Funding from the Wisconsin Partnership Program helped fuel a study published in the Journal of Physiology which suggests that counting calories might not be the only way to improve humans’ metabolic health. Researchers led by Dudley Lamming, PhD, associate professor of medicine (endocrinology) at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health found that lowering the consumption of specific types of amino acids (the building blocks of protein) called branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) improved metabolic health, even when overall calories were not reduced. If the results can be translated to humans, it is possible that diets with low levels of BCAAs can improve symptoms of metabolic syndrome, a group of conditions that collectively increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
