The battle against rat fat.

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati seem to think they've found yet another way to fight the growing obesity epidemic.

I had to read this press release three times before I understood it and even then, I'm fighting a nasty bug so my brain is a little foggy, but from what I ascertained, part of what regulates hunger is the brain's ability to look at the amount of fat we have and decide how much food we need to maintain that. It does this by measuring the amount of blood vessels in the fat. When you treat fat with a certain peptide, the blood vessels stop working and the brain thinks you have less fat, so it asks for less food.

"These experiments indicate that there is a novel system that informs our brains about the size of our fat tissue 'bathtubs' and can influence how much we eat," says Seeley. "The findings highlight the ability to provide new therapeutic strategies for obesity based on these dynamics of blood vessels in our fat tissue." The next step, Seeley says, is to figure out the important signals that come from fat that cause the weight loss.

I'm happy that they're doing these experiments -- and even happier that I think I understood them -- but there's a slight problem with the science. The test subjects were rats. If there was ever a situation where rodents and people were different, it's what led to their obesity. A lot of people who are overweight now used to be skinny and it wasn't any blood vessel mumbo jumbo that caused them to eat that one, fatal Big Mac that led to their downfall.

The brain can send all the signals it wants to your appetite, the signals from the television and all your personal physiological hang-ups are much louder. When a messy break-up and Häagen-Dazs come a callin', all the peptides in the world aren't going to stop them.

via Science Blog