problem — I just wasn't listening to the part that mattered. The Short Version If you remember nothing else, here's the whole thing on one hand: •    Read the first three ingredients. That's most of what you're eating. •    Check both sugar lines — added and total. •    Look for fiber from a named source, and know that eight or nine grams is a good target for one serving. •    Ask what the bar contributes, not only what it avoids. •    If bars have left you uncomfortable, look at which sugar alcohols are in them — not whether there are any. •    Notice how you feel two hours later. That answer outranks the panel. Now Read Ours I'd rather you apply this to our label than take my word for anything. Twelve grams of complete plant protein. Eight to nine grams of fiber from chicory root. Zero added sugar and two to three grams of total sugar — both numbers, not just the convenient one. Cinnamon and turmeric in every bar, plus cacao or ginger depending on the flavor. Stevia and monk fruit for sweetness. Three to four grams of sugar alcohol, all from vegetable glycerin — none of the fermentable ones that cause the bloating. And IMO syrup doing the structural work, counted honestly as carbohydrate rather than dressed up as fiber. That's the whole panel. Nothing hidden behind a proprietary blend. If you want to compare it against what you're eating now, the Sampler Box gives you all three flavors — no subscription, no commitment. See the full panel  →  Next in the series: how much protein you actually need as your body changes — and why the number goes up, not down. Sources •    U.S. Food and Drug Administration — Food Labeling Guide; Added Sugars labeling; Interactive Nutrition Facts Label: Sugar Alcohols (fda.gov) •    U.S. Food and Drug Administration — Review of the Scientific Evidence on the Physiological Effects of Certain Non-Digestible Carbohydrates (dietary fiber determinations) •    International Food Information Council — What Is Glycerin? (ific.org) •    Madsen et al. — Evaluation of the isomalto-oligosaccharide fiber content of commercial products, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry •    Lenhart & Chey — A Systematic Review of the Effects of Polyols on Gastrointestinal Health and IBS, Advances in Nutrition •    Quagliani & Felt-Gunderson — Closing America's Fiber Intake Gap, American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine •    Uribarri et al. — Advanced Glycation End Products in Foods and a Practical Guide to Their Reduction, Journal of the American Dietetic Association These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This post is part of the Resetting Normal Series. Read the full series: Part 1: Resetting Normal · Part 2: What's Actually in Your Protein Bar Here's to aging well… Cheers! — Joel Founder, Five Plus Protein