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posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 22 2014, @09:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the good-fat-bad-fat dept.

ScienceDaily reports that:

Many patients with advanced stages of cancer, AIDS, tuberculosis, and other diseases die from a condition called cachexia, which is characterized as a "wasting" syndrome that causes extreme thinness with muscle weakness. Cachexia is the direct cause of roughly 20% of deaths in cancer patients. While boosting food intake doesn't help, and no effective therapies are available, new research in the Cell Press journal Cell Metabolism points to a promising strategy that may stimulate weight gain and muscle strength.

The research relates to a process that has been gaining considerable attention as a way to combat obesity: the browning of white fat. While white fat normally stores calories, brown fat burns them and generates heat in the process. Therefore, efforts to turn white fat into brown fat may help people lose weight.

Erwin Wagner, of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid, and his colleagues found that in mice and patients with cancer-associated cachexia, white fat undergoes significant changes and turns into calorie-burning brown fat. The transformation leads to increased energy consumption and organ wasting.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by physicsmajor on Tuesday July 22 2014, @10:44PM

    by physicsmajor (1471) on Tuesday July 22 2014, @10:44PM (#72523)

    Cancer sucks. If they figure out what causes this, it could make the secondary effects of cancer suck less. Better quality of life is what terminal patients care about most.

    Then, if that wasn't enough, giving that stuff to healthy, obese people could help them lose weight.

    It's like the highest impact research ever. Might never see anything from it, but the simple fact that fat can transform given some sort of signal from distant cancer cells makes this at least distantly plausible.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday July 22 2014, @10:56PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 22 2014, @10:56PM (#72527) Journal

    While white fat normally stores calories, brown fat burns them and generates heat in the process.

    In other words, the browning process slightly reduces the calorie content of the fat. How does that turn calorie storing fat into calorie burning fat? I don't think it actually does. Merely the use of terms like "stores calories" versus "burns calories" for nearly identical materials indicates to me that pseudoscience is going on.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Tuesday July 22 2014, @11:05PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday July 22 2014, @11:05PM (#72530) Journal

      I think you got it wrong. In essence when white fat cells that stores energy as fat turns into brown fat that will burn energy instead of storing it. That will cause any stored energy to be transformed into heat. That energy will be taken from the fat.

      The big question is what molecule(s) is needed to tell the cells to do this transition. Perhaps it's even worth a Nobel price in Medicine.

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:33PM (#72748)

        Brown fat cells have mitochondria, and those mitochondria express Uncoupling Protein 1 (UCP1), which is basically a proton channel. You may remember that mitochondria work by burning glucose/fat/acetyl-coenzyme A to create a proton gradient and then use the flow of those protons to generate ATP. UCP1 discharges the proton gradient without generating any ATP, thus uncoupling the burning of glucose/fat from the synthesis of ATP. Those cells then burn glucose/fat all the time at relatively high rate. This is great for the (mostly baby, Arctic-dwelling) mammals: they basically carry a fire around with them.

        Other cells also express UCP1 under some circumstances. Skeletal muscle, for example, possibly as a mechanism to thermo-regulate, possibly to balance between carbohydrate and fat as a fuel source.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday July 22 2014, @11:07PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 22 2014, @11:07PM (#72532) Journal

      Huh, I thought from the quote that this was a nutrition-based thing with white fat and brown fat being things you eat. I guess they're actually speaking of the visual appearance of fatty tissue in mammalian bodies. Well, glancing through the Wikipedia article on "brown fat" [wikipedia.org],

      Researchers found that both muscle and brown fat cells expressed the same muscle factor Myf5, whereas white fat cells did not. This suggested that muscle cells and brown fat cells were both derived from the same stem cell. Furthermore, muscle cells that were cultured with the transcription factor PRDM16 were converted into brown fat cells, and brown fat cells without PRDM16 were converted into muscle cells.

      That sounds a bit like white and brown fat might not actually transform into each other.

      I apologize for the reading fail.

      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday July 22 2014, @11:16PM

        by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday July 22 2014, @11:16PM (#72534) Journal

        There might be an additional molecular pathway between white- and brown fat cells.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by sjames on Wednesday July 23 2014, @12:36AM

      by sjames (2882) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @12:36AM (#72556) Journal

      To become brown fat, the number of mitochondria in the cell increases considerably. That allows the cells to convert calories into heat.Where would the pseudoscience be? Every cell in your body contains the blueprints for every other cell type.

      • (Score: 1) by clone141166 on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:52AM

        by clone141166 (59) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:52AM (#72581)

        Nitpicky detail, but not every other cell type; eg. red blood cells have no nucleus and thus no DNA (which consequently makes them virus-proof!).

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Wednesday July 23 2014, @02:12AM

          by sjames (2882) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @02:12AM (#72588) Journal

          To nitpick further, the red blood cells start out with a nucleus but jettison it in the final step to maturity.

  • (Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:54AM

    by Dunbal (3515) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:54AM (#72582)

    " that may stimulate weight gain and muscle strength. "

    Now a serious question will be if this will improve quality of life or longevity at all for the terminal patient.

    • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday July 23 2014, @09:11AM

      by Magic Oddball (3847) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @09:11AM (#72676) Journal

      The summary does state that a certain percentage of cancer deaths are the result of the accompanying cachexia rather than the cancer itself, so I think longevity would improve with it.

      As for increased quality of life, I could be wrong, but it seems to me that somebody with an adequate amount of muscle shouldn't be as quick to become fatigued and should be able to do more things on their own or with minimal help. Having their body mass increase so they're no longer underweight should also mean they won't have the unpleasant sensation that they're cold all the time.

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 23 2014, @07:28PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 23 2014, @07:28PM (#72926) Journal

        Sorry, but the sensation of being cold isn't closely tied to normal body mass. OTOH, the sensation of being cold all the time is quite likely to CAUSE the conversion of normal fat into beige fat. One known way of doing this is to spend a lot of time in a cold room.

        I suspect that you have a causal link inverted...that it's the sensation of being cold that causes the browning of their fats. It possibly also causes persistent shivering, in which case it could be that their muscles just wear out from continuous overwork. (I've never known anyone in that state, so this is just ungrounded speculation.) Certainly muscles seem to wear out as you get older. Up to a point exercise causes them to become stronger, but when past that point it causes them to weaken. This also happens under some other extreme stress situations, such as starvation. Perhaps continual shivering has the same effect.

        It is quite unfortunate, given the above argument, that the sensation of cold isn't necessarily relieved by an external (or internal) temperature in the range optimum for health.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Zinho on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:55AM

    by Zinho (759) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:55AM (#72583)

    I had to read the article (heresy!), but finally figured out that they're researching how to inhibit the conversion from white to brown fat. The wasting they talk about is the result of brown fat burning too much energy, leading to muscle atrophy and extreme weight loss.

    The summary and article are a bit confusing because they both point out that the origin of the research here is cures for obesity - other researchers are working on encouraging the conversion to brown fat. The researches are complementary, and success in either direction may help the other.

    I wish good luck to both groups!

    --
    "Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
  • (Score: 2) by geb on Wednesday July 23 2014, @09:59AM

    by geb (529) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @09:59AM (#72690)

    Dieting via promoting a faster metabolism and the wasting of energy as heat has been tried before. It was very successful, if you used it with care. If you weren't careful, you lost the ability to control heat production within your body. High heat output is a great way to expend energy and lose weight, but it's also a great way to cook yourself.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol#Dieting_aid [wikipedia.org]

    I hope this is better controlled.

    • (Score: 2) by CoolHand on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:11PM

      by CoolHand (438) on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:11PM (#72745) Journal

      This is along the lines of what I was thinking. If they could learn to control this white fat -> Brown fat conversion, and be able to control levels of each, we could tweak our bodies on demand to burn optimal amounts of calories. This would help solve both underweight and overweight problems in the future..

      --
      Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams