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."

Comments

But how would this be deployed?

[Kell Bengal]

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?

Re:So what?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:No, even worse.

[soundguy]

... corn has been described as being "edible oil", due to it taking 2 calories of oil energy to create 1 calorie of corn energy.

Bullshit. For millions of years, corn (and its ancestors) grew happily in the wild, uncultivated earth with only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide for sustenance. For thousands of years, up until the mid-20th century, it grew on cultivated land with the addition of animal waste as a fertilizer. Just because we currently use petroleum-enhanced fertilizers to increase yields and lessen the need for crop rotation does NOT mean that they are in any way "required".

...it takes 9 pounds of corn to make 1 pound of cow.

More bullshit. Cattle are currently fattened in feedlots using corn because it means higher profits from higher yield and more marbled (and therefore more expensive) muscle tissue. 100% natural-grass-fed cattle use up ZERO pounds of corn, and that's pretty much all they had to eat before they were domesticated.

While I'm at it, I'm getting really sick of the most egregious lies that keep getting trotted out around here regarding the amount of petroleum products that are "REQUIRED" by modern farm machinery to grow and process "natural" foods. Again, just because it's currently fashionable and economically desirable to do things that way does NOT make it MANDATORY. The vast majority of farm equipment runs on diesel fuel, which is easily replaced with biodiesel or alcohol. Stationary machinery that is currently powered directly by fossil fuels or with electricity generated using those same fuels are often in geographical areas where electricity can be economically generated by wind, solar, burning biomass, methane from waste processing, or nuclear. In fact, combines and tractors don't move very fast or very far. There's no reason they couldn't operate with a couple tons of batteries and hi-torque locomotive drives instead of those Cat & Cummins diesels

A lot of you seem to forget that there are vast stretches of farmland in the wide-open west that already have the majority of their power generated by nuclear and/or hydroelectric systems. In short, the only reason we aren't weaning ourselves off of "edible oil" is the greed and corruption of the US government (specifically farmbelt senators-for-sale), big agri-business, and especially the global petroleum cartels.

If an alien armada landed tomorrow and vacuumed out 100% of the oil and coal reserves on this planet, we'd suffer for a decade or two, probably losing a big chunk of the population to starvation and wars over food, but eventually we'd ramp back up using alternate energy sources and within a generation, Hummer would be a viable vehicle brand again (possibly as Electra-Hummer or something) and we'd all be right back to not giving a rat's ass about where energy came from or how much of it we're using.