MATHEW EDLUND
Contributing Columnist
edlund@lbknews.com
Mice have been trying to help humans become healthy for over a century. Unfortunately, the humans are not reciprocating.
The most recent attempt by mice to save humans from themselves finds our murine cousins working in studies of stress and fat. Researchers at Georgetown University forced subjects to be bullied by large, aggressive alpha mice, or left them sitting in freezing water.
These horrible experiences are second nature to many working laboratory mice. One way of making mice mimic human depression is to to drown them without any foreseeable escape inside a water tank, creating mouse depression through “learned helplessness.”
Stressed and unstressed Georgetown mice were provided two kinds of diets, normal mouse chow and “comfort food.” The comfort food was an attempt to approximate our human “junk food” diet, high in fat and sugar calories.
The unstressed mice didn’t gain much weight, but the stressed mice fed comfort food gained twice as much weight as expected. Most of that added weight popped up around the belly. Belly fat, both in mice and humans, is associated with metabolic syndrome, which produces diabetes, atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, and shortened lives.
The researchers were particularly interested in neuropeptide Y, long known to effect weight, mood, and response to infection. They injected neuropeptide Y receptor blockers into the fattened mice’s abdomens. Suddenly the abdominal fat began to disappear. Diabetes improved.
Around the word, media trumpeted the new findings. Yet another target for obesity drugs had been discovered. More remarkably, neuropeptide Y injected into the right spots allowed for the growth of shaped, rounded fat pads, of just the sort appreciated in plastic surgery.
Make fat come, or make fat disappear, and all with a simple injection. No wonder Bloomberg Services announced that “1.6 billion obese people” might now expect the perfect future cure.
Unfortunately, that was not what the mice were trying to tell us.
Lots of diseases, including most tumors, have been cured in mice. Agents that block new blood vessels growing into tumors work wonders in mice, shutting down cancer after cancer. Other medications reverse the mouse version of Alzheimer’s disease, or melt away murine arterial fat.
Yet most of those drugs don’t work in humans. Disappointed, many biologists think they should. Humans have about the same number of genes as mice. We’re follow mammals, we have similar responses to stress, so why don’t we respond to the same drugs?
So far that lack of response includes the media heralded neuropeptide Y. Neuropeptide Y receptor blockers were once regarded as a breakthrough treatment for depression. They proved a bust.
Mice are not men. Our biological information systems appear to be very different from theirs, complicated in many undiscovered ways. Only recently have researchers become aware that RNA is not a passive transport of information from DNA to protein, but that there are dozens of different kinds of informational RNAs. Not only do they help control access to and processing of DNA, but there are many RNAs controlling and influencing other RNAs. This may also help explain why 8% of human DNA is of retroviral origin. Retroviruses, like the AIDS virus, are made up of RNA.
What The Mice Are Telling Us
What the mice are trying to tell us has been lost in the media shuffle, but it is a simple message: if you don’t want harmful belly fat, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and obesity, do two things – decrease stress, and don’t eat junk food.
There are many ways to decrease stress. Physical activity is the only action so far that reliably decreases belly fat. It also decreases stress responses overall.
Other means of decreasing stress include yoga, meditation, and simple rest. Though we may think of ourselves as machines, we’re not. Once we consider human design, what humans are built to do, a huge series of stress reduction strategies come into play, ranging from socializing, walking with friends, playing sports, to making sure we set aside enough time for sleep.
As for junk food, a national “farm” policy which subsidizes high dextrose corn syrup makes junk food cheaper, easier to transport, and far more marketable than home grown local produce. A highly effective means of increasing already huge American health care and energy costs is to let this “farm bill” wend its way through Congress. Beyond destroying family farms and local agriculture, the farm bill is really our national food bill. Its policies markedly afflict our already obese population. The fatter we get, the more energy we need to transport ourselves and our food, energy we obtain by spending further trillions of dollars on wars securing oil supplies.
A systemic problem demands a systemic solution. Stress, junk food, and obesity go together. A simple program like FAR, Food-Activity-Rest, can help individuals lose weight, stay healthy and happy, and get the country to go Green simultaneously.
It’s time to listen to the mice.
