Grant: Environments, Genes and Chronic Disease - LOI

More than 50% of all Canadians have the chronic interrelated diseases of obesity, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and type 2 diabetes (T2D). These diseases are also becoming much more common in both adults and children. NAFLD can lead to cancer of the liver, and T2D has a number of complications related to it including blindness, amputation and early heart disease. Therefore, designing new ways to treat or prevent T2D and NAFLD are important. Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is an organ that 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 remove this energy as heat. It does this because it has a 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 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, and this may have something to do with what we are eating. 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. We will conduct studies in cells, mice and humans to examine how agricultural and food processing practices may regulate BAT 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 NAFLD and T2D.