Scientists have been scouring the
world in recent decades for all manner of miracle plants that can help
people slim down. As the market for weight-loss products and supplements
has grown to a multi-billion-dollar industry, they've looked at dandelions,
coffee and nuts, among other things. They've been cultivating an
edible succulent called the caralluma fimbriata chewed
by tribesmen in rural India to control their hunger during a day's
hunt. And they have been trying to isolate and extract whatever it is in
an African plant called hoodia, which looks like a spikey
pickle, that tricks you into feeling full even if you haven't eaten a bite.
But none of these has been more
promising in early studies than a traditional Chinese medicine known as thunder
god vine.
In
a paper published in the journal Cell on Thursday, scientists
said an extract made from the plant reduces food intake and has led to a
dramatic 45 percent decrease in body weight in obese mice.
Study author Omut Ozcan, an
endocrinologist at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said
the substance appears to work by enhancing a fat-derived hormone called leptin
that signals to the body when it has enough fuel and energy. Humans who lack
leptin, can eat voraciously and can become morbidly obese.
"During the last two decades,
there has been an enormous amount of effort to treat obesity by breaking down
leptin resistance, but these efforts have failed. The message from this study
is that there is still hope for making leptin work," Ozcan said in a
statement.
In the study, Ozcan found that with
only one week of treatment with an extract made from thunder god vine --
which they called Celastrol -- the mice reduced their food intake by 80 percent
as compared with those who did not get the extract. Three weeks later,
those mice had lost nearly half of their initial body weight.
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