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posted by janrinok on Wednesday December 21 2016, @12:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the hey-dough-boy! dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:56PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:56PM (#444417) Journal

    IIUC, you've got the hunter-gatherer lifestyle wrong. Most of the calories in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle come from plants. And the exception are those who gather things like oysters.

    OTOH, the nomadic lifestyle *was* heavy in meat. And the Eskimo lifestyle was so heavy in meat that they needed to eat the guts of their prey to get plant vitamins. And in both of those cases you either stayed fit or you died. The polynesian lifestyle was also heavy in meat (if you count fish). But do note that both the Eskimos and the Polynesians tended to carry a lot of fat. The nomads generally didn't. And they were about equally physically active.

    P.S.: Wild meat is rarely high-fat. It may be so in some seasons (if it's been a good year).

    All that said, one reason that metabolic diseases have become common is that people are living longer. You rarely find that kind of problem before 50, and 50 is far past the median lifespan of historic periods, so I think we can assume it's far past the median lifespan of the prehistoric periods, also. Such evidence as I've seen, insufficient as it is, tends to confirm that estimation. It *is* true that people became more unhealthy with the onset of agriculture and a settled lifestyle, but this is generally due to crowding and overwork. When you don't move camp every day, people don't die off as readily from minor problems, like a broken toe. They can become potters instead. (Yes, professional knappers existed before agriculture, but they had to be fit enough to move with the tribe.)

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