An article published by Japanese scientists in the journal proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists has led to much speculation that it may be possible to suppress the sweet tooth in humans. The new evidence suggests that the hormone leptin helps to regulate food intake, affecting a taste for sugary food by acting on the tongue’s receptors for sweetness. Released into the bloodstream by the body’s fat cells, leptin carries a message to a part of the brain called the hypothalamus to stop eating. At least, it does in the bodies of rodents.
In a search for the medical grail of an anti-fat pill, experiments were carried out on mice that were both normal and genetically modified to be obese. Leptin was injected into the rodents by researchers at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Asahi University School of Dentistry, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Kyushu University. The scientists discovered that the normal mice would then show less attention to food with a sweet taste. On the contrary, the GM mice continued to crave sweet foods, leading to the conclusion that the genetically obese have defective leptin receptors.
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The study has excited much interest, but also a degree of scepticism. The professor of human metabolism at Oxford University, Keith Frayn, pointed out that the conclusions could not necessarily be relocated in the sphere of the human anatomy as rodents and humans have different responses to leptin. Indeed, clinical trials which saw the injection of leptin into obese women have had mixed results.
Frayn also warned against seeing the possibility for the development of a wonder eat-what-you-like-diet pill: “A pill that will enable you to eat as many sweets as you like must be something that increases your expenditure of energy. Leptin doesn’t seem to do that in humans. What it’s going to do is affect your appetite, stop you wanting to eat those sweets in the first place.”
“If it is going to be some non-protein sort of drug that will bind to the leptin receptor, that development is probably a good number of years away.”
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