adipocytes
tsaunders | June 25, 2010
By now, readers of Obesity Panacea have hopefully learned that excess weight is not directly predictive of health risk, and that excess fat mass is not in itself unhealthy. Recall that approximately 30% of individuals who are classified as obese by their body weight turn out to be metabolically healthy, and in fact seem not to get much metabolic benefit (or may even get worse) when they lose weight. Also consider that individuals who have NO fat tissue (e.g. lipodystrophy) have extremely elevated metabolic risk factors, meanwhile others who can apparently indefinitely grow more fat mass (…
tsaunders | March 22, 2010In his post last Friday, Peter did a very nice job of introducing the the counter-intuitive idea that having too little fat, rather than too much, causes many of the metabolic problems of obesity. Today I thought it would be good to continue on with this theme and to focus on some of the mechanisms that explain this strange relationship. Let's begin where Peter ended off:
Currently, the emerging theory of why obesity is associated with metabolic disease risk suggests that it is not the excess amount of fat that results in problems - but rather, it is the inability of the fat tissue (…