Eat Lots; Digest Little

varp writes: "Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine have figured out a way to reduce body fat even though you keep pumping yourself with all the grease you can lay your hands on while sitting on the couch and doing nothing. Next wish: Please, please identify the gene which can cause my arteries to choke."

Comments

Green-glowing jellyfish

[Kotetsu]

The researchers employed a novel technique that used a virus tagged with a green-glowing jellyfish protein to visualize the feeding circuit in the brain of a mouse.

The nutritional results are interesting, although practical application in humans is years away. The interesting thing is the use of more stuff from those green-glowing jellyfish. They've used it in plants and monkeys, and now viruses. Who would have thought that glowing jellyfish could end up being so useful?

What goal

[Shotgun]

``If we find a drug that can be used to regulate ACC2 without having some other side effects, I think we've achieved our goal,'' he said.

Stop to consider this for a moment. The western world is rich, with little need for the average human to have to do strenuous work for a living. They can afford to eat all they want, without having to do anything to work that food off. They keep adding fuel, without ever reving their engine. Digestion is a simple system really.

The human body is designed through years of evolutionary development to want to store up fuel as fat. Cyclical weather patterns with the accompanying cyles of feast and famine, insured that those who could store up more energy during the feast periods would fare better during the famine. The problem is, you can't continually add food without burning it off. You can't keep storing up for ever. The western world sees a continuous feast, without ever seeing the famine.

Enter these guys who have a goal of putting a hole in the fuel tank. Instead of stopping the pump, or driving the car for a while, their goal is to let the fuel pour out on the ground. This is ludicrous in its simple-minded short sightedness.

This may be a good technique for some troubling cases, but a much better solution for the majority of people is to push back from the table and get off their fat asses. I say this as a person who has lost 50lbs in the past year, and went from barely being able to run a mile in 12 minutes to running a 6:30 mile and winning a wrestling tournament this past weekend.

Westerners need to drop the idea of loosing weight, and start concentrating on making the body burn the fuel it takes in. This type of solution may make you tip the scales at a lower point, but it won't make you any healthier. There is a lot of evidence that increase flow rate of the blood does a lot of the work of cleaning arteries. How will sitting on the couch eating '0-calory' chips increase blood flow.

In summary, this type of drug is the type of 'no-pain' cure-all that my fellow American like. It hides the current, annoying symptoms, while totally ignoring the overall systemic problems. For those who doubt this, here are other examples of simple, cure-alls for systemic problems:

• gun control to cure violence crime
• censoring of video games to cure school violence
• imprisonment of drug abusers