1. Начало субтитров.

Пропустить до конца

2. Hi, probably the most important nutritional problem in today's society is obesity.

3. Now what is obesity?

4. Essentially obesity is having too much body fat, carrying too much fat in your body.

5. Now what is body fat?

6. In today’s video we’ll address: what is body fat?

7. And I will teach you that it is composed of adipocytes or fat cells

8. and we’ll learn how fat gets stored in adipose tissue in the first place.

9. So let’s take a closer look at adipose tissue.

10. An adipose tissue has a number of functions,

11. a very important one is as a heat insulator or cold insulator depending how you look at it.

12. Certain animals have to endure very cold temperatures

13. and they have a thick layer of adipose tissue to keep them warm

14. and typical examples would be: a seal or a polar bear.

15. We also have a layer of fat but we don’t need to keep ourselves warm anymore

16. because we carry clothing or we have central heating.

17. So that function of adipose tissue may be important for certain animals but for us has lost
most of its appeal.

18. The second, and very important, function of adipose tissue

19. is as an energy storage depot and we all can recognize that

20. That when we eat too much energy, the excess is stored in the fat tissue.

21. This was very important in the past, in prehistoric times when people were exposed to long
periods of famine.

22. They needed to very effectively store the food in the form of a readily available fuel in the
form of fat tissue.

23. And then during periods of famine they could recruit,

24. they could mobilize the fat and use it to be able to do their work and do their activities.

25. Nowadays, food is available everywhere.

26. We don’t need to stuff ourselves during a certain period of the year to help us survive the
winter.

27. So that means that the energy storage function of fat tissue

28. has become a lot less important in the current human being.

29. The third function of adipose tissue is not very often realized and it only emerged about 20
years ago,

30. when leptin was discovered and that is the so-called endocrine function of adipose tissue.

31. The ability of adipose tissue to produce hormones and these hormones are very important.

32. They help the adipose tissue communicate with the rest of the body, for instance in
regulating food intake.

33. What is interesting is that most of the problems that arise in people that have very little body
fat

34. is not because they don’t store any fat.

35. No, the major problems are related to the fact that the production of certain hormones is
disturbed.

36. Ok, let’s take a closer look at a fat cell.

37. Fat tissue is composed of fat cells or adipocytes and these are very peculiar cells.

38. And their main feature is a very large lipid droplet.

39. Now in addition it contains the key organelles that other cells carry as well, so this is nuclei,
mitochondria.

40. But they are very much pushed to the outside.

41. So it is a very efficient energy storage cell in the body.

42. Now how does fat get into these adipocytes in the first place?

43. So let’s start out with the consumption of a fatty meal.

44. And we saw previously that the fat in your diet is processed in your GI tract,

45. it is put into specialized particles called chylomicrons

46. and these chylomicrons deliver the fat throughout your body.

47. And it mainly goes towards two organs: the muscle and the fat tissue.

48. And these two organs are characterized by the presence of a certain enzyme called
lipoprotein lipase.
49. What lipoprotein lipase does, as we saw before, it breaks down the triglycerides in the
chylomicrons,

50. allowing the fat to be taken up into these tissues.

51. Now the activity of lipoprotein lipase dictates where the fat is going,

52. so if you decide to go for a run after that fatty meal,

53. then the lipoprotein lipase in your muscle will be very active.

54. And most of the fat that you consume will be sucked into your muscles to be used as a fuel.

55. If you decide to sit on a couch and watch a movie,

56. then most of that fat will actually be stored because the lipoprotein lipase in the fat tissue will
be most active.

57. Ok, so that’s how fat gets stored into the adipocytes.

58. Now, what happens in the adipocytes is that there is a constant balance

59. between how much fat is going in and how much fat is going out.

60. So what you see is that when people are gaining weight,

61. more fat is going into the fat cell compared to the amount of fat that leaves the fat cell.

62. Whereas people that are losing weight more fat is leaving the fat cell

63. compared to the amount of fat that goes in.

64. At least chronically over an extended period of time.

65. What we actually see on a daily basis if you look throughout the day

66. that a fat cell actually constantly switches from being a net consumer of fat to being a net
releaser of fat.

67. So if we start out in the morning, when you wake up and your stomach is empty.

68. What happens is that you rely on your internal fat storage to mobilize energy to allow you to
function.

69. To serve as an energy source.

70. So fat is being broken down in your adipocytes,

71. so more fat is leaving the fat cell than the amount of fat that comes in.

72. After that heavy breakfast that you consume,

73. it switches so more fat is now going into the fat cell as supposed to the amount that leaves
the fat cell.

74. And that constantly switches throughout the day and you’d hope over a period of 24h,

75. the two balance out each other.

76. Basically that means that over 24h the amount that fat that goes in equals the amount of fat
that goes out

77. and you would be in fat balance and therefore in energy balance and you would be weight
stable.

78. Ok, now, total fat mass is determined by the number of fat cells and the size of the individual
fat cells.

79. Which means that the size of a fat depot can increase because of two reasons:

80. One, the individual fat cells can increase, this is called hypertrophic obesity.

81. But you also can have an increase in the number of fat cells, and this is called hyperplastic
obesity.

82. Now in most people the number of fat cells remains constant throughout adulthood.

83. That means moderate changes in fat mass mostly occur via changes in the size of the
individual fat cells.

84. So that means that the fat cells expand when you gain weight and they shrink when you lose
weight.

85. What we also know is that the average life span of a fat cell is about 10 years.

86. And after those 10 years a fat cell is renewed.

87. So we lose fat cells and we gain some fat cells.

88. We call that a fat cell turnover.

89. Now, at the same time the content of the fat cell is renewed much more quickly.

90. That is happening actually at a rate that is about six times faster.

91. Ok, now I’ve talked to you about white fat, white adipose tissue

92. but there is also another tissue that I haven’t addressed yet and that’s called brown fat.

93. This exist in certain mammals.

94. Now brown fat is involved in a process that we call cold-induced thermogenesis.

95. Basically what it means is that the tissue is able to produce heat.
96. And especially heat during the cold so it allows the animal to keep itself warm.

97. And it happens by a process that is called chemical uncoupling.

98. Now to be able to do that the brown fat needs a lot of mitochondria

99. which are very abundant in those brown fat cells.

100. And another way by which the brown fat cells are different from the white fat cells

101. is that it doesn’t contain one large lipid droplet but it contains multiple smaller lipid droplets.

102. Now brown fat is abundant in a great variety of species

103. including hibernating animals and cold adapted small animals such as mice and rats.

104. And it is activated when these animals are exposed to the cold

105. resulting in the production of heat and allowing the animal to keep itself warm.

106. Now, the reason why I am telling you about this is

107. because for several years we thought that brown fat is not particularly important for adult
humans,

108. but this all changed in 2009

109. when a number of papers that were published together in the New England Journal of
Medicine

110. showed that people, adult people actually do contain brown fat.

111. It was discovered using a technique called PET-CT scan.

112. And basically what you do with this technique is you monitor the uptake of radioactive
glucose

113. in different tissues in the body.

114. What they actually saw is that when these people were cold they saw certain areas of the
body light up.

115. And they realized after a while that this actually represented

116. the uptake of glucose into these brown fat cells.

117. Since then this whole field has exploded

118. because people have realized the potential importance and impact of this finding.

119. Because it could mean that people could actually lose weight

120. by stimulating the heat production in the brown fat cell.

121. It all depends on how important brown fat turns out to be in humans, at this point we don’t
have the answer yet.

122. But the results we have so far are quite promising.

123. What people have also found is that it seems that obese individuals seem to have less brown
fat.

124. Ok, in summary, what I have told you is that fat tissue is a very important tissue.

125. That has a number of functions including insulation,

126. energy storage and an endocrine, hormone-producing organ.

127. We have learned about how fat gets stored in the adipose tissue.

128. And we have learned how it is mobilized

129. and that this process is undergoing a constant switch throughout the day.

130. And at the end I have told you about a new type of fat called brown fat.

131. That has great promise as a future target potentially for obesity.

132. Конец субтитров. Пропустить до начала