Sarcopenia doesn't announce itself. There's no dramatic moment where your muscles suddenly fail. It's a slow, decade-long erosion. You struggle a bit more with grocery bags. Stairs get harder. You avoid certain movements without consciously deciding to. Your world shrinks — incrementally, imperceptibly — until one day you realise you can't do things you used to do without thinking.
The numbers are sobering. Between ages 50 and 80, the average person loses 30-40% of their skeletal muscle mass. Muscle strength declines even faster — roughly 3-5% per year after 60. And with lost muscle comes lost function, lost independence, and dramatically increased fall risk.
Falls are the leading cause of injury death in adults over 65. They kill more people than car accidents in that age group. And the single biggest predictor of fall risk is muscle strength. Not balance training. Not yoga. Raw muscle.
The recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. For a 75kg person, that's 60 grams. That recommendation was established to prevent protein deficiency — the bare minimum to avoid malnutrition.
It was not designed for maintaining muscle mass in aging adults. And the growing consensus among protein researchers is that it's woefully inadequate.
The PROT-AGE study group — an international consortium of geriatric and nutrition experts — published guidelines in 2013 recommending 1.0-1.2g/kg/day for healthy older adults and 1.2-1.5g/kg/day for those with acute or chronic illness. The International Society of Sports Nutrition recommends even higher: 1.4-2.0g/kg/day for active adults.
For that same 75kg person, that's 90-150 grams per day. Double to triple the RDA. And most people over 50 aren't even hitting the RDA.
It's not just about total protein. It's about how much you eat at each meal. Your muscles need a specific amino acid — leucine — to trigger muscle protein synthesis (MPS). In young adults, the threshold is about 2 grams of leucine per meal. In adults over 50, it rises to 2.5-3 grams.
This is called anabolic resistance. As you age, your muscles become less responsive to the protein signal. You need a bigger stimulus to get the same response. A meal with 15 grams of protein might trigger MPS in a 25-year-old. That same meal does almost nothing for a 65-year-old.
To hit 2.5-3g of leucine, you need roughly 30-40 grams of high-quality protein per meal. That's 150g of chicken breast. Or 4-5 eggs. Or a solid scoop of whey protein. Three times a day. This is why the "eat a little protein with every meal" advice falls flat for older adults — a little isn't enough to cross the threshold.
The highest leucine sources are whey protein (the king at roughly 11% leucine by weight), eggs, beef, chicken, and fish. Plant proteins are lower in leucine — you'd need roughly 40-50% more plant protein to match the leucine content of animal protein.
That doesn't mean plant-based diets can't work. It means plant-based older adults need to be more strategic — combining sources, using leucine-rich options like soy and pea protein, and potentially supplementing with free-form leucine to hit the threshold.
A simple framework: 30-40 grams of protein at each of three daily meals, with the largest serving post-exercise when your muscles are most receptive. A protein supplement (whey or plant-based) between meals if you're struggling to hit your target through food alone.
Muscle loss is not like weight loss. You can't just eat more protein later and get it all back. The older you are, the harder it is to build new muscle. The anabolic resistance gets worse. The hormonal environment gets less favourable. The window of opportunity narrows with every passing year.
The 75-year-old who maintained their muscle through their 50s and 60s has a fundamentally different quality of life than the one who didn't. They can travel. They can play with grandchildren. They can get up off the floor. They can survive a fall without breaking a hip.
That's not old age. That's muscle loss that started 40 years earlier and nobody did a damn thing about it.
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