Nutrition, Metabolism, and Anthropometry Lab

The Nutrition, Metabolism and Anthropometry Lab is under the direction of Dr. Daniel Benyshek, and examines dietary factors that play critical roles in human health and disease. Dr. Benyshek and his students are currently working with other faculty from UNLV and a “sister” Nutrition Lab at the Arizona State University (http://www.poly.asu.edu/ecollege/nutrition/index.html), on both experimental animal research and studies with human research participants to explore the effects of diet on maternal and child health, especially during and immediately after pregnancy.



Obesity-related disorders such as the Metabolic Syndrome and type 2 diabetes have reached epidemic levels globally (well over 1 billion people are overweight or obese by World Health Organization standards). Research conducted in the lab includes work on the role maternal prenatal nutrition plays in susceptibility to -- and protection from – obesity-related diseases. Much of the research currently being conducted by Dr. Benyshek and his colleagues is focused on how obesity-related disorders like type 2 diabetes are passed on (epigenetically) from one generation to the next.



One current project being conducted in the Nutrition, Metabolism and Anthropometry Lab is a two-year, type 2 diabetes prevention project funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Benyshek and a team of UNLV researchers and graduate students, including colleagues in UNLV’s School of Community Health Sciences (Dr. Michelle Chino, and Dr. Carolee Dodge-Francis http://publichealth.unlv.edu/), as well as community partners such as the Las Vegas Indian Center (http://www.lasvegasindiancenter.org/) are working with Native Americans living in the Las Vegas area whose blood sugars are high (“prediabetes” http://www.diabetes.org/pre-diabetes.jsp), but are not yet at diabetic levels. The two-year project seeks to understand what special challenges and opportunities urban Native Americans might face in their efforts to keep their higher than normal blood sugar levels from increasing to that of type 2 diabetes through well established diet and lifestyle modification programs that have been successfully implemented in several Native American reservation communities.



Another current research project investigates the practice of placentophagy (eating the placenta following parturition). While consumption of the placenta is a common practice among maternal mammals throughout the Animal Kingdom, it is extremely rare cross culturally among humans. Dr. Benyshek, along with graduate student Sharon Young (graduate students) and research colleagues Dr. Chandler Marrs, UNLV Maternal Health Lab (http://complabs.nevada.edu/~mhlab/index.html), Dr. Deborah Keil, UNLV Clinical Laboratory Sciences (http://alliedhealth.unlv.edu/cls/faculty.html), and Jodi Selander, founder of Placenta Benefits (http://placentabenefits.info/), are investigating the possible beneficial health effects and/or risks of placentophagy on postpartum maternal health.



The Nutrition, Metabolism and Anthropometry lab at UNLV is a state-of the art facility, equipped to do computerized diet analysis and anthropometrics, as well as to obtain comprehensive lipid and metabolic panel values using minimally invasive (finger-prick blood spot) techniques.