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Comment by mahrain | Hacker News Reader

Saving you a Wikipedia search: “ Foods that have high amounts of isoleucine include eggs, soy protein, seaweed, turkey, chicken, lamb, cheese, and fish.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoleucine?wprov=sfti1#Nutriti...

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It doesn't make sense to me to focus-fire a single nutrient of a food, find some reason to not maximize it in mice, and then use that to avoid whole foods that contain that nutrient, especially as a human.

A food could have all sorts of individual nutrients that look bad in isolation while the food only improves human health outcomes when put to the test.

Randomized controlled diet experiments over the lifetime of a human are pretty difficult. So they make do with what data they can get.

Putting that data together to form a recommendation is incredibly difficult. If we could just get people not to imagine that it's trivial ("eat no isolucene and live forever"), we'd be several steps ahead of where we are.

Isn't that the food normally linked with the longevity of people of the Mediterranean areas?

Yes, this study comes with the standard “in mice” caveat. We don’t know if this would replicate in humans. It is interesting though if for no other reason than to illustrate that all calorie sources are not equivalent.

Even in mice there is a large sex difference.Most beneficial in males.

This is a really good point. There are a lot of really odd outcomes these mice models consistently produce but we don't know what causes them and/or don't care because it's not within the scope of the primary research question

Some of us care ;-) including Dudley Lamming.

Here is our group’s latest paper in Science. We try to get at genetics of sex differences in lifespan:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36173858/

In this study we mapped 7 chromosomal regions that modulate lifespan in mice. We are now up to about 35 regions. Of course the goal is to understand the actual processes modulated by each so-called “locus”.

So 100% of my protein sources

It's as if proteins contain a lot of amino acids.

You need it to survive. It's an essential amino acid.

Probably don’t stress about it too much (or really at all), unless you are a mouse.

So everything except beef, pork, nuts and grains in terms of protein sources?

From the summary of the paper

> Restriction of the branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) leucine, isoleucine, and valine recapitulates many of these benefits in young C57BL/6J mice

So maybe stop using that BCAA supplement?

These days BCAAs have the reputation of being pretty useless anyway, unless your diet is very poor. You get enough BCAAs from complete protein sources.

Look up the AXA1125 for non-fatty liver disease and see how BCAA with a bunch of other amino acids (arginine, NAC, glutamine) gets your liver and mitochondria back in shape.

I didn't know about that, to clarify I meant for people using it to build muscle.

I just started using it out of curiosity and I have to say it does seem to improve recovery and building. I don't know if I'm hallucinating yet (just about a week in) but something has changed for sure and that's not confirmation bias (measurable on the bioimpedance meter) Putting muscle mass is not my priority as I am mostly a runner, but I do swim too and upper body strength makes a good difference there. So, I would rather not lose whatever I build and make it easier to maintain... My diet isn't very high in animal products most of the time which may be the reason. But between vegan doomerism and the price of quality meat it's not easy to find a balance...

Turkey should not be high on this list. This source is comparatively low in isoleucine according to Dudley Lamming—the senior author, sand here is a site to check other meats:

tools.myfooddata.com

My advocatus diaboli asks: Was this study financed by Turkey farmers?

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