A High-Fat, High-Sugar Diet May Activate Your Appetite: An Unexpected Finding From A New Obesity Study

It’s strange how sometimes, when scientists search for one thing, they discover something different but equally valuable. That’s the story with these obesity statistics.

New research, appearing in the journal Cell, has discovered another way the body seems to use to control how much you eat. A team of American researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looking at a pathway that is generally involved with the inflammatory response of immunity, discovered that something turned on when the study mice were fed diets high in fat and sugar.

Scientists had been trying to study “metabolic inflammation,” a chronic condition that also happens to be part of many diseases that are part of obesity.

The team noted that an inflammation-related protein appeared to turn on when the mice were fed a diet high in fat and sugar. Once the pathway was active, the mice ate even more.

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

Apparently, the genetic makeup of a mouse is strikingly similar to ours … plus, it’s much 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, although he cannot say why the protein is present, speculating that it may be part of our first need for immune defenses. He believes that today this pathway is activated by a different environmental challenge: chronic exposure to food sources high in fat and sugar.

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

So what does this research tell us? That perhaps there is more to the connection between obesity and the brain that we have yet to understand. There may be many different body systems involved, and it is unlikely that a solution can be found that will fit all.

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

Professor Fran Ebling from the University of Nottingham agrees that the work is interesting, but is convinced that other areas of research may produce more practical results, namely obesity drugs. She worries that anything that blocks the pathway discovered by the University of Wisconsin-Madison team could also interfere with the immune system and therefore the body’s ability to defend itself against disease.

Meanwhile, the best option to avoid being part of the obesity statistics is to reduce the level of foods high in fat and sugar in the diet. Rather than making you feel full and reducing your appetite, as you might think, they actually increase your appetite and make you want to eat even more.

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