Current thinking holds that obesity derives primarily from overnutrition (though compelling
arguments for other mechanisms like endocrine disruption by environmental pollutants also
gain support from the literature). In animals overnutrition is initially handled by adipose
tissue expansion however exhaustion of this route of lipid sequestering results in oversupply
of lipid to other tissues including skeletal muscle heart liver and others. Failure of these
tissues to clear excess lipids through either metabolism or sequestration into putatively inert
triacylglycerols results in perturbation of bioactive lipid metabolism in cells. In particular
aberrant generation of bioactive sphingolipids is implicated in a multitude of pathological
outcomes of metabolic disease including insulin resistance inflammation cardiomyopathy and
others. This volume addresses not only the fundamentals of sphingolipid metabolism and analysis
but also the roles of sphingolipids in these disease processes.
