High Fat, High Sugar Diet May Turn on Appetite: The Unexpected Finding of New Obesity Statistics Research

Strange how sometimes when scientists are looking for one thing, they uncover something different but equally valuable. That's the story with these obesity statistics.

New research, appearing in the journal Cell, has uncovered another way that the body seems to use to control how much it eats. A team of U.S. researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looking at a pathway usually involved with the inflammation response of immunity, found something was switched on when the mice in the study were fed high fat, high sugar diets.

The scientists had been trying to study "metabolic inflammation", a chronic condition that also turns out to be part of many diseases that come part and parcel with obesity.

The team noticed that a protein connected to inflammation appeared to turn on when mice were fed a high fat, high sugar diet. Once the pathway was on, the mice ate even more.

Mice were then genetically altered so the pathway wouldn't work, and they maintained a healthy weight, even when fed a high fat, high sugar diet. If at this point you're wondering, as I was, why mice are so often used in studies like this, here's the rather unflattering reason.

Apparently the genetic makeup of a mouse is surprisingly similar to our own... what's more it's a whole lot easier to breed, study and dissect a mouse. "This pathway is usually present but inactive in the brain," said Dongsheng Cai of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, though he can't say why the protein is present, speculating that it may be part of our earliest need for immune defenses. He believes that today this pathway is activated by a different challenge from the environment: chronic exposure to high fat, high sugar food sources.

Once it's on, the pathway leads to problems in the body like resistance to insulin and leptin.

So what does this research tell us? That perhaps there is more to the obesity-brain connection that we have yet to understand. There are possibly many different body systems involved, and its unlikely that one solution can be found to suit everyone.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison team hopes their work will lead to treatments that put a stop to this weight gaining cycle before it starts. However, this is, of course, a long way off.

Professor Fran Ebling of the University of Nottingham agrees that the work is interesting but is convinced that other areas of research may yield more practical results, namely obesity drugs. He's concerned that anything that blocks the pathway uncovered by the team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison might also interfere with the immune system and therefore the body's ability to defend against disease.

In the mean time, the best option avoiding becoming part of the obesity statistics is to reduce the level of high fat and high sugar foods in the diet. As rather than making you feel full and reducing appetite, as you would think, they actually increase appetite making you want to eat even more.

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