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Obesity has become a worldwide health problem over the past three decades. During obesity, metabolic dysfunction of white adipose tissue (WAT) is a key factor increasing the risk of type 2 diabetes. A variety of diet approaches have been proposed for the prevention and treatment of obesity. The low-protein high-fat diet (LPHF) is a special kind of high-fat diet, characterized by the intake of a low amount of protein, while compared to typical high-fat diet, may induce weight loss and browning of WAT. Physical activity is another effective intervention to treat obesity by reducing WAT mass, inducing browning of WAT. In order to determine whether an LPHF, along with exercise enhanced body weight loss and body fat loss as well as the synergistic effect of an LPHF and exercise on energy expenditure in a mice model, we combined a 10-week LPHF with an 8-week forced treadmill training. Meanwhile, a traditional high-fat diet (HPHF) containing the same fat and relatively more protein was introduced as a comparison. In the current study, we further analyzed energy metabolism-related gene expression, plasma biomarkers, and related physiological changes. When comparing to HPHF, which induced a dramatic increase in body weight and WAT weight, the LPHF led to considerable loss of body weight and WAT, without muscle mass and strength decline, while it exhibited a risk of liver and pancreas damage. The mechanism underlying the LPHF-induced loss of body weight and WAT may be attributed to the synergistically upregulated expression of Ucp1 in WAT and Fgf21 in the liver, which may enhance energy expenditure. The 8-week training did not further enhance weight loss and increased plasma biomarkers of muscle damage when combined with LPHF. Furthermore, LPHF reduced the expression of fatty acid oxidation-related genes in adipose tissues, muscle tissues, and liver. Our results indicated that an LPHF has potential for obesity treatment, while the physiological condition should be monitored during application.

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Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the major neurological disorders causing death in the elderly worldwide. As a neurodegenerative disease that is difficult to prevent and cure, the pathogenesis of AD is complex and there is no effective cure. A variety of natural products derived from plants have been reported to have promising anti‐AD activities, including flavonoids, terpenes, phenolic acids and alkaloids, which can effectively relieve the symptoms of AD in a variety of ways. This paper mainly reviews the pharmacological activity and mechanisms of natural products against AD. Although the clinical efficacy of these plants still needs to be determined by further high‐quality studies, it may also provide a basis for future researchers to study anti‐AD in depth.

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This study proposed and evaluated a novel and scalable process based on enzymatic hydrolysis for the preparation of α-amylase inhibitor (α-AI) in seeds of white kidney bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). The process mainly involved heat treatment (70°C/30 min), enzymatic hydrolysis, isoelectric precipitation and 70% ethanol precipitation. The optimal preparation parameters for enzymatic hydrolysis and isoelectric precipitation were as follows: Flavourzyme 500MG was used for enzymatic hydrolysis and the ultimate hydrolysate was obtained at 180 min, followed by isoelectric precipitation at pH 3.6. The loss of miscellaneous proteins and purification fold in the novel process were relatively low (85.84% and 4.74, respectively), while the α-AI activity yield (67.12%) was much higher than the values obtained by chromatography. Combined with the SDS-PAGE analysis, enzymatic hydrolysis proved to have modified the pI and alcohol-solubility of the miscellaneous proteins, which has a favorable influence on isoelectric precipitation and ethanol precipitation for the preparation of the α-AI.

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