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The fat cell flux explained By John Ditraglia - Contributing Columnist I just listened to Peter Attia’s latest ask-me-anything podcast (AMA#22 April 12, 2021) where together with superhero assistant Bob (I can’t find his last name) they analyze how fat gets into and out of fat cells. This flux is the crux of the issue for fat science aficionados but for these guys it is a sidelight of their main interest in studying how to live longer and better. You can’t listen to the entire podcast without a very modest subscription but you can read my commentary. The podcast starts out with the very basic physics construct of boundary analysis. That is starting out with the fat cell as a black box or a room and you just watch what goes in and comes out. This devolves quickly into complications that is catnip for obsessed nerds like me but might induce many normal people into looking for the bottom line with glazed eyes. That bottom line accounting is not different from the ev ....
Your Glycemic index reminder By John DiTraglia - Contributing Columnist We were reminded about this thing called the glycemic index, which is probably really a thing, by the April 8 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. (1) The glycemic index, which we have belabored before (The glycemic index doesn’t matter, Portsmouth Daily Times 2-2-15), is defined as how much 50 grams of food containing carbohydrates raises the blood glucose level. It might be thought of as the sugar spikiness of a food. (Spikey vs spiky makes a big list on Google) In general, spikiness is a violation of the proposition that an even keel is better and wide fluctuations are generally found to represent malfunction and/or are damaging to your health. Then there is another thing that this report looked at called the glycemic load of a diet. They calculated this by “multiplying the mean net carbohydrate intake by the glycemic index and then dividing by 100.” ....
Yet another magic bullet By John DiTraglia - Contributing Columnist You’re probably tired of me proclaiming magic bullets for the cure of obesity which is still pretty intractable. But one day one of these magic bullets is going to be the one. I need to do a list of all the magic bullets so far but before that there’s yet another to talk about. There is this recently discovered enzyme called nicotinamide N-methyltransferase (NNMT) that is very abundant and busy in white adipose tissue and serves as a critical regulator of the energy metabolism of cells. It has been found that blocking this enzyme causes weight loss and fixes lots of the rest of the story that happens when you are obese. These guys at the University of Texas Medical Branch At Galveston, Texas have reported (1) of some of their work with NNMT. Here they treated diet induced obesity in mice with a molecule called 5-amino-1-methylquinolium that blocks the business of NNMT. They found that it was truly ....
Semaglutide for obesity By John DiTraglia - Contributing Columnist In this randomized clinical trial that included 611 adults with overweight or obesity, 68 weeks’ treatment with 2.4 mg once-weekly subcutaneous semaglutide vs placebo, combined with intensive behavioral therapy (and a low-calorie diet for the initial 8 weeks), resulted in reductions in body weight of 16.0% vs 5.7%.(1) Drugs whose names end in “tide” are peptides. Peptides are little proteins but they are still big molecules when compared to most drugs. That means they have to be given by injection since they would be digested into their amino acid building blocks if you swallowed them. Semaglutide is classified as a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). That makes it sound like it acts like glucagon but it doesn’t. Glucagon increases blood glucose in opposition to insulin. Rather GLP-1s are called that because they are made from a precursor they share with glucagon and instead decreases blood glucose ....
It has long been a contention of mine that the remarkable thing about obesity in childhood is that it goes away much more often than obesity goes away duri ....