HEALTHY muscle cells exposed to fat can become like cells taken from people with diabetes, with the genes that control fat-burning permanently switched off. “In essence, fat tweaks the cell’s ability to burn fat,” says Juleen Zierath of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
The findings suggest that changes to DNA may occur when healthy people eat fat-rich diets, and could ultimately explain why adults develop type 2 diabetes.
Zierath and her colleagues discovered that cells from people with diabetes already had these changes, especially in PGC-1, a gene that orchestrates fat burning.
The researchers found that they could trigger…
