Researchers Enable Mice To Exhale Fat 328
destinyland writes "UCLA researchers made a startling discovery: genetic alterations enable mice to convert fat into carbon dioxide.
Mammals digest fats differently than bacteria — so researchers introduced bacteria genes into mouse livers, and 'the excess fat was literally released into thin air.' (One researcher calls it 'an unconventional idea which we borrowed from plants and bacteria.') The research potentially could help treat serious medical conditions including diabetes, heart disease — and of course, obesity."
obPublic Service Announcement (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a stunning and amazing medical breakthrough -- finally, people don't have to be fat! In other news, eating a well balanced diet, excercise, seen sulking in the corner for not being hip enough. Dr. House overheard saying "It's stuff like this that makes me want to not dangle anymore."
How to stop? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what happens when you're thin enough? How do you avoid going down to dangerously low amounts of stored fat?
Do genetic modifications go away on their own over time, or do they propagate as the affected cells divide?
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I see this a lot when news that could help the obese comes along. I think it's a bit ignorant. First, would you have the same reaction if it similiar news (possible breakthrough) about compulsive gamblers, smokers, alcohilcs, hard drugs, or any other addiction? What about the debilitating OCD like Howard Hughs suffered or any mental disease really? I mean, buck it up and have some will power!
I know many fat people who go days on in eating less than a 120lb person, maybe even losing the weight, only to be broken by one binge and rapidly going back to their old ways. I don't think it's just a lack of willpower, a lot of it is unnatural. Domesticated animals also get fat when there's always food in the bowl. Maybe it's in our nature: for so many generation, the next meal was uncertain, grab it while you still can.
And then there are things like HFCS which adds to the problem. 100 years ago, regular chocolate was a real WEEKLY treat for an average kid, if at all, 300 years ago, sugar was kept in silver lockboxes due to expensive nature, now we have this crap swamping the area.
Imagine in 100 years VR really gets there. I mean really, they bypass your eyeballs, wired right into the brain, touch, feel, smell, everything. Instant orgasm. Imagine how many people will be addicted. Not just because they lack the will power, but the human animal gets exposed to stimuli that in turn rewards its basest and most powerful areas of the brain and we act holier-than-thou when people actually get hooked.
Food, for some people, is the overriding addiction that make other addictions fail. Any help they get is good. And Dr. House would know that.
The purpose of Fat (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpost of fat is to ensure an organism survives when there is not enough food, and in worst case, during famine.
During most of the history of the human species, famine has been inevitable and greatly lethal.
Those humans who can best gain the most fat in the shortest amount of time, are most likely to survive - they are superior than the naturally thin people who are the first to die during famine.
'Curing' people of the ability to gain fat would be severely detremental to the species ability to survive as a whole, outside of specific cases as stated in the article, such as disease or specific genetic conditions.
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:3, Insightful)
My mother has been at least 100 lbs overweight for many years. She insists she "hardly eats anything at all and just can't lose weight", but having been raised by her, I know better -- life with her is a non-stop cavalcade of food. Like all addicts, fat people lie.
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:5, Insightful)
I just don't believe in that whole "victim-of-the-modern-diet" argument so many fat people like to use as an excuse. I live in the same society, shop in the same stores, and I'm not fat. It's called self-control.
Anecdotal evidence. I know people that smoke 3 packs a day and don't get cancer therefore smoking doesn't cause cancer. I may be fat but at least I didn't fail logic.
Re:The purpose of Fat (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But how would this be deployed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I inhale cheeseburgers, I guess it would only be right to exhale them too.
One of the fundamental principles of the fast food industry is that the "food" shouldn't require any chewing. Obvious, but only after some careful thought, but wildly successful.
The generic cheeseburger you inhale is constructed from greasy patties of frozen ground meat, a bun that lightly resembles bread, a thick viscous layer of an edible oil product colored to resemble cheese, and copious amounts of additional vegetable oil mixtures (using various combinations of egg products, corn syrup, and flavourings, colour, and gum) that keeps everything soft and wet.
Substitute one or more of the ingredients with the real or fresh versions, and I suspect you won't be able to inhale. Whether chewing is a feature, I'll leave to you to decide.
Not news. (Score:2, Insightful)
Scientists just figured this out?
I eat a varied and balanced diet which does include a portion of fat.
I am not putting on weight.
When I cycle to work, where does the carbon dioxide that I exhale come from?
Re:Fat - CO2? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when there was significantly more CO2 in the atmosphere different forms of life predominated, and we have evolved during the relatively oxygen-rich period which followed the lengthy period of sequestration of CO2 in trees and underground petroleum.
The CO2 we have been increasingly releasing for the last century and a half is not counterbalanced at all because the number of woody trees which absorb CO2 is being significantly cut back at the same time.
The combination of these factors causes more heat energy to remain in the atmosphere, which means more kinetic energy. Thus we should see an increase in extreme weather, plus an increase in the amount of heat flowing to the polar regions.
As CO2 and heat increase there will be a corresponding increase in the amount of gaseous H2O in the atmosphere, which is also a heat-trapping molecule. Thus we should expect to see an increase in the number of hurricanes and large-scale storms.
What is most feared is a runaway greenhouse effect, in which there simply isn't enough re-uptake of CO2 to counterbalance the domino effect, thus heat and kinetic energy keep going up and up. Ocean levels will most certainly rise, and at an increasing rate, which will lead to the increasing loss of coastal regions, large-scale loss of property, displacement of millions of people throughout the world, and various related crises.
Certainly no one needs to be alarmist, but it is clear that we need to find some solution to regain a reasonable balance, and to do what we can right now. And the most effective thing we can do to slow this trend is alter our behavior and encourage others to do the same.
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:3, Insightful)
Feel free, but we get our guns.
So what? (Score:1, Insightful)
Humans can already metabolize fat into CO2. This is called aerobic metabolism... high school biology anyone? Every time you breathe out, that CO2 is coming from carbohydrates, fat, and proteins.
The article said nothing about breaking down fat to CO2 without providing caloric energy. Now that would be impressive. This is just shunting fatty acids down a different metabolic pathway, that ends in the same product. Physics dictates that they still have to release the same amount of energy to get there, and guess what that energy is? Calories!
Re:No, even worse. (Score:2, Insightful)
Whine all you want about how New York having a cool day means the world isn't getting warmer; when the corn crops start dying from the longer (and hotter) growing season, you'll be more than "a bit thinner".
Markets don't lie.
Food prices falling across the board [newsday.com]
Says to me that there's not a corn shortage.
TEACH? (Score:3, Insightful)
Altering the genetic make up of an organism is now a form of teaching? :-)
Yeah. That'll be the f*cked-up NewSpeak they'll use on the 24-hour news drone, as they splice our children with 'obedience training'.
Re:No, even worse. (Score:2, Insightful)
With the oil/gas prices going back down from their highs last year, using corn to produce ethanol isn't cost-effective, so the artificial (non-food use) shortage is relieved.
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:2, Insightful)
For the 10 years that Arnold Schwarzenegger was Mr. Olypia, he was classified not only as "overweight" aka "fat" but as "obese". Yeah, yeah, I've heard the whole, "Yeah, but that is only for body builders" BS. That logic says that if you have 20 lbs of fat but under that fat, you have the build of Mr. Olypia, you are morbidly obese. It is a bizarre cognitive dissonance.
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:2, Insightful)
And I really am a cripple, so yeah, he's an insensitive clod.
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:3, Insightful)
Good for you. I assume you eschew birth control for the same reasons. Food is for energy, sex is for making babies, if you don't want any, keep it permanently in your pants.
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:2, Insightful)
Haven't you heard? it is called "the moral standard of Mother Nature". Things have a natural order, which is eternal and pure, and humans (specially scientists) try to subvert it all the time. That usually goes very wrong, because crime doesn't pay.
Eating less? (Score:2, Insightful)
we're going to wind up making food a lot more expensive and therefor eating less.
Uh, no. More likely those that are lower on the income scale will end up less able to afford proper nutritional foods, while those on the upper end continue to overconsume. This of course will leads to a greater divide, as nutrition is often one of the biggest bases for physical and intellectual development...
Re:No, even worse. (Score:4, Insightful)
Markets don't lie.
but they are frequently mistaken.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:3, Insightful)
Obesity is a predictable problem of placing humans in an environment with surplus food
Yeah, that's what Americans like to think, but that's bullshit. Eating as much as you want doesn't make you fat. You can get fat off not eating enough but eating the wrong things. It's called malnutrition. If you eat the right food you can eat until you can't take anymore and not gain weight.
See, for example, if you take 1960s France, the country was quite prosperous, everyone ate as much as they wanted, yet we didn't have an obesity problem. Child obesity was 3% in France in 1960, despite that "surplus" of food. But now, the eating culture has changed, under the strong American influence, and now child obesity reaches 17%. We still eat as much as we did in 1960, that is as much as we want, the difference is that what we eat is different.
So no, eating as much as we need isn't the source of the problem, taxing McDonald's isn't the solution, somehow popularising good food is the way to go. How about some French cuisine between two pieces of bread?
So now we get: (Score:3, Insightful)
- Tons of CO released into the athmosphere.
- People learning *nothing*.
- Sugar and other too short carbohydrates without any other vital substances still being the no. 1 unhealthy stuff.
- Very likely other bad side-effects of the bacteria genes.
And all so we all can eat tons of fat.
Wow, what a... uum... great... deal!
I know something better to make people "exhale" the saturated fat* *and* the sugar:
Make them vomit vigorously, as soon as an overdose of saturated fats and short carbohydrates enters their body, without the vital substances and fibers to cope with it.
Or even better, add detector cells to the tongue.
And then watch their eating habits change all by themselves. :)
___
* Because fat all by itself is a good thing. You just should not eat a whole pound of it. ^^
Re:Eating less? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is due to very few people knowing how to cook healthy food for themselves.
Certainly in Britain home cooking is a hobby for the "effete middle classes", not the "authentic, salt-of-the-earth real people".
No one has a clue how to cook, and as far as I know no one learns cooking in school any more. I certainly didn't.
Re:obPublic Service Announcement (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rationalizations. (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, so it's you against them and the only reason you care about is what will further your struggle. Well, when you get done tilting at windmills, start looking around.
Because you don't need a car to live where you do need food. And now your lumping tarriffs in with subsidies and the farm program. They aren't the same. But I will tell you what, how about you quit buying food and eating for a month but continue buying non food products. Then when that over, tell me how you liked it (if you can). I will then tell you why.
I mean seriously, try it. If you don't understand why food is more important then manufacturing cars or computers or TVs, you will afterward.
Wow, almost two centuries and you think it is wrong. What makes you so much smarter then the generations of people and politicians who have came before you over a period of almost two hundred years? Your problem seems to be rooted in doing harm to red states, not in the programs itself.
SO now it's the fat people. Ok, I'm starting to get some insight into how your mind works. I don't believe you are right but now I see.
Yep.. But there should be very little free trade when dealing with food. There is no reason for demand to drive the price out of the reach of the poorer citizens. You may think otherwise but you are completely wrong.