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Longevity & The Aging Athlete:
The role of mycoprotein in long-term performance
This is the second post in our series "The Longevity Stack — A Whole-Food Perspective from The Protein Brewery". Read the first post here.
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Longevity isn’t a single point of health that can be optimized; instead, it’s an approach that aims to help people live healthier, for longer. It’s achieved by improving interconnected biological systems, including muscle integrity, metabolic stability, and gut function, working well and working together.
In our previous blog, we explored how the longevity consumer has a mindset that drives them to incorporate chosen solutions into daily rituals in order to maximize their long-term health – also known as their healthspan.
When it comes to longevity consumers who are also athletes, we’re presented with an audience for whom thinking in terms of nutrition and being their best selves is nothing new. But what happens when this audience begins to age? How do they balance performance with longevity?
The legacy sports nutrition consumer
Enter: the legacy sports nutrition consumer. Typically middle aged, this is an audience that’s trained consistently for years, often decades. Strength or endurance remain central to their routine and their lifestyle is structured around exercise and recovery. They’re familiar with how the right diet can help them achieve their goals. They are also more likely to track metrics including nutritional input and health output.
To them, age is not a barrier and they’re not disengaging from performance as they grow older. Instead it remains core to how they see themselves and they want to continue doing what they do for as long as possible.
Biologically, however, they’re at an age when subtle shifts in performance and recovery begin to emerge, while the nutrition plans – core to their routines – have most likely been focused on short-term gains, not long-term health.
This is an audience that’s realizing it’s no longer as simple as training harder and eating more protein; that as the body ages there are other considerations to support continued performance.
As healthspan, rather than personal bests, becomes the more relevant metric, the ability to remain physically independent is what matters. For the legacy sports nutrition consumer, longevity is performance under a different framing.
From building muscle to maintaining it
Muscle mass and strength remain among the strongest predictors of survival and independence.¹ But while sarcopenia – the age-related, progressive loss of skeletal muscle mass, strength, and function – is commonly associated with old age, it begins decades earlier.
Unfortunately, as we age, maintaining muscle becomes progressively more complex as our biology changes. It’s influenced not only by amino acid availability but also by vitamin D status, inflammatory tone and overall metabolic health.² And while we know that protein requirements increase as we age, emerging research indicates that protein quality, not just total intake, becomes increasingly important, too.³
This understanding reframes muscle as “the organ of longevity” – as health experts put it – rather than just a performance metric. Prevention, supported by both training and adequate nutrition, is more effective than attempting to rebuild lost tissue later in life.
However, traditional sports nutrition has often been optimised for short-term performance rather than long-term health: isolates prioritise speed of absorption, while fiber has been removed from the majority of protein powders to maximise protein density and simplify formulation. As such, many of the high-protein dietary patterns that our legacy sports nutrition consumer follows often underdeliver on fiber, and fiber deficiency remains common, even among health-conscious consumers.
Yet fiber’s influence on microbiome diversity and gut integrity plays a significant role in nutrient absorption, inflammatory signalling and metabolic regulation. Delivering protein and fiber together can deliver better results in terms of muscle maintenance.⁴
Renewal, not just repair
When performance nutrition is designed with decades in mind, its architecture changes. Ingredients must simultaneously support muscle maintenance, gut integrity and cellular renewal, while the concept of recovery expands beyond repair alone.
Autophagy, the body’s intrinsic process of clearing damaged cellular components and recycling them into new structures, plays a central role in maintaining cellular efficiency, supporting mitochondrial turnover, muscle quality and resilience. This is where compounds such as spermidine generate interest. A naturally occurring polyamine present in all living cells, spermidine has attracted attention for its role in promoting autophagy and supporting cellular renewal pathways.
Integrating it into performance solutions reframes recovery as more than the repair of muscle, instead becoming about preserving the quality and functionality of tissue over time.
Introducing Fermotein®: A food-first approach to performance longevity
Fermotein® is an example of a whole-food ingredient that can support a product designed to support performance longevity.
The nutrient-dense mycoprotein powder is minimally processed and naturally high in protein (50%), providing a complete amino acid profile to support muscle maintenance and strength for consumers as they age. It also contains prebiotic fiber (30%) unique to fungi and essential micronutrients and bioactives including the all-important spermidine. With a PDCAAS of 1.0, it delivers high-quality protein while retaining the fiber matrix typically removed in isolates.
Due to its near-complete nutrient profile and the fact it delivers protein, fiber and spermidine, Fermotein® allows multiple layers of the longevity stack to be addressed within a single ingredient platform.
Designing sports nutrition for longevity performance
The legacy sports nutrition consumer does not require less intensity or lower ambition. Instead, they need a nutritional model that acknowledges evolving biology and supports sustained capability. Longevity is not about shying away from performance, it’s being able to perform for as long as possible.
By designing performance nutrition with long-term health in mind rather than short-term gains, there is an opportunity to shift from fragmented supplementation towards a system that supports performance nutrition, regardless of age.
Interested in trying Fermotein® in your own product?
(1) Muscle Mass Index As a Predictor of Longevity in Older Adults, Srikanthan, Preethi et al., The American Journal of Medicine, Volume 127, Issue 6, 547 - 553
(2) Kim D, Morikawa S, Miyawaki M, Nakagawa T, Ogawa S, Kase Y. Sarcopenia prevention in older adults: Effectiveness and limitations of non-pharmacological interventions. Osteoporos Sarcopenia. 2025 Jun;11(2 Suppl):65-72. doi: 10.1016/j.afos.2025.05.005. Epub 2025 Jun 4. PMID: 40718352; PMCID: PMC12288930.
(3) Eunjae Lee, In-Dong Kim, Seung-Taek Lim, Physical activity and protein-intake strategies to prevent sarcopenia in older people, International Health, Volume 17, Issue 4, July 2025, Pages 423–430, https://doi.org/10.1093/inthealth/ihae064
(4) Frampton J, Murphy KG, Frost G, Chambers ES. Higher dietary fibre intake is associated with increased skeletal muscle mass and strength in adults aged 40 years and older. J Cachexia Sarcopenia Muscle. 2021 Dec;12(6):2134-2144. doi: 10.1002/jcsm.12820. Epub 2021 Sep 29. PMID: 34585852; PMCID: PMC8718023.