Obesity May Protect Against Metabolic Syndrome

Monday, March 8, 2010 - 13:49 in Health & Medicine

Insulin resistance, high cholesterol, fatty liver, greater risk for diabetes, heart disease, and stroke are all related to obesity, but are likely not caused by it, according to a review in Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism. In fact, obesity is the body's way of storing lipids where they belong, in fat tissue, in an effort to protect our other organs from lipids' toxic effects. It's when the surplus of calories coming in gets to be too much for our fat tissue to handle that those lipids wind up in other places they shouldn't be, and the cascade of symptoms known as metabolic syndrome sets in. read more

Read the whole article on

More from

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net