Fatty foods can trigger binge eating

According to science news, a study has been done that shows that fatty foods can trigger binge eating. Foods high in fat have the same trigger that marijuana does when it informs the body to keep eating. Scientists have come to the conclusion that if they can control this trigger then they would possibly be able to stop people from over eating and in turn, help with the obesity problem.

I feel that this would be a great step and in trying to help people who are overweight. There are many people who have an overeating problem that cannot be helped. It seems to be more of a compulsion than anything. The growing rate of obesity, especially in America is a horrifying reality. So if scientists could stop this trigger, then maybe many peoples lives could be saved.

Should You Use Fat Substitutes in Your Diet?

Fat-substitues and artificial sweeteners have become more popular in the past 30 years than the have ever been before. Our country is very focused on losing weight and eating healthier. Consumers believe that if you use fat substitutes in your food, or sweeteners with no calories, you will lose weight. But do they really work the way they are supposed to?

A lab experiment relating to this information was performed on rats. Some rats were given regular potato chips- high in fat and calories. Other rats were given regular chips on some days, but low-calorie chips on other days. The low calorie chips contain a synthetic fat substitute. This synthetic actually passes through the body without being digested. Most people would think that this would be good for you, since the fat is not absorbed by your body. However, scientists have found that fat substitutes actually disrupt normal digestive function, and can lead to weight gain and obesity.

This fact would be proven in the results of the rat experiment. The group of rats that consumed both types of chips actually gained weight, ate an increased amount of regular rat food, and developed a high amount of fatty tissue. The rats that ate just the regular potato chips actually had better results. Obviously, we cannot always relate experiments performed on rats to humans, but both mammals' eating patterns and digestive systems are similar in nature.

Why are the fat substitutes and artificial sweeteners not as effective as you thought? Well, as brought out before, scientists have found that they disrupt your normal body's digestive system. When you start to eat something sweet, or something fattening, your body is responding before you even know it. As soon as the food touches your tongue, your body secretes hormones and your metabolism changes. By eating a fat substitute, though, you play a trick on your body. The body expects to ingest calories and fat, but instead, gets neither. Thus, your body's digestive system may be affected for the worse.

I enjoyed reading this article because I am highly interested in nutrition. Recently, I have heard many people talk about artificial sweeteners and give their opinion on them. My opinion is that regular sugar and regular fat is good for your body- in moderation. Natural foods with low calorie and fat levels are always better than synthetically produced fat substitues and artificial sugar.

Picture link- http://www.fanpop.com/spots/potato-chips

Turning 'Bad' Fat into 'Good' Fat

More than two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight, and more than one-third are obese, according to government estimates.

According to ScienceDaily, by knocking down the expression of a protein in rat brains known to stimulate eating, Johns Hopkins researchers say they not only reduced the animals' calorie intake and weight, but also transformed their fat into a type that burns off more energy. The finding could lead to better obesity treatments for humans, the scientists report.

"If we could get the human body to turn 'bad fat' into 'good fat' that burns calories instead of storing them, we could add a serious new tool to tackle the obesity epidemic in the United States," says study leader Sheng Bi, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The Johns Hopkins study, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, looks at two types of fat made by the body: white and brown adipose tissue. White fat is the typical fat that ends up around your middle and other places, and is the storehouse for the extra calories we eat. White fat cells have a single large droplet of lipid, one of fat's building blocks, such as cholesterol and triglycerides.

Bi and his colleagues designed an experiment to see if suppressing the appetite-stimulating neuropeptide Y (NPY) protein in the dorsomedial hypothalamus of the brain would decrease body fat in rats. Located just above the brain stem, the hypothalamus helps regulate thirst, hunger, body temperature, water balance and blood pressure.

For five weeks, two groups of rats were fed a regular diet, with one group also treated with a virus to inhibit NPY expression and the other left as a control group. At the end of five weeks, the treated group weighed less than the control group, demonstrating that suppression of NPY reduced eating.

Then, researchers split each of the groups into two, creating four sets of rats. One of the treated groups of rats and one of the control groups were fed a regular diet while the other treated and control groups got a high-fat diet. Of the rats on the regular diet, the control group weighed more at the end of 11 weeks than those rats in which hypothalamic NPY expression was knocked down. In the high-fat group, the control group rats became obese; those rats in which NPY expression was silenced gained less weight.

Bi says he believes that the transformation from white to brown fat resulting from NPY suppression may be due to activation of brown fat stem cells contained in white fat tissue. While brown fat seems to vanish in humans as they emerge from infancy, the brown fat stem cells may never disappear and may just become inactive as people age.

Bi says it may be possible to transplant or inject brown fat stem cells under the skin to burn white fat and stimulate weight loss. "Only future research will tell us if that is possible," he says. This study also shows that low levels of hypothalamic NPY increase spontaneous physical activity, improve blood sugar levels and enhance insulin sensitivity in rats, but it remains undetermined whether this brown fat transformation also contributes to these effects.

I found this article to extremely interesting. You cannot go a day without hearing about obesity on the news. I feel that this research can lead to a better, more natural way to help those who are obese lose weight.

Worms Lead to Understanding of Human Obesity

According to ScienceDaily.com, researchers exploring human metabolism at the University of California, San Francisco have uncovered a handful of chemical compounds that regulate fat storage in worms, offering a new tool for understanding obesity and finding future treatments for diseases associated with obesity.

The UCSF team took armies of microscopic worms called C.elegans and exposed them to thousands of different chemical compounds. Giving these compounds to the worms, they discovered, basically made them skinnier or fatter without affecting how they eat, grow, or reproduce.

The discovery gives scientists new ways to investigate metabolism and could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to regulate excessive fat accumulation and address the metabolic issues that underlie a number of major human health problems, including, obesity, diabetes and some forms of cancer.

This article caught my eye solely because we always speak about worms in class. After I started reading it, I was surprised to see that they discovered new ways to investigate metabolism in humans. I thought it was cool that they could take worms and compare it to the complex systems of humans. Obesity in America has become a growing (no pun intended) problem over the years, and it is only getting worse. To be able to get a start on figuring out new drugs to help boost metabolism and fat loss would be great. I can also see it being negative, however, due to the fact that our society strives to look good and be skinny and new drugs can hurt our ways of thinking on how to lose weight.