Engineering a Balanced Diet? Hormone FGF21 Promotes Protein Preference
To function daily, your body gleans energy from three food-derived macronutrients: carbohydrates, fats and proteins. How you divvy up those macronutrients in your diet is a matter of personal preference.
But what if you could train your brain to prefer one macronutrient over the other?
After all, not all macronutrients are created equal. While carbohydrates and fats are stored as inert forms in the body for later energy use, proteins are broken down to amino acids, which provide the biochemical basis for muscle, hormones, enzymes and neurotransmitters, among other important molecules. When demand for amino acids exceeds the dietary supply, our bodies respond by breaking down muscle and other functional proteins.
For this reason “protein intake has important effects on many aspects of health, from development to aging to metabolism to performance,” said Associate Professor Karen Ryan, Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior.
In a study appearing in Endocrinology, Ryan and her colleagues, including Molecular, Cellular and Integrative Physiology Ph.D. student and lead study author Karlton Larson, identified the hormone fibroblast growth factor-21 (FGF21) as a control for regulating dietary protein intake in male mice. They found that male mice injected with the hormone increased their intake of dietary protein over carbohydrates and fats.