Anti-fat pill could help keep the Weight Off

[steaner]

A pill might replace that third helping of turkey at future Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. A newly-discovered chemical found naturally in our body 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.
If similar tests in larger animals pan out, humans will be next, says Gerald Shulman, a molecular biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut whose team discovered this new role for the molecule, called N-acylphosphatidylethanolamine (NAPE).
"We have this epidemic of obesity and we have very few agents that are able to effectively treat obesity," he says. "We'd be quite interested in trying a clinical trial to see if giving this back would reduce food intake in humans."