They Found The Main Culprit For Obesity

2024 Author: Jasmine Walkman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 08:29

Scientists believe they have discovered the main culprit for obesity. Their research may be the key to fighting obesity. Thanks to the discovery over time, more effective weight loss methods can be used than exercise and diet, writes the New england journal of medicine.

It is the FTO gene, which scientists claimed to be linked to obesity in 2007. At the time, however, experts could not figure out how and in what way it affects people's weight - they failed to link it to appetite and other factors related to nutrition.

Now experts from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that the defective variant of the gene is the reason why food energy is not burned, but stored as fat.

Experiments have shown that this process can be reversed - this is what gives scientists hope that obesity will soon be solved and drugs or therapy will be developed. This finding challenges the widely held view that people gain weight by choice. Most people think that those who are obese eat too much and do not exercise, and this is the reason they have become overweight.

The defective gene also does not doom people to obesity, experts say, it simply predisposes them to gaining weight.

One of the scientists involved in the study was Dr. Clifford Rosen. He is convinced that the current study is the key that scientists needed to develop drugs that would make fat cells function differently. Scientists do not commit to deadlines and do not promise when the pill will be invented.

They emphasize that it will not be magical - its purpose will not be to allow people to tread freely. Not only is the defective variant of the FTO gene the cause of obesity - there are other genes in the human body that are also important, scientists say. The defective gene is found in about 44 percent of Europeans and 5 percent of blacks.

FTO is something like a major switch of two other genes whose job is to control fat burning. It has long been known that there is brown adipose tissue, which burns calories, and white, which stores them. The human body is constantly producing fat cells, and the two genes in question, which experts are talking about, determine whether they will turn white or brown, and the FTO gene is also involved in the process.

In one study by scientists, the effect of a defective gene was blocked. As a result, the mice used in the study lost 50 percent more weight than the control rodents. Defective gene rodents even burned more energy than other mice while sleeping.

The scientists also performed laboratory tests on human cells. After they were able to isolate the defective gene, an increase in the energy burning of fat cells was observed. In addition, normal metabolic function has been restored.

Exercise and proper nutrition are especially important for health and good figure, and this will not change, even if a cure for obesity is invented, the scientists conclude.