Eating Enough Protein? Why Your Body May Not Be Absorbing It
Eating enough protein doesn’t always mean your body can use it. On the ‘Live & Well’ podcast, AmplifyeP24’s Courtney McHugh explains why absorption matters more than intake — and how digestion, aging, and hormonal shifts change the way protein actually works in the body.
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We’ve all heard the same protein advice for years. Track your intake. Up your grams. Drink a shake if you need to. Lift heavier if you can. But many people have been following this advice, and things still aren’t working. There is a disconnect between efforts and results.
This gap came into focus during a recent episode of the ‘Live & Well’ podcast, when host Melissa Magsaysay spoke with Courtney McHugh. McHugh is the founder of Amplifye P24, but her perspective on protein is less about products and more about what happens after food is already eaten.
“It’s not consuming more grams,” McHugh said. “It’s absorbing more grams.” She kept coming back to that several times during the conversation, framing absorption as the step most people never think about when protein advice stops working.
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Most of us assume that if it’s on the plate, the job is done. The body just handles it. But that’s a big assumption. “You’re not absorbing all the protein you eat,” she said, noting that this often surprises people who believe they’re doing everything right.
On the podcast, McHugh explained protein in a different way. Something far broader than a muscle-building tool. “Protein is the building block in everything else,” she said, pointing to hair, skin, nails, immunity, and inflammatory processes. If the protein isn’t breaking down right, what you actually need is never hitting your bloodstream. Which kind of misses the whole point, McHugh explains.
When protein isn’t fully broken down, she says, those components may never reach the bloodstream in the amounts people expect. “If you can’t absorb the protein you’re eating,” McHugh said, “then it’s not doing what it needs to do.”
She doesn’t see this as a personal failure but just a gap in how we talk about health, which advice assumes our digestion is automatic. And it isn’t.
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How the body actually uses protein
When McHugh explains protein digestion, she starts with timing, not with amino acids or muscle synthesis. “You want your digestion to start at the top, at your stomach,” she told Magsaysay. “The second your food hits your digestive system, you want it to start breaking it down because that’s when you get those amino acids… into your bloodstream.”
She explained that many digestive enzymes don’t activate until later in the digestive tract because stomach acid can deactivate them. In those cases, she said, some protein passes through without being fully accessed. “If it’s later, it just turns into waste,” she said. “You don’t actually pull out what you need to.”
That, she explains, is why protein quality isn’t as simple as it’s often presented. “Not all protein is created equal,” McHugh said, clarifying that even protein-rich foods that are considered high-quality can vary in how accessible their amino acids are, depending on digestion.
“The question isn’t just, am I eating protein....” she said. “It’s, is my body able to take what I’m eating and turn it into fuel?”
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Why protein needs change with age
This disconnect becomes more noticeable with age, McHugh explains. She spoke at length about this in the context of women, describing estrogen as a hormone that supports muscle synthesis and protein metabolism.
“As women age, we lose the ability to break down protein and absorb it,” she said. As estrogen declines, she explained, absorption can become more difficult, even as protein becomes more important for maintaining muscle and recovery. “That special added layer,” she said, “is that as we age, it gets even more important to absorb that protein.”
Men, she noted, experience hormonal shifts as well. “Men start to degrade the amount of testosterone they have in their body,” McHugh said, describing how she sees that affect muscle maintenance and protein use over time.
The issue, in her view, isn’t that protein stops mattering. It’s that the advice around it rarely changes as bodies do.
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McHugh acknowledged that protein absorption isn’t something most people can easily measure. She mentioned nitrogen balance testing as one clinical example, but noted that it’s not part of routine care. As a result, people often rely on indirect signals.
“Do you have brittle nails? Thinning hair? Are you fatigued?” she asked. “If you’re weightlifting, does it take a while to recover?” She was careful not to frame these as diagnostic markers. Instead, she described them as cues that something may not be lining up internally.
During the episode, Magsaysay reflected on how pervasive protein messaging has become, particularly for women navigating midlife and strength training. McHugh agreed, saying that constant emphasis on eating more can feel exhausting. “It just feels like that’s all you hear about when you talk about protein right now,” she said.
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What she finds more useful is shifting attention to how efficiently the body is using what’s already there. “What better way to unlock what you’re already doing,” McHugh said, “than to make it work better?” She described protein absorption as a bridge between effort and outcome. “We’re not adding something to your body,” she said. “We’re unlocking your body’s ability to do something it already knows how to do.”
McHugh didn’t present protein absorption as a new rule or a trend to chase. Instead, she framed it around what many people can already recognize. MuHugh believes we’re all following old advice. “It’s not just about how much you eat,” she said. “It’s about what your body can actually use.”
Seen that way, protein absorption isn’t a new mandate. It’s an explanation for why effort and outcome don’t always align. A thread McHugh and Magsaysay continue exploring on the podcast through sleep, GLP-1 medications, muscle loss with age, and the overlooked role digestion plays in how protein actually works in the body.
Click here to listen to the full conversation
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