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turning a plate of pasta into fat


U.S. researchers have found a gene responsible for turning a plate of pasta into fat, offering new clues about how the body metabolizes carbohydrates and how they contribute to obesity. Reuters....


The actual abstract is here - although I don't think you would immediately get the pasta makes you fat message from that! Anyway, what is interesting to me is the way the news story presents some things:

  • there is a process in the liver that turns carbs into fat;
  • the researchers seem to know that bread, pasta and rice make people fat:
"We hope that this research will one day help people eat bread, pasta and rice and not worry about getting fat," Roger Wong, a graduate student who worked on the study, said in a statement.
  • there is this potential genetic method of stopping carbs making you fat...
"The DNA-PK disabled mice were leaner and had 40 percent less body fat compared with a control group of normal mice because of their deficiency in turning carbs into fat," Wong said.
He said the mice who lacked this gene did not get fat when they ate high-carb food and they had lower levels of blood cholesterol, which can reduce the risk of heart disease.

Since humans have the same gene, the team thinks it may serve as a potential target for drugs to prevent obesity.



Why not just stop eating the bread, pasta and rice? Genetic engineering made simple.
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Stephan Guyenet said…
Weird. I wonder if the mice had hyperglycemia or something. What happened to all the glucose that wasn't being turned into fat?
March 26, 2009 at 9:29 PM
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