14 DAY TRIAL // You get fat just by drinking water. Hours of aerobics and unending diets and still?nothing. While some lucky bastards ingest tonnes of delicious and fattening food haunting your dreams, they still look so good in their forties. They and their children also.
Now, scientists have found the "skinny" gene and even in a variety of animals.
"This gene is in every organism from worms to humans. We all have it. It's very striking." said the senior author, Dr. Jonathan Graff, an associate professor of developmental biology and internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
The gene was first found over 50 years ago by Winifred Doane, now a professor emeritus at Arizona State University and back then a graduate student at Yale University.
He observed that some fruit flies were particularly fat while others were rather skinny. The differences appeared to be linked to a sole gene, named by Doane "adipose", but this research was forgotten until catching Graff's attention.
Graff focused on the genetics of those flies and found that individuals with efficient copies of the adipose gene were really thin, while those with mutated copies were bulkier. A good copy and a bad one meant medium weighted flies.
"The gene was more like a volume control rather than an on/off switch," said Graff.
But when the skinny flies were put to famine-like conditions, their mortality rate boomed.
"From an evolutionary perspective, this gene is the one that helps animals do well in affluent times - very much like the situation in western countries today. In times of plenty, these super skinny, sleek and fast flies can easily get away from predators. But in times of shortage, they don't make it." said Graff.
The team found that the same gene turned worms fat when deleted. Tests made on single mammal cells in a test tube found that the deletion from ordinary cells turned them into fat cells.
"The cells actually became plump as they accumulated fat droplets. Mice engineered to have efficient versions of the adipose gene were much sleeker than normal counterparts. In fact, they had one-third the body fat of wild mice. That would be a big difference in humans. The average woman has about 25 % body fat. Reducing that by a third would take her down to about 9 %. That's super lean - a supermodel kind of thin," said Graff.
"Theoretically, you might be able to come up with an obesity treatment that mimics what this gene does. But that doesn't mean people should wait for a pill to cure obesity. That's a long way off," said Dr. Louis Aronne, a clinical professor of medicine and director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Program at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City.
"It would be interesting to look at this gene in populations prone to obesity, like the Pima Indians," said Eric Ravussin, a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La.
Ravussin's studies revealed that the Pimas, inhabiting Arizona and Mexico, turn obese only when their life is sedentary and food plentiful.
"This gene appears in cells all over the body. This means that scientists will need to carefully look for side effects when they change levels of the gene or the protein it encodes," warned Ravussin.