Labrador retrievers, overeating and overweight?

 This article discusses genetic links between some dog breeds and obesity. Most specifically this study looked a labrador retrivers, a mutation in the POMC gene. This gene mutation affects the dog's appetite, metabolism, and brain pathways. Dogs with this mutation are hungry all the time and burn fewer calories than a dogs without this mutation. In order to better maintain these dogs the text encourages owners to spread out feeding and take steps to make sure that the dogs are receiving proper amounts of exercise. 

    I found this article very interesting because I didn't know that overeating could be traced back to a gene mutation. I'm interested to see if this kind of research can be performed on humans as well as other species. I also wonder what kinds of treatments can be developed to help with this mutation. 

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Can we Blame our Genetics for Overeating?

The decisions in our life like the amount and types of food we consume are controlled by both personal choices and genetic history. The FTO gene is the first gene to be linked to obesity, and one small change in the gene is the difference between low risk and high risk obesity. Individuals who have one high risk copy have a 30% chance to develop obesity, and those who have two high risk copies of the gene have a 70% chance of developing obesity.  A survey of individuals with either one or two copies of the high risk gene revealed that not everyone who was genetically prone to obesity was obese.

The topic of overeating is also a nature vs. nurture case because an individual's risk for obesity is affected by their genetic make up but also the environment in which they live in. Our physiological response to eating or any other habit is associated with a reward system within the brain. It's been established that gene variation can increase a person's chances of being addicted to eating or any other addiction. However not everyone who has this gene variation will get addicted. I agree with this article because an individual's genetic history can make someone more prone to a certain addiction, but the environment in which they are in also plays a significant role.

Of Canines and Obesity

Many people in the United States own dogs, and much of the time, regular exercise and walks keep these dogs filled with energy, playing with and following their owners with vigor. However, just like humans, dogs can become lethargic and eat too much, becoming overweight and not wanting to move much at all. The dog breed that seems to have the most trouble with this specific problem is one of the more popular breeds in the United States, the Labrador retriever.

Researchers from the Cambridge University labs has concluded that this abnormality is due to a DNA variation that keeps the brain from sending signals to the body that it is satisfied. Most of the time, when animals eat food, receptors in their brain make sure to activate when too much food enters the body. This sometimes manifests into a stomach ache to warn the body that the amount of food is excess, or in a more extreme case, send a message to the body to throw up to get rid of said excess food. However, in some animals like the Labrador retriever, the receptors are damaged by a gene variation, and up to 23% of all Labrador retrievers have at least one copy of this variation.

This gene being affected is called pro-opiomelanocortinm or POMC for short, and it codes for a protein of the same name.This gene controls hunger and fullness, and a variation can cause a delay or absence of feeling full. According to the article "the brains of Labrador retrievers may be hard wired for obesity," but as Eleanor Raffan, the author of the journal Cell Metabolism, says, it's "not a straight forward picture." What is straightforward is that when numerous dogs were studies and had their behavior profiles analyzed, it was discovered that in the POMC, there was a deletion of the 14th base pair resulted in a β-MSH and β-endorphin break, and that break is related to fat creation and increased body weight. In an interesting turn of events, most of the endorphin breaks happened in service dog, which prompted scientists to learn more about the gene so that they could try and find a connection between humans and dogs in terms of the POMC gene, since both species have the variation in slightly different forms.

Finding out if the genes in Labrador retrievers correspond to human genes would be very beneficial to human health because scientists can see what happens in human minds to trigger people to eat more then they should, and if they can isolate and fix the gene, or at least keep tabs on it, then work for a cure to obesity could be in the works, and that project would be worthwhile to the entirety of human health, as well as animal health if the Labrador genes are isolated and studied too.