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Why Our Tongues Our Are Worst Enemy in Controlling Diabetes

Posted: Friday, November 11, 2005

The tongue has built-in taste for fatty food. In experiments with rodents, The fact that the tongue harbors receptors for fatty acids could shed new light on appetite control and obesity, according to the researchers, led by Philippe Besnard of the University of Bourgogne.

Scientists have speculated that the tongue may have a receptor designed to detect fat, but this study is the first to pinpoint one, according to Besnard and his colleagues. The receptor, a protein called CD36, is already known to exist in many tissues and is involved in fat storage, among other jobs; it is also goes by the name of fatty acid transporter, or FAT.

Rats and mice, not to mention many humans, have a natural preference for fatty food, and rats have already been shown to have CD36 proteins in their taste buds.

To see whether CD36 might be the tongue's fat detector, Besnard and his colleagues studied rats and mice that were either normal or had the gene for CD36 "knocked out," inactivating the protein.

They found that while the genetically normal animals naturally opted for fattier fare when given the choice, the CD36-deficient mice had no such preference. And when the researchers put fatty acids on the tongues of the normal animals, this alone triggered a release of fat-processing substances from the digestive organs. Again, the same was not true of mice lacking CD36 activity.

Besnard stated that, though the body's regulation of fat intake is complex, these findings point to the importance of CD36 receptors on the tongue.

Source: Diabetes In Control: