Tag: Johannes H. Bauer

UPI: Some organic food may be healthier

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 27, 2013

The international news wire service UPI has covered research carried out in the fruit fly lab of SMU biologist Johannes H. Bauer by Plano, Texas, high school student Ria Chhabra in its March 27, 2013, article “Some organic food may be healthier.”

Bauer, an assistant professor in SMU’s Department of Biological Sciences, mentored Chhabra in her research to examine whether there would be health differences to fruit flies fed an organic diet or a nonorganic diet. Chhabra’s study found that flies fed an organic diet fared better on important health tests, particularly fertility and longevity.

Read the UPI article.

EXCERPT:

UPI
Fruit flies fed an organic diet did better on tests of general health and two significant measures of health — fertility and longevity, U.S. researchers say.

Ria Chhabra a student at Clark High School in Plano, Texas; biologist Johannes H. Bauer of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas; and Santharam Kolli, a research associate at SMU, said the data demonstrated fruit flies raised on organic food extracts performed better on the majority of health tests.

“We don’t know why the flies on the organic diet did better. That will require further research. But this is a start toward understanding potential health benefits,” Chhabra said in a statement.

Chhabra said the study was inspired by a conversation her parents had on the merits of buying organic food.

Bauer said his laboratory utilized one of the most widely used model systems, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, often used to study human diseases such as diabetes, heart function and Alzheimer’s disease because of the fruit fly’s short life cycle and low cost.

The study, published in PLoS One, also found some negative or neutral results using diets prepared from organic raisins, which might suggest the beneficial health effects of organic diets might be dependent on specific food items, Bauer said.

Read the UPI article.

Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Dedman College, Johannes H. Bauer, Ria Chhabra, Santharam Kolli, SMU Department of Biological Sciences

Culture, Society & Family Health & Medicine Plants & Animals Student researchers Videos

Fruit flies fed organic diets are healthier than flies fed nonorganic diets, study finds

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 25, 2013

Fruit flies raised on diets based on organic foods performed better on a variety of health tests, including fertility and longevity

A new study looking at the potential health benefits of organic versus non-organic food found that fruit flies fed an organic diet recorded better health outcomes than flies fed a nonorganic diet.

The study from the lab of SMU biologist Johannes H. Bauer, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, found that fruit flies raised on diets of organic foods performed better on several tests for general health.

“While these findings are certainly intriguing, what we now need to determine is why the flies on the organic diets did better, especially since not all the organic diets we tested provided the same positive health outcomes,” said Bauer, principal investigator for the study.

Sherpa, Type 1a supernova, SMU, ROTSE 3b

Mark Chancey, SMU, Study uncovered bias, factual errors and insufficient curriculum standards in most Texas public school Bible courses

Reidus hilli, John Graf, SMU, coelacanth, Dipluridae,

Fruit flies on organic diets showed improvements on the most significant measures of health, namely fertility and longevity, said high school student researcher Ria Chhabra.

“We don’t know why the flies on the organic diet did better. That will require further research. But this is a start toward understanding potential health benefits,” said Chhabra, a student at Clark High School in Plano, Texas, who led the experiment.

Chhabra sought to conduct the experiments after hearing her parents discuss whether it’s worth it to buy organic foods to achieve possible health benefits.

Bauer, an assistant professor in SMU’s Department of Biological Sciences, mentored Chhabra by helping guide and design her research experiments. The research focus of Bauer’s fruit fly lab is nutrition and its relationship to longevity, health and diabetes.

“It’s rare for a high school student to have such a prominent position in the lab. But Ria has tremendous energy and curiosity, and that convinced me to give this research project a try,” Bauer said.

The findings, “Organically grown food provides health benefits to Drosophila melanogaster,” have been published in the open access journal PLOS One. Buaer and Chhabra co-authored the paper with Santharam Kolli, a research associate at SMU. The article is available from PLOS One online at http://bit.ly/RGB8LJ.

Flies on organic food performed better on some health tests
“The data demonstrated that flies raised on organic food extracts by-and-large performed better on the majority of health tests,” reported the researchers.

It remains unclear why organic diets delivered better health, the researchers said.

The Bauer lab results come at a time when the health effects of organic food are widely debated.

Prior studies by other researchers have found conflicting results when reviewing the scientific literature for data. While several studies have shown elevated nutrient content and lower pesticide contamination levels in organic food, a recent publication reporting a large-scale analysis of all available studies concluded no clear trend was apparent.

Fruit flies were fed extracts from produce purchased at a grocery store
In order to investigate whether organic foods are healthier for consumers, the lab utilized one of the most widely used model systems, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Because of the low costs associated with fly research and the fly’s short life cycle, researchers use fruit flies to study human diseases, from diabetes to heart function to Alzheimer’s disease.

The Bauer lab fruit flies were fed organic and nonorganic produce purchased from a leading national grocery retailer of organic and conventional foods. The flies were fed extracts made from organic and conventional potatoes, soybeans, raisins and bananas. They were not fed any additional nutritional supplements. The researchers tested the effects of each food type independently and avoided any confounding effects of a mixed diet.

The health tests measured longevity, fertility, stress and starvation resistance.

Findings suggest beneficial health effects dependent on specific foods
Some negative or neutral results were obtained using diets prepared from organic raisins, which suggests the beneficial health effects of organic diets are dependent on the specific food item, Bauer said. That might explain some of the inconsistent results in the published studies in the scientific literature, he said, noting some studies suggest there is a nutritional benefit from organic food, while others suggest there is not.

“To our surprise, in the majority of our tests of flies on organic foods, the flies fed organic diets did much better on our health tests than the flies fed conventional food,” Bauer said. “Longevity and fertility are the two most important aspects of fly life. On both of these tests, flies fed organic diets performed much better than flies fed conventional diets. They lived longer, had higher fertility, and had a much higher lifetime reproductive output.”

Factors such as soil condition and latitude where the produce was grown weren’t considered, mimicking a typical grocery store shopping experience. — Margaret Allen

Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

Tags Dedman College, Johannes H. Bauer, Ria Chhabra, Santharam Kolli, SMU Department of Biological Sciences

Health & Medicine Plants & Animals Videos

Human diabetes has new research tool: Overfed fruit flies that develop insulin resistance

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 4, 2012

Researchers find that fruit flies overloading on carbs and protein not only gain weight but have shortened life spans — and develop insulin resistance, a hallmark of Type 2 human diabetes

With Type 2 human diabetes climbing at alarming rates in the United States, researchers are seeking treatments for the disease, which has been linked to obesity and poor diet.

Now biologists at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, report they have developed a new tool that will help researchers better understand this deadly disease.

By manipulating the diets of healthy adult fruit flies, the researchers developed flies that are insulin-resistant, a hallmark of Type 2 diabetes.

Until now, researchers largely have relied on rats, mice and other animals as model systems for exploring the metabolic and genetic changes that take place in diabetics.

A dye test in fruit flies uncovers whether fat cells are responding to insulin. On the left, insulin signaling is active. On the right, insulin signaling is inactive. (Credit: Bauer, SMU)

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has been widely deployed in labs to investigate a wide range of human diseases, from Alzheimer’s to cancer. But the scientific literature hasn’t documented use of the adult fruit fly for studying the metabolic disruptions that are the hallmark of Type 2 diabetes. The fruit fly’s advantages include its low cost and a very short lifespan, both of which enable scientists to undertake rapid screenings in their search for new genetic and drug treatments.

The insulin-resistant fruit fly was developed in the lab of SMU biologist Johannes H. Bauer, principal investigator for the study. It was accomplished by feeding fruit flies a diet high in nutrients, said Bauer, an assistant professor in SMU’s Department of Biological Sciences. That process mimics one of the ways insulin resistance develops in humans — overeating to the point of obesity.

The lab’s insulin-resistant fruit flies now can serve as a highly relevant and efficient model for studying Type 2 diabetes.

“We learned that by manipulating the nutrients of fruit flies, we can make them insulin resistant,” Bauer said. “With this insulin-resistant model we can now go in with pinpoint precision and study the molecular mechanisms of insulin resistance, as well as drug treatments for the condition, as well as how to treat obesity, how to block insulin resistance and how metabolic changes from a specific diet develop. The possibilities are endless.”

The researchers reported their findings in the article “Development of diet-induced insulin resistance in adult Drosophila melanogaster,” published in Biochimica et Biophysica Acta – Molecular Basis of Disease.

Two overfeeding diets, carb and protein, both result in insulin resistance
Insulin, produced by the pancreas, is the hormone that tells our cells to absorb glucose, a necessary sugar molecule that provides our body, particularly the brain, with the energy to function, make repairs, move and grow.

In Type 2 diabetes, a person is insulin-resistant because his or her cells fail to respond to insulin’s signal to absorb glucose. The disregulation of glucose upsets the body’s delicate internal equilibrium, causing massive disruptions in normal cellular processes. These interruptions manifest in multiple disease symptoms, making Type 2 diabetes difficult to characterize, treat and cure.

To provide a good base model organism to study aspects of this complex disease, researchers in the Bauer lab wanted to determine whether flies develop diabetes-like metabolic changes when fed different diets. The researchers developed the insulin-resistant flies in two different ways: One group of fruit flies was overfed a carbohydrate-loaded diet; a second group of flies was overfed a protein-loaded diet. In both cases, the disruption had a profoundly detrimental effect on the flies’ health and physiology.

SMU biologist Siti Nur Sarah Morris, lead author on the study, said the results the researchers observed were both expected and unexpected. The researchers expected the flies to gain weight, which they did. Carb-loaded flies gained excessive weight and got fat, just like humans who overeat sweets, french fries, pasta and ice cream. Protein-loaded flies also gained weight, but upon extreme overfeeding they lost weight, just like humans who follow the popular Atkins Diet, a weight loss program in which participants eat only meat, seafood and eggs.

The researchers expected the carb-loaded fruit flies to develop insulin resistance, which they did.

In a surprising result, however, the fruit flies that overate protein also developed insulin resistance, but at a quicker and more severe rate.

“Carb-loaded flies gain weight. Protein-loaded flies gain and then lose weight. So the two diets have exactly opposite effects on metabolism,” Bauer said. “But too much of either one of them causes insulin resistance. That surprised us.”

Overfed flies had shortened lifespans, differences in fertility
In other findings, carb-loaded flies experienced a profound decline in egg-laying, a measurement of fertility. In contrast, protein-loaded flies first experienced increased egg-laying, but the extreme diet led to decreased egg laying. Both diets led to shortened longevity, the scientists reported.

“The high-protein flies looked frail and unhealthy. They moved less, almost as if sedated,” Morris said. “The fatter flies on the high-carb diet had massively decreased fertility; they flew less but still tried to move.”

While both diets resulted in insulin resistance, differences were remarkable.

“The carb data imply a linear relationship between carb levels and health. The more carbs, the more weight, the more sugar storage and fat, the more insulin resistance and the less fertility,” Bauer said. “But with protein, this relationship becomes parabolic, meaning all readouts go up, then come down again. The decreased storage we liken to a catabolic state that is primarily destructive for the body’s optimum metabolic functioning, such as the ketosis typically seen in people eating Atkins-type diets.”

Besides Morris and Bauer, other authors on the study were SMU students Claire Coogan, Khalil Chamseddin and Santharam Kolli. Other co-authors, from Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, La., are Jeffrey N. Keller, director, Institute of Dementia Research & Prevention, and Sun Ok Fernandez-Kim. The research was funded by the National Institute on Aging. — Margaret Allen

Tags Dedman College, Johannes H. Bauer, Siti Nur Sarah Morris, SMU Department of Biological Sciences

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news

Fruit flies raised on diets based on organic foods performed better on a variety of health tests, including fertility and longevity

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news

Researchers find that fruit flies overloading on carbs and protein not only gain weight but have shortened life spans — and develop insulin resistance, a hallmark of Type 2 human diabetes

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news