BAIBA (Beta-Aminoisobutyric Acid)

BAIBA (beta-aminoisobutyric acid) is a small non-protein amino acid your body makes from two sources — the amino acid valine and thymine, one of the building blocks of DNA — and its blood level rises modestly after exercise in some, but not all, human studies. In mice and in cell cultures it turns white fat “beige”, improves blood sugar and protects bone cells, which is why the L-form is now sold as a supplement. In people, the published evidence is one single-dose absorption study and one eight-week trial, and that trial found no difference from placebo in weight, body fat, metabolic rate, blood sugar or cholesterol. BAIBA is a genuinely interesting signalling molecule, not a proven supplement — and nowhere near creatine’s evidence base.

Table of Contents

  1. What BAIBA Is: One Name, Two Molecules
  2. From Urine Curiosity to Supplement
  3. The 2014 Discovery: A Signal From Exercising Muscle
  4. Beige Fat and Blood Sugar: Strong in Mice, Unproven in People
  5. Bone and Muscle: The Osteocyte Story
  6. Your Genes Set Your Level: AGXT2 and the “High Excretors”
  7. What Happens When People Take It
  8. Myths & Overclaims: “The Biggest Thing Since Creatine”?
  9. If You Are Considering It
  10. Safety, Regulation & Who Should Avoid It
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

What BAIBA Is: One Name, Two Molecules

BAIBA stands for beta-aminoisobutyric acid; chemists also write it as 3-aminoisobutyric acid or 3-amino-2-methylpropanoic acid. It is an amino acid, but not one of the twenty your body strings together into proteins. It is a non-protein amino acid: a small molecule that circulates on its own as a by-product of metabolism, and that turns out to carry signals between organs. Two of its chemical cousins have pages on this site. BAIBA is beta-alanine with one extra methyl group (a single-carbon side branch) — the chemists who first described it in 1951 called it “alpha-methyl-beta-alanine” — and it contains exactly the same atoms as GABA, the brain’s calming messenger, arranged in a different shape.

Like a pair of hands, BAIBA comes in two mirror-image forms, called enantiomers, that have the same parts but cannot be laid exactly on top of each other. Your body makes both, by two completely separate routes:

The names are a genuine source of confusion, and it is worth untangling them before reading any claim:

Finally, BAIBA is not a vitamin or an essential nutrient. There is no dietary requirement for it and no known deficiency disease; the body makes its own from valine and thymine. Eating extra valine does not appear to raise it quickly: in the one human study that tested this, a 1,500 mg dose of valine left blood L-BAIBA no higher than a placebo did over five hours.

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From Urine Curiosity to Supplement

BAIBA was first reported in 1951 as “a new amino-acid obtained from human urine” (Crumpler, Dent, Harris and Westall, Nature, 1951). For decades afterwards it was studied mostly as a curiosity of metabolism and genetics, because the amount a person excretes turned out to be largely inherited: a common trait called hyper-beta-aminoisobutyric aciduria, in which some perfectly healthy people pass many times more BAIBA in their urine than others.

The modern story is short and has moved quickly:

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The 2014 Discovery: A Signal From Exercising Muscle

When you train for endurance, a protein in muscle called PGC-1α helps drive the response, regulating many of muscle’s metabolic genes. Mice engineered to carry extra PGC-1α in their muscle, like mice that exercise, show more heat-burning (“thermogenic”) gene activity in their white fat. The open question was how a signal gets from muscle to fat. A team at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, reporting in Cell Metabolism in 2014, analysed the small molecules released by muscle cells engineered to overproduce PGC-1α and found BAIBA among them.

What they showed, with the evidence tier for each finding:

Later human studies have been less tidy. In a 2019 randomized crossover study, 15 recreationally active adults who cycled for one hour at 40% of their peak power saw D-BAIBA rise 13% and L-BAIBA 20%, and a 2026 study found that both forms rose after a bout of treadmill exercise in 60 people. The same 2026 study followed 33 healthy men through ten weeks of endurance cycling: their L-BAIBA rose while their D-BAIBA did not change. L-BAIBA also tracked aerobic fitness, though loosely (correlations of 0.25 in the group of 60 and 0.49 in the group of 33), while D-BAIBA did not track it at all. On the other side of the ledger, a crossover study found that a cycling session at 70% of peak aerobic capacity did not change serum BAIBA in untrained adults, whether they had eaten or fasted (Morales et al., 2017), and a 2023 study of ten sedentary young adults found no change in BAIBA after either a maximal walking test or a resistance-exercise session. Diet matters too: two weeks of a roughly 1,200-calorie-a-day diet raised BAIBA in 23 women with obesity whether or not they also did interval training, leading the authors to conclude that an energy deficit is a key driver of circulating BAIBA (Faiz and Malin, 2023).

The fair summary: exercise can nudge BAIBA up — by roughly 13–20% in the human studies that reported a percentage — but not in every study, and eating less raises it as well. In the 2014 mouse experiments, BAIBA added to drinking water raised blood levels 2.7- to 12-fold. The rise that exercise produces in people is far smaller than the rises that produced the striking results in mice.

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Beige Fat and Blood Sugar: Strong in Mice, Unproven in People

Most of your body fat is white fat, which stores energy. Brown fat and its look-alike, “beige” fat, burn energy to make heat — our brown-fat animation shows how. Turning white fat beige is an attractive idea for weight control, and it is the headline of the BAIBA story.

The mouse evidence is genuinely striking. In the 2014 study, mice given BAIBA in their drinking water (100 mg per kilogram of body weight per day) ended up with less body fat on MRI scans (9.0% versus 13.1% in untreated mice), burned more energy without moving more or eating more, and cleared a glucose load better (the area under the glucose curve was 15.9% lower). A 2015 study from Korea found that BAIBA protected mouse muscle cells from the insulin resistance caused by bathing them in palmitate, a saturated fat, and that in mice fed a high-fat diet it reversed diet-induced weight gain, improved glucose tolerance and damped inflammation, working through AMPK (the cell’s fuel gauge) and PPARδ (a switch for fat-burning genes). Evidence tier: animal and in vitro.

The human evidence is thin and, where it has been tested directly, negative. The Framingham link between higher BAIBA and better blood sugar and blood fats is an association: it cannot tell us whether BAIBA helps, or whether fitter, leaner people simply make more of it. The only direct test came in 2026: in an eight-week randomized, double-blind trial, 500 mg a day of L-BAIBA did not change fasting glucose, blood lipids or blood pressure, and did not raise resting metabolic rate or lower body fat, compared with a placebo (details in the human trials section). None of the published human studies has shown BAIBA turning fat beige in a living person; the closest human evidence is stem cells in a dish. Evidence tier: cohort association (positive) and one small RCT in humans (null).

If blood sugar or weight is your concern, our insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and obesity pages cover approaches that have been tested in people.

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Bone and Muscle: The Osteocyte Story

Buried inside your bones is a network of cells called osteocytes. They sense the pull and pressure of movement and help direct where bone is built up or broken down. When osteocytes die — as they do with disuse, and when damaged by reactive oxygen species (“free radicals”) — bone is lost. A research group in Indiana and Missouri asked which molecules released by contracting muscle might keep osteocytes alive, and in 2018 reported in Cell Reports that the answer was BAIBA:

Follow-up mouse studies point the same way: BAIBA seems to work with exercise rather than instead of it. In one, L-BAIBA on its own did not increase bone formation, but combined with a deliberately weak (sub-optimal) bone-loading stimulus it increased bone formation more than either did alone — and L-BAIBA by itself raised grip strength (Prideaux et al., 2023). In another, middle-aged male mice given L-BAIBA plus a running wheel for three months had larger, stronger slow-twitch calf muscles, better bone structure and less fat in their bone marrow than untreated mice, benefits the running wheel alone did not deliver — although one measure of muscle endurance improved with running alone and not with the combination (Vallejo et al., 2025). And the 2026 Nature Communications study found that L-BAIBA is the main driver of BAIBA’s effects on mouse muscle: mice given BAIBA while wheel-running ran farther than runners without it (in groups of only four and five mice), and blocking the enzyme that makes L-BAIBA in the leg muscles blunted the gains from training. In human muscle cells grown in a dish, L-BAIBA shifted markers of muscle-fibre type through the same MRGPRD receptor. Evidence tier: animal and in vitro.

In people, there are only associations. A 2023 study measured both forms in 120 adults aged 20 to 85. L-BAIBA was weakly linked with higher bone density in women (a correlation of 0.28) — and also, unexpectedly for a supposed fat-burner, with higher body-mass index and more body fat. D-BAIBA rose with age. Correlations of 0.2 to 0.3 account for less than a tenth of the differences between people, and they cannot show cause and effect. No human trial has been designed to test BAIBA on bone, and the one eight-week trial found no change in fat-free mass. What does build bone and muscle in people is covered on our weight-bearing and resistance exercise page. Evidence tier: human cross-sectional association.

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Your Genes Set Your Level: AGXT2 and the “High Excretors”

How much BAIBA is in your blood and urine depends heavily on an enzyme called AGXT2 (alanine–glyoxylate aminotransferase 2), which works inside the mitochondria of liver and kidney cells and clears D-BAIBA. A common variant in its gene, known as rs37369, changes one building block of the enzyme (the valine at position 140 becomes an isoleucine) and makes the enzyme work less well, so BAIBA builds up.

Why this matters to anyone reading a supplement claim:

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What Happens When People Take It

This is the section that should decide whether a supplement is worth buying. As of September 2026, PubMed lists just two published studies in which people took BAIBA. A search for randomized trials that mention BAIBA returns about a dozen records, but in none of the others did anyone take BAIBA; it was only something measured.

1. The absorption study (2023)

Design: randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover. Twelve healthy young adults (six men and six women, average age 24) each took, after an overnight fast and on separate occasions, a single dose of 250 mg, 500 mg or 1,500 mg of L-BAIBA, 1,500 mg of valine, or a placebo, and gave blood samples over the next five hours.

Result: L-BAIBA is absorbed, and blood levels rise with the dose. After 1,500 mg, blood L-BAIBA peaked at about 278 micromoles per litre — roughly 25 times the placebo peak of about 11 — compared with peaks of about 95 after 500 mg and 63 after 250 mg. Valine did not raise L-BAIBA at all. There were no clinically significant changes in blood safety tests and no adverse events. What it did not measure: any effect on fat, muscle, blood sugar, bone or performance. Evidence tier: pilot pharmacokinetic RCT in humans.

2. The eight-week trial (2026)

Design: randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled. Thirty-seven adults with overweight or obesity (average age 43, average body-mass index 31; 28 women and 9 men) followed a calorie-reduced diet and a weekly exercise program for 56 days and took, every day, either a placebo (12 people), 500 mg of L-BAIBA (13 people), or 500 mg of L-BAIBA plus 40 mg of grains of paradise, a spice of the ginger family (12 people).

Result: every group lost weight and reduced its body-mass index and waist size — the diet and exercise worked. The supplements added nothing measurable on top: compared with placebo, there was no difference in body weight, resting metabolic rate, fat mass, fat-free mass, percentage body fat, resting heart rate, blood pressure, glucose or any blood-lipid measure. The one difference was in how hungry people said they felt: the L-BAIBA group rated its hunger lower than the placebo group at days 14, 28 and 56, without any difference between the groups in how much people reported eating. The supplements were well tolerated, with no adverse events reported. The authors suggest that eight weeks may be too short, that any effect may be small, and that the diet and exercise program may have masked it. Worth knowing when you weigh it: the trial was sponsored by the company behind the tested ingredient, says so, and reported its null results plainly. Evidence tier: small RCT in humans — null for every physiological outcome.

3. A trial that stopped

A second outcome trial, which began in 2023 to test L-BAIBA alongside a 12-week exercise program with body-fat mass as its main outcome, was terminated after enrolling 23 people. The registry gives the reason as withdrawal of funding, and no results have been posted (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05775016).

Add it up and the entire published human record for BAIBA as a supplement is 37 people — 12 who took single doses and 25 who took it daily for eight weeks — with no effect on body composition, metabolic rate, blood sugar or blood fats in the only trial that measured them.

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Myths & Overclaims: “The Biggest Thing Since Creatine”?

A popular video calls L-BAIBA “the biggest thing since creatine”. That comparison is worth taking seriously, because creatine is exactly the right benchmark — and the gap is enormous.

Creatine has been tested in more than 700 randomized controlled trials indexed on PubMed. The International Society of Sports Nutrition’s 2017 position stand summarizes a large body of evidence that creatine consistently raises the creatine stored in muscle and improves high-intensity exercise performance and training adaptations, and that short- and long-term use — up to 30 g a day for five years — has been safe and well tolerated in healthy people and in a range of patient groups from infants to the elderly. BAIBA has two human studies, 37 people, eight weeks at most, and one outcome trial that found no effect on body composition. On today’s evidence the claim is not supported, and it is not a close call.

The other popular claims, one by one:

None of this makes BAIBA uninteresting. It is a real signalling molecule with a receptor, a plausible mechanism and striking animal results. That is the stage at which a molecule becomes worth testing properly in people — not the stage at which it has been shown to work in them.

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If You Are Considering It

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Safety, Regulation & Who Should Avoid It

What is known. In a 90-day study, rats given L-BAIBA by mouth at 100, 300 or 900 mg per kilogram of body weight per day showed no treatment-related harm; 900 mg/kg/day, the highest dose tested, was the “no observed adverse effect level”. In people, single doses up to 1,500 mg caused no clinically significant changes in blood tests over five hours (12 young adults), and 500 mg a day for eight weeks caused no adverse events or meaningful changes in safety blood tests (25 adults). That is the whole human safety record: short, small, and in healthy volunteers.

What is not known. No published study has given BAIBA to people for longer than eight weeks, or included pregnant or breastfeeding women, children or teenagers, or people with kidney disease, liver disease, diabetes, heart disease or thyroid disease — all of whom were excluded from the eight-week trial. No published study has examined interactions with medicines. BAIBA is not an inert filler: it acts on a cell-surface receptor (MRGPRD) and on the PPAR family of metabolic switches, which is exactly why it does things in mice.

One animal signal. In the 2025 study of middle-aged mice, the animals given L-BAIBA plus a running wheel for three months had a slightly prolonged QTc interval on their electrocardiograms compared with untreated mice (Vallejo et al., 2025). The QTc is a measure of how long the heart takes to recharge electrically between beats, and doctors watch it because a long QTc can set the stage for dangerous rhythms. It was a small change in mice, and neither published human study reports heart-rhythm (ECG) results, so it is a question rather than a finding — but it is a reason for people with a heart-rhythm condition, or who take medicines that prolong the QT interval, to stay away until someone checks.

Kidney caution. D-BAIBA is made and cleared mainly in the liver and kidney, through AGXT2; people with kidney disease were excluded from the only trial; and nothing is known about how BAIBA supplements behave when kidney function is reduced. Anyone with chronic kidney disease should not experiment with it. See our kidney disease page.

How supplements are regulated. In the United States, the FDA does not approve dietary supplements before they go on sale, and a company generally does not have to show the FDA its evidence of safety. The main exception is a “new dietary ingredient” — one not sold in the U.S. before October 15, 1994 — for which the maker must notify the FDA, with the basis for its safety conclusion, at least 75 days before marketing, unless the ingredient is already in the food supply in a chemically unaltered form (FDA: Questions and Answers on Dietary Supplements). “Clinically studied” or “patented” on a label is marketing language, not an FDA finding. What is actually in the bottle is a separate question from whether the ingredient works: our How to Verify a Supplement guide explains what third-party seals do and do not check, and the Dangerous Supplements section covers hidden drugs, contamination and overdose risks.

Who should avoid it: pregnant or breastfeeding women; anyone under 18; people with kidney or liver disease; people with a heart-rhythm condition or on medicines that prolong the QT interval; and anyone taking prescription medicines until they have checked with a pharmacist — not because harm has been shown, but because no one has looked.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Tanianskii DA, Jarzebska N, Birkenfeld AL, et al. (2019). Beta-Aminoisobutyric Acid as a Novel Regulator of Carbohydrate and Lipid Metabolism. Nutrients. — PubMed PMID: 30823446
  2. Roberts LD, Boström P, O’Sullivan JF, et al. (2014). β-Aminoisobutyric acid induces browning of white fat and hepatic β-oxidation and is inversely correlated with cardiometabolic risk factors. Cell Metabolism. — PubMed PMID: 24411942
  3. Stautemas J, Van Kuilenburg ABP, Stroomer L, et al. (2019). Acute Aerobic Exercise Leads to Increased Plasma Levels of R- and S-β-Aminoisobutyric Acid in Humans. Frontiers in Physiology. — PubMed PMID: 31611815
  4. Daou HN, Watt NT, Gad SA, et al. (2026). The metabokine β-aminoisobutyric acid mediates exercise performance and skeletal muscle adaptation through a PGC1α-BAIBA-PPARδ axis. Nature Communications. — PubMed PMID: 42613329
  5. Mendez-Gutierrez A, Aguilera CM, Osuna-Prieto FJ, et al. (2023). Exercise-induced changes on exerkines that might influence brown adipose tissue metabolism in young sedentary adults. European Journal of Sport Science. — PubMed PMID: 35152857
  6. Jung TW, Hwang HJ, Hong HC, et al. (2015). BAIBA attenuates insulin resistance and inflammation induced by palmitate or a high fat diet via an AMPK-PPARδ-dependent pathway in mice. Diabetologia. — PubMed PMID: 26105792
  7. Kitase Y, Vallejo JA, Gutheil W, et al. (2018). β-aminoisobutyric Acid, l-BAIBA, Is a Muscle-Derived Osteocyte Survival Factor. Cell Reports. — PubMed PMID: 29425508
  8. Lyssikatos C, Wang Z, Liu Z, et al. (2023). L-β-aminoisobutyric acid, L-BAIBA, a marker of bone mineral density and body mass index, and D-BAIBA of physical performance and age. Scientific Reports. — PubMed PMID: 37821627
  9. Suhre K, Wallaschofski H, Raffler J, et al. (2011). A genome-wide association study of metabolic traits in human urine. Nature Genetics. — PubMed PMID: 21572414
  10. Kittel A, Müller F, König J, et al. (2014). Alanine-glyoxylate aminotransferase 2 (AGXT2) polymorphisms have considerable impact on methylarginine and β-aminoisobutyrate metabolism in healthy volunteers. PLoS One. — PubMed PMID: 24586340
  11. Krieger JM, Hagele AM, Orr LS, et al. (2023). Dose-Response Absorption Kinetics of Oral L-Beta-Aminoisobutyric Acid (L-BAIBA) Supplementation in Healthy Men and Women. Journal of Dietary Supplements. — PubMed PMID: 36184601
  12. Allen LE, Sutton PJ, Schrautemeier A, et al. (2026). Effects of L-BAIBA supplementation with and without grains of paradise on changes in resting metabolic rate, body composition, and cardiometabolic risk factors. Nutrition Journal. — PubMed PMID: 42271377
  13. Shanmugasundaram D, Fan Q, Wang M, et al. (2022). Safety Assessment of L-β-Aminoisobutyric Acid (L-BAIBA): Subchronic Toxicity Study in Sprague Dawley Rats. International Journal of Toxicology. — PubMed PMID: 35549583
  14. Kreider RB, Kalman DS, Antonio J, et al. (2017). International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: safety and efficacy of creatine supplementation in exercise, sport, and medicine. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. — PubMed PMID: 28615996

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. PubMed: Beta-aminoisobutyric acid (BAIBA)
  2. PubMed: L-BAIBA supplementation
  3. PubMed: Randomized trials of creatine supplementation

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