SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Obesity's effects extend all through the body, and the liver is one of the more serious victims. Poor diet can cause fat to build up in the organ, leading to chronic liver disease and other serious health issues like diabetes and heart disease. Now a team from Saint Louis University has found that switching off a particular protein decreased the body fat and improved the blood sugar levels of mice.
...
"When I think of fatty liver disease, I think of fatty hepatocytes – liver cells," explains Baldan. "Each cell has many lipid droplets, and those droplets contain triglycerides. The lipid droplets aren't skinny-dipping in the cells, though. They are coated by proteins. One such protein is called 'fat-specific protein 27,' or FSP27."The function of body fat is to store energy for later use. But what FSP27 does is prevent those lipids from mobilizing – being used – and instead encourages them to stay put in the cell. A high-fat diet increases the amount of FSP27 and, in turn, the amount of fat that builds up in the liver. Inversely, triglycerides can also accumulate as a result of fasting, which sees the body begin to process more stored fat, sending mobilized fat to the liver for processing.
Knowing this, the team hypothesized that shutting off FSP27 should reduce fat build-up. To test the idea, the researchers used two groups of obese mice, afflicted with high blood sugar and fatty liver disease. The difference was, one group was fed a high-fat diet, while the other mice were genetically modified. Some of each group were then treated with antisense oligonucleotides, polymers which essentially switch off FSP27.
Mice treated with a compound to shut off the fat-specific protein FSP27 showed significant declines in fat.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday December 21 2016, @04:45PM
Aspertame has been the subject of quite a few health studies that show mixed results of it causing obesity, cancer, and even possibly still diabetes. Some of those studies actually come from places somewhat more trustworthy than Mercola's website. I'm not saying they're true or not; I wouldn't know. I'm not a fan of the notion though. Also, on a personal level, aspertame gives me horrible stomach-aches. I used to love Fresca, but cut it down when I eventually figured out that I felt like I was going to throw up when I was drinking it. Same thing with a diet coke, though I seldom noticed because I don't like the taste enough to be able to finish a can of it.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:34PM
Aspertame has been the subject of quite a few health studies that show mixed results of it causing obesity, cancer, and even possibly still diabetes.
Yes, I know. I'd emphasize the "mixed results." Basically, the reception of aspartame has been a series of "Ack, it causes X!" followed by subsequent (generally more rigorous) studies that show no such effect. One of the most famous scares was back in the 1990s when it was accused of causing brain cancer and a few related cancers, but when scientists did the analysis again and tracked stuff back a few more years, they discovered the minor trend upward in these cancers started years before aspartame was even on the market.
There have even been double-blind studies [food.gov.uk] of people who claim to have "aspartame sensitivity" which show no consistent effects if people don't know they're consuming it. I'm not saying I don't believe you -- I'm saying that apparently double-blind studies show most people who claim such effects are probably misleading themselves.
So, yeah, there have been various assertions about the bad effects of aspartame in reputable studies. The problem with such science (as I pointed out in my previous post) is that human dietary studies are difficult, and any apparent effects in a given study could be the result of all sorts of confounding variables. So, you can't just view one study in isolation -- you need to look at all of them collectively. If you really want to dig into this, I'd suggest having a look at the European Food Safety Authority's work on this. (The EU is known to generally be a bit more conservative about evaluations for additives than, say, the FDA. If there were serious concerns, they'd be more likely to voice them, perhaps decrease the recommended safe dosage, or even ban the substance outright.)
The EFSA reviewed over 600 studies on aspartame (data available here [europa.eu]). It's in the process of a full-scale re-evaluation of all data on safety (expected to be completed by 2020), but the draft opinion [europa.eu] was released in 2013. Its summary states:
The Panel concluded that there were no safety concerns at the current ADI of 40 mg/kg bw/day. Therefore, there was no reason to revise the ADI for aspartame.
(Note that ADI is equivalent to drinking somewhere around 2 to 3 DOZEN cans of diet soda PER DAY for an average adult, depending on your weight. And the ADI is just a recommendation based on super-conservative extrapolations, intended to be orders of magnitude lower than where effects have been observed. Based on lab rat, etc. studies, the Panel determined that negative effects only should occur at above 4000 mg/kg bw/day, though they estimate a value of 1000 mg/kg bw/day for pregnant women based on some other studies. That's hundreds or even thousands of cans of soda per day.)
Most of the major cancer societies, etc. seem to agree. As for causing obesity or diabetes or whatever, there have been some correlations in recent studies both in weight gain and metabolic effects, but nothing conclusive about causation -- and certainly nothing that necessarily indicates an intake of diet soda is WORSE than drinking a similar amount of regular sugar-filled soda (which is also well-known to cause weight gain and metabolic effects).
To be clear, I don't consume aspartame myself -- or at least I don't ever deliberately do it. I don't like the taste of most artificial sweeteners either. But rather than taking a random study or two out of context, I'm going to place more confidence in a review panel that examined over 600 of them and wrote a 250-page report summarizing the safety issues.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:19PM
I can't disagree with pretty much any of that. I was just spouting about what I'd read. Gives me enough pause to avoid the stuff though, particularly since I don't really get much benefit from the type of foods it's in anyway.
Related to the sensitivities, I'm guessing a lot of it is psychological. In my particular case, I made the discovery probably about 20 years ago in high school. I don't think I realized aspertame was even in the soda at the time, much less cared. For all I know, it was something else in it that caused the issue to begin with, and it's just something I ascribe to the sweetener. Don't really care to try the experiment now though.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!