Participants must be healthy and fit the age requirement. With physicans on staff, interested subjects undergo a complete physical at the laboratory and also provide their medical history, Pawelczyk said. One room in Noll Lab is designed to make temperature adjustments to suit the researcher's needs. All the rooms that house participants must comply with hospital standards, he said. Participants may even find themselves in an isolated room for 24 hours to measure their resting metabolism, if they choose.
Researchers can then study what affects their metabolism.
Other studies may require participants to eat specified foods. For this, Noll Lab has a metabolic kitchen to prepare such meals, Pawelczyk said. We try to make it so it's not exclusively pay. The researchers perform the studies on themselves to have a better understanding of what participating is like. Most of the proposals were eventually approved, Yekel said.