Research

Hormonal

Adipocyte ATP-citrate lyase (ACLY) is essential for handling dietary carbohydrates and maintaining metabolic homeostasis in females, as its deficiency leads to lipodystrophy-like phenotypes, hepatic steatosis, and insulin resistance when consuming high-carbohydrate diets.

For women, high-carbohydrate diets may pose a higher metabolic risk if adipose tissue function is compromised, potentially leading to fat storage in the liver and insulin resistance. Men may tolerate similar carbohydrate loads better. This suggests that women might benefit from monitoring carbohydrate quality and quantity more closely, especially if they have underlying metabolic vulnerabilities.

GoodQualifiesHIGH confidence
When fed a high-sucrose diet, AclyFAT-/- females exhibit a lipodystrophy-like phenotype, with minimal fat accumulation, insulin resistance, and hepatic lipid accumulation, whereas AclyFAT-/- males have only mild metabolic phenotypes.
Sully Fernandez et al. · Cell Reports · 2019

Why this rating

Strong experimental evidence using conditional knockout mice, RNA-seq, metabolite analysis, and in vivo feeding studies, though results are specific to mice.

Source

Adipocyte ACLY Facilitates Dietary Carbohydrate Handling to Maintain Metabolic Homeostasis in Females

Sully Fernandez et al. · Cell Reports · 2019

DOI 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.04.112

mechanism_onlyCited 75×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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