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MIT Researchers Discover "Metabolic Master Switch" To Control Obesity
New submitter ahbond writes: The meme of the chubby nerd alone in the basement may be a thing of the past. Well, at least the chubby part, if recent work at MIT pans out and we're able to use a biological "master switch" to "dial-in" a persons metabolic rate. “Obesity has traditionally been seen as the result of an imbalance between the amount of food we eat and how much we exercise, but this view ignores the contribution of genetics to each individual’s metabolism,” said senior author Manolis Kellis, a professor of computer science and a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and of the Broad Institute.
Where do I sign up to try?
BMR (basal metabolic rate) really doesn't vary much person to person. What does vary is calorie intake and activity levels.
For the most part, people who are obese aren't just eating the extra 100, 200 calories a day above their potentially low BMR. They're eating hundreds of calories above that, and getting little to no physical activity.
Due to a new technique called "CRISPR-Cas9", there's been a whole lot of rapid development on the gene-identification front, and likely to be an explosion of new ones in coming months/years.
It's definitely being used here: Linky.
Likely lots of half/false leads will also come out of all this too, but thanks to all this, we're getting a lot further into exploring the whole nature/nurture beyond simple debating points, and I think it's all amazing and interesting.
Ryan Fenton
It isn't being ignored; it's part of the equation, and always has been. Metabolic rate acts as a multiplier on the "calories out" part of the equation.
Even if you can identify a gene that increases metabolic rate and find some way to have it be expressed, you're still going to get fatter/overweight/obese if you eat more than you use. That part doesn't change.
And I ain't no ivy leaguer.
Running an engine faster shortens it useful life,hmm, maybe this might not be a good idea. Will turning up the biological clock shorten up the life based around the clock. What is really solved by tweaking your system so that you can eat more junk food, damn, I just imagined the junk food companies incorporating this chemical into the pseudo foods they produce, they would go nuts with it.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Seriously?!
"the *Broad* Institute"?!
That controls the switch they found this year. And so on and so on. The complexity of nature is bested only by the ego of man and his "discoveries".
Sin Pills Rool. ;)
The ability of people to eat until they gross themselves out, or have trouble getting to front door to pay for the pizza, is not to be underrated.
Use it now before Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O'Donnell's asses explode.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
I'm sure every landwhale feminist out there will freak and call this fat-shaming.
The diet industry hates him!
it's called my mouth. i stop putting shit into it when i want to control obesity.
the AMA or McDonalds?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
So if there is a genetic issue here, then why the hell is the obesity rate increasing. shouldn't we be through no concious effort be breeding this out of society
Which just means that people will eat even more, not getting as fat but filling their arteries with cholesterol and other harmful substances. Just like Americans smoke more, and drink more if it is available, they will keep eating to excess.
When people admit the connection between depression and eating fatty foods yielding a drug like high, they may start to fight the American obesity epidemic.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1502214#t=articleResults
It is nice to consider the genetic factor, but soon we are going to be told genetic expression is modulated by the environment, and especially by what we eat.
This may seems to bring us back to the starting place, but it is not exactly the case, since food quality (and not only quantity) will come into account. At least.
Original paper, New England Journal of Medicine
http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10...
The article is vague, but if you changed a person's metabolic rate (how many calories are burnt without exercises) you would also expect them to have a corresponding change in body temperature.
This is precisely what they found.
I've made another posting (later) in which I link to a PDF of the original research paper, if you care to read it.
See subject for disclaimer.
I hit periods where I can eat next to nothing and I no longer lose any weight. I take a day and gorge like some fat, planet-consuming monstrosity? Boom, weight loss restarted. Shedding pounds by eating a whole pizza is ridiculous, but the way it works if you're body is in, "Hurr, we're starving" mode.
Spend half your money on coke, the other half on drugs to avoid gaining weight, what a life!
All mammals have highly evolved to make the maximum use of all food eaten. Why wouldn't they? So do people with 'high metabolism' have a higher body temperature, on average? If not, where precisely does the energy magically disappear to?
This is just more of the usual bullshit that comes from 'researchers'. People are entirely responsible for their own weight, and telling them otherwise is precisely what greedy, lazy people want to hear. Eat less food and you'll lose weight. It isn't rocket science. Some people should try feeling hungry for a few hours a day, but they can't because they have negative emotions which they aren't prepared to face.
Funny, so many developers/coders here, and yet they forget ye old addage 'garbage in, garbage out', or another way, if input > output, guess what happens?
So many people want excuses (it's my genes, it's my metabolism, I'm big boned, blah blah fucking blah). For the VAST majority of people, it's simple, they consume more calories than they burn.... period.
I dropped 30 lbs after keeping a food log for 6 months -- you know what I found, I was initially eating more than I should be, shocker I know! I reduced my calories from ~ 2200 a day to ~1600 and what do you know, I lost about 1-1.5 lb a week every week. It's THAT simple for 99% of the population, why is it everyone claims they're the 1% who have a thyroid or metabolic issue, when they know they're fat cause they fucking eat too much?
People want a pill or quick fix for everything... or an excuse
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
The reason people are bigger is because they overeat and/or don't exercise.
I was overweight and started counting calories so i don't overeat. It went very slowly, but i lose 0.5-2.5 Kg per month (varies wildly) without changing any other aspect of my life and will cross BMI 25 soon.
dont eat like a pig and you wont look like one, sorry there will never be an app to fix that
IMHO, the nerd stereotype has traditionally been skinny -- someone who lacks the muscular bulk for rough team sports, but whose higher metabolic rate translates into quicker thinking, and possibly attention disorders. The chubby image is a more recent phenomenon, likely related to changes in food culture, such as energy drinks, and everything with HFCS. Of course, being an outlier of any kind is a good starting point for being a nerd, but you only need to look at the population at large to see how the weight distribution has shifted in the past few decades.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
...with just one weird trick that modifies your DNA.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
That quote was from a computer scientist. If energy in > energy out you will get obese. Genetics isn't going to magically create the fat for you, nor does it magically make exercise take no energy to perform, it just contributes to how big or small the right side of the balance is going to be.
I think part of the problem is even if you say have two people with the same hunger "drive" and they manage to eat the "right balanced diet" for that caloric level there is no guarantee that your desire to eat is going to match your bodies ability to burn that which you eat. So for example, people with this disease might have to live a life where they are always a bit hungry, or walk their asses off every day in order to force themselves to balance out. Anyways, there are many factors that go into obesity, but at some level it is a disease and like someone with asthma or liver failure it means your lifestyle might not be able to be the same as the next guys, or even the way you prefer. I don't like it that I need to workout 4-5 days a week to keep my body weight stable, but that is what I have to do because I have a slow metabolism and prefer exercise over eating very small portions (for me at least normal meal + exercise leaves me less hungry than taking the equivalent calories out of my meals instead, + it has nice side effects like benching 300lbs and a resting heart rate of 52).
Part of the problem is diet and exercise take time. A lot of other medical conditions don't really take that long each day to deal with, you take your pill, carry your inhaler in case you need it etc, but proper diet and exercise means you are probably spending an hour a day making food (or the equivalent hours working to pay for it prepared for you) and another hour or so being active (maybe more if you go to a gym and then need a second shower on workout days) which you might not be lucky enough to get from your work either. It can easily eat up 15 hours a week.
I think there probably is a genetic basis for obesity and being overweight. I sit on my ass all day coding and eat one or two meals a day. I don't have this thing people call hunger pangs, and I have to be careful so that my body doesn't hit starvation mode. Also, it's my opinion is that fasting but eating some every day makes you age more slowly. I'm 34 and people still ask what I'm studying in college when I graduated over a decade ago. I asked random people that don't know me how old I look, and 26 is the general consensus.
You can already raise your metabolism by taking synthroid. While this might be interesting from a genetic standpoint, there's already a pill that will make you burn more fat.
How many more decades do I have to wait until its available?
How many tens of thousands of dollars will I have to pay per year for it and will I (of course I will) have to take it for the rest of my life?
Eat less.
Indeed in the past the wealthy were [mostly] obese. Guess what was that thing they could afford but almost no one else could [it was rare and very expensive]
Vegies? Nope.
Fat? Nope.
Protein? Nope.
Sugar? Bingo!!!
Modern diets are only about 10,000 years old, and the calorie rich eating of today is less than 100 years old.
That's a bit of a fallacy there.
Corn, potato, beans, tomato, turkey, cocoa, peanuts, sunflowers (8-11% of vegetable oil comes from its seeds)... and many more.
All those didn't exist as far as the world is concerned until the discovery of America.
And so many more would only become common and thus cheap after being transplanted to Americas and farmed there on all that empty and rich land, with free slave labor, then traded with the rest of the world.
Sugar was known for thousands of years, but it didn't "take off" until 18th century.
And that's all just before we changed those foods to be better. Wind the clock back mere decades and look up Norman Borlaug.
The bread we eat today could not exist mere 50 years ago.
So, from one side, 10000 years as a limit to the "change in our diet" due to agriculture is nonsense.
From another, we didn't go out there into the wild, experimenting willy-nilly what to grow agriculturally.
We just picked the BEST food for US and planted and cultivated MORE of it.
We have an enzyme which takes a rather rare (in nature) sugar called sucrose and splits it into fructose and glucose so we could both get energy and save energy (eat our cake and have it too) from a single molecule.
We EVOLVED to be able to do that - so we planted crops that make more of that molecule.
Some of us have an enzyme which allows us to digest lactose and get energy from that too - after we wean off from our mom's milk.
So we bred cattle that produce THAT molecule (and fat, and meat, and hides...).
Some Japanese can digest cellulose cause they have special gut bacteria with enzymes which allow them to get energy from algae.
Why all those various ways to harvest energy from all those plants and animals?
Because there never was enough of it. We went hungry.
Again - India mere decades ago. Parts of Africa today. Europe and Americas before that, mere decades not centuries ago.
Heck... centuries ago we had nearly no way to preserve food.
Canning is an early 19th century invention. Refrigeration took decades more. Modern refrigeration took even longer.
Before that we ate when we could, what we could, stored some dried foods and prayed for short winters.
And we went hungry.
We did not "change our diet" 10000 years ago by content, nor did we do it by quantity until recently.
The fact that we ARE getting fat off of modern food PROVES that we have evolved to eat that kind of food.
We did not evolve to not spend those calories by sitting the whole day working, sitting while going from place to place, spending winters in comfortably warm rooms with all that cheap food we don't have to hunt, or plant, or harvest or even steal... right there at our arms reach.
There's no "modern" diet, in a biological sense. Same food, just more of it, more easily.
There IS a modern lifestyle and modern technology. Like cars, electricity, penicillin...
That's the bit we haven't yet figured out how to adapt to ourselves in a way that we get more benefits.
Just like we fixed plants to be more nutritious. Or edible.
There's a technology we figured out long ago that allows us to digest otherwise indigestible or poorly digestible food.
I.e. To get more benefits out of food by adapting it to ourselves.
It's called cooking.
There is a science that's equivalent of cooking for modern life, but it is in its infancy.
It's called ergonomics.
But it is where cooking used to be back when we would scour the ground after a forest fire, looking for animals that got cooked alive.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I know, I know. According to /. all fat people are faggots who are responsible for being fat. That may be true, and maybe all Samoans are evil faggots because they are fat, and Asians are the bestsest people in the world because they are skinny, but isn't being fat a survival characteristic in times when there is a scarcity of food. I mean a nice 6 pack is great in good times, but when times get bad that chiseled fuck is going to starve. During the Renaissance the ideal of physical beauty is what would be considered morbidly obese by the ohh soo knowing and knowegelable scientific guardians of right though at the AMA. Seriously what is wrong with being fat. Some people despite what every right thinking person knows to be true have to work harder at not blowing up than others. Those people would in less forgiving times be outproducing and outspawning those of slighter build.
Yup. Already seeing them.
I'm overweight. There are reasons for it. The biggest one, though, is simply eating too much. I'm making no excuses, and am not going to call myself beautiful or healthy. I'm not. I know what healthy feels like, and I am not there right now.
Push your fat ass away from the table. People on slashdot should know better.
Here, check this out from one of our own: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackd...
My mom used to tell me her mom would make tomato sandwiches during the war. She loved them and viewed them as a treat. Later she found out that the reason she got them was that was all there was. And my mom was lucky, her parents had some land with some fruit trees and a big garden. I think one of the unfortunate things of today is when you are short of money, it is fast food that is the tomato sandwich, and the tomato sandwich had less calories than a big mac and fries.
Walking is great exercise if you do it fairly quickly. Walking slowly hardly burns calories at all. I suspect walking makes a significant difference. My weight has varied but my wife grouches at my relative skinniness when we eat fairly similarly similarly, but I walk more and faster, at least when we are not walking together. I suspect hurrying and fidgeting heavily impacts metabolic rate.
On the other hand I totally quit desserts a while back and that made it way easier to lose weight. No soft drinks, no desserts. Food is definitely addictive, though. Reducing sugar was hard. And depressing.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Its Metathetical.. but if you have this "pill" that can temporarily "block" or switch off these IRX3 and IRX5 effects.. you would have a "starvation" or "obesity" pill.
I doubt they would make a whole "treatment" that you only needed once in a lifetime.. but even so.. women for example might want obesity when bearing children.. and switch it off before and afterwards.
None of this will really get around "toxins" which things like purified "sugar" or purified "anything" will become.. extremes just defy control.
Someday we will come to the conclusion.. we have to learn to accomodate and live within our means and our environment.. and strive for balance where there is none.. these "pills" will come to pass.. but they will be an extra burden.. and no doubt people will abuse and misuse them.
As someone with a low metabolism due to Hashimoto's, I would gladly volunteer to get a pill that would up my metabolism.
Although I am on synthroid, its just not the same, and I would love to dial UP my metabolism a few notches not only to lose that last 40 lbs but also to have increased energy.
The only downside to this I see is the possibility of using it as a way to eat even more unhealthy food. Just because you're now burning more calories doesn't mean you have carte blanche to eat any shit you want. You still have to eat decent food.
if you look at the past, i guess that means were evolving, right?
i feel special.
TFA seems to assume that people that are storing fat never burn it, but that's complete and utter bullshit. Or did I read it the wrong way?