Double Fat

An unhealthy diet doesn’t just overload the body with fat, it also hampers cells’ ability to manage that fat safely. A study on how the liver copes with fat surges illustrates this conclusion. Researchers compared liver cells in fasting mice and those on a ‘Western diet’. In liver cells of fasting mice, mitochondria (outlined in the pictured liver section from a mouse on a normal diet) and lipid droplets (fat storage units, pink) couple together closely and maintain a healthy balance between fat storage and energy conversion in mitochondria. In Western diet mice these contact points are reduced, meaning fat accumulates in oversized lipid droplets or leaks into the cell as harmful free fatty acids. The researchers also identified a mediator of this connection, and a way to tweak it to tune fat flux in liver cells, suggesting a possible point of entry for new treatments for liver diseases.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Sun Woo Sophie Kang and colleagues
• Cell Biology and Imaging Sections, Thoracic and GI Malignancies Branch, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Metabolism, March 2026