Factors Influencing Weight Gain and Obesity

Jeniffer Beshel’s talk on her research on obesity linked behaviors in Drosophila mentioned how the obesity rates have been increasing throughout the years in the U.S and around the world, making obesity not only a dangerous and prevalent disease, but also a resource consuming one. She mentioned both in her talk and in her paper how obesity and its feeding behaviors are influenced by both genetics and environmental factors. In her study “A Leptin Analog Locally Produced in the Brain Acts via a Conserved Neural Circuit to Modulate Obesity-Linked Behaviors in Drosophila”,  she and her colleagues show how unpaired 1,which functions similar to leptin in mammals, knockout in the brain leads to an increase in food consumption, increases response to food cues and the attraction to food in drosophila compared to wild-types. They also tested for the effects of a high-fat and high-sugar diet, much like the environment we have in our current society, on weight gain in both wild-type and upd1 knockout. They find that both the high-fat and sugar diets led to weight gain in wild-type and upd1 knockout flies, but the upd1 knockout flies gained about 3 times more weight compared to wild-type. Through this they were able to show how both genetics and the environment can influence weight gain. From the talk, it was clear that obesity is becoming a more prevalent disease not only in America but all around the world and that we need to find a way to combat it.

One way to combat this may be to set a fixed food consuming time period as outlined by a Circadian diet or eating according to your internal clock. In an article from the New York Times, titled “A 12-Hour Window for a Healthy Weight” which mentions how just a defined 12-14 hour feeding time window led to weight loss in obese mice. The study reviewed in the article exposed mice to either a time restricted diet or Ad Libitum (eat whenever), they found that when a time restricted diet was imposed on obese mice, they found that they lost weight compared to the eat whenever condition. They also did the same experiments using high sugar and high fat diet, and found the same results where the time restricted condition experienced weight loss. Furthermore, even when the time restricted condition mice were allowed to cheat (eat whenever) on weekends, they also found that these mice lost weight compared to eat whenever at all days condition. As a whole the study mentioned by this article suggests that when we eat food affects weight gain.

These two studies together show that obesity and weight gain are not only influenced by our genetics or environments, but also by our feeding time period.

Works Cited:

Beshel, J., Dubnau, J., & Zhong, Y. (2017). A Leptin Analog Locally Produced
in the Brain Acts via a Conserved Neural Circuit to Modulate Obesity-Linked
Behaviors in Drosophila. Cell metabolism, 25 1, 208-217 .

Reynolds, Gretchen. “A 12-Hour Window for a Healthy Weight.” The New
York Times, The New York Times, 15 Jan. 2015,
well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/a-12-hour-window-for-a-healthy-weight/?searchResultPosition=4.