We can’t live without methionine. But we can do a better job of restricting the amount of it we put into our bodies. There’s a lot of methionine in beef, lamb, poultry, pork, and eggs, whereas plant proteins, in general, tend to contain low levels of that amino acid—enough to keep the light on, as it were, but not enough to let biological complacency set in. The same is true for arginine and the three branched-chain amino acids, leucine, isoleucine, and valine, all of which can activate mTOR. Low levels of these amino acids correlate with increased lifespan26 and in human studies, a decreased
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