Here’s
to your health
Fat Cell Numbers
The
findings of a new study may help explain why it’s
sometimes hard for some people to lose weight and keep it
off. A new technique was developed to estimate the age of
fat cells. Fat cells removed from adults during different
procedures indicate that each year about 10 percent of fat
cells die and are replaced. But the total number appears,
once you leave your teen years, to remain fairly constant.
Investigators also looked at changes in our fat cells across
a lifetime. They discovered that overweight children seem
to add more fat cells than normal weight children and that
fat cell numbers climb throughout the teen years. During
adulthood, however, the number of those fat cells stabilizes.
It appears
that fat cells can enlarge and shrink, but they don’t vanish. So when you lose weight, your cells contain
less fat and are smaller, but they still have the capacity
to store fat because you have the same number of fat cells.
That’s why it’s sometimes hard to keep the weight
off that you lose. You’ve still got the storage capacity.
One
way to help regulate how much your fat cells store up is
to watch portion and serving sizes. They’re not
the same. A “portion” is the amount of a food
that you choose to eat and may have little relation to the “serving
size. People often think a recommended serving is a “portion” of
food, regardless of its size. For example, a tablespoon of
whipped cream does NOT mean as much whipped cream as you
can balance on a tablespoon! That might be your chosen portion,
but it’s certainly not the same as a serving size.
Learn to read the food labels and measure to know if what
you consider a “portion” is actually a “serving”.
Another
complication relating to filling up our fat cells is, even
without the “super size” options in
today’s restaurants, portions have gotten larger. If
you’d like to quiz yourself on how portions today compare
with portions from 20 years ago, take the “Portion
Distortion” quiz. You can also see how much physical
activity is needed to burn off all those extra modern-day
calories. Go to Links.
[Source: National Institute of Health]
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