The Judas Cell
By Sanford Rose
Dolors & Sense
KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—5/12/2014—Fat comes in two major varieties: white and brown.
In its white form, it serves both as a storage depot and a major endocrine gland.
In its brown form, it helps regulate body heat.
In lean people, fat constitutes about 15-20 percent of the body.
In the obese, the percentage doubles, to 40 percent and even more.
The fat cell dumps a lot of chemicals into the blood.
Its major secretions are leptin and adiponectin.
Leptin controls our satiety response.
In the lean, leptin is the good guy, telling us when to pull away from the dinner table.
In the obese, leptin becomes the bad guy.
That’s because the level of leptin varies directly with body mass.
The obese have so much leptin in their blood that they become leptin resistant.
This leads to perverse signaling: the brain reads starvation when it should read satiety.
The apostasy of leptin, while serious, is perhaps less serious than the behavior of adiponectin, the other major fat-cell secretion.
Adiponectin assists in sugar metabolism and fat burning.
But, unlike leptin, its level falls when body mass increases.
So it isn’t there when the obese need it most.
For want of adiponectin, the obese are more prone to insulin resistance.
And insulin resistance opens the door to the dreaded metabolic syndrome—e.g., type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and atherosclerosis.
The fat cell is a fair-weather friend.
When we are lean, it keeps us lean and therefore healthy.
When we are fat, it makes us fatter and therefore unhealthy.
Sanford Rose
Sanford Rose, of New Jersey and Florida, served as Associate Editor of Fortune Magazine from 1968 till 1972; Vice President of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972; Senior Editor of Fortune between 1972 and 1979; and Associate Editor, Financial Editor and Senior Columnist of American Banker newspaper between 1979 and 1991. From 1991 till 2001, Rose worked as a consultant in the banking industry and a professional ghost writer in the field of finance. He has also taught as an adjunct professor of banking at Columbia University and an adjunct instructor of economics at New York University. He states that he left gainful employment in 2001 to concentrate on gain-less investing. (A lifelong photo-phobe, Rose also claims that the head shot accompanying his Weekly Hubris columns is not his own, but belongs, instead, to a skilled woodworker residing in South Carolina.)