Dylan Stoll | Health Editor
Featured Image: The nobiletin in oranges has been found to reverse symptoms of obesity in mice. | Courtesy of Pixabay
Obesity, defined medically as having a weight that is considered unhealthy for a given height, is a daily concern for almost 30 per cent of Canadian adults. On a global scale, obesity rates have tripled since the 70s. By 2016, 1.9 billion adults worldwide were considered obese.
In response to this, some members of the medical science community have made obesity a prioritized target of research. One such group, a handful of researchers from Western University, have made what one can describe as a significant breakthrough in the treatment of obesity through the study of oranges.
Now one may ask: what does a tropical fruit have to do with treating obesity?
Oranges have a wide variety of health benefits, but they are most well-known as a great source of vitamin C. They also contain a considerable amount of fibre (a 131 gram orange contains 3.14 grams of fibre or 10 per cent of an adult’s daily requirement), and they even assist in maintaining the healthiness of one’s skin.
Now, if oranges could speak, they would proudly say that they’ve received yet another recognition of their attributes through the discovery of nobiletin, or rather, the effect nobiletin has on the human body.
Nobiletin is a flavonoid, a type of phytonutrient that is partly responsible for the fruit’s colour. When researchers isolated this compound and gave it to mice that were fed high-fat and high-cholesterol diets, they found that the mice were significantly leaner and had lower levels of blood fats and insulin resistances than those mice that were fed the same diet, but were given no nobiletin.
“We’ve shown that in mice that already have all the negative symptoms of obesity, we can use nobelitin to reverse those symptoms, and even start to regress plaque build-up in the arteries, known as atherosclerosis,” said senior author of the study, Professor Murray Huff.
But, how does nobelitin work?
What the team had hypothesized is that nobiletin acts on a protein pathway (AMP-activated protein kinase) responsible for burning fats to produce energy.
To determine this, the researchers genetically modified the mice to lack AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) and then gave them the nobelitin thereafter — in the end, the result was the same.
“This result told us that nobiletin is not acting on AMPK, and is bypassing this major regulator of how fat is used in the body,” explained Huff.
Although they were wrong, this is still good news — any pharmaceutical treatments produced from this study will have no complications with other obesity drugs that do act on this pathway.
“The next step is to move these studies into humans to determine if nobiletin has the same positive metabolic effects in human trials,” said Huff.
However, before you start calling Western in a vain attempt at pre-ordering nobelitin, it should be noted that not all people that are technically considered obese are really in danger.
A study conducted here at York led by Jennifer Kuk back in 2018 found that patients who have metabolic healthy obesity but lack other metabolic risk factors are not more likely to die.
Image courtesy of yFile
“We found that a person of normal weight with no other metabolic risk factors is just as likely to die as the person with obesity and no other risk factors,” explained Kuk. “This means that hundreds of thousands of people in North America alone with metabolically healthy obesity will be told to lose weight when it’s questionable how much benefit they’ll actually receive.”
As always, go to your doctor for guidance, but remember to weigh the pros and cons. They are, after all, following a strict set of guidelines, and sometimes those guidelines can reach a little too far.
