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A study has unveiled a previously unrecognized role for an essential nutrient in shaping the cellular landscape for one of the body's first lines of defense against infection, immune cells called macrophages. The findings identifying a role for the nutrient choline under normal conditions and in response to an intestinal worm infection in mice could potentially have significant implications for other models of human infection, perhaps even cancer immunity. Dr. Morgan Fullerton explains that by blocking a specific part of metabolism the research team saw an unexpected defect emerge in macrophages—sentinel cells that are one of the immune system's star...

Metabolism studies reveal surprising insights into how we burn calories—and how cooperative food production helped Homo sapiens flourish It was my daughter Clara’s seventh birthday party, a scene at once familiar and bizarre. The celebration was an American take on a classic script: a shared meal of pizza and picnic food, a few close COVID-compliant friends and family, a beaming kid blowing out candles on a heavily iced cake. With roughly 380,000 boys and girls around the world turning seven each day, it was a ritual no doubt repeated by many, the world’s most prolific primate singing “Happy Birthday” in...

Kidney cancer encompasses a wide spectrum and can present with extensive metastases or just a handful. However, today all patients are treated the same. They all receive medication. Investigators report the results of a clinical trial exploring the role of stereotactic ablative radiation therapy (SAbR) for patients with a handful of metastases, or so-called oligometastatic disease. The study represents the first clinical trial for patients with untreated oligometastatic kidney cancer. Each year brings more than 430,000 new cases of kidney cancer worldwide and nearly 180,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. About 40% of patients develop metastatic disease. Metastatic...

Can you eat your way out of a kidney disease? Perhaps you can—according to a new study. Associate Professor Markus Rinschen has shown that the intake of the amino acid lysine, an over-the-counter food supplement, protects laboratory animals from kidney damage. The study was primarily conducted on rats with high blood pressure—hypertension—and associated kidney disease. But a small pilot study confirms that the amino acid could have similar effect in humans, without definite evidence for clinical effects on kidney disease. "We discovered that there is an accelerated transformation of the amino acid lysine in humans and animals with kidney disease....

New UC Riverside research shows soybean oil not only leads to obesity and diabetes, but could also affect neurological conditions like autism, Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, and depression. Specifically, the scientists found pronounced effects of the oil on the hypothalamus, where a number of critical processes take place. “The hypothalamus regulates body weight via your metabolism, maintains body temperature, is critical for reproduction and physical growth as well as your response to stress,” “The dogma is that saturated fat is bad and unsaturated fat is good. Soybean oil is a polyunsaturated fat, but the idea that it’s good for you is...

People who live through traumatic experiences in childhood often suffer long-lasting consequences that affect their mental and physical health. But moreover, their children and grand-children can also be impacted as well. In this particular form of inheritance, sperm and egg cells pass on information to offspring not through their DNA sequence like classical genetic heredity, but rather via biological factors involving the epigenome that regulates genome activity. However, the big question is how the signals triggered by traumatic events become embedded in germ cells.“Our hypothesis was that circulating factors in blood play a role,” says Isabelle Mansuy, professor of neuroepigenetics...

Grizzly bears spend many months in hibernation, but their muscles do not suffer from the lack of movement. The bear's metabolism and heart rate drop rapidly. It excretes neither urine nor feces. The amount of nitrogen in the blood increases drastically and the bear becomes resistant to the hormone insulin. A person could hardly survive this four-month phase in a healthy state. Afterwards, he or she would most likely have to cope with thromboses or psychological changes. Above all, the muscles would suffer from this prolonged period of disuse. The scientists from Berlin, Greifswald and the United States were particularly...

Thousand of epigenetic switches in the liver control whether genes turn on or off in response to circadian cycles. The figure illustrates daily changes, every six hours, in five different...When it's dark, and we start to fall asleep, most of us think we're tired because our bodies need rest. Yet circadian rhythms affect our bodies not just on a global scale, but at the level of individual organs, and even genes. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute have determined the specific genetic switches that sync liver activity to the circadian cycle. Their finding gives further insight into the mechanisms behind...

You’re not imagining it: There really are differences between the way men and women diet, lose weight and respond to exercise. Some of the differences stem from biology; other differences are behavioral. But though many of these seem to give men a head start, they shouldn’t be taken to imply that guys have it easy. No matter who you are or where you’re starting, the road to your ideal weight is difficult at best, and confusing for most. But the information that researchers are unearthing about the differences in the way that men and women lose weight inspires hope that...

Obesity-related diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome are triggered by a lack of oxygen in adipose cells, according to a study led by UC San Diego researchers. An excess of fatty acids causes an increase in oxygen consumption, which outstrips the supply, triggering hypoxia, the study found. This leads to inflammation in the adipose cells, which in turn leads to insulin resistance, obesity and related diseases. And that's the short version. The full chain of events is even more complicated. The study, performed in mice, points to possible therapies in people, said researchers led by Dr. Jerrold...

South Korea’s current fetish with ‘watching people eat’, or ‘dinner porn’ as the crazy is now known has uncovered a new star. The dinner porn craze involves no sex of course, but simply watching other people eat – online, on TV, wherever. According to a report on asiaone.com, quoting Elite Daily, Tae Ryun Huh is the new and emerging Korean sensation. No just because she eats, but because of how much she eats. And then this amazing fact – the school worker weighs 48kg. Tae Ryun Huh invited TV cameras to watch her eat and the South Korean show discovered...

If you’re already holding your first coffee of the morning, you might want to put it down, because drinking four cups a day could raise your risk of dying young, researchers warn—but only if you’re under 55. They found that consuming 28 cups of coffee a week increases the chances of premature death in younger people by half. … The risk of death from all causes rose by 56 percent for men and women younger than 55 who drank more than 28 cups of coffee a week, said a report in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings. … Recent research has...

The energy in–energy out hypothesis is not set in stone, argues Gary Taubes. It is time to test hormonal theories about why we get fat. “It is better to know nothing,” wrote French physiologist Claude Bernard in An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), “than to keep in mind fixed ideas based on theories whose confirmation we constantly seek.” Embracing a fixed idea is one of the main dangers in the evolution of any scientific discipline. Ideally, errors will be uncovered in the trial-by-fire of rigorous testing and the science will right itself. In rare cases, however, an...

Enlarge Image Heart attack. Following a big meal, oily nutrients in the bloodstream of Burmese pythons (shown) spur massive growth of their hearts. Credit: Stephen M. Secor At the end of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the titular villain undergoes a literal change of heart. His blood-pumping organ swells to three times its prior size. The ticker of the Burmese python (Python molurus) similarly balloons, but the cause isn't Christmas cheer—it's a big meal. A new study of recently fed snakes suggests that a precise mixture of fatty acids in the blood drives this cardiac growth, unveiling...

Researchers have found what appears to be a critical tuning dial for controlling whole body energy, according to a new report in the January issue of Cell Metabolism, a Cell Press publication. When energy levels within cells drop, it sets off a series of events designed to increase the amount of calorie-rich dietary fat that the body will absorb. This energy reset mechanism is surely critical for survival under natural conditions of scarcity to ensure a steady supply of fuel, the researchers say. Today, many of us who enjoy a Western diet loaded with fat might do better if we...

Federal judge in Chicago acts after being flooded with emails prompted by the author-infomercial king. Kevin Trudeau, the slick, silver-tongued infomercial king and best-selling author amassed a fortune over years of persistent, late-night hawking. This week, he made the wrong sales pitch. Kevin Trudeau has been ordered to appear before a federal judge in Chicago this afternoon after flooding U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman with e-mails. CASE AGAINST HIM What led the late-night miracle-cure hawker to criminal contempt charges in Chicago: * Kevin Trudeau's Shop America USA as well as Natural Cures Inc. are in Elk Grove Village. * Trudeau...

<p>The blueprint of a small organism's cellular machinery has been unveiled, offering the most comprehensive view yet of the molecular essentials of life. But the research also shows just how far biologists have to go before they understand the complete biochemical basis of even the simplest of creatures.</p>

Nature Reviews Cancer 9, 691-700 (October 2009) | doi:10.1038/nrc2715 Abstract Although metabolic alterations have been observed in cancer for almost a century, only recently have the mechanisms underlying these changes been identified and the importance of metabolic transformation realized. p53 has been shown to respond to metabolic changes and to influence metabolic pathways through several mechanisms. The contributions of these activities to tumour suppression are complex and potentially rather surprising: some reflect the function of basal p53 levels that do not require overt activation and others might even promote, rather than inhibit, tumour progression...

Imagine a form of life so unusual that we cannot figure out how it dies. That’s exactly what researchers are finding beneath the floor of the sea off Peru. The microbes being studied there — single-celled organisms called Archaea — live in time frames that can perhaps best be described as geological. Consider: A bacteria like Escherichia Coli divides and reproduces every twenty minutes or so. But the microbes in the so-called Peruvian Margin take hundreds or thousands of years to divide. “In essence, these microbes are almost, practically dead by our normal standards,” says Christopher H. House (Penn State)....

If your blood glucose is out of whack, the problem may be in your bones. New research in mice shows that bone cells exert a surprising influence on how the body regulates sugar, energy, and fat. A bone-cell protein called osteocalcin influences energy metabolism through its effects on pancreatic and fat cells.