Grant: Environments, Genes and Chronic Disease

More than 5 million Canadians have the chronic interrelated diseases of obesity, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and type 2 diabetes (T2D) and their incidence in the population are rapidly increasing. Obesity is an important risk factor for developing NAFLD and T2D which contribute to the development of liver cancer and heart disease. Therefore, designing new ways to treat or prevent T2D and NAFLD are important. Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is an organ which has long been known to exist in rodents and infants but remarkably only in the last 5 years has been discovered in adult humans. BAT has the unique capability, compared to any other organ in the body, to burn large amounts of sugar and fat and effectively dissipate this energy as heat due to the presence of unique protein called uncoupling protein 1. Thus BAT is frequently characterized as the body's furnace. The activation of BAT in rodents has been shown to reverse obesity, T2D and NAFLD. In addition recent studies have shown that by exposing humans to cold you can increase BAT activity and lower blood sugar levels suggesting that increasing BAT activity may represent a viable therapy for treating T2D. Unfortunately, in individuals with obesity or T2D the ability to switch on BAT is compromised. Determining why BAT activity is reduced and identifying new ways to switch it on has generated world-wide scientific and clinical excitement around developing a new therapy for obesity, NAFLD and T2D and is the focus of the current proposal. In this proposal we will conduct studies in cells, mice and humans to examine how agricultural and food processing practices may regulate BAT metabolic activity directly or indirectly by altering the billions of bacteria that reside within our gastrointestinal tract. These studies will help us develop new strategies to enhance BAT activity that may be effective for treating and preventing obesity, NAFLD and T2D.