Link: Networks of genes behind obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com.
Even though the whole philosophy of disease-ifying weight continues to bug me, I confess to being intrugued by this kind of research. As I had already started to surmise as just a Scientific American level layperson, this research demonstrates that the body's genetic regulatory systems are not just a simple set of on/off switches, but an incredibly complex system rife with multiple feedback loops, redundancies, and ohter complexities. So when you're talking about the impact of high levels of body fat on overall health, it's only to be expected that there are numerous different command-and-control gene networks involved in mediating that impact. Which would suggest why most current medical solutions for obseity, which typically tend to intervene at just one point in what turns out to be a complex cascade of biochemical events, tend to backfire in all the ways that they do--it's like pulling just one pickup stick out of a whole pile and not anticipating that the rest of the pile won't shift around or even come tumbling down.
As I read between the lines of this article, I also note more evidence for the fact that adipose tissue is not just an inert "container" for body fat, but living tissue like any other bodily tissue, with its own unique genetically-supervised functions, including feedback loops that influence other tissues of the body.
I've also learned, from long experience of reading these kinds of articles in mass media, that things can often get oversimplified. So I went and looked up the abstracts of the original scientific research papers on which this article is based. At least to judge from the abstracts, the NBC article seems to be more-or-less on track--though unfortunately one can't see the full texts without shelling out bucks. But if you want to check out the abstracts, you can go here and here.
Comments