Traci Watson in Nature:
Even after drastic weight loss, the body’s fat cells carry the ‘memory’ of obesity, research1 shows — a finding that might help to explain why it can be hard to stay trim after a weight-loss programme. This memory arises because the experience of obesity leads to changes in the epigenome — a set of chemical tags that can be added to or removed from cells’ DNA and proteins that help to dial gene activity up or down. For fat cells, the shift in gene activity seems to render them incapable of their normal function. This impairment, as well as the changes in gene activity, can linger long after weight has dropped to healthy levels, a study published today in Nature reports.
The results suggest that people trying to slim down will often require long-term care to avoid weight regain, says study co-author Laura Hinte, a biologist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “It means that you need more help, potentially,” she says. “It’s not your fault.” Although we’ve long known that the body tends to revert to obesity after weight loss, “how and why this happens was almost like a black box”, says Hyun Cheol Roh, an epigenome specialist at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis who studies metabolism. The new results “show what’s happening at the molecular level, and that’s really cool”.
More here.
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