Hormones are the new diet magic
This one’s from the “completely unsurprising” department. Oxyntomodulin injections prevent people from overreating by promoting a feeling of fullness. Oxyntomodulin is the hormone that tells your brain that your stomach is full.
Typically when one eats, it takes approximately 20 minutes for the feeling of fullness to propagate to the brain and tell you to put your fork. This is the reason that if you’re like me and you house your food, you can eat more than you could if you ate slowly. Researchers found that by artificially stimulating the feeling of fullness, people ate less, and tended to lose weight.
This makes me wonder if slower eating is just another reason that our European cousins tend to be less obese than Americans. Slower eating, smaller portions, less fast food.
It should come as no surprise then, that pharmaceutical companies are already working on an oral dosage form that will likely be available in a few years. It should be noted before one is tempted to hate on obese people for eating too much and being too lazy to lose weight themselves that there is a medical condition where the patient is naturally deficient in oxyntomodulin and always feels hungry as a result. However… I also think that the drug should be available to those who are unable to conquer obesity on their own for whatever reason. Obesity is a huge killer in the United States and much of the rest of the first world.
<Insert obigatory, generic diet and exercise exhortation here.>
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[...] I’ve written about obesity in the past, and I couldn’t pass up this particular article I just came across. The basic premise is that if one eats more than usual and gains some weight over the course of, say, a week, one is not inclined to eat less to make up for it. The possible reason cited: “The study suggests that eating behavior does not normally respond to internal cues, such as physiological mechanisms involved in the regulation of body weight, but to external cues,” said David Levitsky, professor of nutritional sciences and of psychology at Cornell. “In other words, when the subjects returned to the same environment — in this case our eating lab — they returned to their same eating patterns, regardless of any biological signals.” [...]
Pingback by polyscience.org » People don’t eat less to compensate for overeating — August 15, 2005 @ 11:06 pm
[...] Back in July, I wrote about a hormone, oxyntomodulin, that had been isolated which tells the brain that the stomach is full. Pharmaceutical companies are now working on turning this knowledge into an oral diet drug. Now, another compound has surfaced which suppresses the desire to eat and drink. This one has its roots in Scottish medieval times: Augustinian monks have chewed the plant to suppress all urges to eat or drink. The plant, lathyrus linfolius, was processed at a hospital there to make a potion. It is thought that this potion was brewed to help villagers lose weight or cope with the effects of a bad harvest. [...]
Pingback by polyscience.org » Herbal diet supplements — August 30, 2005 @ 5:00 pm