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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

ceramides, mitochondrial fission, reactive oxygen species, obesity, insulin resistance

College

Life Sciences

Department

Physiology and Developmental Biology

Abstract

With the unabated rise in obesity in the United States and globally (1), increasing efforts are being devoted to understand and prevent both the onset and the consequences of excess fat gain. As evidenced by health trends, efforts to curtail weight gain have proven largely ineffective, as the number of obese adults in the U.S. is projected to grow by 2.4 million annually (2). The increased prevalence of obesity would not be noteworthy if such a trend were not accompanied by a substantial economic and personal cost—medical costs are roughly $150 billion annually and obese individuals may expect a loss of 20 years of life (3). Excess weight gain is associated with increased risk of the most prominent killers in the developed world, namely cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers (4). With efforts to reduce obesity failing, an alternative approach is to target the mechanism that explains the increased risk of disease with weight gain. With little exception, this mechanism is insulin resistance—a failure of particular cells to respond to insulin.

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