Maximum Effort

Atticus J. Brown 3/7/15

The Effect of Dietary Calcium or Ca^2+ on Weight Loss

To begin, Ca^2+ is being utilized to bring about a certain result when combined to adipocytes that have been formed through lipogenesis, which is the break down of food into fatty reserves. The reasoning for the experiment is to see whether dietary calcium has the ability to slow down the formation of adipocytes, which in high amounts results in obesity in human organisms. Through a complicated process, many factors contribute to this wait loss and some common chronic diseases cease to exist when measures such as consuming a dietary calcium (dairy products) rich diet can lower the risk of contracting those chronic diseases and significantly improve prevention of those diseases before contraction even occurs.

The subjects of the experiment were limited to overweight African Americans, from the beginning the hypothesis was confirmed because when the subjects transferred from only getting ~400 mg/day to getting ~1000 mg/day of the dietary calcium, the subjects body weight went down 4.9 kg in one year or 10.78 lbs (Zemel 147S). I assume that is without exercise, but that is not specified anywhere in the essay. So, once they conducted the experiment they found that dietary calcium works far better than its supplemental counter part.

When they had such conclusive results from the first test results, they went on to understand why the dietary calcium provoked such a reaction. The findings showed the gene agouti is a part of the issue as an “...obesity gene expressed in human adipocytes” (Zemel 147S). In order to test it more thoroughly, they used mice, which had a similar gene with the same effect. When the gene is operational, it creates fat and that fat is stored in the adipocytes. However, at the same time inhibiting the process of lipolysis, the breaking down of fats. This resulting in an over storage of fat, however with treatment (one being a dietary calcium rich...