7th September 2026

Newsletter Monday

Hello Reader,

I was reading a new study last week that caught my attention for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it was about nutrition and exercise as we get older, which are subjects I spend rather a lot of time talking about.

Secondly, it was carried out at Queen’s University Belfast.

I am married to a Northern Irishman and have spent enough time there to know that any nutritional intervention taking place in Northern Ireland has to contend with the fact that visiting somebody’s house without being presented with enough sticky buns to cater a small wedding, is practically unheard of.

The study was called PROMED-EX.

Researchers recruited 105 people aged over 60 who were at risk of undernutrition and experiencing some subjective decline in their memory.

They split them into three groups.

• One received personalised support to follow a protein-enriched Mediterranean-style diet.
• One received the same dietary intervention plus a home-based exercise programme.
• And the control group received a healthy-eating leaflet. Wow.

Now, there’s an important detail here.

For the two groups who got dietary intervention, it wasn’t:

“Here’s a leaflet. Try to eat better. Best of luck.”

They received personalised advice, recipes and meal plans, some of the foods were actually delivered to their homes, and there was regular contact and support.

And would you believe it?

The people who were given food, support and someone checking how they were getting on changed their diets considerably more than the people who were handed a leaflet and left to get on with it.

Medical science continues to break new ground.

After six months, nutritional status had improved significantly in both groups receiving the dietary intervention compared with the control group.

There were also improvements in measures of cognitive function.

Now, before we get carried away, this does not mean that eating a Mediterranean diet or eating more protein prevents dementia.

It was a small study, it lasted six months, and these were people specifically selected because they were at risk of undernutrition and reporting changes in their memory.

And the intervention changed lots of things about their diet. We can’t pull protein out of that and declare it responsible for the results.

But I do think the study highlights something important that gets rather less attention than the latest supplement promising healthy ageing.

People often gradually start eating less as they get older.

Appetite changes. Illness intervenes. Shopping and cooking can become more difficult. People find themselves cooking for one after decades of cooking for many.

Meals get smaller, and sometimes what constitutes a meal becomes increasingly… optimistic.

- Tea and toast.

- A bowl of soup.

- A jacket potato with a bit of cheese.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those foods.

But if that becomes how you routinely eat, it’s surprisingly easy for the overall quality and quantity of your diet to start slipping.

And protein tends to be one of the things that gets progressively whittled away.

Hold on a sec...

Before anyone disappears down a rabbit hole of tracking protein, weighing their food or buying supplements, that’s not what I’m suggesting.

For most of us, getting enough protein can be much more ordinary than that.

It means not skipping the eggs at breakfast because you’re still haunted by cholesterol messages from the 1980s.

It means eating the whole tin of tuna at lunchtime rather than carefully saving half of it while making up the rest of your plate with a few lettuce leaves.

And it means building your evening meal around a decent source of protein rather than deciding tea and toast will do because you’re eating alone tonight.

That’s what I mean when I say get enough protein.

Make it a proper part of your meals.

You don’t need to count the grams. You don’t need to track your macros.

And you certainly don’t need to buy everything in the supermarket that has HIGH PROTEIN stamped across the packet.

Because while I was reading around this study, I was reminded of another trial I’d come across recently.

And this one was asking a quite different question.

Researchers took more than 200 healthy people over 65 and followed them for a year.

These weren’t people selected because they were at risk of undernutrition. Their diets were already providing a reasonable amount of protein.

(around 1.1g/kg/day at the start of the study. If you like numbers, for someone weighing 70kg that’s roughly 80g of protein a day.)

The researchers wanted to know what happened to their muscles if they were given additional protein, with or without resistance training.

And this is where things get interesting.

Adding another 40g of protein a day, without resistance training, didn’t significantly improve the muscle outcomes compared with the control group.

In fact, the people taking additional whey protein alone still lost quadriceps muscle over the year.

The group doing heavy resistance training was the one that preserved muscle and got stronger.

Now, that doesn’t mean protein doesn’t matter.

And it certainly doesn’t tell us that somebody eating very little protein wouldn’t benefit from eating more.

That’s not what the researchers were studying.

What it does tell us is that in healthy older people who were already eating a reasonable amount, simply adding a load more protein wasn’t some sort of magic shield against age-related muscle loss.

Which brings me to one of my favourite descriptions of modern nutrition.

Comedian Kevin Bridges has a routine in which he refers to the “protein extremists”.

Damn, I felt seen.

Walk around a supermarket now and apparently everything needs protein added to it.

Protein ready meals. Protein cereal. Protein ice-cream. Protein puddings. Protein bread. Protein water.

I await protein-enriched washing-up liquid.

There is an enormous space between eating hardly any protein and becoming a protein extremist.

And there’s an equally important distinction between feeding your body properly and giving your muscles a reason to stick around.

You need to train that muscle.

Which brings me back to one final thing about that first study in Belfast.

Remember the group who were also given an exercise programme?

The researchers concluded that "adherence to it was poor".

As somebody who spends a significant proportion of my working life trying to persuade people to do strength training, I admit my heart sank a bit when I read that.

Although perhaps it shouldn’t have. Because this is real life.

We can devise increasingly precise recommendations about optimal diets, protein intake and resistance training.

We can create beautiful exercise programmes. But people still have to actually do them.

And PROMED-EX demonstrated something I see constantly in healthcare and coaching: support matters.

Giving somebody information isn’t the same thing as helping them change their behaviour.

Most people already know vegetables are good for them.

Most people know they should move more.

Nobody reaches their seventies and suddenly discovers, thanks to an NHS leaflet, that smoking isn’t particularly good for you.

Knowing is rarely the whole problem.

Perhaps that’s why I like these two studies together, despite the fact that they were asking completely different questions.

Neither gives us a shiny new hack for ageing.

Eat properly.

Don’t let your meals gradually become nutritionally smaller as your life changes.

Make sure there’s a decent source of protein on your plate rather than assuming a light dusting of cheese on a jacket potato has got it covered.

And if preserving your muscles as you get older matters to you - and it should - use them.

No protein pudding required.

Oh and I have coaching spaces available now if you are interested.

Hit reply.