Gerald Shulman’s team has just discovered a chemical found naturally in our body that blocks hunger and weight gain. Mice and rats, and presumably humans, produce the chemical after eating a fatty meal.

When researchers gave the rodents an extra dose, they ate less and shed weight, with no ill effects. Tests will have to be made on larger animals, but if they turn out to be well, humans might be next. Gerald Shulman is a molecular biologist at Yale. He and his team discovered this molecule, called N-acylphosphatidylethanolamine (NAPE).

Shulman told the media: "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 this back would reduce food intake in humans." The study appeared in the journal Cell on Wednesday.

In order to test the animals’ reaction, the researchers synthesized NAPE and injected it into the abdomen of the animals, whose appetites diminished greatly. When NAPE was delivered in much smaller amounts directly to the brain, it had the same effect on appetite as a larger dose injected into the bloodstream. NAPE concentrated in the hypothalamus, a brain part well known for regulating hunger.

For a few years now, scientists are working together trying to understand how the body tells the brain to control food intake. Obesity is a big problem worldwide, as people eat fattier diets and get less exercise, and NAPE could real help combat this problem. These findings could help guide efforts to create better drugs to suppress appetite and reduce obesity.

Other scientists, like David Earnest, professor of neuroscience and experimental therapeutics at the Texas Health Science Center College of Medicine, say they’re not sure about the NAPE treatment going as planned, but these are certainly some encouraging observations.