For most people, dieting is not an effective way to lose and keep off large amounts of weight: the body fights attempts to shift more than a little. How might new drugs help?
to treat obesity, which is now widely accepted by doctors as a chronic disease. Being seriously overweight raises a person’s risk of suffering from diabetes, heart disease, strokes and 13 cancers. But there is evidence that, for most people, dieting is not an effective way to lose and keep off large amounts of weight: the body fights attempts to shift more than a little. How might new drugs help?
The history of weight-loss medication is a sorry tale. In 1934 as many as 100,000 Americans were using dinitrophenol to shed excess pounds. It is toxic, causing cataracts and, occasionally, deaths. By one estimate 25,000 people were blinded by the drug; it was banned as a drug for human use in 1938 but deaths continue to this day as people are still enticed to buy it online. Next amphetamines became popular—until the risk of addiction and other side-effects became apparent.
The new generation of weight-loss drugs, which seem far safer, were discovered by accident. They were developed to improve glucose regulation in diabetics, who suffer from an excess of sugar in the bloodstream. The drugs use short chains of amino acids to mimic the hormones produced naturally by the body after a meal, but which diabetics sometimes produce in insufficient quantities., one such hormone. This increases the production of insulin and reduces the production of glucagon .
But the potential benefits of such drugs go beyond their ability to promote weight loss in individuals. By showing that molecular mechanisms hinder people’s attempts to lose weight, they show that gluttony is not to blame when people remain obese. That should slowly help to eliminate the stigma. Both weight-loss surgery and drugs are useful tools in the fight against obesity.
More action is ultimately needed because the problem is growing rapidly: more than half of the world’s population will be overweight by 2035, compared with 38% today, according to the World Obesity Federation, an. New weight-loss drugs represent a turning-point in the treatment of obesity. But if governments want to spend less on medication and surgery, they will need to focus on preventing people from becoming obese in the first place.
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