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Researchers Enable Mice To Exhale Fat
destinyland writes "UCLA researchers made a startling discovery: genetic alterations enable mice to convert fat into carbon dioxide.
Mammals digest fats differently than bacteria — so researchers introduced bacteria genes into mouse livers, and 'the excess fat was literally released into thin air.' (One researcher calls it 'an unconventional idea which we borrowed from plants and bacteria.') The research potentially could help treat serious medical conditions including diabetes, heart disease — and of course, obesity."
The problem is that global warming legislation will raise energy costs, alter land use, and, ultimately, in a few hundred years, shorten the growing season. So we're pretty much setting ourselves up to go through getting a bit thinner. Cutting down on our ability to save fat is almost like evolutionary suicide. 100 years from now, it will be like the old days, people that are fat will be rare and obesity will be a sign of power and wealth.
This is my sig.
Is this something that has to be engineered into an organism, or can it be applied after-market? From the sounds of it, it's a genetic splice and not something easily applied to preexisting organisms. TFA doesn't seem to say. Anyone know? Great news for the fatties of tomorrow, but what about the porkers of today?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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Your point is well made, and quite important; but I don't think it goes quite far enough. Even if we did cling to the naive view of "willpower", so what? Is technology that makes life easier a bad thing? Why suffer when you can have your cake and eat it too?
Sure, you could avoid weight gain by eating your veggies and running a lot; but if you can have your steak and be slim too, why not? There is something really perverse and masochistic about opposition to this sort of tech(and masochism is fine, if that's your thing; but imposing it on others is a bit much). There are loads of situations where you could avoid consequences by "self control", or you could just use a little engineering. If I need dental work, should I skip the anesthetic and just suck it up? Why? Anesthetics are cheap and pain sucks. If my eyes aren't so good, should I just squint? Why? A few dollars worth of polycarbonate and some optical know-how will make my life substantially better. Should I refrain from sex unless I can deal with children? Why? Prophylactics are cheap and highly effective.
There are, certainly, some things that no amount of technology will compensate for, mostly because they are unethical; but in cases where the downsides of indulgence can be cleared up with a little engineering, advocating self-control instead is just puritanism. Perfectly fine to make the choice for yourself, or if you suffer the externalities; but damn perverse to impose on others.
Once some screenwriter or movie company gets a hold of this story/idea, we are in for a slew of new, badly thought out horror movies. Something like the "Resident Evil" trilogy crossed with mummies. Wonderful.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Packs of hungry wolves eating the sickly, old and too fat to run for their lives should be reintroduced into our cities. Save an endangered species and get human evolution back on track.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
To paraphrase Abbie Hoffman.
Telling obese people to just stop eating and exercise is like telling manic-depressives to just cheer up.
Obesity is a predictable problem of placing humans in an environment with surplus food. We have evolved in an environment where food was not plentiful, and one of the best behavioural traits to have if you wanted to survive was to eat as much as you could when you could. That behavioural trait is now causing problems for many people.
Obesity is disgusting, but telling people that isn't going to solve the problem. Personally I wouldn't care one bit if taxes were increased (which would result in increased prices) for junk-food outlets like McDonalds and Burger King, it would hopefully limit the amount of shit that people eat, and would also be able to provide some funding for the massive costs that are going to be coming along very soon as obese and overweight people start requiring medical help.
According to an article on the BBC about a week ago, 44% of children in Mississippi are obese or overweight, that is disgusting and something needs to be done to fix this problem.
Apparently more than 25% of adults in my country, New Zealand, are obese. It is a serious problem, anything higher than 5% obesity in a population should be taken as a serious problem.
Using random values from the web, CO2 is 1.9769 g/L, and human body fat is 900.7 g/L. So the fat is going to expand about 500 times before it gets out of the body.
With Olestra, people were shocked, shocked, that you'd get runny shits if a fatty substance passed through your body undigested. My prediction: if this takes off, life will imitate art.
The human body is in essence a fat-burning machine. It is made to burn fat, and fat is its most efficient, most safest form of energy. As a coincidence it can also handle pure sugars and carbs (which break down to sugars) by secreting insulin into the bloodstream when carbs/sugars are ingested. When insulin enters the bloodstream, two things happen: Firstly, the body's lipolysis stops (the breaking-down of fat), resulting in the body stopping its burning of your fat reserves, and instead starts storing the fat you ingested (ever had a "pasta diet" for a longer while and noticed the effect of it?). Secondly, the insulin (and not the sugar) results in the familiar increased heart activity (and sometimes palpitations) that come from sugar ingestion, which is a contributing factor to reduced cardiac health. Last of all, stressful production of insulin due a diet overly rich in carbs or sugars, as known since long, increases the risk of developing diabetes - simply put, a burned out pancreas.
Carbs/sugars are the catalysts for storing fat instead of burning it. The problem is solved by reducing your carb/sugar intake, and replacing that energy amount by a fat intake.
There are, actually, ways of causing the body to break down food without providing ATP(by interfering with oxidative phosphorylation in your mitochondria), instead producing heat, which allows extremely efficient weight loss. 2,4-Dinitrophenol was used back in the '30s for the purpose. Unfortunately, if you get the dose wrong, the hyperthermia will fuck you up quite efficiently. Not recommended.
"I live in the same society, shop in the same stores, and I'm not fat. It's called self-control."
/.?? I know right?!) who could eat McD's 4 times a day and stay 112 lbs and never get off the couch, and other girls who ate vegetables and soup and gym 3 times a week and couldn't break 200 lbs.
If that's what you believe then you fail at googling.
Can a person who is genetically pre-disposed to be fat be skinny? Of course, I've seen biggest loser, but they'll have to workout 12 hours a day and eat less than 1300 calories to reach the same size other people take for granted.
And I'm very tired of skinny people going "I have self-control, you fat people don't". Um, no. I see your shopping carts skinny people, it's not stuffed with celery and carrots and spinach, it's the same thing as the fat people. And I see the skinny people buying pizzas and super-sized meals too. I've dated girls (on
I gained 60+ lbs recently. I stopped running 5 miles a day and stopped eating 2 lbs of spinach daily and ate "normal" food. That's all it took.
I will say this: if you're fat and you don't run 5 miles a day then don't whine "it's genetic, I can't help it". You can help it, you're just not trying. Until you can run 5 miles in a hour (12 minute miles, a slow run) everyday you can't say "I can't help being fat" because you're not even trying.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
While it doesn't help, the blame cannot be all on McD's. Personally, I achieved my lowest weight (merely 'overweight') after a year of biking 20 miles a day and staying under 1500 calories a day. I haven't eaten at McD's since my teen years (It's just not good eats :-) The problem is, it's just not possible to keep doing that and put in that 60+ hour work week.
Not everyone is the same as you. You live in the same society, shop in the same stores, and you're not depressed, schizophrenic, rife with obsessive compulsive habits, etc. Your assessment is that your personality and habits is entirely based off of your environment and your "willpower", which is far from the truth.
I'm a victim of ruining my metabolism.
I eat one medium to large meal a day (aka a fast food meal not super sized because that is terrible). Sometimes I eat two small to medium meals a day (a sandwich or something) but usually one medium/large.
My metabolism right now is probably closer to a crocodile than to a human.
I spent the last...5-6 years of my life in that pattern neither gaining nor losing weight. But I began overweight so I was homeostatic at a bad point.
But then again, I started exercising last month and lost 10 pounds so far while leaving my diet as is, so I think I'm doing alright. If I lose enough weight to hit a "normal" point I can just go back to my old lifestyle and remain in balance forever.
Yawn.. And in the middle of your analysis you have forgotten or totally missed the important parts, the why. Farm subsidies originally started after WWI as a way to combat the loss of farms due to falling cotton prices. This had a problem because demand drastically shrank after the war and as European countries started rebuilding, they started locking out imports in favor of domestic products. The government originally purchased excess crops at a minimum price with the expectation of being able to resell it later. This threw the market for a loop because farmers started switching to cotton for a guaranteed price making it impossible for the government to get our from under the excess. The added a few other crops to the mix because shortages were being found. This wasn't because of political support or anything of the sorts, it was because if the ability to grow cotton at the time was diminished by farms going under on a mass scale, it would have wrecked the economy (which ultimately happens by the same forces). You have to remember, there was no domestic alternative to cotton at the time and farming was labor intensive which is why the unemployment numbers were so high during the dust bowl and great depreciation.
After WWII, we sent a lot of food overseas and had to increase production in order not to artificially raise prices at home. Subsidies were once again used to increase production. Then as Europe started comming back into it's own, the subsidies turned from promoting farm growth to paying farmers not to produce but to keep the capacity. This turned around in the 70's and 80's drought in one area and flooding in another cause some shortages again. Now the focus is on either not producing crops at all or collecting in order to provide foreign aid. Either way, the idea is to have a reserve or reserve capacity that can't stabilize the food chain in the US.
All the problems with implementation that you have pointed out were in the implementation, not the motivation. You are essentially missing the forest for the trees.