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Comment by languagehacker | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of how DNP, a chemical used for creating explosives, has been used as a weight-loss drug. It's surprisingly effective, but overdosing on it will result in a long, hot, agonizing death.

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The fundamental reason why 2,4-Dinitrophenol (DNP) burns fat is surprisingly complicated. Basically, it intoxicates mitochondria in your cells being their power houses. These organelles create ATP, a universal metabolic energy carrier, by maintaining a proton gradient across its membrane. By means of chemical osmosis this gradient is what drives the ATP synthase enzyme under normal conditions. Now, DNP is capable of shuttling protons along the gradient and short-circuits this process catalyzing the conversion of fatty acids into worthless heat.

Interestingly, babies use a controlled variant of this mechanism to help maintain their body temperature thanks to their brown fat tissue. It makes babies look cute and keep warm. :)

This is an animation and cursory explanation of ATP synthesis, with suitably dramatic music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT5AXGS1aL8

This animation and associated narration is much more detailed, but a bit slow for something you haven't vetted your interest in yet :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXpzp4RDGJI

DNP was banned after causing a lot of deaths. Still a fascinating drug, I don't remember exactly how it worked but it disrupted respiration so that less ATP was produced from electrons while their energy instead was 'spent' increasing heat

There’s a surprising amount of this. Nitroglycerin is both an explosive and a heart drug, of course, and gunpowder was probably originally developed as an alchemical ‘medicine’.

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