Do steaks make you big?

Adjusting the intake of high protein foods like meat, eggs and milk products could determine whether you become a rugby player or marathon runner and may help you lose weight, according to new research published this month in the Journal of Biological Chemistry . Dr Stefan Broer, head of the molecular nutrition group in the ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment at The Australian National University, said the study by a group of ANU and Sydney researchers could potentially lead to the development of new weight-loss drugs. 'When it comes to controlling your body weight, everybody thinks about reducing sugar and fat. But we also eat a lot of protein so we wanted to find out how it influences your body weight,' he said. To investigate the problem, the team generated mice that could not digest protein as well as a normal mouse and measured a wide variety of physiological and physical properties. 'During digestion, your stomach and intestine breaks down protein into smaller subunits called amino acids,' Dr Broer said. ?So we focused on mice that could not transport amino acids from the intestine into the cells of the body and therefore could not properly process proteins.