A pill may be able to replace your third helping of turkey at future dinners for Thanksgiving and Christmas. There is a newly discovered chemical that is found naturally in our bodies that may be capable of blocking hunger and significantly reducing weight gain.
Mice, rats, and presumably humans are producing a chemical after eating a meal that is rich in fats. When researchers gave mice and rats an extra dose of this particular chemical, not only did they eat less, but they also ended up shedding more weight without any negative effects. If similar tests in larger animals continue to pan out, then humans will be next, according to a molecular biologist at Yale University named Gerald Shulman. His team discovered this completely new role for a molecule within our body, known as N-acylphosphatidylethanolamine or NAPE.
According to Shulman, there are very few agents out there that are capable of treating obesity, but scientists are extremely interested in trying out a clinical trial to see if giving NAPE back to the human body would reduce food intakes. Fatty foods have been confounding researchers who are looking at how the body determines when it is satiated. Levels of fatty acids actually fall when people eat greasy, fatty foods, only to increase with hunger. This peculiar behavior is what prompted scientists like Shulman and Matthew Gillum to scour the blood for the compounds responsible for shooting up after a fatty meal is consumed.
Their search turned up NAPE, or N-acylphosphatidylethanolamine. Fatty acids in our foods are converted into NAPE within our stomach before they head into the blood stream. From that point, the chemical races directly into the appetite center of the brain, in the gypothalamus, shutting down the neurons that are involved in signaling that our bodies are hungry.
This accurately explains why when rats and mice were injected with NAPE, they act as if they had gorged on food. They show little interest in further stuffing their faces. After five days of the NAPE injections, the rats in the study ate 30 percent less food overall, and lost a quarter of their rate. Rodents that did not get the NAPE injections, on the other hand, actually gained a little weight during the study. Shulman's team did not notice any other changes in the rats and mice fed with NAPE, indicating that there may not be any side effects to artificially supplanting the body with NAPE.
Right now it is too early to tell whether or not giving humans NAPE will offer the same benefit, but humans do produce the molecule in the same way that rats and mice do. Shulman's team is now working to determine how this works with fatty food intake and whether or not it will benefit humans in the future.
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