The Maladaptive Response of Adipose Tissue to High Fat Diet Feeding

The ability of organisms, from yeast to humans, to safely store energy as dense hydrophobic carbon chains secured away in lipid droplets represents an incredible evolutionary advantage. The further use of adipocytes as a professional lipid storage cells emphasizes the importance and benefit of safe long term energy storage. As lipids are capable of acting intracellularly as both signaling molecules and detergents, there proper storage and sequestration is of pivotal importance if they are to be used for the maintenance of energy homeostasis. With the safe storage of energy dense lipids and their later partitioning to other metabolically active tissues, the production of ATP can continue to occur in multiple organs during periods of food deprivation. With this in mind, many early investigators saw the importance of adipose tissue, though its true importance was not recognized till relatively recently.