Belly Fat Exposed

Posted on April 17, 2008

Talk about your vicious cycles. A new study finds that belly fat could be making you hungrier. Wonderful! I just knew it wasn’t the fault of my conscious self. So…belly fat makes me hungry, ergo I eat. Which leads to…uh-oh, more belly fat. So the marquis screams come out…’See the Blob that ate….again…and again!!’

The research was performed at the University of Western Ontario. The culprit is a hormone called Neuropeptide Y, or NPY. It was thought that only the brain produced this hormone, but no, it turns out that your belly fat can make it too. So NPY produced in the brain initially makes you eat more and gain weight around your middle, and then that fat makes more NPY, which makes you eat more.

Now, fat cells aren’t able to reproduce themselves. But the release of NPY can stimulate the reproduction of cells that are precursors to fat cells. So the end result is the same—more and more fat cells. The researchers next want to come up with a way to easily detect the presence of the hormone—and to turn it off (please do, that would make me very happy). The hope is to identify and treat those people at greatest risk for becoming abdominally obese. Preventive maintenance says it would be easier to prevent obesity than to treat the many diseases that can result from obesity.