Obesity Immunity – Sci-Fi or a real thing?
In the last forty years the amount of obese men has tripled and the amount of obese women has doubled. The problem is so big that there are more people that are overweight living on Earth than there are people who suffer from malnutrition.
Male abdominal obesity.
By Tibor Végh (Tenerife 2010 124.JPG) CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Humanity is in an evolutionary trap. Millions of years ago it was important that our ancestors got every single calorie they could get. And sort of a rule came into existence when disaster stroke – who is fat, will be thin. Who is thin, will die. But today the majority of humankind has access to food every single day. But our organisms still haven’t adapted. And in combination with today passive lifestyles, the calories don’t get burned off and get transformed into fat.
Scientists have claimed to discover a miracle drug that would allow you to lose weight. If even one in ten of those would be true there would be 7 billion slim people on the Earth. But we all know that is not how reality looks. So far the only working way to get thin is – Eat less and move more. But that remains a quite unpopular option. This where scientists from the University of Copenhagen come into play. In their recently published a study they show how they managed to keep mice thin even though they were overeating.
The scientists discovered that mice need a special gene to create fat tissue. This gene is called NAMPT. And if you block the function of this gene through gene manipulation they become immune to obesity. They can eat as much a high-calorie food as they want and will only have as many fat cells as healthy mice have.
We humans also have the NAMPT gene. And in the past, it was beneficial to have as an efficient variant of the gene as possible because, with every famine that came, the people who didn’t have an efficient variant just died off more and more. But these days we could really use these inefficient variants or to disable its function. Sadly, we can’t just use genetic engineering to disable the gene in humans. But often scientists are capable of finding a substance that can limit its effects without the need to manipulate the genes.
The mice suffered no ill side effects when the NAMPT gene was disabled. But whether we can achieve a similar result in humans and thus a really effective drug against obesity will come into existence is still yet to be seen.
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Luckily I seem to have a natural protection against obesity because no matter what I eat I don't get fat :P
just wait until you get older and your metabolism slows down :D
It's pretty common for guys in their youth to not get fat, but once you get older, stuff changes.
Developing a drug against obesity is a good idea. Most people suffer from this, which is really bad for our health. It will be nice if such drug can be developed to help people.
Yeah, getting something like this would be really cool, though I am unsure whether it can just work so easily on humans as it does on mice. Often stuff that works on mice doesn't work the same way for humans.
It would be very beneficial for the scientists to find some medicine to help people with obesity problems. Until now, the most effective operation is the stomach, and science seems to be moving in that direction.
Stomach operations do come with a slew of their own problems, I don't think it's that great of a solution.