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