health blog 12

"We uncovered a well-controlled process for mobilizing energy to the tissues that need it," explains senior author Claudio Villanueva, Ph.D., assistant professor of Biochemistry at U of U Health. Expanding on these findings could lead to a therapy for cold sensitivity. As reported online in  Cell Metabolism  on Sept. 5, the supplement works by boosting levels of a newly discovered fuel source for brown fat, a "good fat" that generates body heat in response to the cold. Lighting the Fire Within While humans have only small amounts of brown fat, it is far more prevalent in mice that must adapt to the cold in order to survive. Unlike white fat that stores calories, this active fat burns energy to maintain the body's core temperature. Villanueva and his team clued into a different outlook on cold adaptation after determining that circulating levels of a waxy lipid called acylcarnitines fluctuated in response to the cold. Levels shot up in young mice as th...

"Our team wanted to make every effort to study female perspectives on how exercise affects diet, because most other studies neglect females," said Jenna Lee, a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at MU. "We wanted to take a look at what drives diet preference and if environmental factors, such as physical activity, play a role in how males and females eat." The team, led by Matthew Will, an associate professor of psychological sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science, divided male and female rats into two groups -- a sedentary group and one that had access to a running wheel. Both groups ate the same food. After another week, Lee replaced the standard diet with three optional diets: high fat (similar to cookie dough), high sucrose (three times more sucrose than the other two diets), and a high-cornstarch diet. Each of the diets were matched on proteins, and the rats had continuous access to all three diets for four weeks. Re...

Writing in the  American Journal of Preventative Medicine , Andrew Stokes, assistant professor of global health at BUSPH, and colleagues said their findings "highlight the importance" of considering the previously obese subpopulation when monitoring the obesity epidemic. "The results suggest that a much larger fraction of the population is affected by obesity than is reflected by statistics on current weight status alone," the researchers wrote. The researchers expanded the scope of their study to include all US adults who were ever obese as well as the currently obese. They found that 50.8 percent of American men and 51.6 percent of American women had experienced obesity as of 2013-2014. The prevalence of obesity, past and present, also differed across different demographic groups, with race, sex, education, and smoking status revealing disparities in obesity, weight loss, and obesity-related diseases over time. The researchers then examined data around ...

In Switzerland, about each tenth grownup suffers from morbid weight problems. Such corpulence can't solely result in diabetes or heart problems, but in addition to fats accumulation within the liver. Worldwide, about 25 to 30 % of all adults and more and more youngsters are affected by such steatosis -- turning into essentially the most frequent liver illness in recent times. Some sufferers undergo from irritation that would result in a scarred shrinkage of the liver (cirrhosis) and even most cancers. Receptor for programmed cell dying activated Regardless of the rising frequency of obesity-related liver steatosis, there may be at present inadequate data in regards to the origin of this illness. On the College Kids's Hospital Zurich, researchers from the College of Zurich have recognized a signaling pathway in liver cells which will contribute to the event of steato...