We’ve just heard from Appetite that they’ve accepted our paper ‘O-GlcNAc cycling mediates energy balance by regulating caloric memory’. The paper came out of a collaboration between us and the labs of Chad Slawson and Udayan Apte at Kansas University and John Hanover at NIDDK (NIH), USA. In the paper we describe our discovery that O-GlcNAc seems to regulate how a meal affects future intake by affecting the formation of a caloric memory of how many calories the meal contained. The memory function is built into satiation such that the memory impacts after how many calories we feel satiatied, or that we’ve had enough food. Without the memory energy imbalance develops. Discovering a mechanism by which food intake and subsequently body weight are regulated over time may be part of the answer to how body weight remains stable over long periods of time – a question that has stalked the fields of food intake and body weight research for many years. Today most dietary interventions and treatments agaist obesity, a condition with excessive accumulation of body weight and fat, don’t work over time. After a short period of weight loss people bounce back. Likewise, it is very difficult with current treatment protocols for patients with anorexia nervosa to increase and keep their body weight at more healthy levels. Targeting caloric memory may be a mechanism by which patients with unhealthy body weight can get help that works not just temporarily but over time.
