The Bauer Confidential

The big science story of last week was probably the announcement that the platypus genome has been sequenced. There are many reasons why I think that is cool, mainly because the platypus is such a weird animal. It’s got a bill, lays eggs, nurses young, and is a mammal. Such an odd creature!

There was also another article that seemed interesting. Why are some people obese and others lean? An article published online in Science last week looked at the biological aspects of this. Using BMI, the authors arranged two study groups, obese and lean. It was discovered, not so surprisingly, that obese people have a larger total number of fat cells than leaner people. When examining different age groups, it was also found that from early childhood to about 20 years old, the body is consistently increasing the total number fat cells. After the age of 20, the number of fat cells in your body appears to remain constant. The authors suggest that total number of fat cells in the adult body is determined sometime during childhood. What determines that number is a good question, but don’t despair!! We can still loose weight. The authors examined patients before and after gastric bypass surgery to see how they lost their weight. It was discovered that two months after the surgery (and after many pounds were lost), the number of fat cells remained the same, but the fat cell volume was greatly reduced. So adults lose weight by decreasing the amount of fat in their fat cells, not by killing off fat cells. So eat healthy and get plenty of exercise. That’s the Doctor’s orders!!

I’m not sure if this report deserved to be in one of the more prestigious journals like Science, but I did find it interesting and it had other nice tid bits and predictions about where (anatomically speaking) pharmaceutical companies could target medicines for weight loss. What I thought would be interesting would be an examination of the eating habits of both study groups, lean vs. obese. For example, obesity is probably a combination of both genetics and eating habits. People can’t control their genetics, but they can control their eating habits, and if, for example, parents have poor eating habits, they will unconsciously teach those habits to their children. To get to my point/question … will different eating habits in young (or very young) children affect the total number of fat cells accumulated by the time the person reaches 20 yrs of age? I don’t know, but what I do understand is that according to the CDC, there is an obesity epidemic in America and population genetics on a large scale like the USA doesn’t normally change dramatically in a generation or two. Eating habits, on the other hand, can change really fast. This begs the question, what and/or how are people eating differently now as compared to 30-40 years ago that is causing such an expansive problem?

Recently I read a book my Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, in which he argues that changes in our agricultural system and our psychological approach to food is a major component of the obesity epidemic. I won’t go into a book review, but if you’re curious about the eating habits in America and what he considers “healthy eating” it’s a quick and interesting read.