This is the final installment on alternative metabolism of glucose during insulin resistance. In this post, I will describe how the addition of fucose to proteins – fucosylation – influences the risk of infection and modulates the microbiota. Fucose is a 6 carbon monosaccharide – like glucose, mannose, fructose, and […]
The New York Times today published an important story that summarizes research on the validity of using a mouse model for trauma, sepsis, and infection. The original paper by Seok et al. was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. The bottom line is that […]
In a previous post, Soeters and Soeters proposed that IR adjusts glucose metabolism, favoring the pentose phosphate pathway instead of glycolysis. Another alternate glucose metabolic pathway also exists. This is the hexosamine shunt.
In 2004, Backhed and colleagues first demonstrated that the obese, insulin resistant phenotype could be transferred from one animal to another by transferring the fecal microbiota. The investigators accomplished this by raising mice genetically predisposed to obesity under sterile conditions. Germ free mice did not become obese, despite typical energy […]
Many authors have cited the-allocation of energetic resource to the immune system as an adaptive event that occurs during insulin resistance (e.g. Odergaard 2012, Tsatsoulis 2011, Esteve, 2010). An article by Soeters and Soeters in Clinical Nutrition (May 2012) adds another chapter to the potential evolutionary role of insulin resistance. […]
In a recent January issue of Science, Odegaard and Chawla (2013) reviewed the varied effects of insulin resistance and inflammation. Refreshingly, they take an evolutionary approach. They write: “An appreciation of the adaptive context in which these responses arose is useful for understanding their pathogenic actions in disease.” This statement […]
Several recently published articles explore the idea that insulin resistance – a key feature of diabetes – is an adaptive mechanism that evolved by natural selection. Because of this recent interest, I am going to write a series of posts describing the various hypotheses that may provide an evolutionary explanation […]
Last year, my colleagues and I published Nutrient Signaling, an evolutionary hypothesis for the immune modulation by nutrients. Click here and here for more. We were prompted to write this paper because of these observations: 1) Chronic inflammatory diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, and atherosclerosis have reached epidemic proportions and […]
From a recent student: “I am a fourth-year medical student at the University of New Mexico and I recently took a course titled Evolutionary Medicine, taught by Joe Alcock, MD. Evolutionary medicine seeks to answer questions about health and human disease from the perspective of evolutionary biology. The goal is […]
Emergence of Evolutionary Medicine: Publication Trends from 1991- 2010 was just published in the Journal of Evolutionary Medicine. This article explores the domain of evolutionary medicine, conceptualized by the area of overlap shown in the following diagram: Publication in the area of Evolutionary Medicine is experiencing exponential growth. These […]
