"The Disease of Kings"

The disease gout also known as the “disease of kings” is on the rise as more and more Americans gain weight. It’s called the disease of kings because it was once thought to be only associated with the privileged few who had the means necessary to over indulge in food. The prevalence of gout has more than doubled in the past 50 years. Gout can be correlated to obesity and hypertension.

Gout is a build up of uric acid, because of diet, lifestyle, disease or medication, which causes small crystals to form in a joint, leading to inflammation and intense pain. Despite the increasing cases of gout in America it is one of the most, if not the most preventable and treatable forms of arthritis.

Obesity has been increasing dramatically in our county over the past half century. Even children are affected by obesity. As children and adults gain more weight, the risk factors for cardiovascular problems and diabetes goes through the roof. Its one thing that you can’t change your genetics, but you can change your diet. Gout can be easily prevented with a good diet and exercise. I think that if you find you self incapable of keeping/making a diet or starting a good exercise routine, its time to see a professional such as a nutritionist, personal trainer, or even some sort of therapist so later down the road you don’t not have medical problems to deal with. Because life is filled with so many ups and downs, I think obesity and all the problems associated is one of the last thing’s I would want to be concerned with.

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.