Slashdot Mirror
Study: Mice Gain Weight In Cold Temperatures Due To Gut Changes (economist.com)
Beeftopia writes with the results of a study described in The Economist: Mice were separated into two groups, one temperature maintained at 6C, the other at 22C. Researchers expected the cold mice to lose weight as they burned stored fat to stay warm. And for the first few days they did. But after five to ten days, in spite of their rations not increasing, the cold mice begain to put on weight. When scientists examined the gut microbiome of the previously identical mice, they found they were radically different. Additionally, the intestine had grown villi 50% larger than those of the warm temperature mice. Finally, after transplanting the gut microflora into a new batch of aseptic mice kept at warm temperatures, those mice showed the increased insulin sensitivity, cold tolerance, and villi length of the cold mice.
Scratching my head here. What's the conclusion to be drawn, from these experiments? That if we don't want to gain weight, we should all move to Florida?
This explains why I gain weight when pouring beer after cold beer into my gut.
This is important stuff here!
I tell you if i ever find myself being a mouse in the Antarctic region this will come in very handy thank you very much.
Got anything for crocodiles in Florida? The weather is SO much nicer there.
I found that interesting. Identical mice placed in different environments, on the same diets. One set gets fat, the other stays normal weight.
Certainly obese humans should eat healthier and exercise, but perhaps it's not all moral failing that make them fatter than normal weight types.
Also, something like this might suggest further areas of human research. Instead of just saying that the naturally skinny differ "in the genes", researchers might start investigating different subsystems, such as the digestive, to see how changes in them might mitigate weight gain.
Over the last several years there have been a lot of interesting results come in regarding the microbiome in the gut and the overall effect that has on health and metabolism. Although fecal transplants have been shown to effect the gut flora, it will be interesting to see more investigation of probiotics and the extent to which they genuinely contribute to a healthy gut, and what parameters there are to that.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
n/t
as a canadian i no longer have to worry about getting too fat in the winter.. it's supposed to happen. and i suppose if i dont want to diet or exercise in the summer, i can always move a little further north!
What do you think would happen to the obesity rates if we got rid of air conditioning?
Congratulations, you discovered thyroid hormone.
We don't know shit!
What if the signatures of aliens in space are nothing but fake body fat, like that makes the smile on your face?
Exactly! Our microbiomes are the new frontier of health for all sorts of things, obesity being number one for the general western population.
It's only a matter of time, and IP law, that engineered bacteria will be sold as designer probiotics to counter all sorts of maladies. Could we easily create a grassroots organization to distribute colon flora? Sure! But the fat, sterile westerners will say "Ew, gross!", but happily pay for Monsanto Microbiome Enhancement Plus for a premium. (it's a fictional drug to counter the bacterial imbalance created by eating processed, industrialized food.)
Just as the finding of lead in our environment is bad for humans, perhaps so will antibiotics from medicines to soaps, along with polymers such as BPA (commonly found in most thermal paper receipts that people handle on a daily basis), be found to cause harm to our microbiome.
If you count cells in the human body, there are more bacterial cells than human cells; of course the human cells are much larger, but human individuals are complex organisms living with lots of other living "things".
that's the take away. In other words, being fat doesn't just mean you're a lazy slob. Stuff like this has enormous social implications for the United States, where we kinda have a culture of "blame the victim" in the guise of personal responsibility. Basically more and more things we blame on lose morals we're finding physical causes of. For the rest of the world this might not be such a big deal, but here in the States this might have a huge impact on our politics.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You can take your mice, wrap them up in duct tape, and shove them somewhere, which will give you an auto-erotic adventure.
Why don't these scientists study some humans who live in cold places? I think it would be way more interesting to see how humans cope with the cold, and how their body fat deals with this.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Usually the calories in/out crowd only look at the calories that make it into the bloodstream and calories burned by exercise.
Then there's the strange situation of when fattening food animals is talked about what is really meant is causing them to gain meat, not fat.
You know, you don't have to stay here. Feel free to find a better place to live.
So u think fat ppl should hav the willpower to extract less nutrients with their diffrnt intestines?
If you're not fat, why not get fecal transplant from someone morbidly obese? Get back to us after watching your body betray you.
Villi is as specializes a term as intestine, and both are taught in grade school.
Seems like something we already knew, but didn't understand the mechanism. The cooling days in Fall are uncomfortable compared to the warming days in Spring even though the thermometer reads the same, because your body had gotten better at burning calories over the Winter.
No. They should simply account for what they have no control over and adjust their calories intake.
Scratching my head here. What's the conclusion to be drawn, from these experiments?
It's evidence on a very specific level, the microbes somehow helping to regulate the length of intestinal villi. We've pretty well established how mammal bodies release stored fat as needed, but the mechanisms that regulate its intake are not as well understood.
So the interesting question becomes, why are we seeing evidence of a 'system' that is capable of actively regulating villi length rather a simple observation like mere presence of 'germ' x results in y. Stated another way, we're seeing evidence of ongoing symbiosis rather than an evolutionary result. Perhaps Akkermansia muciniphila functions as the Winter fat-storage inhibitor and there is significant evolutionary advantage to thinning out in the Spring --- even if the price is reduced nutritional uptake. This is (slightly) counter-intuitive because we are used to thinking of food uptake as something that has been constantly perfected over time (eg more is always better).
Perhaps the article reads a little strange because it involves temperature YET and there is the complete absence of a politically motivated guilt zinger woven into its presentation. But watch the headlines, I'm sure some will bite, viz:
CLIMATE CHANGE INTERFERING WITH NATURE'S FAT STORAGE MECHANISM?
AMID CLIMATE FEARS, THERE MAY BE THIN HOT RATS IN OUR FUTURE
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Crap! I'll have to work on a different flavor then.
really that is nice, but yet it doesn't explain human hogs getting so obese, since al gore and his cult of scientists keep screaming about the hottest months in decades and how we are all doomed with a 2 degree increase in temperature, so then wouldn't everyone be getting skinnier since its getting hotter?
I raise pigs on pasture year round in a cold climate (USDA Zone 3 Vermont mountains). For years I have done selective breeding to produce pigs that pasture well and thrive right through cold winters without the need for commercial grain / hog feed. There is a genetic component and this article suggests a gut biome component too which is likely passed through the herds from sow to piglets since young pigs practice coprophagia which has been shown to also teach them what to eat as well as inoculating their digestive tracts with appropriate bacteria. This may explain why people have a hard time dumping confinement pigs out on pasture, especially in our hard climate.
I leave the translation to you...