They can either spur or prevent it. It’s amazing how much we still don’t know about this subject, and how so much conventional wisdom, especially about diet, is utterly wrong.
6 thoughts on “Mitochondria And Obesity”
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They can either spur or prevent it. It’s amazing how much we still don’t know about this subject, and how so much conventional wisdom, especially about diet, is utterly wrong.
Comments are closed.
Mitochondria are fascinating critters, or actually former critters. Their remote ancestors were closely related to the bacteria that cause cholera before they entered an endosymbiotic relationship with an archaeon and developed into the first eukaryotic cells. Cholera bacteria need a host to reproduce, but can survive outside cells. Mitochondria have lost so much of their genome that they can no longer survive outside a eukaryotic cell. Multi-cellular life depends on a component that is descended from or at least related to a dangerous parasite…
Reading through Wikipedia, it appears that the actual relation is to a clade called “SAR11” which is extremely common in the ocean (1 in 3 cells at the surface is claimed). It belongs to a different class (which is two levels above the clade level and two levels below the bacteria domain, if that clarifies anything) than the cholera bacteria. Apparently the class that cholera belongs to has numerous notorious disease agents in it while the SAR11 clade belongs to a class that doesn’t.
Interesting, there are several suspects however, including Rickettsia. SAR11 appears to be a more recent suspect however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickettsia_prowazekii
I keep thinking that most people aren’t even thinking in terms of half the potential of truly understanding human metabolism. Rather than simply understanding the true cause of body-types and fixing obesity, understanding and fine control over metabolism could be used to increase many aspects of energy use and availability. What if you could take some sort of horomone adjustment or gene therapy that ramps up your metabolism so that you have plenty of mental energy and alertness all the time?
In our ancestral environment, there may have been a reason for metabolism to be slower than it is today, but in the modern world, with ready access to food and sedentary jobs, why not set the default burn rate as high as humanly (or inhumanly) possible?
Quite simply, because it’s a very complex system, and we aren’t certain what that will actually do. Much like, whoops, “eat less and exercise more” seems to have given us a diabetes epidemic. First, do no hard. Before we start messing with people’s biochemistry, let’s get back to the “lost knowledge” of body types. Healthy weight, sugar, heartbeat, ranges for Ectomorphs, Endomorphs, and Mesomorphs would, I think solve a lot of the problems caused by our current “Procrustean bed” medical system.
Odd fact: The original mitochondria all had names like Lopez and Rodriguez.