New Faculty Profile: James McKendry
Assistant Professor at LFS
Dr. James McKendry is a new Assistant Professor in the Faculty who will use innovative tools to understand how nutrition and exercise affect our health as we age.
Dr. McKendry comes to LFS having just completed his postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University. He worked under Dr. Stuart Phillips, a world leader in muscle metabolism and a Canada Research Chair in Skeletal Muscle Health. During his fellowship, Dr. McKendry focussed on understanding how protein quality can influence muscle building in older individuals (aged 60 and above).
“As we age, our bodies become less able to utilize the nutrients in our food,” Dr. McKendry says. “So, improving the quality of protein that older individuals consume may have important outcomes for muscle and health.”
In defining high-quality protein, Dr. McKendry emphasizes its digestibility and amino acid composition. Increasing the quantity of protein is one method of improving muscle outcomes, but focusing on improving the quality of whole-food protein sources can have a profound impact on muscle.
As ethical and sustainable food production concerns rise, the demand for plant-based alternatives has increased dramatically. Recent advancements in food science and protein extraction have created a wider variety of plant proteins to choose from: pea, potato, rice, and more.
With that in mind, Dr. McKendry compared the ability of different protein sources—plant- and animal-based—on muscle building in older adults. Dr. McKendry showed that plant-based (pea) was as effective as animal-based (whey) for building muscle during aging—and both were better than collagen protein.
Dr. McKendry completed his undergraduate, master’s, and PhD degrees at the University of Birmingham, UK, in Sports and Exercise sciences, analogous to Kinesiology in Canada. His undergraduate thesis project focussed on how intense exercise affects the brain’s response to images of food. He found that intense exercise repressed the reward regions of the brain to images of high-calorie food — making people less inclined to reach for highly processed foods.
However, his real passion was skeletal muscle. Like any aspiring sports scientist and ‘failed athlete’, Dr. McKendry says he wanted to understand how to make his own muscles bigger, so his master’s degree explored how changing the amount of rest taken between sets of resistance exercise influenced how quickly we build muscle.
Inspired by his mother’s work with older people in a hospital, Dr. McKendry then began studying the effects of aging on the muscles in high-performance older athletes during his PhD. By focusing on older athletes who had been highly active for many years, they isolated the effects of chronological aging and other lifestyle factors on muscle. To do this, they took muscle biopsy samples to look at the muscle fibres under a microscope, and used stable isotope tracers and mass spectrometers to measure how fast muscle was being built during the hours and days following resistance exercise.
At LFS, Dr. McKendry will establish the Muscle, Aging, (In) Activity, and Nutrition (MAIN) Lab. He’s excited to join a Faculty with a heavier focus on nutrition at a university with a dedicated centre for research focused on healthy aging (Edward S.H Leong Centre for Healthy Aging).
“I’m extremely excited and a little nervous about leading my own research group,” Dr. McKendry says. “It’s amazing to have a job at a world-leading institution where your career goal is to pursue scientific questions you find interesting and that benefits society. My research group aims to extend the health span and improve the quality of life that older individuals experience.”
