So in males, genetic variation related to these traits will have almost no effect at all.” Manipulating Fat Genes “This is indicative of a biological program that is active in females, but inactive in males. “Our results indicate that the same genetic variant will have an effect in females, but not in males, in particular for distribution of body fat between the legs and trunk,” Rask-Andersen says. "So in males, genetic variation related to these traits will have almost no effect at all. Even if a man has one of those genes that would help shuttle fat away from his middle, that gene isn’t actively working to redistribute the fat cells in his body, the way it is in a female. Rather, it’s that 37 of these genes might only be active in women. He calls those differences “striking,” chalking them up to the action of 98 genes that he identified in the genetic data of the individuals he studied.Īs important as those genes are, Rask-Andersen adds that they’re part of a very complex system: It isn’t simply that women have genes that shuttle fat into their lower halves and men don’t. In their trunks, men carried 62.2 percent of their body fat, whereas women carried only 50 percent. In the study, Rask-Andersen and his colleagues found that men carried 28 percent their body fat in the legs and hips, whereas women carried 39.7 percent of their body fat in those areas. However, it is possible to sum the effects and generate a polygenic score that is applicable to each individual and describe a meaningful amount of the variation of these traits.” Legs, Hips, and Trunk “In general, each variant contributes a small amount to the overall trait. “I did not expect to see such contrasts between males and females,” Rask-Andersen tells Inverse. His work corroborates this observation with hard data. It’s common knowledge that men tend to accumulate fat in the midsection and women tend to accumulate in the legs and waist, says Mathias Rask-Andersen, Ph.D., lead author of the paper and researcher at Uppsala University’s medical genetics and genomics research group. The study results were published this week in Nature Communications. The fate of fat cells - whether they end up in the stomach, legs, or hips - might come down to the effect of just 98 genes, regardless of how many avocados you eat, how much apple cider vinegar you chug, or whether you are male or female. Thanks to the body measurements of 362,499 people, we can officially say that the places where fat accumulates in the body in men and women is far from random.
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