The dangers of a high-fat diet
A high-fat diet forced a normal liver to acquire the characteristics of a cancerous one
Maria Azarova, Naked Science
Healthy liver tissue can behave like cancer cells if high-fat foods predominate in the diet, scientists from the Laboratory of Cellular Metabolism and Metabolic Regulation at the Leuven Center for Cancer Biology (Belgium) said. In a study published in the journal Cancer Research (Broadfield et al., Fat induces glucose metabolism in non-transformed liver cells and promotes liver tumorigenesis), experts demonstrated this using the example of laboratory mice on a high-fat diet.
We have repeatedly talked about the consequences of obesity. Since the 1980s, there has been an increase in the number of overweight people around the world, especially in developed countries. In most cases, they face problems such as diabetes mellitus and diseases of the cardiovascular system. In addition, the prevalence of liver cancer among obese patients is also increasing every year – and understanding how excess fat can contribute to the development of this type of cancer is extremely important.
Cells use fat in several ways: to generate energy, stimulate growth pathways, or preserve it for future use. Scientists used the Lipometrix lipidomics platform (the study of pathways and networks of cellular lipids in biological systems) to understand whether there is something unique in the role of fat for tumor cells.
Professor Sarah-Maria Fendt and her team studied metabolic changes in the liver tissue of mice that were put on a high–fat diet at a time when they did not have tumors, as well as later - after the tumors had already formed.
It turned out that before the onset of any signs of cancer, liver tissue used glucose in the same way as a tumor. Such an active consumption of glucose is considered one of the markers of cancer, it is also called the Warburg effect.
The bottom line is that most tumor cells tend to produce energy mainly through active glycolysis followed by the formation of lactic acid, and not through slow glycolysis and oxidation of pyruvate (pyruvic acid salts) in mitochondria using oxygen – as in most normal cells. In the cells of a rapidly progressing cancerous tumor, the level of glycolysis is about 200 times higher than in normal tissues.
Having discovered such premature changes in liver tissue, the authors decided to go further and determine what happens when tumors form completely. In particular, they tested sensitivity to glucose, which is usually rapidly excreted by the body.
"Amazingly, mice that received a high-fat diet and had a higher tumor load could remove glucose from their blood as easily as healthy mice, although they suffered from diabetes. As a result, we found that the tumor tissue consistently breaks down glucose, regardless of whether the mice were fed a fatty or normal diet," she said. Fendt.
As the results showed, when cancer cells develop from normal liver cells, their glucose metabolism is constantly increasing. A high-fat diet causes these changes before the tumor appears, therefore, with this type of diet, non-cancerous liver tissues may be more likely to become malignant.
"We learned that before the development of cancer, liver tissue exposed to a high fat content apparently used an alternative way of splitting fat in the cellular compartment (isolated areas in the cell that are surrounded by a bilipid membrane layer - ed.), called peroxisoma. We also confirmed that peroxisome metabolism increases the level of cellular stress and increases glucose uptake," added Dr. Lindsey Broadfield, one of the lead authors of the study.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru