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Obesity can be treated by turning off one gene
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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The number of people suffering from obesity is growing every year, and this can lead to serious health problems.
Due to excessive passion for food, insufficient physical activity, and genetic predisposition, millions of overweight people risk dying from coronary heart disease, diabetes, atherosclerosis, and other diseases caused by obesity.
"Our body is designed to store energy in the form of fat. In case we have to survive in difficult conditions, reserve energy sources are activated. However, at the moment the situation looks like this: in developed countries people do not have problems with food, eat well and move little. But everyone knows that in order not to gain weight, a person must spend as much energy as he acquires with food," says Professor Alexander Pfeiffer, head of the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Bonn.
Since many people love to eat tasty and plentiful food, but they have no time or simply do not want to do physical exercise, the ideal solution to the situation seems to be the invention of some kind of magic pill that could burn fat while we lie on the couch digesting everything we have eaten.
A group of scientists, led by Professor Pfeiffer, managed to take the first step towards making the dream of all the lazy people and gluttons on the planet come true.
Science knows of three types of fat. White fat stores energy, which is why people gain weight, brown fat acts as a “burner” of white fat, producing heat. In adults, this type of fatty tissue is located partly along the spine and on the back of the neck. And finally, the third type of fat is beige. It is produced by white fat cells and also burns energy.
Fat-burning brown cells could reduce fat deposits in white cells. But how do you turn white fat cells into beige ones? Scientists around the world are busy finding a solution to this question.
Vasodilator-stimulating phosphoprotein (VASP) inhibits the formation of beige and brown adipose tissue.
In studies on mice, scientists blocked the VASP gene in the animals. As a result, the mice lost weight and gained muscle.
According to experts, the data from these studies can be used to further study the possibility of converting harmful fat into useful fat. However, this will take a lot of time, because the experiments were conducted on mice and it is not known how successful they will be when applied to people.
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