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Friday, November 11, 2005

Thin! thin! thin!

Posted by on November 11 at 9:06 AM

According to the NYTimes, researchers at Stanford University claim to have found a hormone that “sharply reduces the desire to eat.”
The substance, obestatin (OHB-statin), is manufactured in the stomach and small intestine, and tells the brain to signal the body to “eat less.”

Mice who tested the hormone (with weight problems, assumedly) ate half their normal portions and lost weight after eight days.

UW obesity researcher Dr. David E. Cummings (who was not involved in the study) said, “The chances that this is going to hold up in humans are very high.”

`People dislike injections, so drug companies are more likely to try to develop a molecule that mimics obestatin but can be taken by mouth’, said Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University.

Such as a bacon-wrapped pellet, perhaps? What do the mice think?

Sadly, while these mice ate less, they didn’t shed as much weight as one would expect from mice on diet pills—which might intimate that their bodies lost muscle mass and not extra fat.

Still, scientists agreed that they looked great.

Also: According to Scientific American, French scientists might have pinpointed a receptor in taste buds that is responsible for sensing fat, which could be a vital first step in weight loss therapy. With a little help from technology, people could me munching on wood chips and nutrasweet packets, and be thin! thin! thin! in a matter of years.

Sigh.

What ever happened to good ol’ fashioned gastric bypass surgery?