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Keim Lab
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KEIM LAB

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    • Nancy Keim, Ph.D, MS, RDN

      Research Scientist

      Adjunct Professor, UC Davis Department of Nutrition

      Office: (530) 752-4163

      Email address: nancy.keim@usda.gov

      Google Scholar page

      Research Interests

      Studies focus on human energy intake, energy expenditure, and energy homeostasis. Dietary intake, physical activity, and how the body handles energy can vary greatly between persons. Our goal is to understand these variations and determine how the body adapts to different dietary conditions, physical activity demands, or body weight changes.

      Themes of the Laboratory Research

      • Energy fuel usage in response to a variety of test meals. How do we best measure if fat is a preferred fuel or if carbohydrate is a preferred fuel. This exploration is termed metabolic flexibility. The goal is to determine if this approach is useful for determining precision nutrition recommendations.
      • Individual metabolic responses to diet patterns, such as the Mediterranean diet.
      • Understanding eating behaviors and how homeostatic mechanisms and hedonic eating mesh together.
      • Building models of hunger and satiety using both subjective and objective measures. The subjective measures include self-reported feelings using visual analog scales, established eating behaviors, reported preferences for different types of foods, and motivations for food selection. The objective measures include measurements of gut-derived hormones (short-term responses) or hormones involved in energy homeostasis such as leptin and insulin


    • Dr. Keim is a member of the research team that investigates diet patterns includes Brian Bennett, Liping Huang, Kevin Laugero, and John W. Newman.

    • Methods and Technique

      • Bomb calorimetry measures the gross energy in foods, urine, and fecal samples
      • Indirect calorimetry measures energy expenditure at rest and in response to a test meal. Substrates used to produce energy by oxidation, such as lipid or glucose, can be estimated.
      • Appetite assessment using visual analog scales and hormones related to appetite such as ghrelin, GLP-1, PYY, and GIP.
      • Physical activity monitoring
      • Physical fitness
      • Body composition using dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA), and bioelectric impedance analysis (InBody)