Biological Pathway
Lipid Metabolism
Last updated
How the body makes, stores, moves and burns fats. It covers lipolysis, releasing stored fat as free fatty acids; fatty acid oxidation, burning them for energy; lipogenesis, making and storing them; and the transport of fats in the lipoprotein particles a standard lipid panel measures. Records tagged here may concern any of those, and they are separately regulated.
Why it matters here
The distinction that matters most on a compound record is between releasing fat and burning it: a rise in free fatty acids in the blood is a different measurement from a fall in fat mass, and only the second is what most readers mean.
What it is not
Lipid metabolism is not fat loss: a compound can mobilise stored fat with no change in body composition if the released fat is simply re-stored. Fat oxidation measured over an hour in a laboratory also does not add up to weight change over weeks.
Also called
- lipid metabolism
- fat metabolism
- lipid handling
- lipid oxidation
Compounds carrying this term
None on file yet. This term is in the controlled vocabulary but no compound record currently uses it — which is a statement about our coverage, not about the term.