Posted on 05/04/2008 11:48:37 PM PDT by neverdem
Every year, whether you are fat or thin, whether you lose weight or gain, 10 percent of your fat cells die. And every year, those cells that die are replaced with new fat cells, researchers in Sweden reported Sunday.
The result is that the total number of fat cells in the body remains the same, year after year throughout adulthood. Losing or gaining weight affects only the amount of fat stored in the cells, not the number of cells.
The finding was published online Sunday in the journal Nature.
Obesity investigators say the study raises tantalizing questions: What determines how many fat cells are in a person’s body? When is that number determined? Is there a way to intervene so people end up with fewer fat cells when they reach adulthood? And could obesity be treated by making fat cells die faster than they are born?
“This is a new way of looking at obesity,” said Dr. Lester Salans, an obesity researcher and emeritus professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
But for now, researchers say, they do not have a clue about how to answer those questions.
“There is a system waiting to be discovered,” said Dr. Jeffrey S. Flier, an obesity researcher and dean of Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Flier and other obesity researchers cautioned, though, that even if scientists knew how the fat cell system worked, it was not clear that it would be safe or effective to treat obesity by intervening. One of the hard lessons of the past couple of decades has been that the body has redundant controls to maintain weight.
“I suspect that the body’s regulation of weight is so complex that if you intervene at this site, something else is going to happen to neutralize this intervention,” Dr. Salans...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
First intelligent thing I've heard out a researcher in years.
The body is extremely good at maintaining and regulating its internal systems. Screwing around trying to alter things very often gets canceled out, if there's a regulatory mechanism somewhere in there.
What could be simpler?
I've also been told that to lose weight 'fatties' should eat foods that are high in sugar, like fruit, and refined flour, such as biscuit mix...
Do you have any source for that?
Stanford researchers synthesize compound to flush HIV out of hiding and into crosshairs
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Got it from Discovery TV show about Plastic Surgery.
I have never heard of the expanding fat cell phenom either.
Rejecting the Archer Daniels Midland Diet is medical heresy - you could end up being publicly flogged by farm-state Republicans. ;)
Paraphrasing the great social arbitor of our time, Homer Simpson, "FReepers, is there nothing they don't know?"
;)PaMom
Why should they care if we eat their crops directly, or after they've been run through a cow, chicken or pig? Actually they'd have more demand for the grain if we ate more meat, because that's a more inefficient process. IOW, lots more grain gets used up feeding animals for people to eat than if people ate the grain directly.
Why should they care if we eat their crops directly, or after they've been run through a cow, chicken or pig? Actually they'd have more demand for the grain if we ate more meat, because that's a more inefficient process. IOW, lots more grain gets used up feeding animals for people to eat than if people ate the grain directly.
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