Yellow Fat Person - © Unknown

Obesity News Update: Recent Scientific Findings

One thing the Internet has done in just the past few years is to make the fruits of learned journals available to lay readers, often translated into plain English. A scan of these sources reveals a wealth of new scientific findings on the Obesity Epidemic…

Proud Fat Girls - © wearyourvoicemag.comThese kids think they’re striking a blow against ‘fat shaming’. But they’re
really exposing their elevated risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes
and other serious health conditions linked to obesity…

Obesity costs the world’s health care systems an estimated (US)$2 trillion per year – the cost to treat diseases and conditions that obesity either causes or exacerbates. Primary among these are heart disease and type 2 diabetes, along with myriad metabolic disorders. Here’s a rundown on recent findings in the global research effort on obesity.

CRISPR Joins the battle against obesity

CRISPR is an acronym for the latest, most precise method for gene manipulation. It’s being used by researchers in almost every branch of biology, and its benefits are already being seen in the food and nutrition spheres. Now, scientists at the University of California – San Francisco (UCSF) say they’ve found a way to amend a gene associated with obesity to limit the condition.

Though the human genome contains two copies of every gene in an individual, one from each parent, scientists know of at least 660 genes where a mutation in just one copy can lead to diseases, some of which are devastating. One such condition is severe obesity, which the authors of the new study used as a model to develop a new therapeutic approach for treating these disorders. A a modified version of CRISPR has been used to ramp up the activity of certain genes and prevent severe obesity in mice with genetic mutations that predispose them to extreme weight gain. Importantly, the researchers achieved long-lasting weight control without making a single actual edit to the genome.

“We thought that if we could increase the dosage of the existing functional copy of the gene, we could prevent many human diseases in individuals harboring these mutations,” says Dr. Nadav Ahituv, Senior Author of the new study. “We were able to accomplish this by using a novel CRISPR-based technology developed right here at UCSF.”

It’s not an official treatment, yet, but further studies leading to human trials are planned.

Obesity linked to cancer risk

The American Cancer Society (ACS) reports that excess body weight was a causal factor in approximately 3.9 percent of all cancers worldwide in 2012, the latest year for which complete statistics are available. The ACS also says figure that is expected to rise in the coming decades given current trends.

Policies, economic systems, and marketing practices that promote the consumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor food, changing behavioral patterns that couple high total energy intake with insufficient physical activity, and human-built environments that amplify these factors are driving a worldwide rise in excess body weight, according to a new report. The report, appearing in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, a peer-reviewed journal of the ACS, says excess body weight accounted for approximately 3.9 percent of all cancers worldwide in 2012, a figure that will undoubtedly rise in the coming decades given current trends.

Overweight and obesity has been linked to an increased risk of 13 cancers: cancers of the breast (postmenopausal), colon and rectum (colorectal), corpus uteri, esophagus (adenocarcinoma), gallbladder, kidney, liver, ovary, pancreas, stomach (cardia), and thyroid, as well as meningioma and multiple myeloma. More recently, overweight has been labeled a probable cause of advanced prostate cancer as well as cancers of the mouth, pharynx, and larynx.

Eat dirt to fight obesity?

A new report from the University of South Australia (UniSA) suggests that we could fight obesity at the front end of the process by ingesting small amounts of very special ‘dirt’.

Investigating how clay materials can improve drug delivery, UniSA researcher and PhD candidate Tahnee Dening serendipitously discovered that the clay materials she was using had a unique ability to ‘soak up’ fat droplets in the gut.

Dening says this accidental discovery could potentially be a cure for obesity: “I was investigating the capacity of specific clay materials to improve the oral delivery and absorption of antipsychotic drugs, when I noticed that the clay particles weren’t behaving as I’d expected. Instead of breaking down to release drugs, the clay materials were attracting fat droplets and literally soaking them up. Not only were the clay materials trapping the fats within their particle structure, but they were also preventing them from being absorbed by the body, ensuring that fat simply passed through the digestive system.”

Absorbent clay therapy could not only become a treatment for obesity, but could also help treat other conditions which are exacerbated by ingesting too much fat. Further testing and development are needed.

And that’s not all…

But those are the big stories involving obesity this week. As always, we’ll be keeping a sharp eye on this issue…

~ Maggie J.