14 DAY TRIAL // A paper published in yesterday's issue of the journal Science documents how the intestines behave in the aftermath of a gastric bypass surgery.
By the looks of it, such procedures reprogram the guts, meaning that they make them more efficient at burning sugar.
Information collected while carrying out experiments on obese and diabetic rats suggests that, for some reason, rodents subjected to gastric bypass burn sugar faster that they did before the surgery.
Provided that the same thing happened in the case of human patients, this could explain why it is that diabetics who undergo such surgeries not only lose weight, but also experience improved sugar control.
“We have to think about this surgery differently. It’s not just changing the plumbing, it’s altering how the gut handles glucose,” obesity researcher Randy Seeley at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio comments on the findings of this investigation. Nature reports that, all things considered, intestines probably start burning sugar faster after gastric bypass surgery because they are trying to compensate for the fact that the shrunken stomach is sending less nutrients their way.
In the case of mice, this increase in the speed with which the body processes sugar appears to be brought about by higher levels of a protein dubbed GLUT1, the same source informs us.
This protein is in charge of transporting glucose to cells so, naturally, having more of it fosters improved sugar control.
If GLUT1 affects the human body just as it does mice, it could be used to develop drugs that mimic the effects of a gastric bypass.
More precisely, researchers could one day be able to successfully treat diabetes without having to actually perform surgery on a patient.
“It’s all still very controversial. The hope is that one day we can bypass the bypass,” researchers Nicholas Stylopoulos at the Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts explains.