Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition closely linked to obesity, affects roughly 25 percent of people in the U.S. There is no drug treatment for the disease, although weight loss can reduce the buildup of fat in the liver.
Now, studying mice, new research shows that a natural sugar called trehalose prevents the sugar fructose — thought to be a major contributor to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease — from entering the liver and triggers a cellular housekeeping process that cleans up excess fat buildup inside liver cells.
The research, by a team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, appears Feb. 23 in the journal Science Signaling.
If you feed a mouse a diet high in fructose plus provide drinking water that contains three percent trehalose, you completely block the development of a fatty liver.
