this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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The "fat cells are multiplying" is normal when having surplus calories in the body. The "empty fat cells scream hunger" is something that was suspected basically for ages, but has finally be proven not long ago, the paper is less than half a year old. It had been referred to here on Lemmy, at least to a science or nature article that pointed to the paper.
Could you direct me to the paper where it was proven? There seems to be a notable amount of bad journalism and broad misrepresentation of the science on this topic.
We are basically discussing whether or not obesity is an inescapable condemnation, so we should not sensationalize the topic whatsoever, and we should especially not present it as a fact if it is not a fact
Found it. It was older than I thought, though: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08165-7
To be honest, reading thru the study and poking at some of the discussions about it online, it seems to not be remotely saying what people are saying it’s saying lol.
Like they weren’t able to find many of the results they expected in actual human samples compared to the mice. They also found that slower weight loss seemed to correspond with fewer and less severe epigenetic changes.
That second point there was never really expanded on beyond a throwaway statement, but it jumped out at me because the humans studied received bariatric surgery. Which causes massive weight loss very quickly. They even cited that as a potential confounding variable.
It’s also not really about “fat cells multiplying” at all, but rather how a collection of dozens of different factors differ between never obese and formerly obese samples, and only at the two year mark after a weight loss intervention.
Their own conclusion is that “they have not proven” their findings have anything to do with weight regain. This is then bizarrely and immediately followed by what can only be described as an unprompted advertisement for Ozempic, along with speculative musing that further study is needed to determine if it could be used to “erase or diminish” the epigenetic memory (despite semaglutide being unrelated to the experiments and appearing nowhere else in the paper?). Interestingly enough, there’s also an extant conflict of interest statement linking one of the researches to several pharmaceutical companies, including Novo Nordisk
All in all, it strikes me as nothing more than yet another case of bad science reporting. With people kind of going in with preconceived notions, glossing over all of the details, and emerging with snippets taken out of context (body remembers being fat! It changes your genetics!). Lo and behold all the online discussion centers around just the provocative headline and the speculative sections of the paper.
It seems like the researches even deliberately tried to use language to bait this type of response from the general public (although this is now just speculation on my part). In summary, I am unpersuaded by the available evidence. Thank you however for linking it! There is a lot of other interesting info in there