As more and more people suffer from obesity and, consequently, obesity-related diseases, scientists are faced with a new question: is there a pill that can fight obesity? Doctors have long recommended overweight and obese people have an active life and a healthy diet based mainly on vegetables and fruits, but what if they can’t comply with the requests. We all know that it’s easier to swallow a pill and wait for the miracles of science to happen. Is that wrong, is that good? I guess everybody needs to answer on its own, but I think a combination of pills and healthy habits would be certainly of more help in the case of obese people.

When it comes to anti-obesity pills, there are few choices on the market and no one can guarantee you they will really work. But US scientists have now identified a fatty substance that exists naturally in our body which blocks hunger and weight gain. Mice and rats, and presumably humans, produce the chemical after eating a fatty meal.

German Shulman, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor of internal medicine and of cellular and molecular physiology at Yale University School of Medicine, gave mice an extra dose of this chemical, called N-acylphosphatidylethanolamine (NAPE) and found that they ate less and shed weight, with no side effects. Tests will have to be made on larger animals, but if they turn out to be well, humans might be next.

“We’re excited but we have to be cautious. We would love to be able to take this to man tomorrow because we need effective ways to treat obesity and, right now, we have very few agents that work effectively. But we have much work to do,” Shulman said. He and his colleagues are well known for their work on understanding how insulin resistance develops and leads to diabetes.

In this study, rats were given NAPE for five days and there was a continuous reduction in food intake and a decline in body weight. To be more explicit, they ate 30 percent less food and lost a quarter of their weight. “It suggests NAPE or long-acting NAPE analogs may treat obesity,” Shulman said.

The study is the first of its kind. It clearly showed that injecting NAPE into the rats’ bloodstream lowered their food consumption without making food unappealing to them. The study also found a connection between injecting NAPE directly into the rats’ brain and a drop in calorie consumption.

If these findings apply to humans too, they will be a salvation for the 300 million adults who suffer from obesity worldwide and who are at high risk for life-threatening illnesses such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, all consequences of obesity.

“We have this epidemic of obesity and we have very few agents that are able to effectively treat obesity. We’d be quite interested in trying a clinical trial to see if giving back would reduce food intake in humans,” Shulman said.