Thu, Jan-05-17, 18:22
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Senior Member
Posts: 3,199
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Plan: High protein, lower fat
Stats: 000/000/145
BF:276, 255 hi wts
Progress: 0%
Location: Michigan U.P., USA
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The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body’s Least Understood Organ
And What It Means For You by Sylvia Tara https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Life-...d/dp/0393244830
I haven't heard too much about this book but it sounds interesting. I've heard before that "fat is an endocrine system" but didn't really know what that means; it sounds like maybe this book explores that.
A lengthy excerpt from Wired magazine, snipped for brevity:
Quote:
The Mysterious Virus That Could Cause Obesity
RANDY IS 62 years old and stands tall at six foot one. He grew up on a farm in Glasford, Illinois, in the 1950s. Randy was raised with the strong discipline of a farming family. From the time he was five, he would get out of bed at dawn, and before breakfast he’d put on his boots and jeans to milk cows, lift hay, and clean the chicken coops. Day in and out, no matter the weather or how he felt, Randy did his physically demanding chores. Only when his work was complete would he come into the kitchen for breakfast.
Tending to the chickens was hard work—it involved getting into the pen, clearing birds out of their dirty cages, and shooing them into a holding enclosure. This process was always a little scary because the animals could be quite aggressive after being cooped up all night. On one of these occasions, when Randy was 11, a particularly large and perturbed rooster swung its claw and gave him a good spurring on his leg. Randy felt the piercing of his skin and squealed in pain. He said it felt like being gored by a thick fishhook. The rooster left a long gash, and blood streamed down Randy’s leg to his ankle. He ran back to the house to clean the wound, as chickens are filthy after a night in their cages.
Some days later, Randy noticed a change in his appetite. He was constantly hungry. He felt drawn to food and thought about it all the time. He started eating in between meals and overeating when he finally sat down to dinner. Randy had always been a skinny kid, but in the course of the next year, he gained about 10 pounds. His parents thought it might be puberty, though it seemed a little early. His pudginess was also unusual given that everyone else in the family was thin. Randy was no stranger to discipline. He forced himself to eat less, switched to lower-calorie foods and exercised more. But by the time he was a teenager, he was bouncing between 30 and 40 pounds overweight. He says, “I gained all of this weight even though these were some of my most active years on the farm.”
Randy’s family supported his efforts to control his weight. They made lower-calorie foods, gave him time to exercise, and didn’t pressure him to eat things he didn’t want. However, he continued to struggle with his weight through college. Randy kept thinking back to the moment everything changed. He had been the skinniest kid among his friends. And then he got cut by that chicken.
[snipped]
The Pounds Keep Coming
While Nikhil Dhurandhar was in India pursuing his curiosity about fat, Randy was looking for solutions of his own. After a brief stint as a teacher he moved back to the family land in 1977 because he loved farming. ...
At 40 years old and 350 pounds, Randy was in trouble. If he didn’t fix this problem soon, he would start to develop serious complications of diabetes, including cardiovascular disease and nerve damage.
[snipped]
A New Way to Manage Fat—Stop the Blame
Randy’s physician had been treating him for years and knew that his patient’s struggle was difficult and ongoing. The physician referred Randy to an endocrinologist—Richard Atkinson at the University of Wisconsin—who was having some success with difficult obesity cases. ...
Atkinson also introduced Randy to his new postdoctoral assistant, a young scientist from India, Dr. Nikhil Dhurandhar. Dhurandhar examined Randy and studied his blood samples. Randy tested positive for antibodies to Ad-36, meaning he had likely been infected with the virus at some point in the past. Randy remembered being scratched by that rooster as a child, and that afterward his appetite exploded and he started gaining weight quickly. His troubles with food and rapid fat accumulation—he understood it all now. If he was like the chickens, the marmosets, the twins, and the other humans in the study, then his infection with Ad-36 was helping his body to accumulate fat. He says, “What Atkinson and Dhurandhar did for me changed my life. They made everything make sense. It was very liberating and very empowering.”
How Does a Virus Lead To Fat?
How would a virus like Ad-36 cause fat? Atkinson explains, “There are three ways that we think Ad-36 makes people fatter:
(1) It increases the uptake of glucose from the blood and converts it to fat;
(2) it increases the creation of fat molecules through fatty acid synthase, an enzyme that creates fat; and
(3) it enables the creation of more fat cells to hold all the fat by committing stem cells, which can turn into either bone or fat, into fat. So the fat cells that exist are getting bigger, and the body is creating more of them.”
The researchers acknowledge that the rooster scratch may have been the start of Randy’s infection. But they are cautious—the transmissibility of Ad-36 from chickens to humans has never directly been studied.
Though Dhurandhar and Atkinson have conducted several strong studies showing the contribution of Ad-36 to fatness, skepticism remains. Atkinson says, “I remember giving a talk at a conference where I presented 15 different studies in which Ad-36 either caused or was correlated to fatness. At the end of it, a good friend said to me, ‘I just don’t believe it.’ He didn’t give a reason; he just didn’t believe it. People are really stuck on eating and exercise as the only contributors to fatness. But there is more to it.”(my emphasis)
Dhurandhar adds, “There’s a difference between science and faith. What you believe belongs in faith and not in science. In science you have to go by data. I have faced people who are skeptical, but when I ask them why, they can’t pinpoint a specific reason. Science is not about belief, it is about fact. There is a saying—‘In God we trust, all others bring data.’” https://www.wired.com/2016/12/myste...-cause-obesity/
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Last edited by JLx : Thu, Jan-05-17 at 18:27.
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