So as I understand it, when people are overweight it’s because their body is taking lots of excess fat and sugar and turning it into fat cells, which are then stored up as excess energy/sustenance for hard times in the future. Then when the person is starving, or exercising hard, the body decides to convert those fat cells back into energy, and presto, weight loss.
So there must be some message or trigger that is sent from the brain, or some gland, to the fat cells telling them to convert to energy. That message or trigger is most likely a little chemical messenger of some sort.
So why isn’t it possible to build a pill or injection which is basically that trigger? Fool the fat cells into thinking that their stored energy is needed. And hey, presto, weight loss.
This seems like an awfully simple idea, but it presumably isn’t, because if it was, someone would have implemented it and made a bajillion dollars. So what about the situation is more complicated?
IANAD, but from what I understand, the liver turns fat cells into glucose for the muscles to use. Let’s say there is a pill or injection that mimicks the signal sent by the liver to initate this process. OK, so now you have a shit ton of glucose in your blood if you took this magic pill. But, your body isn’t in any kind of state to use that glucose. It’s a metabalism issue. Your body “burns” the glucose to provide itself engery. But, if your body doesn’t need the energy, the glucose will just get turned back into fat. Yes, a small amount of energy will be lost transferring it from fat to glucosde and back to fat again, but I imagine it’s a trivially small amlunt, nto to mention the hell you’d put your pancreas through every time you took a pill and your insulin level skyrocketed, and possibly overtime increased your chances for type II diabetes.
Actually, the fat cells contain otherwise rendered fat inside them, right? It’s not the actual cell that travels to the liver (or whatever organ), is it? Then what’s the transport mechanism for passing the fat through the cell walls. Is it possible that it’s transformed on location, so to speak? Not to say you won’t have the same problem with high sugar levels, but now I’m curious and it’s been a long, long time since 9th grade biology.
Yes, and the OP was asking why such a pill hasn’t been invented. Not IF such a pill had been invented or whether such a pill is worse than exercise on a character-building level.
The problem is that the human body is a collection of complicated mechanisms, all of which work together in intricate and not-completely understood ways. So, when researchers think they’ve discovered the magic gene or chemical signal that turns off weight gain, usually, at best, they’ve only solved a piece of the puzzle.
It could be that there are other feedback mechanisms that take up the slack, or turning off one mechanism may have unintended dire effects (I’m thinking Olestra’s “anal leakage” here).
Yeah I have heard this too. Appetite regulation is important to survival so there are supposedly a variety of overlapping systems. So if you take a drug that boosts your dopamine levels (like amphetamines) you’ll lose weight but you’ll gain it back eventually even if you still take the drug.
I figure in 20 years they’ll know enough to help most obese people not be obese. Even right now you can probably combine xenical, meridia & accomplia into one pill and lose 20% of bodyweight with it. It’ll cost $400 a month to take them though.
IANAD, but since the wiki article mentions that there are 6 known types of receptors for leptin and it has a role in fertility, it sounds to me like a global regulator that you don’t really wanna screw with unless you can control the side effects.