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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		How saturated fats short-circuit immune cells
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:04
	Publish Date:		2016-05-31 19:00:00
	Description:		Saturated fats do more than just make a person pack on calories. Endocrinologist Suneil Koliwad of the University of California, San Francisco found that saturated fats essentially short-circuit immune cells called macrophages, preventing them from cleaning up overwhelmed fat storage cells when a person is obese. "Obesity is fundamentally the manifestation of the enlargement of fat cells in the body that expand as they fill up with fats that are taken in from the diet. And we’ve become interested in how macrophages change their activation state, when confronted by lipids that are present at high levels, most notably, in the context of obesity." Koliwad looked at both mouse and human macrophages, and found that saturated fats triggered a pathway to inflammation different than that activated by an infection. There may be something worth studying in terms of how obesity produces inflammation that might be able to get at the mechanism of how diabetes takes root.
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