Muscle-to-fat interaction: a two-way street?

摘要

In a recent issue of The Journal of Physiology, a study by Sitnick et at (2009) sheds new light on the role of muscle and fat in lifestyle-related diseases. They show that chronic high fat feeding impairs the ability of murine skeletal muscle to hypertrophy in response to a mechanical load. If their experimental study can be translated into human biology, it means that the consequence of a high fat diet is not just an increase in fat mass, but a decrease in muscle mass.