• Question: why do people get fat, like how do we produce fat

    Asked by dkmegan to Mike, Pip, Tianfu, Tim, Tom on 29 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Tim Stephens

      Tim Stephens answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      It’s how your body stores spare energy that it doesn’t need right now. I am not exactly sure how we produce it, but a biology textbook (or the pathology zone on here) will almost certainly give you an answer.

    • Photo: Tom Lister

      Tom Lister answered on 30 Jun 2012:

      Fat is taken out of foods in the upper intestine, as it is broken down by lipase. It is only these broken down things that get through the intestine wall into the blood. The blood then transports these to adipose tissue (fat cells) which swell as they get filled up.
      We can also produce fat from sugars. Fat is just lots of sugar molecules joined together to form long chains – and this is also done by enzymes.

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