Aah! Those days of being young. When you could eat anything and everything as much as you wish and still would not gain an inch of fat. Well, one of the perks of youth. But slowly as life progresses you start to notice fat around your waist, body getting softer and you feeling a little off. But why does it happen? Why do people gain weight as they start getting older?
Well, new research at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has uncovered why that is: Lipid turnover in the fat tissue decreases during aging and makes it easier to gain weight, even if we don’t eat more or exercise less than before. The study is published in the journal Nature Medicine.
The scientists studied the fat cells in 54 men and women over an average period of 13 years. In that time, all subjects, regardless of whether they gained or lost weight, showed decreases in lipid turnover in the fat tissue, that is the rate at which lipid (or fat) in the fat cells is removed and stored. Those who didn’t compensate for that by eating fewer calories gained weight by an average of 20 percent, according to the study which was done in collaboration with researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden and the University of Lyon in France.
“The results indicate for the first time that processes in our fat tissue regulate changes in body weight during aging in a way that is independent of other factors,” says Peter Arner, professor at the Department of Medicine in Huddinge at Karolinska Institutet and one of the study’s main authors. “This could open up new ways to treat obesity.”
Well in simple terms, if you don’t want to gain weight with increasing age, you have to seriously focus on your caloric intake.
Comments are closed.