The Telegraph UK reports that British and Swedish scientists have made some interesting discoveries about human fat cells.
It seems that they were able to track radioactive isotopes in the fat cells of people who lived during the years 1955-1963, when much land-based nuclear weapons testing was going on around the planet.
Being able to track the isotopes meant they could figure out some information about fat cells that weren’t known before, such as:
we’ve long believed that the number of fat cells in your body is the number of fat cells in your body, and they fill up if you get fatter and empty out if you get thinner. Not so, say these scientists. In fact we replace the fat cells in our body at a rate of about 10% per year. So each year about 10% of our fat cells die off, and we produce the same amount of fat cells to replace the die off.
When we diet, the fat cells do indeed ‘empty out’, but the total number of fat cells remains constant, constantly and naturally replenished. So when you stop dieting, there is still the same number of fat cells waiting for business as usual. Get that – when you diet, fat cells don’t go away.
People who are naturally thin have, not surprisingly, fewer fat cells than people who are fat. That’s a no-brainer. And as you’d expect, it’s both our genes and our childhood foundation that determines how many fat cells we have. Fully half of the population of the planet have a gene sequence, discovered by these same scientists, that makes them more likely to have more fat cells. Presumably the sequence evolved for a very good reason: starvation has always killed more humans than disease, war, or natural disaster. And the food riots we’re seeing around the world now highlights the smartness of old mum Gaia in giving us this natural ability.
Which makes the whole ‘you must be thin’ debate even more ridiculous! This work is of course aimed at finding a “treatment for the disease of obesity” by targetting the genes that produce new fat cells – but surely what it’s really saying is that half of all humans naturally have more fat cells than the other half?
