facilitator: thank you for coming along. thisis going to be a lot of fun, because had you told me about two years ago that i would bestanding in front of nearly 700 people talking about weight loss i would have laughed myhead off, because i didn't know the first thing about it.for those of you who watch catalyst you might have seen last week we had a little storyabout this. we're going to elaborate on some of that tonight. if you weren't watching catalystlast week then tonight we're going to answer a really weird question. when you lose weightwhere does it go? i can't believe that - it's not a questionthat we all just know the answer to. now if there are young people here they know me fromanother show. i pop up on this program - it's
called studio 3.[video plays in background] facilitator: i blow things up - i have a lotof fun - they call me the surfing scientist on there because i do surf. i do this kindof thing. [video plays in background]facilitator: that's a rubbish bin with some liquid nitrogen in a bottle and 1500 ping-pongballs exploding. i do a lot of work with kids, which i think may have helped me cotton ontothis question in the way that i did. i visit lots of schools. so i'm not just doing stuffwith telly. i have been to - well, just in the last little while just these few schoolshere, this is all this year. there's a few more. probably been to about - what is itnow? we're up to something like 30 to go this
year. it's up to about - it'll be 100 by theend of this year. so i'm a busy little camper. but my first job was as a physicist, workingin the laser industry. i used to make the optical coatings that go on the ends of laserbeams - well, not laser beams, laser tubes. so here's a laser, it's a helium neon laser,and the little bits of glass that go on the end there are what i used to make.but then i left the - so i studied physics at qut and then i did a grad dip at anu andi've worked as a lecturer with primary school teachers at griffith university. very sooni'll be doing some guest lecturing with my new best friend who's here this evening, professorandrew brown - i'll introduce him to you later, who is the first person that i really bouncedthis idea off on tv and that's what went to
air last week.but look, let's get cracking. this is how it all started for me. about two years agoi went to fiji with a friend, went surfing and i noticed that i had a gut, which i wasn'tsuper stoked about. so i did what you're meant to do - i started at 86 kilograms and didwhat they say - eat less, move more. i was five kilograms overweight - that's prettyheavy. so in 11 weeks it was very easy, just ate less, moved more.i'm not a hero, i don't want any rounds of applause for that, but here's what i did next.i drew a little graph - because i was very excited - and here's some year 8 mathematics.plotted the line and figured out that i was losing 85 grams per day, which is quite asignificant little amount. it's not the most
you can lose - we'll get to that in a minute.but i extrapolated and saw that hey, if i keep doing this i'll be at my target weightof 70 kilograms by around about july that year. so that worked our really nicely.here's what really happened. that's the graph. this is what it looks like. it's weird. thiswas taken at the beginning of 2013. this freaks me out to this day. there you go, look atthat, bizarre. look, absolutely weird. so anyway, where did it go? that was the bigquestion that i had. i didn't know where it was going at first because i'm not a biochemisti should say, but these blokes here won a nobel prize for figuring out a huge chunkof this. so i don't want to take any credit for the science of other people. i didn'twork any of this stuff out.
hans krebs and lipman figured out some reallyserious stuff but no one's really worried about it the way i worried about weight loss,as far as i can tell. when you ask around here's the kinds of answers you get.[video plays] facilitator: so that's pretty much the answeryou get from anyone you ask that question to. we've asked some interesting people. i'veasked dieticians, doctors, high school teachers, personal trainers, you name it, people don'treally know where the weight goes. so when you're standing on the bathroom scales and10 kilograms are missing where in the universe are the 10 kilograms? that's what we're goingto talk about tonight.
so to get there we should have a think aboutwhat is fat? look, we've known what fat is for a long time but i'm going to just showyou one researcher who did some great work. jules hirsch, he's an american, he did someterrific research which gave us a very useful equation which we'll get in just a minute.he's published this paper in 1960. studies of adipose tissue in man. he went and lookedat well what is fat precisely? he knew what fat is, it's triglycerides, but what's thechemical formula precisely? so i'm just going to remind you that you know a fair bit aboutthis already. you already know this formula. that's the formula for…audience: water. facilitator: what's the formula for carbondioxide, it's c…
audience: co2.facilitator: thank you. so you actually pretty much know - well, you know the three elementsthat you need to know about for human fat. so here's what human fat is. fifty-five carbonatoms. this is the average fat molecule. one-hundred-and-four hydrogens and six oxygen atoms. we know thatthanks to jules hirsch and that number has been recently reviewed and it's still remarkablyaccurate, so yippee-aye-a. now if you go and learn a little bit abouttriglycerides and how they're put together - they're made of three fatty acids stuckto a glycerol backbone. i'm not going to bore you too much with all the details. however,there is a bit of variation in the number of atoms. they all do very much the same thingwhen they're stuck together chemically. but
there is a little bit of variation. so youcan have 36 carbon atoms instead of 55. but look, the average molecule of fat in yourbody has 55 carbons, 104 hydrogens, six oxygens. now, that means that the difference betweenlooking like that and like that - literally it is, that is the difference, c55 h104 o6.or if you're a lady, the difference between that and that, there you go, c55 h104 o6.fascinating, isn't it? so where is it hanging out? well, here's areal quick introduction to where it sits. under your skin, under your dermis, so you'vegot your epidermis then your dermis, under there is a layer called subcutaneous fat,you all know about that, that's what hides your six-pack, if you can't see it. it's thatsubcutaneous fat. it's what stops all the
visible muscles - you can't see their definededges because of that subcutaneous fat if it gets too thick.so there's your dermis, your epidermis and subcutaneous fat there. now this stuff iscells call adipocytes. that's the name. meet your enemy if you want to lose weight - it'snot your enemy, you actually have to have this stuff. it's terrific. humans wouldn'tbe what they are without it. so it's not bad at all but it's easy to make them a littlebit too big. so they're called adipocytes and here's somethingthat's worth knowing about - there's another type of fat that's not under your skin butin around your organs, it's called your visceral fat, and we'll probably end up talking aboutthis a little bit tonight. visceral fat is
called the bad fat. we're just starting tolearn a lot more about the fact that it's an endocrine organ. it's pumping out hormonesand some of those hormones seem to be problematic if there's too much of that abdominal fat.but we might get to talk about that a bit later, because first of all let's just havea look at these little adipocytes. so these are adipocytes under a microscopeand all that white stuff is this c55 h104 o6. now i'm told that all cells can have lipiddroplets in them but you're adipocytes, they're full of nothing but essentially. they've gota nucleus and maybe one or two, i don't know how many mitochondria, but not many, and therest is just taken up by this massive blob of fat. look, there's heaps of them here.so that's what it is. that droplet is starting
to be studied as well. this is fascinatingthat there's so much yet to be learnt. there's a paper here not just fat, the structure ofthat lipid droplet, and we still are learning a lot about the nature of that fat that'sin your adipocytes. so there's another question that comes up- if you talk to personal trainers and a lot of people they will say oh by the time you're20 you've got his number of fat cells in your body and that won't change. however - andthat's old rhetoric - dogma really from a while ago because it turns out that that'snot true. you can grow new adipocytes and you do grow new adipocytes all the time.so if you put on weight - they did this study where they overfed people with carbohydrate,they all put on some weight and lo and behold
what happens? this is the question they werewondering. do the cells that are there just get bigger? do they fill up with this c55h104 o6? or do you grow whole new ones? the answer is, it's a combination of the bothand it depends on which part of your body. for women it was mainly, in this study, aroundtheir abdomens. the adipocytes that were there got bigger but they also grew brand new onesin their upper legs. so it's a very complicated story. there is more to it. you can lose fatcells as well. so apoptosis is when cells die, and they dieall the time. so there is so much more. i'm just whetting your appetite here, becausei wanted to show you where this stuff goes when you lose weight. so c55 h104 o6, herecomes the equation that is called weight loss,
this is it. you've got to inhale - to getrid of that fat you've got to inhale some oxygen and then you will turn it into thosetwo chemicals you already knew about - it becomes water and carbon dioxide. that watercan go out as urine or sweat or it could go as saliva or breast milk if you happen tobe feeding, or it could go in your faeces or your tears. it could become pus - probablybetter not to think about it. but let me show you what we're talking abouthere. i've got some carbon dioxide and water for you to have a look at. it's in this containerhere. i'll just put on a glove. so i have some frozen carbon dioxide and i have somewater, h2o and co2. this is frozen carbon dioxide and hopefully it'll fit in there.if not i'll just snap a bit off.
right, when you chuck it in water it bubbled.you've seen this a million times. so had i. i never realised i was looking at what fatbecomes, but there you go. that's what it becomes. isn't that amazing? when you loseweight it becomes this. i reckon that's amazing. now that's what fat's made of, but that'snot fat, obviously. so how does it become fat? well, co2 and h2o it all happens in plants,right. the fat in your body was first photosynthesised by a plant and it turned it into sugar - wemight talk about this a little bit more in a minute - then the sugar may have been turnedinto fat in the plant. or you might have eaten that sugar and your body might have turnedit into fat but essentially it started off as this and its plants that put it togetherand then you and i eat it and off we go and
put on some weight. totally amazing.now, this little arrow here is simplifying something called biochemistry which takesthree years at university just to get your undergraduate in. so it's not an easy subject.in fact it's incredibly complicated and i'm still in awe of anyone who does well in it.but let's focus on where these kilograms go. we've got kilograms, kilograms, kilograms.energy is what most people think that the fat becomes. a lot of people think that fatjust turns into heat, that's the answer you get. most of the doctors i've asked said itjust turns into heat. well it doesn't turn into heat - you get some energy out. but you'vegot to have the same number of atoms afterwards that you started with beforehand. so it'sinteresting.
now we've measured that in kilojoules andlook, it can become heat or you can use it to move or you can use it to think. you canuse it to do all sorts of stuff. but that energy is actually sunlight. the energy inthe food was put there by a plant putting carbon dioxide and water together. so we'reall running on sunlight, that's really cool. if you're a bit of a hippy this will reallyring your bells. anyway, this heat stuff let's just talk aboutthat for a second. because let's get the difference between mass and energy really clear. thisis the best way i can think of. i've got these little toys - i found them at a toyshop notthat long ago. they're these little jumpy toys. you can push them down and the suctioncup sticks to itself. it's got a little foot.
if you stick it down it then jumps up in theair. isn't that great? well, what's that got to do with anything?i'm going to use it to clarify what the difference is between mass and energy. so think aboutthis for a second. if i put one of these things on some scales and measure it, which i havedone, they weigh about six grams. but if i push it down do you reckon it weighs a differentamount or would it weigh exactly the same? everyone gets this. it's exactly the same.so the weight doesn't change, it's still six grams.now, while that spring is pushed down it's got some energy stored in it. it's so easyto figure out how much that is because all you've got to do is measure how high it jumps- this is high school physics - potential
energy is mass times gravity times height.so we can calculate precisely how much energy there is stored when you push that springdown - and it's about 0.03 joules, which is 0.0004 kilojoules. if you really like calories- this is the only thing i'm going to talk about calories tonight then we're going backto si units. we're not in america. but there you go for the calorie counters.now by the way, in case you want to know well what is that worth 0.003 kilojoules, let'scompare that to what's in an ice cream, 1181 kilojoules. so there's enough there - that's40 million times the amount of energy that's in this spring when you push it down, whichlets it go half a metre high. your body takes quite a bit of energy to operate. it's incrediblehow much energy we use. so isn't that fascinating.
now hopefully having seen that you'll neverbe confused by this energy business again. energy is just this amazing stuff that youcan't see, touch, taste, feel. it's just a unit of measure. it's the same energy - sameunits of energy in a spring as it is stored in food.so let's move on and see what's going on here. so here's the - the weight loss equation isfascinating. if you do the stoichiometry. so what i mean is to get rid of 10 kilograms,let's say, of fat - if you do lose 10 kilograms by the way you'll lose some other mass aswell - not just triglyceride, but we're just going to focus on triglyceride and we mightcome back to that as well. so how much would you need of all these other things and howmuch would you get.
so this is called stoichiometry. it's year10 science. last week on catalyst when we did this we edited out a very critical sentenceof mine and a lot of chemists out there thought that i didn't know this bit and oh boy, didi get in trouble. i'll talk to you about that in a minute as well. but look, to do thisany year 10 student should be able to do this by going to the periodic table of the elementsand just doing the maths. you'd have to inhale 29 kilograms of oxygen to get rid of that10 kilograms of fat and you'll get 28 kilograms of carbon dioxide, 11 kilograms of water.look, we've been able to figure that out since the '60s. that equation's been doable in allthat time and yet for some reason - i don't know why - but no one ever bothered to reallyput it out there. i reckon that is absolutely
fascinating. so anyway, it means that beforeand after you lose weight there will be precisely the same number of atoms in the universe.it doesn't change, right? to change the number of atoms in the universe you've got to donuclear physics. you are not a nuclear reactor - you're a chemical device. so the numberof atoms won't change. so by the way, if you lose 10 kilograms there's320 kilojoules in that amount of fat so that's enough to keep you running for 37 days. bythe way in case you were wondering, yes, you can just not eat. here is a paper called featuresof a successful fast of 382 days duration. this bloke called patient ab didn't eat for382 days. that's a year and 17 days. don't try this yourself without close supervision.but here's what that paper says. patient ab
was 27, he weighed 207 kilograms at the beginningand he got down to 81.6. so he lost 125 kilograms. that's 330 grams a day. i lost 85 grams aday. so this is roughly the theoretical maximum that you can lose, right?so when you hear people rabbiting on about how quickly can you lose huge amounts of weightjust compare it to this guy. that's as much as you can hope to lose and that is very intenseand i don't think anyone should try it. it's crazy, because it's dangerous as well.so he was given multivitamins, some vitamin c, some yeast. it's all in this paper. soif you want to get more details you can just grab this paper and read it. he was givenwater or black coffee, non-caloric fluids. in other words, fluids without any energyin them.
so he was still only 88.9 five years laterafter this paper was published, so he kept the weight off as they like to say in thegame. but don't try it please because it can be fatal and there are five cases reportedin that paper alone of people who died trying. he was supervised by doctors; he had his urinetested regularly and blood samples taken. he needed potassium from days 93 to 162. heneeded some sodium from days 345 to 355. no other treatment was given. he was an outpatient.37 to 48 days between stools. that means going to the toilet kids. yeah, because if you'renot eating fibre there's nothing really to [whistles] out the other end. so fascinating.now, back to our little equation - because this gets better. i've got more demos to dotoo. so here's my question, right? so that
was all just how you do chemistry. but i hadthis weird way of thinking about this because i was losing weight and i rang around wonderingwell okay, if i start with 10 kilograms i want to know out of the 10 kilograms - notthe oxygen but the fat - how much of that will come out of my lungs as carbon dioxideand how much of it's going to become water. that's my question.so the first bit is easy - all of the carbon atoms will go into carbon dioxide. all ofthe hydrogen atoms will go out as water - simple. but to get this number really accurate youneed to know what happens to these six oxygen atoms. the question is, are they going togo out in the carbon dioxide or are they going to come out in the water that you excrete?this took ages. i was on the phone ringing
around. i rang my friend, professor brown,but he was overseas on sabbatical so i got one of his colleagues, didn't know the answer.i rang monash uni, got another professor there, didn't know the answer. i rang flinders university,no, didn't know. also we were wondering why do you want to do this. this seems like apointless thing to do. well, i didn't think it was pointless. soi pursued this question. i was like a dog with a bone. the people at catalyst rememberi was just fixated on this - a little bit obsessed. one sunday morning i found thispaper. it's called the fate of utilising molecular oxygen and the source of the oxygen, of respiratorycarbon dioxide, studied with the aid of heavy oxygen. what does that mean?well, it was published in 1949. so this is
old, beautiful, wonderful biochemistry. here'sa picture of what they did. there's a mouse which they have injected with heavy water.so it's water in which the oxygen atom has been labelled with a couple of extra neutrons.so it's a heavier form of water, or a heavier form of oxygen. so they pumped it in, in theform of water. lo and behold it turned up in the exhaled carbon dioxide. which meansthat water and carbon dioxide molecules in your body are swapping their oxygen atoms.why do they do that? well, it's because of this equation here. water plus carbon dioxidegives you carbonic acid. that's what gives water that prickly sensation when you scullfizzy mineral water. it's the carbonic acid forming in your mucus membranes as a bit ofcarbon dioxide dissolves into it; it makes
an acid which irritates you. which, again,fascinating. so that reaction is sped up in your body byan enzyme. but look, i'll show you a little demo that every kid should see at school.i've got some phenolphthalein - it's a ph indicator - in this water. if you add somelime water - so this is just builders' lime from a hardware store. if you add that tothis phenolphthalein stuff then whoop-dee-doo it goes lovely and pink.so i'll just show you what this stuff's doing and then we'll do the actual demonstration.so when you put something which is alkaline in here it turns pink. if you put in an acidlike, for instance, vinegar then the ph will go down. this is acetic acid. give it a swirland it goes beautiful and clear - how lovely.
if you put in another kind of base, like forinstance your dishwashing powder from your dishwasher machine - this is quite alkaline,so you pour a bit of that in, and it will very rapidly turn it a beautiful fuchsia.if you put in a little bit of citric acid it goes back to clear again. whoop-dee-doo.so no matter what the acid is this lovely stuff will change colour if it goes alkaline,lovely fuchsia. now i'll put some more builders lime in somemore phenolphthalein and we'll give it a little swirl. i'll show you this little fact of nature.when you exhale out comes some carbon dioxide. every kid knows that fact. the carbon dioxidecame from your mitochondria. it's where - in every single cell this happens. i love this.so then it goes to your lungs and watch this.
[conducting activity]facilitator: thank you very much. now, i'm not the first person to have done that. michaelfaraday did a very similar demonstration back in the 1800s. he started the royal institution'schristmas lectures for children. if you've never looked at them please check them out.but what we've just demonstrated is that when you exhale out comes carbon dioxide and itreacts with water and forms carbonic acid which decreases the ph of the water.lo and behold, this is how your brain knows that you need to breathe soon. because inyour body, in your hypothalamus, you can detect the ph of your blood. when you're panickingunder water and you want to get to the surface because you're running out of breath, it'sbecause of this reaction going on in your
blood. dropping the ph of your blood. isn'tthat amazing? so you don't detect that your oxygen levels are down, you detect that yourcarbon dioxide levels are going up. amazing. i didn't learn any of this stuff at schooland i was a captive audience, as you all were. for 12 years i attended school, didn't seeany of that. something to think about, i think. so that was a lovely little demo. but backto our - so we've found something out here. the paper that i found helps me to answerthis question, right. so what's going to happen to these atoms? so we know that the 55 carbonsare going to come out as carbon dioxide, 104 hydrogen atoms are all going to become water.but from that paper i could deduce that four out of those six oxygen atoms will go outin carbon dioxide molecules and the other
two will go out with water. that's becauseit doesn't matter what they first become; they get swapped in your blood. before theyget to your lungs, no matter what they were to start with, they'll just end up in thattwo to one ratio that they exist in these two substances, carbon dioxide and water.so yippee, you can solve the equation. this is fantastic. the answer is right here.it's 84 per cent of the mass in a triglyceride molecule becomes carbon dioxide and 16 percent of the mass becomes water. so here's the big fact, when you lose 10 kilograms 8.4of them depart your body via your lungs. your lungs are the major excretory organ for fat.who knew that? not many people. well now you do. one-point-six kilograms becomes water- and water can come and go rapidly, right?
you can drink a litre of water and put a kilogramon like that. so carbon is the game. that's where you want to get rid of the carbon forweight loss. water comes and goes very rapidly. now, there's a few frequently asked questionsthat i should answer at this point, one is can i just breathe more. you'd be amazed howoften i get asked that one. the answer to that is yes you can just breathe more butyou'll start to feel dizzy because you'll be hyperventilating and you could well faint,but go if you like. frequently asked question number two is doeseight loss cause climate change. that's a concern because if you think that you definitelydon't understand what's causing climate change as well as you should. so i'm not going toanswer that except that it's wrong.
a third not frequently asked but should befrequently asked question is how does my maths work when you're in ketosis, which is whenyou go on a very low carb diet and your liver starts to make things called ketone bodiesout of your fat and you burn them differently. they're water-soluble. some of them can comeout with your urine. i haven't done the maths on that. one day maybe we'll measure somepeople's urine and we'll see just how much carbon is coming out of their urine. but look,that's pretty extreme. i'm not here to advocate any kinds of diets. so we might talk aboutthe ketogenic diet a little bit later but let's move on, because i'm not all for that.so the idea is if you want to lose weight all you've got to do is you've got to eatless and move more. this is actually the only
way that it's possible but it's become controversial.some people don't believe this, which makes me giggle, because it's the only way. youwill lose weight by breathing and you'll gain it again when you eat.so this is where - let's talk about breathing just quickly because you might think aboutthis later. in every breath about nine grams of carbon comes out of you. that's just carbon.the carbon dioxide weighs a bit more. but the carbon is coming out through your lungsand it's about nine grams per breath. i'll just show you that this is true. here's aballoon [blows up balloon] and a bit more of my breath. i've been doing this demonstrationfor nearly 20 years - actually maybe a little bit more. it only occurred to me literallylast year that this is weight loss that i
was looking at all that time.so here's a beaker which i'm about to fill with liquid nitrogen. i'll show you the liquidnitrogen just so you get a good look at it - because everyone loves this stuff. so itis very reminiscent of water - just clear. it's got bubbles in it because it's boiling.it boils at minus 196 degrees celsius, which blows a lot of people's minds. it's got amuch lower boiling point than water. well, there are other substances that have muchhigher boiling points than water. so gold - you can boil gold. my first job out of uni,making optical coatings, i used to boil gold in a vacuum chamber. you can do it.so here we have nitrogen in its liquid form and i'm going to pour some onto this balloonwhich will make the balloon very cold, obviously,
and it doesn't pop the balloon, which is fantastic.something amazing's happening though. the molecules inside the balloon are losing someof their kinetic energy so the balloon collapses because the pressure inside is decreasing.it's decreasing because when you cool a molecule down all you're really doing is slowing itdown. so these ones are losing some of their kinetic energy. now i can just - i can touchthe balloon without wearing gloves, because it's not a good conductor of heat.so i'll pour a little bit more on. now what's happened in the balloon is just amazing. theoxygen has all turned into liquid oxygen. because that happens at minus 183 and we'reat minus 196, even colder. so i'll show you some liquid oxygen. you don'tuse all the oxygen when you inhale, you only
use a little bit of it. twenty-one per centof the air going in is oxygen and 79 is nitrogen. when you exhale there's still about 16 percent of that air is oxygen. so it's in here. the other bit, the four to five per cent,is carbon dioxide. that, if i hadn't eaten any food in the last few days, would all betriglyceride that's been metabolised. maybe a bit of protein - hopefully not, you don'twant to burn that stuff. so let's take a look. the balloon is droopyand saggy. the top is full of nitrogen. if i get it clear then you'll see some liquidin there. you see that? at the back it might be a little bit tricky. but there is someoxygen in there and it's swirling around and very rapidly turning back into gas. so it'sall disappeared now. now we're left with some
powder. that white powder is carbon dioxide,it came from my mitochondria and it used to be food - and i ate it probably yesterday,maybe the day before. when you blow on it, it vanishes.so if you're wondering where you food goes, mate, it comes out of your lungs. food doesnot go down the toilet. so here's another question for you, what's the difference betweendigestion and metabolism? ask your friends. they use the terms interchangeably. here'show i get the message across to little kids. i show them that look, here's a lolly andhere is a pool noodle. if i put the lolly in the hole that runs through the pool noodleit can fall all the way through and it appears at the other end.so while i have it here i say to the little
kiddies, right, where's the lolly kids andthey'll say oh it's in the noodle. but then you say, well hang on, is the lolly in thefoam that the noodle is made of and they all say no, it's not. it's in the hole that runsthrough the noodle. same with food, when you swallow food it's not in your body, it's inthe hole that runs from your mouth to your butt and whatever comes out the other enddidn't get into you. so digestion is getting the lolly into the foam.that's a pretty amazing process. it's very complicated and there are lots of steps. butonce you have digested it it's no longer in the hole - the only thing that comes out theother end there, into the toilet bowl, if fibre from plants that you couldn't digest,and bacteria that have inhabited your digestive
tract.so that's the difference between digestion and metabolism. the first step is digesting,getting it into your blood, then you metabolise it in your cells. that's where you split thesemolecules back up. now while we're on the topic of sugar i'dbetter quickly show you what we're talking about here. if you drink a bottle of softdrink this big and wonder why you might be putting on weight if you're drinking one ofthese every day - i'll just show you something amazing. if you do the maths that much softdrink - it doesn't matter what brand, it doesn't matter what flavour, it has about 17 teaspoonsof sugar in it. you can do the maths if you know that a teaspoon of sugar is four grams.so i've got a metric teaspoon here. you can
count along here. i'm going to show you what17 teaspoons of this stuff looks like - here we go. [counting to 17]. there you go. soif you drink that then it is the equivalent of sitting down with a spoon and eating that.no different. in terms of your nutrition, not different.exactly the same. why didn't i see that at school? i still haven't seen this at school.i haven't seen it on any tv program. i haven't seen it anywhere. why don't people do demos?i don't get it. but please show everyone you know that demo, particularly people who wonderwhy they struggle to get rid of their weight. because if you're struggling with it, it'sbecause you're putting too much back in. you will breathe out 210 grams every day.i've done the maths on my own body. you will
take 12 breaths a minute at rest - each oneis going to take that little tiny bit of carbon with it - that's 17,280 breaths a day andyou will lose about 210 grams every day. the only reason you don't lose weight is becauseof what you eat. it's because you're putting too much back in. so if you want to lose weightjust cut back. now when i say eat, you don't have to noteat. you can eat food, heaps of it - you can eat a mountain of vegetables and get almostzero kilojoules, because most of its fibre and water. so go and fall in love with foodagain and figure out what you like - don't ask me, i'm not your diet guru. just findout what you like the taste of that has very few kilojoules and mate, it will literallyfly out of your lungs.
so look, we could do the maths on carbohydrates- and 75 per cent of this sugar, if you do the maths, same as i did with fat - 75 percent of that will come out of your lungs and the other 25 per cent will become water. sothe maths is just a little bit different than it is for fat. seventy-five per cent of sugaryou exhale if you metabolise it. now speaking of diets, i'm not going to promoteany kids of diets, but there's this idea of a healthy diet. well, this bloke, called johncisna, he went on a mcdonald's only diet. he just ate less. but only mcdonald's. helost quite a bit of weight. mcdonald's only 90 day diet. i'm not advocating this but itjust goes to show that it's actually much more simple than people think - you just haveto eat less. he went for a walk and he ate
the right number of kilojoules and he lost16.8 kilograms and his cholesterol came down and yippee-ki-yay, wonderful stuff.so i think on that note if you've still got any questions about how fat gets out of youwe will be able to cover them in our chat. but hopefully from now on the mystery is over.weight loss claims that you hear out there you can now put them under the microscopeand say well hang on a minute, what are these people telling me that this wonder drug orwonder food or super food can really do for me and why is it so much better than me justnot eating as much? there is nothing as simple as just cutting back on the tucker and goingfor a walk every day. so there you go. good luck with your weight loss.i will now introduce our panellists and we
will start to have a bit of a discussion uphere. so they're going to have a chat to us - i feel very lucky to have these people andthe calibre of them joining me here on stage for a panel discussion and your questions.so let me introduce them to you. i'm going to walk over to the little screen over therebecause we've got three people coming to chat to you. the first one - there's two from theuniversity of technology of sydney and my new friend from the uni of new south wales.our first panellist is doctor elizabeth denney-wilson and she's a senior lecturer here - actually,sorry, she's associate professor just as of this last few weeks. so that's a massive dealin a person who works at a university's career, so congratulations. i won't introduce hertoo much because she's got a wonderful story
that she will tell you. so could you pleasemake welcome to the stage associate professor elizabeth denney-wilson.female: i'm going to put the case for prevention. because we know that obesity risk begins veryearly in life. this, unlike ruben's slides, is not a picture of a fat belly but a pictureof an absolutely beautiful pregnant belly. we know that even factors that happen in uterocan affect a person's likelihood or their propensity for weight gain in childhood. soright from the start the food choices that parents make on behalf of their children,including whether a child's breast fed and when solid foods are introduced and what kindsof solid foods, these can all predispose a child to excess weight gain.how children gain weight is also important.
so this is your common garden-variety growthchart. this one is a weight for age growth chart; these are in use all around the world.there are a few different varieties but they're all pretty much the same. what happens generallyspeaking is when babies head off to their maternal and child health nurse or to theirgeneral practitioner and they're weighed and measured generally speaking most kids willsit on a centile and they'll stick with that centile pretty much throughout their lives.that's what happens to most children. but some children experience what we call rapidweight gain. these children actually cross centiles, or go from a lower centile to ahigher centile. sometimes this is catch up growth becausethese kids might have had some retarded growth
in utero for one reason or another. but inthe vast majority of cases it's because these kids are being overfed.when i first became interested in infant feeding when my now adult children were babies thething that we worried about was parents diluting infant formula because they wanted to makeit last longer. but nowadays the reverse is true and we actually worry about people overfeedingtheir babies. so babies who are breastfed, they get to choose when they've had enoughto eat. so they have their feed, they come off the breast and their mum learns to trustthem that they're getting enough to eat because they grow and they have the right number ofwet nappies. if only we knew this - they were obviously having the right number of breathsas well.
but when a baby is bottle-fed there's a temptationto ensure that the child finishes the bottle at every feed. this might involve continuingto nag a child or wake them up or jig them around until the bottle's finished, or itmight involve just continually coming back and forward with the same bottle until thatbottle is finished. this overrides a child's natural instincts around satiety or fullness.so it overrides their ability to know when they've had enough.so what happens to these kids who have rapid weight gain? well, we know that children whoexperience rapid weight gain are about three times more likely to be obese when they'retwo, they're three times more likely to be obese when they're five and what we know isthat growth trajectories tend to track into
adulthood. so these overweight toddlers becomeoverweight children and overweight teenagers and overweight adults. that's when risk factorsstart to appear. so i'm just going to give you a shamelessplug now. my research team - and a couple of members are here tonight - have developedan app that's recommended by primary healthcare providers and it provides expert advice forparents around feeding their baby, around settling their baby without feeding them andaround helping mums to look after themselves. we are targeting disadvantages mums becausewe know that they're less likely to breastfeed, more likely to bottle feed and also becauserapid weight gain is more common in families experiencing disadvantage.but i can hear some of you saying all right,
so these kids are a bit tubby but isn't itjust puppy fat? well, i'm here to tell you that no, excess weight can be harmful evenif you happen to be a puppy. speaking of puppies - i mean teenagers - thisis the work i did for my phd where i took blood samples from 500 teenagers who werein year 10, so in high school in the sydney metropolitan area. so they weren't attendingweight loss clinics or going to see their gp or anything like that. they were just kidsattending high school. we weighed and measured them as well. what we found was that 80 percent of the obese boys had elevated levels of insulin which is one of the markers thatsuggests that you might be on the pathway to develop type 2 diabetes.we also found that almost half of them had
elevated liver enzymes which are suggestiveof a thing called fatty live, which is exactly as it sounds - there's excess fat sittingin the liver. about a third of them had low levels of hdl cholesterol, or so-called goodcholesterol. i just want to remind you these were 15 year olds and they had these riskfactors already that we would normally associate with much older people and that are reallychronic disease risk factors. so i'm suggesting that prevention is betterthan cure. to achieve obesity prevention we need some long-term strategies that are implementedand not just announced. what we really don't need is another glossy brochure announcingwhat we're going to do to limit weight gain or get people moving more. we need to targetchildren and their families, because that's
where we're going to get the best bang forour buck in terms of preventive healthcare. we also need to ensure that the strategiesthat we implement are well evaluated so we can see if they're working or not. oh, thatspells policy. who's responsible for that again? okay. over to you.[applause] facilitator: so our next speaker is doinga form of research that i barely can get my head around. it's a whole new field as faras i can tell - proteomics. just to give you a little bit of indication - i know that thereare some slides here that really pop my brain. so would you please welcome dr matt padulafrom the university of technology sydney as well.[applause]
male 1: i'll start off just by saying thatwhen they came to me a couple of months ago to talk about this i had the same idea asyou guys had, none. but over the last couple of weeks i've been thinking about this, lookinginto it and realising this is wickedly cool. the way that ruben describes it was absolutelyawesome. if they had described it that way when i did biochemistry back in 1994 i probablywould have remembered the krebs cycle a lot better. in all seriousness.so on the left there that's basically all of the metabolic pathways that are withinyour body. so this is everything that could happen. now what proteomics is, is basicallythe study of every single protein that happens in a particular cell at a particular momentin time. not all of this happens at the same
time. different cells, different things happen.so what we try to do in proteomics is we try and look at say okay, how are things changingwith disease? because most people think of proteins as there's my steak, okay, i'm goingto eat that, i'm going to get protein, that's going to turn into muscle, yada, yada, yada.but proteins are more important than that. proteins are actually the things that do thework in your body. they catalyse your reactions, they allow you to digest food, they allowyou to do these metabolism things. you wouldn't be able to make carbon dioxide without allof these enzymes. so under different disease states - and obesitycan be termed as a disease - under different disease states the level of proteins changes.some proteins go up, some proteins go down.
so what proteomics aims to do is to look athow these things change within a disease, because these are the things that are actuallydoing the work. cancer occurs because of protein - proteins doing different things in yourbody that they're not supposed to do. so i've actually over - i'll point this way- over this side i've just zoomed in on a small little bit - this is still fairly supercomplicated. what this is saying is that these are the particular molecules that are beingmade. these little numbers down in the middle here you probably can't see, these numbersrefer to enzymes. so each one of these has a slightly different number referring to thedifferent enzymes that catalyse these particular reactions. these things can go up in concentrationor down in concentration depending on what's
going on in the cell. this is a simplifiedversion of this. so what happens here, this tag, this is triacylglyceride.this is fat. so a number of enzymes - and we have the two main ones here, hormone-sensitivelipase and adipocyte triglyceride lipase, these are the guys that directly break thisdown because triacylglyceride are insoluble. you can't do anything with them. you needto actually make them dissolve in water so that they can go off and do other things.so these two enzymes are quite impotent to break stuff down. then it all goes into thispathway and then it ends up in the tca cycle, which end up making ruben's carbon dioxide.now, these enzymes here have been directly related to obesity here and their expressionlevel is determinant. i'm not going to get
into that too much any further. but what ifind interesting is that - and it's a thing that probably anyone who's tried to lose weighthas had to go through you'll lose a reasonable amount of weight really quickly but then youwon't lose anything else. it's this particular figure that turned me onto this. i got alertedto this not because of reading this paper where it comes from - because in this paperthey didn't actually talk about it. they put the graph there but they didn't actually realisewhat it meant. it was a review that realised what it meant.what it essentially says is that you will lose - no matter what diet that you're onthey all seem to act the same. some of them work a little bit better than others but youlose the majority of the weight in the first
two months and then after that you do buggerall. if anything you start to put it back on. there's a reason behind this, and thereason is that you can quite easily lose 50 per cent of the triglycerides in your cellbut then what you're doing is you're actually doing - if you do this quickly and you doit too fast your adipocytes shrink and they shrink too fast.so your cells don't exist and sit there in isolation. they're surrounded by other proteinsand a thing called the extracellular matrix. if that doesn't shrink at the same rate asthe adipocytes do you induce this stress response. so cells become stressed, just like you dowhen you've had a bad day at work. so what happens is that when they undergo this stressresponse their reaction to that is take up
more triglycerides. they actually return toa preadipose state. so they basically go back. one of the things - i do work on fat a littlebit. my interest in fat is not in weight loss, it's actually in the fact that fat is therichest source of adult stem cells in your body. forget bone marrow or anything likethat, fat is where most stem cells are. so we spend a lot of time extracting out stemcells and getting rid of the adipocytes and not even caring. but it makes sense - andthis is where you've got all these stem cells in there and they normally become adipocytes.so you increase the mass of them and that's where you get more of them. but you can makethem do other things. anyway, i'm getting a little bit off the track.so there's been a lot of work now - there's
not as much out there as i thought that therewas going to be. i was quite surprised at how little research has been done. becausefat is such an important endocrine organ. it makes hormones and things like that. themajority of the studies about proteins have been about what those hormones do, where theygo, how they affect other organs and so on and so forth. no one's really looked at whathappens to the fat, what happens in the proteome when you lose triglycerides.but what seems to happen is that when you do something - and this information comesfrom a paper that was published this year, they did a very clever thing where they tookfat cells and they grew them up in culture and they basically imposed calorie restrictionon them in culture. so they grew them at about
10 per cent the amount of glucose that youwould normally take up normally. what you end up seeing is the normal stuff, yes youget increased lipid breakdown, you get increased release, you get the shrinking. but you get89 proteins that are being changed in their expression. so they're either increasing ordecreasing. this is not just related to proteins thatbreak down fat but it's also in the structural remodelling of the cells. cytoskeleton changes,extracellular matrix changes to reduce the size of that. but you also get a really importantthing which is a reduced amount of inflammatory proteins. there's a massive amount of evidencenow coming out that the main reason that people have trouble losing weight is because of athing called exercise salience.
what it's essentially saying is that if youdon't exercise and you take up weight your adipocytes and your fat cells respond by producingmore hormones and more inflammatory proteins. those inflammatory proteins stop you fromexercising. they dissuade you from exercising. therefore, you eat more. therefore, you puton more adipocytes. therefore they make more hormones and therefore, you're less likelyto exercise. so this whole idea of exercise salience isbecoming quite interesting. what a few groups are doing now is they're starting to lookat whether or not there are genetic dispositions or environmental dispositions to encourageyou to spontaneously do exercise. so that's a really interesting field of research. ithink that that is probably where treatment
is going to go. there's not going to be amagic bullet, there's going to be what can we actually do to encourage a person to doexercise. to make them feel good about exercise and become addictive. that's probably alli need to say. [applause]facilitator: as i said, it's massively complicated in the world of protein. i'd love to hearmatt have a conversation with a gym junkie who takes whey powder to build up muscle.we might talk about that in a minute. now our next speaker i met through this littleprocess of thinking about weight loss. he was the first person i tried to ring to findout what happens to the six atoms in a triglyceride, but he was away in finland it turns out. ileft a message and i never heard back from
him. i thought what a rude bugger. no, i didn't.anyway, when we did the catalyst story we got to meet. so i'd love you to give a verywarm welcome to my new best mate, professor andrew brown.male 2: so thanks for inviting me today ruben. it's great to see ruben in action and greatto see a wonderful audience like we have here who are obviously very interested in biochemistry.that's what i teach. it is, indeed, complicated. so i teach fat metabolism and my researchis focused around one particular fat, which most of you will have heard of, cholesterol.so it's a fascinating molecule. when you think of cholesterol it may be thatthe first thing that you think about it indeed catalyst. because there was a couple of showson catalyst last year on cholesterol where
they asked a bunch of experts - not me - butother experts, some of whom i'd never heard of before, including dr sinatra. so dr sinatrahas a very interesting website where you can learn the truth about statins and cholesterol.you can also learn about something called grounding. so this is a direct quote fromdr sinatra. putting your bare feet on the ground you soak up lots of electrons because,as we know, the earth is negatively charged and our bodies are so full of free radicals.so if you do feel like just kicking off your shoes and getting grounded, please do.so dr sinatra i think would be a great person to have on your barefoot bowling team, maybegreat at karaoke, would do an excellent rendition, i'm sure, of my way. but probably having himas an expert on an official science show,
maybe not such a good idea.one of the things that they did show on the catalyst program, which i think was very useful- is this idea that there are two faces to cholesterol. that too much, which is whatwe normally think about, can be a bad thing in terms of heart disease. but the flip sideis that we need cholesterol. so we need cholesterol. without it our cells leak like sieves. weneed it to make steroid hormones - so to make testosterone and oestrogen. without them lifewouldn't be much fin - indeed, life wouldn't be.it's also important in early development, which is why eggs contain so much of it. that'swhy we've evolved these elaborate mechanisms for keeping our cholesterol levels under tightcontrol. so this careful balancing act - and
the chinese have this very useful conceptof yin-yang. in scientific parlance we call that homeostasis.so that's what my lab is researching. it's really how we get that sweet spot of cholesterol.how our cells optimise and get that balance right. so they do it by controlling how muchcholesterol goes into the cell, how much cholesterol goes out of the cell and how much cholesterolwe make. so that's the balancing act there. my lab is particularly interested in how wemake cholesterol. so this is a complicated process. so as you can see, you've got a twocarbon little lego block which you're then building up into this complicated four fusedring structure called cholesterol and it's complicated. so when i first encountered cholesterolsynthesis i was like trying to navigate around
tokyo using the subway and without being ableto speak japanese. whereas, of course, in sydney we do things far more simply.so i will depict cholesterol synthesis as a typical sydney beach scene, where here you'vegot a boy who's pouring in that two carbon unit, acetyl-coa, and you can see it flowingall the way down to cholesterol. you see it pooling at this point here, hmgr, which standsfor hmg-coa reductase, and that's considered to be the rate limiting step. so it's theslowest step in the pathway. it's the target of the statins.so some of you may be on statins - chances are you'll know somebody who's on this drugbecause they're the best selling drug class in australia, worth a tidy $30 billion peryear internationally. like any drug, not without
their side effects. those side effects arethought to be due to the fact that there is a side stream which comes off here. so thatside stream leads to a bunch of other important molecules and we'll just call that importantstuff. so what we've been looking at is other enzymesin the pathway. so there's about more than 20 other enzymes in this pathway and we'relooking at the regulation of each of those. so you can see this miniature uluru sm, andthat stands for squalene monooxygenase, it's a long name. what we've found is that's anotherrate-limiting step in this process which is tightly regulated. so it's another possibledrug target that we could use to manipulate our cholesterol levels.so back to ruben's big, fat question. this
is a photo that we took a few months ago - actually,a former graduate of this esteemed university took this, [matthew wiley]. so i think ifyou think about the image that we try to present to the world - we have bondi rescue beingbeamed around the world - so we often try to think of ourselves, i think, as a nationof lifesavers - and even our prime minister gets into the act. sorry, that's too muchinformation. but when you think about it the reality isthat in terms of the shape that we're getting into we're looking more like these are ourlifesavers. or, perhaps, we're looking like a life-size replica of the titanic. i thoughti had a picture here. there it is. so i guess the question is, is this our future? a raceof supersized humans devouring the planet
so that pretty sydney beach scenes like thetop picture are only a virtual tour. just an electronic memory. i'd just like to goback to this picture - and that's actually me in the background. you can't recogniseme because my head's been swapped. you don't believe me, do you? that is indeed me. i assureyou it is a fat suit. thanks for your attention. [applause]facilitator: well as you can see it's a very complicated field. so i think the first thingthat i would love to just kick off with is why do we think that this - what seems tobe a question that we could have answered 100 years ago, for the general public haslaid hidden and completely obscured by all this extra info? and why haven't we heardthis very simple explanation of weight loss
before? that it becomes carbon dioxide andwater. did you learn it at uni? you said you did the krebs cycle, matt, did you…male 1: no, not to this extent. i remember learning it in second year biochemistry buti certainly - it was never put in that kind of context. i think this is the problem thatwe have when we're teaching high school students - and you'd know this - we have the same problemwhen we're teaching university students is that we're all quite happy to teach - well,sorry. the historical thing is to teach to pass the exam or to pass the subject. whereaswhat we really need to be doing is teaching with these practical examples to reinforcethese kind of concepts so that they're not instantly forgotten as soon as they leavethe exam room. i think that's part of the
issue. it's just that - it's just never beentaught in an interesting way. facilitator: now your undergraduate days,elizabeth, were - tell us about those? did you learn this sort of stuff?female: well there was beer… male: there's always beer.facilitator: there's was what? there was beer [laughs]?female: there was beer, yeah. facilitator: it's fattening if you have alot of it, apparently. they say. it's got two fixed carbon atoms in alcohol, that'smy point. yeah. female: i do remember learning the krebs cyclebut from a book. i'm pretty sure it was in the web of life. my husband would probably- he's a bit of a fan of the web of life as
well. but i'm pretty sure that's where i learntthe krebs cycle, yeah. male: page 312.female: thank you. facilitator: page 312, i'll be checking thatlater on this evening. now andrew teaches this form of biochemistry and i've actuallybeen in the lecture where it gets taught. we've discussed this, but how would you describewhy people - even advanced biochemistry students don't seem to retain this really simple fact,do they? male 2: yes, i think the main reason is thatthe way that we teach biochemistry is we have to cover a lot of material. it's quite fragmented.individual lecturers often give different parts of the overall - well, different metabolicpathways so it's hard for the students - sometimes
hard for the lecturers - to actually integratethe information. i think the other thing really is that our emphasis has really been alwayson how we turn food into energy. so that really has been - that's the sort of stoichiometrythat we have. we don't talk about mass, we talk about number of molecules and the numberof atps produced which, of course, is the energy - the universal currency of energythat we always talk about in biochemistry, atp. so i think that's really it.if you think about, i guess, the historical perspective of how biochemistry arose, itarose at a time when there was - a lot - when food shortages were a lot more important thantoo much food, which is the case today. so this really is, i guess, just bringing a differentperspective. as ruben knows, we actually asked
this - our students, so this was probably120 students who answered the survey, ruben's big fat question, after i'd actually givethe lecture on beta-oxidation of fats, which is the way that you breakdown fats.somewhere buried in there was talk about carbon dioxide and water being formed. when theyanswered that question it was probably less than 20 per cent actually said co2, the rest- most of them actually said atp, which goes back to matt's point that they're going forthe exam. or the other thing that they did is they just downloaded very bit of informationthey had and just had an essay answer for a one-line question, which is typical undergraduatestudent. facilitator: it is. atp being, by the way,adenosine triphosphate. it's the molecule
which gets that energy out of your sugar molecule,that bit of sunlight, and it becomes a different chemical bond and then that's used for allsorts of stuff in the cell. i mean it get so complicated so fast biochemistry. it tookme ages to find that carbon dioxide. there's one more thing - i'll just stick with biochemistryfor one second - because i've attended a few of andrew's lectures now. in one of them yousaid that it's not really quite right to say that we burn food, you say we electrocuteit. male 2: sure. electrocuting probably isn'tstrictly correct either. what it is, is that. so if you think about burning fat, like iimmediately think of a candle burning or a flash in a fry pan or something like that.so obviously the way that we're burning fat
inside our bodies, well, metabolising fatis a lot more subtle. luckily no flames are involved. so what we're really doing is thatit's - we're ripping electrons of that fat - fat is very reduced. it's a hydrocarbon.we can put adipose tissue from liposuction clinics into a diesel engine and run a dieselengine - it's been done. so i think - so what you're then doing is you're shuttling downall these electrons eventually to make that atp. to make atp in the mitochondria.facilitator: super complicated. i'm amazed that anyone ever managed to figure it out.we can talk about the biochemistry until the cows come home but most people don't go beyondgrade 10 science. so elizabeth, you deal with actual people who…female: yes, i do, whole people.
facilitator: yeah, exactly. who - probablyfor most of us our body feels like this black box. we don't know what goes on inside it,got no idea. you stick food in, somehow you live. so clearly teaching the world biochemistryis not going to solve the obesity crisis that we're facing.female: i wouldn't think it would be my first suggested intervention.facilitator: you've already said that you think preventing it is probably going to bethe solution down the track and i'd definitely agree with that. i think we've got a perfectchance with every school kid. we've got them sitting there for 10 years at least. however,that doesn't help people who have got to middle age who would like to lose a bit of weight.so what do you do with people?
female: well it's really complicated, as yousaid. you need to eat less and move more. [laughter]female: so you know all of those books that you can buy, all of the weight loss booksand all of the special drugs you can buy. well, what they all say is eat less, movemore, they just have different ways of doing it. so some people want you to do it as aliquid, some people want you to do it as all protein or higher fat, higher carbohydrate.but the reality is you need to eat less and move more.we've got some - there's this really fascinating data set that's been collected over the last30 years and it's been collected at the university of denver. they've tracked the habits of peoplewho have successfully lost 30 pounds or more
- because it's the united states, so 12 or13 kilograms, and kept it off. they've looked at their diets, their physical activity habitsand what kind of things they do. the overwhelming message is that they're active for about anhour a day - it can be as simple as walking. they keep an eye on what they eat. so nothingas strict as weighing portions or anything but they're mindful of what they eat. theydo some sort of self-monitoring around maybe weighing themselves once a week, that sortof thing. over the years the diet composition has changed.so it's gone to higher protein or higher carb or whatever the latest fad happens to be.but those three things remain true; they monitor what they eat, they monitor their weight andthey're physically active.
facilitator: it's very simple. i wasn't goingto dish out any advice to anyone who's trying to lose weight but for the first three monthsall i did was go for a bit of a walk on top of what i was normally doing and stopped drinkingfull cream cappuccinos that i was smashing every day. so everyone's got their own wayof approaching eating less. but it doesn't have to be this big drag either, does it?it doesn't have to be a carrots and celery only thing.female: no. any diet - all of the diets - so all of those diet books and all of the weightloss products you can spend your money on, they all work if you follow them - they don'twork if you don't follow them - because they all reduce your calorie intake in some way.but the best diet is the one that you can
stick to, and that's what you need to find.you need to find your diet that works for you, that keeps your calories around the numberof calories that you're burning every day. facilitator: yeah, right. so back to somethingyou were saying, matt, which was - and i'm going to pick it up - this idea that if youstart dieting and you do start successfully losing weight then your body responds in thisway that just forces you to not stick with those healthy habits. so hopefully the onething that maybe some of these studies don't take into account is that driving every humanbody there's a brain. if we educate that person a little bit more, rather than throwing reallycomplicated sounding science at them, if we just sit them down and maybe say to them look,the only reason you're not losing weight is
because you're eating. atoms don't magicallyappear inside your body because you've got medieval curse where [makes noise] where didthat come from? you had to eat them. so maybe - do you think some of these studies- i've read tons of them, reviews and they gave - they're very complicated and it allsounds fancy and fantastic but do you think maybe we forget that we're dealing with peopleand they can think? male 1: yeah, well one of the things thatstruck me just sitting here and listening to elizabeth just now is that we're missingone particular point and that is to be able to do this properly you need support. youneed the support of your friends and your family and things like that to be able tostick to it. i mean if you're in an environment
where you are trying to lose weight and everyonearound you is gorging themselves stupid then you're not going to be very motivated to dothat. the same thing with trying to get into an exercise program, trying to do that thinga day. i mean i go out every morning and i jump thetrain off at parramatta and i ride my bike inform parramatta to ultimo. it takes me anhour and 20 minutes. some days it's really hard to get out of bed because i'm by myselfand it's boring. it's hard to push yourself when you're by yourself. so you really needto find something where you're actually enthused to go out and get moving and move around.then when you are at dinner or something like that, that you're not being encouraged toovereat because your mother 15 years ago told
you that you couldn't leave the table withoutfinishing everything on your plate. female: absolutely.male 1: i think that there's a big support problem that needs to be addressed as well.facilitator: right, yeah. that moving thing - here's a little thing that i love pointingout to teenagers - watch toddlers. watch them when…male 1: they never stop. facilitator: they don't stop moving and theylaugh when they're running, they like it. for some reason we stop running around, it'sreally weird. male 1: it is addictive. i mean people aregoing to laugh about this but there is a massive body of research out there that says thatexercise becomes addictive. it becomes a need.
you can't do it to an extreme - i'm not sayingthat everyone needs to go out and run an ultra-marathon but you'll get to the stage where if you skipa day or two days you will start to get antsy and you'll start to get stressed. you don'trealise it but it's because you haven't done your exercise. you haven't got that - youhaven't got your body moving so that it has the anti-inflammatory response that havingexercise generates. it actually makes you feel good because it's producing proteinsand chemicals that reduce inflammation and, therefore, make you feel good. so it's worthdoing. facilitator: andrew, when we talk about thisexercise and all the various ways you can lose weight, still biochemically ultimatelywe're going to have to coax triglyceride out
of adipocytes, aren't we? can you just remindthe people the first step of that - you've got a molecule stuck inside a cell, why isit stuck in there? can a full triglyceride get out of a cell? what has to happen to itfirst and what causes that to happen? male 2: sure. yeah, so there's hormone signalswhich usually then sense that there is some sort of energy deficit, which then stimulatesthat triglyceride to start being split up by an enzyme called hormone-sensitive lipaseor - and there's also adipose triglyceride lipase as well. so they're just basicallysplitting that triglyceride up into the fatty acids, which are part of it. then that fattyacid actually has to be split up too. so a fatty acid might have something like 16 carbonsand you were splitting it off every two carbons
in that process called beta-oxidation. i alwaysthink of it as being like putting a log into a wood chipper and it's just spitting outthese itty-bitty bits of two carbon molecules. facilitator: totally amazing because the triglyceridecan't, by itself, get through a cell wall, right?male 2: no. facilitator: it's got to be dismantled.male 2: exactly. facilitator: then once it's outside the cellit's put back together again and then off it goes through your bloodstream and overto where it's needed for energy production. i'm constantly saying to andrew that i amamazed that people have figured this stuff out because as you all know water, h2o, youcan write down the molecule, you can draw
a picture of it - a ball with two other ballsstuck on it. but it doesn't look like that. it looks like - we've got some there. it'sa clear liquid when you've got a lot of it. fatty acids don't look like long chains of- with cs written on them conveniently. somehow people figured all this stuff out. where ithappens in mind-blowing that it happens between the membranes of a mitochondria. it's allreally wonderful stuff. i can't get enough of it. but hopefully we can get it into thecurriculum.
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