Fat, inactive yet healthy: Could hibernating bears hold clues to treating diabetes in humans?

Just before hibernation season, brown bears eat a lot – as much as 20,000 daily calories, enough to put on around four kilos each day. And then they barely move, for months.

This is part of bears’ adaptive strategies to survive long winters without food.

If we humans did the same, we would gain dangerous amounts of weight, and then we would probably develop diabetes.

But the remarkable metabolism of hibernating bears avoids that, and scientists are exploring what we can learn from them to improve our own health.

"Many of us are absolutely fascinated by how bears are able to gain so much weight during the year and then go into hibernation and use all the energy stored, and then emerge from hibernation active and with no negative consequences of this dramatic weight gain and loss throughout every year," Professor Joanna L. Kelley, one of the study researchers from Washington State University, told Euronews Next.

One of the interesting things about bears is that during hibernation, they become insulin-resistant, and during the active season, they're insulin-sensitive, she explained.

"That means that, every year, they have reversible insulin resistance," she said, adding that understanding this unique phenomenon could hold the key to treating insulin resistance and ultimately diabetes in humans.

"We thought, wow, if we could figure out how bears are able to do this naturally every year with no negative consequences, then maybe that will give us some information on how to potentially develop new therapeutics for humans: let's leverage the incredible natural biology and learn about that in bears. And so that's exactly what we've done," she said.

Along with a group of scientists, Professor Kelley has identified eight key proteins –