

Irradiating the hypothalamus reduces body fat by 30% in 10 weeks in mice - joeguilmette
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/03/obesity-and-brain?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ahighhypothalamusdiet

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SkyMarshal
Before you go off giving yourself brain cancer, try changing your diet first.
Reduce or eliminate foods that spike your glucose, which reduces your insulin
levels, which makes your body burn stored fat instead of food glucose for
energy. Good overview here:

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/04/new-
evoluti...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/04/new-evolution-
diet-insulin-and-obesity-how-to-eat-like-a-caveman.html)

Much of what we eat today - grains, legumes, starches, processed foods - our
body hasn't genetically adapted to yet. We've had these foods for no more than
the past 10,000 years when agriculture was invented, yet Homo Sapiens have
existed for the past 200,000 years, and our various Homo X and primate
ancestors for several million years before that. Obese people have a worse
reaction to these foods, but no one is completely unaffected by them.

Obesity 'cures' like in the OP are just the insanity that results from trying
to hack solutions to a problem without fully understanding it.

~~~
m_eiman
_We've had these foods for no more than the past 10,000 years when agriculture
was invented, yet Homo Sapiens have existed for the past 200,000 years_

10,000 years is about 400-500 generations, which sounds like quite many to my
genetically untrained eyes. Since the human population boom has occurred
during those 10k years and more or less wholly thanks to agriculture, pretty
much everyone alive now is a descendant of people who did much better on that
diet than they had been doing on previous foods.

Maybe someone who knows genetics could share an opinion on this: aren't
400-500 generations enough to filter out genes incompatible with agricultural
food from the gene pool?

~~~
Homunculiheaded
I've never understood why so-called "paleo" dieters have to push this point so
hard, which as far as I've ever read is pure speculation (in roughly this time
milk drinking populations have evolved a lactose tolerance).

I'll easily buy the idea that we eat way too many refined carbohydrates and
that has an ill effect on our health. Why harp on the "we're not evolved to
eat grains!", if this were definitively proven to be false would paleo dieters
jump back to eating bagels? I doubt it. This seems more to be the case of
people taking up an extreme position and then cliaming "science!"

Eat more fruits and veggies, and less refined grains? sounds great. "Science"
tells us to stop eating all wheat products! Sounds more like fanaticism.

~~~
SkyMarshal
>I've never understood why so-called "paleo" dieters have to push this point
so hard, which as far as I've ever read is pure speculation...

You're right that it's probably unneccessary to even mention that aspect, the
salient point is to avoid foods that spike your glucose, and as a result your
insulin. It just so happens that anthropologists realized that once you
eliminate those foods from your diet, what you're left with is the exact diet
of paleolithic era man.

>Science" tells us to stop eating all wheat products! Sounds more like
fanaticism.

Read the Intro and first chapter of Arthur De Vany's book, The New Evolution
Diet. It explains the science.

------
joeguilmette
Strange the article laments the lack of a silver bullet for weight loss.
Surely the idea of a nonitrusive round of radiation (a procedure that has been
around for just shy of a century) resulting in rapid body fat loss.

The impermanence of the condition seems to make boost its potential effects.
Simply go in for a few treatments until you're down to your target weight, and
if you happen to gain it back in a few months or years, just go in again...

This also gives credence to idea that obesity is a psychological malady, like
depression or schizophrenia. It is certainly as difficult to treat.

~~~
pavel_lishin
The article didn't mention any side effects. I take this to mean that we just
don't know what they are yet, rather that there are none.

I remember reading an article about a doctor irradiating children's thyroids.
I think the goal was to shrink the thyroid, believing that it hindered speech
acquisition. Turns out, all it did was raise the rates of thyroid cancer to
something near 100% in the treated children.

~~~
klenwell
The version I heard here:

[http://www.radiolab.org/2008/dec/29/how-to-cure-what-ails-
yo...](http://www.radiolab.org/2008/dec/29/how-to-cure-what-ails-you/)

linked the practice to doctors' misunderstanding of the cause of SIDS (crib
death). It's interesting to learn where they came up with that
misunderstanding.

Edit: In this case, they were actually irradiating the thymus gland.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Thanks, internet!

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wgd
The paper discussed in the article appears to be
[http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.30...](http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3079.html),
and the radiation treatment used is
<http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1667/RR2214.1>. Assuming the dosing was the
same as in the original paper, this means that the radiation beam was 10 Gy of
X-Rays over a 9mm^2 area, which is somewhat interesting because according to
Wikipedia "A whole-body exposure to 5 or more gray of high-energy radiation at
one time usually leads to death within 14 days". So I'm surprised the beam
merely "deactivates" neuron production, it seems more like something that
should be expected to kill the targeted cells entirely.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
If your stomach lining cells stop dividing for a few weeks, you digest
yourself and bleed out through an ulcer. If your bone marrow cells stop
dividing for a few weeks, you bleed to death or die of infections. Location
matters.

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gxs
>>Dr McNay compared neuron growth in mice fed either normal food (containing
20% fat) or a high-fat diet (60% fat).

It bothers me that they don't state whether or not the calories were the same.
While I suspect the high fat diet was higher in calories, it bothers me that
people vilify fat like this.

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RangerGuy
That's like saying chopping off your limbs reduces body weight by 50 pounds in
3 minutes. It's a true fact.

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manmal
Since our environment, mood, etc. play their part in our brain chemistry and
"brain genes" activation/deactivation (gene expression), this could mean that
there is more to weight loss than sports and nutrition. IIRC the hypothalamus
enacts control over our body via hormone production, meaning that a
"hypothalamus problem" could hinder thyroid hormones or up cortisol
production.

It fits well into the big picture - stress or stressful environment cause
"bad" gene expressions in hypothalamus -> hormone imbalance -> metabolism
lowered -> fat storage.

Perhaps the effect of our environment and wellbeing on our bodyweight is
greater than one would have thought.

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2ck
There isn't anything particularly noteworthy in this article. Past experiments
with creating lesions in the hypothalamus of mouse brains have shown increases
in weight. Alternately, stimulating another region will cause the mouse to eat
less.

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stevejabs
Silver bullet = Modifying and controlling your diet and exercising.

I understand the thyroid issues for some people, but most would rather take
the easy "magic pill" way out. You gain nothing from weight loss plans like
that. Losing weight and keeping it off is a lifestyle change. Most people
aren't willing to commit to it.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
A lifestyle change - or a body reconditioning. Changing your body chemistry
through diet and exercise may in fact change the very areas of the brain the
article mentions. The end result may be exactly the same. You may prefer or
enjoy exercise; others certainly don't. And if they have different phobias
about methods of intervening (be it exercise or brain chemistry), they may
legitimately come to a different conclusion.

