A New Fat Fighting Drug is showing a Lot of Promise
America is known to the rest of the world as the fattest country on the planet. (We’re number One! We’re number One!) Somehow I don’t think this fact is a cause for celebration! Unfortunately, we really are number one on the list of fat countries, with the United Kingdom falling in behind and Canada, our neighbor to the North coming in third place. We have even had to coin a new word for fat: Obese. Apparently now there is fat, and then there is obese. We have actually gotten too fat to be fat! (Think about it…)
It is no surprise that we are dying of heart disease, diabetes and cancer, and researchers have been trying to come up with the miracle cure for obesity for the last few years. There have been a few breakthroughs, but so far nothing has really had dramatic enough results to be called a cure. The only thing that is guaranteed to work is diet and regular exercise. However, since we seem to be miserable failures at doing those 2 things, researchers are continuing their studies!
One of the latest studies on the subject of obesity may have actually achieved the results we have been anxiously waiting for – a cure for obesity! We actually can’t call it a cure yet; before anyone can claim that something cures a disease or an ailment, it has to be an FDA approved drug. However, this new discovery may soon be FDA approved, as long as it makes it through some final tests.
Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas created a drug that they have named “Fatostatin.” This drug proved in the tests already done on it, that it can actually stop the body from making fat. Instead of your body getting energy from fat, this new drug releases energy from food. Fatostatin not only stops the body from making fat, but it also appears to reverse diabetes and lower cholesterol at the same time. This will make it a very popular drug , and if it is approved, it may just make history!
So far, all of the tests have been done on mice, which makes the findings inconclusive, because mice and rats lose weight at an alarmingly fast rate. There have been many “new drugs” in the past that have been wildly successful on mice and rats, but failures on humans. However, researchers are extremely hopeful about Fatostatin. It is doing more than many drugs in this testing stage have, and they really think this could be it. We could really have a cure for obesity in our hands very soon. More tests need to be done, and if they are successful, the FDA will have to run their own tests as well before Fatostatin hits the shelves, most likely under a new name. If all does not go as planned, then it will be back to the drawing board for the scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.
