Research

Hormonal

Doubling dietary leucine intake via drinking water supplementation improves glucose tolerance, insulin signaling, and reduces hepatic steatosis and adipose inflammation in high-fat diet-induced obese mice without altering total body weight or food intake.

In a mouse model of obesity, doubling dietary leucine (via water supplementation) improved how the body handles glucose and reduced liver fat and inflammation, without causing weight loss. This suggests that ensuring adequate leucine intake might support metabolic health in obese individuals, although human translation requires caution as this was an animal study.

ModerateSupportsMEDIUM confidence
Doubling dietary leucine reversed many of the metabolite abnormalities and caused a marked improvement in glucose tolerance and insulin signaling without altering food intake or weight gain. Increased dietary leucine was also associated with a decrease in hepatic steatosis and a decrease in inflammation in adipose tissue.
Yazmín Macotela et al. · PLoS ONE · 2011

Why this rating

High-quality mechanistic data in a controlled animal model, but results are not directly translatable to human clinical outcomes without further validation.

Source

Dietary Leucine - An Environmental Modifier of Insulin Resistance Acting on Multiple Levels of Metabolism

Yazmín Macotela et al. · PLoS ONE · 2011

DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0021187

mechanism_onlyCited 265×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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