I’m not sure if this research is “reinventing the wheel”, or just poorly described in this article.
To start with, it has long been known that there are clusters of cells in the white fat, called MAST cells (also known as mastocytes and labrocytes). They are clusters of cells of several types of tissues and contains many granules rich in histamine and heparin, which when irritated, they release into the body as part of the immune response.
A typical person with a normal amount of body fat has a given amount of these MAST cells. But when a person gains weight, not only do they develop a *proportional* amount of MAST cell bodies, but they get *more* than a proportional number.
And this is where the problem lays. Because MAST cells, when they get irritated, tend to stay irritated, and producing histamines and heparin, which, oddly enough, encourages the development of more white fat cells.
Because starvation has been a problem for people for tens of thousands of years, our bodies have adapted to try and gain weight, and to keep extra weight, to survive seasons when there wasn’t enough food. So tricking the body into losing weight isn’t easy.
When we first try to lose weight, we have about a two week period in there before we start losing fat, which starts first in the liver. But when the liver begins to burn fat, it reacts by becoming more efficient and lowering our metabolic rate so we don’t burn fat as quickly.
In any event, going to their research, they have discovered that if you have a lot of MAST cells, which implies a lot of extra fat, and you consume more saturated fats, it tends to irritate your MAST cells to start producing histamines and heparin.
This, in turn, can interfere with our insulin sensitivity.
But this is not the whole story. As has been clearly shown in recent years, if you *just* consume meat and fats, not carbohydrates, people tend to lose weight, often a lot of weight. This is because protein and fats work in a complementary fashion with carbohydrates.
So by themselves, saturated fats may not be wholly responsible for irritating MAST cells.
A poor description in a press release is nothing new. IMHO, they figured out a cell signaling pathway for inflammation and insulin resistance. Does it apply to all saturated fatty acids? Maybe we'll find out soon enough. Check the dates it was received and accepted. It wasn't very long between those dates.
Fatty acid–induced NLRP3-ASC inflammasome activation interferes with insulin signaling
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