Eat What You Want Without Getting Fat? There's Now A Pill That Will Let You Do Just That

Many people tend to scoff at obesity, laying the blame at the feet of the people suffering from it.

In fact however, there are a lot of reasons someone could be overweight, from hormonal imbalances to metabolic diseases. And scientists think they have a way to help them now.

See, with weight gain caused by a medical condition, it actually takes much more effort to stay fit than a healthy person, and that's if it's even possible for the person in question. So it seems unfair to say that someone should be able to deprive themselves of their favourite food or has to exercise twice as much, just to keep up with people that don't suffer from things like diabetes, or thyroid imbalances or other conditions. Luckily, researchers from Flinders University and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center think they have an easier solution on their hands.

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It's the mother of all weight loss pills, so to speak. The team have managed to identify a simple gene, called RCAN 1, which they can turn off to let your body burn more calories at a steady rate. At least, it's worked so far in mice. Test rodents that were given RCAN1 inhibitors and fed high-fat diets for prolonged periods showed no discernible weight gain.

Basically, turning off this gene lets your body burn away the calories you eat instead of storing them as fat. And since it worked on the mice, there's a good chance it works on humans too.

"We know a lot of people struggle to lose weight or even control their weight for a number of different reasons," lead researcher Professor Damien Keating of Flinders University told Science Daily. "The findings in this study could mean developing a pill which would target the function of RCAN1 and may result in weight loss."

You see, RCAN1 was an important gene centuries ago when food wasn't so easy to come by. It acted as a metabolic inhibitor, to let our bodies store some of the calories we ate as fat for when we might not have food available. Of course, we have an abundance of available food in the 21st century, at least in first-world countries, so this gene is not useful anymore. Instead of saving body fat for a rainy day, it's causing a buildup of the stuff far more than we'd ever need.

According to the scientists then, blocking RCAN1 helps our bodies transform white fat (the obesity-related kind) to brown fat, which our bodies instead burn to produce heat. Based on their findings, this process stops the dangerous buildup of fat around areas like the belly, and even causes our muscles to burn more calories at rest. And these findings held for mice fed high-calorie diets for everything between eight weeks to six months.

"The ideal," Keating says, "would be to take some sort of pill that didn't require you to watch your diet, that didn't require you to exercise. Now, that might seem like a pipe dream, but the findings that we have out of this mouse study at least indicate a novel pathway that we might be able to target."