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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 earth is screwed if we ever get this to work on humans. Good news is that we will be able to build Burger Kings in Antarctica. Bad news is that the burgers will be made out of penguins.
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I inhale cheeseburgers, I guess it would only be right to exhale them too.
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It's a stunning and amazing medical breakthrough -- finally, people don't have to be fat! In other news, eating a well balanced diet, excercise, seen sulking in the corner for not being hip enough. Dr. House overheard saying "It's stuff like this that makes me want to not dangle anymore."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Politicians have been exhaling excrement for centuries.
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.
The slogan writes itself "Don't Hold Your Breath"
... just sayin'
And yeah, I know it's CO2 ... you want a global-warming joke instead, *you* make it.
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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Great... and then this "fat air" condenses out, and you're left with chubby rain, all over again.
So will mice taking this fat-to-CO2 drug have to pay for extra carbon credits? ;P
-Turkey
So what happens when you're thin enough? How do you avoid going down to dangerously low amounts of stored fat?
Do genetic modifications go away on their own over time, or do they propagate as the affected cells divide?
Have you tasted penguin? It's fucking delicious. Almost as good as bald eagle.
Why do people think that CO2 = bad? There is a natural carbon cycle. CO2 goes into the air, plants breath it in and breath out O2 while turning the carbon into sugar. Animals eat the plants (and other animals) and use the bonds in molecules containing carbon as a storage for energy. As they use the energy, the carbon goes back into the atmosphere. When things are in relative equilibrium, everything is fine.
The problem with fossil fuels is that there used to be a lot more carbon in the atmosphere, which was absorbed by plants which died and took the carbon with them. When we burn fossil fuels, we are re-releasing this carbon into the atmosphere, changing the balance of things. Except for deforestation and burning of fossil fuels, most other CO2 related activities don't actually change the overall amount of carbon in play. There is no need to be alarmist about this.
The purpost of fat is to ensure an organism survives when there is not enough food, and in worst case, during famine.
During most of the history of the human species, famine has been inevitable and greatly lethal.
Those humans who can best gain the most fat in the shortest amount of time, are most likely to survive - they are superior than the naturally thin people who are the first to die during famine.
'Curing' people of the ability to gain fat would be severely detremental to the species ability to survive as a whole, outside of specific cases as stated in the article, such as disease or specific genetic conditions.
Wake me up when they figure out how to make them exhale beer.
I could go for a cold MausBraü about now.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
The problem with cars running on gasoline is that the carbon in the carbon dioxide they emit used to be stored deep underground. Once it is emitted into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, about half of it will remain for hundreds of years, thus increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
This is as opposed to the carbon in the carbon dioxide you exhale, which came from plants. The plants got the carbon from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Thus, exhaling carbon dioxide does not cause a increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The carbon cycle... learn it, live it, love it!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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.
Scientists just figured this out?
I eat a varied and balanced diet which does include a portion of fat.
I am not putting on weight.
When I cycle to work, where does the carbon dioxide that I exhale come from?
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Back when there was significantly more CO2 in the atmosphere different forms of life predominated, and we have evolved during the relatively oxygen-rich period which followed the lengthy period of sequestration of CO2 in trees and underground petroleum.
The CO2 we have been increasingly releasing for the last century and a half is not counterbalanced at all because the number of woody trees which absorb CO2 is being significantly cut back at the same time.
The combination of these factors causes more heat energy to remain in the atmosphere, which means more kinetic energy. Thus we should see an increase in extreme weather, plus an increase in the amount of heat flowing to the polar regions.
As CO2 and heat increase there will be a corresponding increase in the amount of gaseous H2O in the atmosphere, which is also a heat-trapping molecule. Thus we should expect to see an increase in the number of hurricanes and large-scale storms.
What is most feared is a runaway greenhouse effect, in which there simply isn't enough re-uptake of CO2 to counterbalance the domino effect, thus heat and kinetic energy keep going up and up. Ocean levels will most certainly rise, and at an increasing rate, which will lead to the increasing loss of coastal regions, large-scale loss of property, displacement of millions of people throughout the world, and various related crises.
Certainly no one needs to be alarmist, but it is clear that we need to find some solution to regain a reasonable balance, and to do what we can right now. And the most effective thing we can do to slow this trend is alter our behavior and encourage others to do the same.
-- thinkyhead software and media
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.
Altering the genetic make up of an organism is now a form of teaching? :-)
Yeah. That'll be the f*cked-up NewSpeak they'll use on the 24-hour news drone, as they splice our children with 'obedience training'.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
*sigh*
Lipolysis -> Beta Oxidation -> Acetyl-COA -> TCA Cycle -> NADH/FADH -> ETC -> ATP -> CO2
It's completely natural and spontaneous in the absence of excess blood sugar.
we're going to wind up making food a lot more expensive and therefor eating less.
Uh, no. More likely those that are lower on the income scale will end up less able to afford proper nutritional foods, while those on the upper end continue to overconsume. This of course will leads to a greater divide, as nutrition is often one of the biggest bases for physical and intellectual development...
Quite true, and one of the things that I'm worried about with the pathway described. Cellular respiration is tied to thermoregulation, and by introducing a pathway which metabolically does nothing for your cells (like the glyoxylate shunt seems to in mammals), you introduce the risk of overheating.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
- Tons of CO released into the athmosphere.
- People learning *nothing*.
- Sugar and other too short carbohydrates without any other vital substances still being the no. 1 unhealthy stuff.
- Very likely other bad side-effects of the bacteria genes.
And all so we all can eat tons of fat.
Wow, what a... uum... great... deal!
I know something better to make people "exhale" the saturated fat* *and* the sugar:
Make them vomit vigorously, as soon as an overdose of saturated fats and short carbohydrates enters their body, without the vital substances and fibers to cope with it.
Or even better, add detector cells to the tongue.
And then watch their eating habits change all by themselves. :)
___
* Because fat all by itself is a good thing. You just should not eat a whole pound of it. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Oh man, imagine all the condensate on the furniture, computer screens and keyboards, windows and the like. Fortunately a typical geek lair doesn't have windows.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
Oh, so it's you against them and the only reason you care about is what will further your struggle. Well, when you get done tilting at windmills, start looking around.
Because you don't need a car to live where you do need food. And now your lumping tarriffs in with subsidies and the farm program. They aren't the same. But I will tell you what, how about you quit buying food and eating for a month but continue buying non food products. Then when that over, tell me how you liked it (if you can). I will then tell you why.
I mean seriously, try it. If you don't understand why food is more important then manufacturing cars or computers or TVs, you will afterward.
Wow, almost two centuries and you think it is wrong. What makes you so much smarter then the generations of people and politicians who have came before you over a period of almost two hundred years? Your problem seems to be rooted in doing harm to red states, not in the programs itself.
SO now it's the fat people. Ok, I'm starting to get some insight into how your mind works. I don't believe you are right but now I see.
Yep.. But there should be very little free trade when dealing with food. There is no reason for demand to drive the price out of the reach of the poorer citizens. You may think otherwise but you are completely wrong.