Discover the Science of Health
It’s not you. You’re not imagining it. It really, actually, legitimately is harder to keep weight off than it is to lose it in the first place. You really do feel hungrier than you used to, and still the pounds keep creeping back on. This is the conclusion that Dr. Joseph Proietto and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne just published in the New England Journal of Medicine [1].
Lose weight image via ShutterstockA new series of billboard and television ads is outraging Georgians, who object to the “Stop Sugarcoating It, Georgia” campaign being run by the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta pediatric hospital. The ads depict overweight and obese children in a variety of settings, and are meant to shock parents into action.
It’s obvious that obese people more have fat than non-obese people, but it’s not as clear how it happens. Do obese individuals have more adipocytes (fat cells) than lean people, or do they have the same number of adipocytes, just larger ones? It turns out to be both. But the way that comes to pass is just being worked out by scientists. Engineering Professor Dr. Amit Gefen and his colleagues at Tel Aviv University recently demonstrated in a mouse cell line model that preadipocytes (precursors to fat cells) subjected to prolonged periods of “mechanical stretching loads” — the kind of weight we put on our body tissues when we sit or lie down — differentiate significantly faster, and retain significantly larger fat droplets, than those that are not. The research was published in the American Journal of Physiology — Cell Physiology [1].
Fat has a bad reputation, both in food and on the body. It’s certainly true that the U.S. has a problem with body fat; according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about two-thirds of adults in the U.S. are overweight, and fully one-third of adults fall into the more serious “obese” category [1]. Still, appropriate amounts of body fat serve valuable roles. These include helping to maintain the immune system and nervous system, protecting body organs and padding areas where the skeleton would otherwise put pressure directly on the skin (such as the soles of the feet).
Too much body fat, however, is associated with a number of negative health effects, including increased risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, and apnea.
There are a multitude of alternative sweeteners available on the market today. Some of these, like fructose, contain calories. Others — the so-called non-nutritive sweeteners — do not. While these “artificial” sugars don’t elevate blood glucose like table sugar does (which makes them more appropriate and healthy for diabetics than traditional sugar is), and while the body can’t convert them into fat, they’re not completely free of problems and complications as components of diet.
