http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-02-natural-sugar-fatty-liver-disease.html
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.
...
"In general, if you feed a mouse a high-sugar diet, it gets a fatty liver," said first author Brian J. DeBosch, MD, PhD, a pediatric gastroenterologist. "We found that 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. Those mice also had lower body weights at the end of the study and lower levels of circulating cholesterol, fatty acids and triglycerides."
...
Trehalose is a natural sugar found in plants and insects and consists of two glucose molecules bound together. While it is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for human consumption,
DeBosch cautions that more research is required before trehalose could be tested in people with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease as part of a clinical trial.
"I can't recommend it to my patients yet," said DeBosch, who sees patients at St. Louis Children's Hospital. "We know the mice that received drinking water with three percent trehalose lost weight, and we suspect that weight loss was due to loss of fat, but we can't be certain that's the only effect. We need more studies to make sure they were not losing bone or muscle mass."
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