Can one pill replace the meal??
Magic in pill form.
This is the latest scientific proposal launched by a group of researchers from the prestigious Salk Institute in the United States to fight obesity and eat without fear of gaining weight with the help of a pill. In reality, more than magic what they offer is a drug that tricks the body into starting to burn fat without consuming any food and, therefore, no calories. The trick is achieved with a drug called "fexaramine", a chemical compound that aspires to become the new anti-obesity promise, although so far it has only shown its effectiveness in mice.
Scientists at the Salk Institute, led by Ronald Evans, explain in the journal "Nature Medicine ", how the treated animals reduced their weight and also improved in all problems related to obesity: cholesterol dropped, glucose was kept at bay and inflammation, a marker related to cancer and cardiovascular disease, was minimized. The researchers are convinced that these good results make "phexaramine" a good candidate to start a clinical trial with real patients. Other centers in the United States, Switzerland, Australia have also collaborated in the finding.
Straight to the gut
One of the advantages of this compound is that, unlike other drugs already approved against overweight such as those that suppress appetite or have caffeine, it does not dissolve in the bloodstream. Although it is taken orally, it only works when it reaches the intestine, thereby reducing side effects on other organs and improving their function.
"This pill is like an imaginary meal,"
explains Evans, director of the Salk Institute’s gene expression laboratory and lead author of the work. The pill sends the same signals that normally occur when you eat a large amount of food. The body prepares to make room to store the new foods, but there are no actual calories and there are no changes in appetite. '
Twenty years of research
The discovery of this promising anti-obesity pill has not been accidental. It comes after two decades of study of a receptor called FXR, a protein that plays a key role in the digestion and storage of fat and sugars. The American researchers showed that the human body activates this protein at the beginning of each meal, preparing for the arrival of new foods. FXR not only causes the liver to release bile acids to aid digestion, but it also changes blood glucose levels and allows the body to burn some fat in preparation for the arrival of food. The new pill manages to activate this protein.
Some pharmaceutical companies had already developed drugs that modulated XRF, but had not been able to do so without significant side effects. They achieved their goal, albeit damaging other organs. The advantage of the new drug is that it acts only in the intestine, respecting the liver, kidneys and adrenal glands. Eating generates a response throughout the body, and "this is the first time that this response has come from the intestine alone," says Evans, despite the fact that eating generates a response throughout the entire body.
One pill daily
If patient experiments work as well as mice, the idea would be for overweight people to take a pill a day to keep the scale in check. Although, as scientists from the Salk Institute already warn, it would act as one more aid in a weight loss plan. That is to say, the drug would not allow to leave aside the gym and physical activity or to follow a reasonable diet.
In the laboratory, the treated mice also took a daily "feraxamine" for five weeks. They began to lose weight when taking it and, unlike the animals that did not take it, they lost fat, their cholesterol dropped and they improved from diabetes. They also noticed changes in the intestinal flora and the harmful white fat became brown and good. Just as there is a "good" and "bad" cholesterol, the metabolism has two types of fatty tissue: a whitish one responsible for the "love handles" and another brown or brown, a "good" fat that consumes calories to maintain body temperature adequate.
Thus, the new drug appears to achieve the goal of losing weight in several ways. Not only does it activate a regulator of digestion and fat storage but it also somehow manages to activate those good, brown fats. This is another of the ways in which many laboratories have pinned their hopes to combat weight gain in the world.
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