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Johns Hopkins Health Alert

The Obesity Vaccine

Johns Hopkins Health Alerts | Nutrition and Weight Control | The Obesity Vaccine

Researchers are trying to develop a vaccine that suppresses ghrelin -- a hormone secreted by the gut into the blood that acts on the brain to stimulate appetite.

Eating more calories than you expend is an important cause of obesity. In fact, regardless of your genetic predisposition to obesity or your resting metabolic rate, you cannot gain weight without consuming more calories than you burn.

To point to overeating as the cause of obesity is overly simplistic, however. It does not explain why a 125-lb woman can eat 1,800 calories a day and not gain weight, while another 125-lb woman struggles to avoid gaining weight on 1,200 calories a day. This difference occurs because numerous other factors contribute to weight gain, including resting metabolic rate and physical activity. Nevertheless, obese people must be consuming more calories than required by their individual make-ups and activity levels. Otherwise they would not store excess body fat. Thus, if you’re overweight, you must reduce your calorie intake to lose weight.

Now there’s promising news for people struggling to keep weight under control: Researchers are trying to develop a vaccine against obesity using antibodies to the appetite-stimulating hormone ghrelin. The obesity vaccine shows promise in rats, according to a recent study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Volume 103, page 13226).

Ghrelin is a hormone secreted by the gut into the blood that acts on the brain to stimulate appetite. In rats, the hormone also decreases energy expenditure and slows the breakdown of fat. But rats deficient in ghrelin or lacking a receptor for the hormone store less of the food they eat and fail to gain weight when placed on a high-calorie diet.

In the study, the researchers prepared three different antibodies to ghrelin and tested them in 17 male rats as a possible vaccine against weight gain. The vaccinated rats were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, but the rats given two of the three vaccines gained less weight, maintained muscle mass, and lost body fat compared with the control mice. The third vaccine was ineffective.

Although the results are encouraging, the research is preliminary. And just because something works in rats does not mean that it will have the same effect in humans. In fact, in humans (especially obese people) appetite is not the only trigger to eat -- emotions, habit, and stress, for example, also play a role -- so a vaccine that quenches appetite may not have significant or lasting benefits in humans.

Johns Hopkins Health Alerts | Nutrition and Weight Control | The Obesity Vaccine

Posted in Nutrition and Weight Control on December 12, 2007

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Users and editors may post comments here at their own discretion. The views expressed do not constitute medical advice and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins Medicine or University Health Publishing, which has no responsibility for its content.


Instead of trying to find ways for people that have very low metabolisms to live while eating way less then the general population, which pretty much has been shown to be impossible for most - why not consider things that are causing their metabolism to be so low - such as thyroid problems that are NOT always detected by blood tests such as TSH, which is often useless for many people, toxins, or other abnormal states. These are basically ignored and people that struggle while eating what most would consider a low calorie diet are just told to develop will power and starve all the time- or research is concentrated on finding drugs to make them not be hungry! And with today's food supply being so depleted many couldn't even get the nutrients they need from the amount of calories that they may have to eat to keep from gaining. I'm not saying that some people are not fat because they really eat too much and have huge appetites and I don't really know how they feel because I don't have a large appetite. But I do know that I had NORMAL thyroid tests but benefit greatly from taking thyroid, which has cured not only an extremely slow metabolism (although I still have to be careful and can't eat 2000 calories a day at almost 5'10")and it has also cured various other symptoms I was having. Had I not found a doctor who treats PATIENTS instead of LAB VALUES - I would still be miserable and over 30 pounds heavier while eating about 1500 calories of WHOLE FOOD a day and exercising! And another thing that should be addressed is the effect on metabolism of all the chemicals and junk in modern processed foods. All of this is ignored and it would seem it's mainly because of Big Pharma and Big food processors that want us to think the garbage they churn out is good for us. I'm completely convinced of this from personal experience and the experience of many others.

Posted by: Lizart | January 12, 2008



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