Not everyone gets supersized on a high fat diet, and now reseachers
are learning why. A new shows why some people can eat
excessive amounts of food and not gain weight or develop
type 2 diabetes, while others are more likely to develop
obesity and this most common form of diabetes on any diet.
The study used two strains of mice with differing tendencies
to gain weight and develop diabetes on a high-fat diet.
Researchers C. Ronald Kahn says, "Although this study was
done with mice, it points out new mechanisms that may
underlie the ability of genetically different mice?and perhaps
genetically different people?to not gain much weight on high
caloric diets."
It has long been known that people significantly differ in their
tendency to gain weight and develop metabolic syndrome, a
group of conditions including hypertension, abdominal obesity,
high triglycerides and glucose intolerance that can lead to
type 2 diabetes. More than 60 million Americans either are
obese or have metabolic syndrome, putting them at risk for
type 2 diabetes and its frequent complications, including
cardiovascular disease and other serious conditions. Currently
21 million Americans have diabetes and approximately one-
third of them do not even know they have the disease.
Formerly known as adult-onset diabetes, type 2 diabetes is
occurring more frequently in young adults and even in
children.
In New Scientist, Roxanne Khamsi reports on a mouse study
that fed genetically identical mice very different diets, which
showed that "a high-fat diet can desensitize the brain to
appetite-suppressing hormones, effectively leaving the brain
unaware of obesity." The brain cells of the mice that ate the
high fat diet stopped responding to leptin, which scientists
think is one of the main hormones that controls how much we
eat and how much of it we store as fat. Diets may fail
because our brains become insensitive to leptin. A compound
called SOCS-3 was found inside the brain cells of the obese
mice. SOCS-3 must have prevented the signal sent by leptin
from registering within the cells, so the mice never felt "full"
and did not stop eating. Khamsi quotes researcher Michael
Cowley as saying, "There is a perception in society that
obesity is a failure of will. This work suggests that's not an
appropriate model."
But just as with people, not ALL these mice became
supersized. Khamsi writes, "Among those that received the
high-calorie chow, some became obese while others
maintained a normal weight. (The reason for this difference
remains a mystery)."
Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
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