Bacon with sour cream and a slim waist? Block the expression of MGAT2 in intestinal cells!
Fat does not reach the belly
Pyotr Smirnov, "Newspaper.Ru»
Instead of fighting the absorption of fats, you can prevent their transformation into a form convenient for the body. Without the enzyme that is responsible for the transformation, the stomach does not grow even on a fatty diet. Perhaps it's the low efficiency of transformation – the transformation is slow, the level of fat in the blood increases barely, and white fat cells simply do not notice that they have something to put off.
To the frustration of too many residents of well-fed countries, the law of conservation of matter and energy is valid not only for individual chemical reactions, but also for whole organisms, including humans. That is why dreams of a slim figure, a healthy body and active longevity are not compatible with the love of delicious high-calorie food.
There are two "classic" solutions to this problem – eat less and exercise more. There are many more alternatives. You can, for example, get pleasure from food, and then get rid of it using the "two fingers" method. You can speed up its passage through the intestines or try to "catch" fats before they are absorbed into the intestines.
Robert Farese from the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases in San Francisco, California, and his colleagues proposed another alternative - to disrupt the conversion of fats in the body from one type to another.
The method tested on mice prevented rodents from gaining excess weight and developing pathological changes in their heart, liver and pancreas.
White fat, which has reached perfection in mammals, is the ideal "bins" for storing energy. Excess calories are deposited here, which, if necessary, can easily be turned into heat or useful work. A variety of food triglycerides, which make up up to 30% of the diet in developed countries, are easily broken down into individual fatty acids in the intestinal lumen.
Then they are absorbed in the small intestine and directly in its wall turn into new di- and triglycerides, convenient for our body. Further, new triglycerides enter the bloodstream in the form of tiny droplets – chylomicrons packed in a protein shell. And already these droplets can either be claimed by the cells of our body, primarily muscle, or deposited in adipose tissue.
The defining reaction in this scheme is the synthesis of new triglycerides using the MGAT2 enzyme. It was on him that Farese and the co-authors of the publication in Nature Medicine focused.
Strangely enough, mice defective in the gene of this enzyme turned out to be viable. This means that the transformation of fats into the desired form was still carried out by some roundabout ways - it is impossible to survive without fats at all.
However, without the MGAT2 gene, even in conditions of a fatty diet, mice practically did not gain weight, the level of "bad" lipids and cholesterol in the blood increased much less, and the heart, blood vessels, liver and pancreas practically did not suffer from an obese lifestyle.
And although all these indicators differed in "defective" mice and normal rodents on a healthy diet, the key role of MGAT2 is undeniable.
Scientists have yet to figure out where the calories, so hard to get for adipose tissue, "disappear". One hypothesis is that in the absence of the MGAT2 enzyme, it takes much longer for the cells of the small intestine to absorb and transform. This avoids a sharp increase in the level of lipids in the blood, and as a result, the white adipose tissue "does not feel" excess and does not begin to lay down reserves. As a result, most of the fat, as it arrives, burns in the muscles, where it goes to work, or in brown fat, where it is spent on warming up the body.
But even without understanding all the mechanisms, the effects demonstrated by Farese can become a very good direction for pharmacological developments.
Eugenics apologists will probably suggest depriving all parental cells of the mentioned MGAT2 even before conception: children born without this gene would not be tempted by gluttony.
There is also a less radical option – to find substances that block the MAGT2 enzyme. The direction for the search for a future "cure for obesity" is tempting: the enzyme is located in the intestinal cells and the spread of these drugs is easy to limit, reducing possible side effects.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru18.03.2009