Protein After 60: The Material vs. the Signal
A review published this past December pooled 441 studies. In healthy older adults, protein supplements did not add muscle, strength or physical performance. Who they did help is the part worth your time.
441 STUDIES — Collated across 33 reviews with meta-analyses. No increase in muscle mass, strength or physical performance from protein supplementation in older people in general.
Nobody has ever asked me whether they should lift more. Plenty of people have asked me what protein powder to buy. Three papers below, all from the last nine months. Two of them say the powder is not the thing. The third says what is — and then quietly undercuts how much credit I get to take for it.
It depends entirely on who you are
Age and Ageing, December 2025
This is a review of reviews — the top of the evidence pyramid. Thirty-three systematic reviews with meta-analyses, pulling data from 441 separate studies, searched from 1990 all the way through August 2024.
The headline: no increase in muscle mass, strength or physical performance from protein supplementation in older people in general, and none in healthy older people. With exercise or without it. The authors’ own summary line is that the evidence does not support routine use in healthy older adults.
But they didn’t stop at the average, and this is why the paper is useful rather than just deflating. Split by who was supplemented and it flips: in older people living with long-term conditions, there was medium-certainty evidence of at least small increases in muscle mass and strength — and the benefit was more certain when exercise came with it. In hospital patients with hip fractures, protein supplementation reduced medical complications.
So the question is not “does protein work.” It is “am I one of the people it works for.” For a lot of you, the honest answer is no, and you can stop spending the money.
Protein without the training did nothing
BMC Geriatrics, 2025
This one asked the question that actually matters if you are hoping a supplement will do the work for you. It looked specifically at physically inactive older adults — people who, for reasons of stamina or illness, cannot get to a useful training intensity. If protein alone were going to help anyone, it would be them.
Searched to the end of January 2025. Result on total lean body mass: a mean difference of −0.01 kg. Not a small gain. Nothing, to two decimal places. A second group of trials came out at +0.61 kg, also not statistically significant. Secondary measures of muscle mass showed what the authors call negligible benefit. Strength and physical performance were a mixed bag, some up, some flat.
The honest limit, and it is a real one: this rests on six randomized trials. That is a thin evidence base to declare anything settled, and the authors say so themselves — they call for better-designed studies. I’m including it because it points the same direction as a review of 441 studies, not because six trials would convince me on their own.
What works — and the number I can’t spin
Frontiers in Nutrition, 2025
35 randomized trials, 2,331 people, all with sarcopenia diagnosed by the two accepted international standards rather than by whatever each study felt like using. Searched to July 2025. Everything ranked against everything: exercise alone, nutrition alone, both together.
Both together won all three outcomes — grip strength, walking speed and appendicular muscle mass — and beat either one alone on strength and mass. On muscle mass specifically, exercise alone worked (+0.16) and nutrition alone did not reach significance at all (+0.11, confidence interval crossing zero). Both together more than doubled what exercise managed by itself.
Now the part I’d rather not print. The authors set a bar in advance for what counts as a difference a person would actually notice: 5 kg of grip strength. The winning combination produced 3.69 kg. None of the three interventions cleared that bar. On walking speed, only the combination crossed the 0.10 m/s threshold, and its confidence interval straddled it.
They also rate their own evidence as low to very low certainty throughout. So the ranking is the best we have, and it is not a promise.
Matt's take
Read this first if you have any kidney problem. Protein is one of the few things in nutrition that a physician may be deliberately limiting. If you have chronic kidney disease, reduced kidney function, or you have been put on any restricted diet, do not increase your protein because of this article. That is a conversation with your doctor, not with me, and the right answer for you may genuinely be less rather than more.
Here is the whole thing in one line: protein is the material, and the training is the signal. Material with no signal sits there. That is what the −0.01 kg in study two is — a building supply delivered to a site where nobody is building.
And now the awkward part. Three papers that all point at exercise, written up by the man you pay to supervise your exercise. You should discount that accordingly, so let me do it for you. Study three is the one with my name on the line, and its own authors say the winning result — the thing I sell, combined with the thing the supplement industry sells — produced 3.69 kg of grip strength against a 5 kg bar for “a person would notice this.” It did not clear the bar. Nothing did. Those were mostly twelve-week trials in people who already had diagnosed muscle loss. What that tells me is not that the work fails; it is that nobody gets transformed in twelve weeks, and anyone selling you that timeline is selling you something. What we are actually doing is bending a slope you stay on for years. I would rather you knew that than be pleasantly surprised into quitting in March.
If you’re at a desk all day: you are almost certainly not protein-deficient. A normal diet with meat, fish, eggs or dairy in it clears the requirement without trying. Your gap is not powder. If there is a real problem it is this one: you train at 5:30 or 6:00am and then the first actual food of your day arrives around noon. That is six hours of hard work and a coffee. Fix that with food — eggs, yogurt, leftovers, whatever you will actually eat standing up — before you spend sixty dollars on a tub. Nothing in these three papers says a supplement beats a breakfast.
If you’re over 70, or managing a long-term condition: this is where it flips, and study one is specifically about you. Long-term conditions were the group with medium-certainty benefit, and the benefit was more certain alongside exercise. The reason is not mysterious — appetite drops with age, illness blunts it further, and several common medications blunt it further still. If your day is a piece of toast, a small lunch and not much dinner, you are not in the “healthy older adult who doesn’t need it” group, and adding protein may do real work. In my experience breakfast is nearly always the meal that is short. Start there, with food first.
On powders and shakes, practically: supplements are not regulated the way medicines are, and what is on the label is not guaranteed to be what is in the tub. If you take one, or you are thinking about one, tell your physician and tell me — some interact with medications, and several “senior nutrition” drinks carry a lot of sugar, which matters if you are managing blood glucose. I am not against them. I am against buying one instead of doing the thing that actually moves the needle.
I’m a strength coach, not your physician or your dietitian. If you have kidney disease, diabetes, heart failure, a swallowing difficulty, or a prescribed diet of any kind, your doctor’s instructions outrank everything above. I would rather have their guidance in writing than guess well.
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This article first ran in the Forged Home Fitness weekly newsletter. It is general fitness education, not medical advice, and does not replace your physician.
