Kee-Hong Kim, Assistant Professor in Food Science at Purdue led a research study conducted at the West Lafayette University, which shows that Resveratrol in red wine and fruits like blackberry and passion fruit turns into piceatannol in humans on consumption, which effectively stops fat cells from maturing. This chemical resembles in structure with resveratrol which has already been established as an anti-oxidant with properties to fight heart disease, cancer and several other diseases.
‘Piceatannol actually alters the timing of gene expressions, functions and insulin action during adipogenesis, a process in which early stage fat cells become mature fat cells thus delaying or even causing complete inhibition of adipogenesis’, says Kim.
He used cell culturing to confirm his findings, but in future he aims to see if it makes a difference on animal obesity. He wants to find ways of stopping the degeneration of piceatannol, so that large concentrations can be directed into the bloodstream to prevent adipogenesis and thus increasing body fat.
In a period of 10 days or more, the immature fat cells, called preadipocytes, passes through several phase to become mature fat cells called the adipocytes. "These precursor cells, even though they have not accumulated lipids, have the potential to become fat cells," Kim said. "We consider that adipogenesis is an important molecular target to delay or prevent fat cell accumulation and, hopefully, body fat mass gain."
Kim found that, at the first stage of adipogenesis, piceatannol binds to the insulin receptors of immature fat cells and thus, blocking the ability of insulin to control cell cycles and activate genes that are responsible to carry out further stages of fat cell formation. Piceatannol blocks the pathways essential for the immature fat cells to get mature and grow.
Piceatannol is one of the various compounds that are being studied in Kim's lab because of their potential health benefits.
Details of the study financed by the Purdue Research Foundation have been published in the latest edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
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