Obesity Panacea  In his post last Friday, Peter did a very nice
job of introducing the the counter-intuitive idea that having
too little fat, rather than too much, causes many of the
metabolic problems of obesity.  Today I thought it would be good
to continue on with this theme and to focus on some of the
mechanisms that explain this strange relationship.  Let’s begin
where Peter ended off:  Currently, the emerging theory of why
obesity is associated with metabolic disease risk suggests that
it is not the excess amount of fat that results in problems –
but rather, it is the inability of the fat tissue (specifically
subcutaneous) to expand enough via the development of numerous,
healthy adipocytes or fat cells to store all the excess calories
being ingested.  Fat tissue is made up of many small fat cells,
called adipocytes, each of which stores a single droplet of
lipid. When we say that there are problems with having too
little fat, we really mean that there are problems with having
too few adipocytes.  For t