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Junk food makes you eat more

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Junk food makes you eat more

It triggers messages that are sent to the body’s cells, warning them to ignore appetite-suppressing hormones that regulate our weight.

The effect can last for a few days sabotaging efforts to get back to a healthy diet afterwards, the study found.

The study shows for the first time how particular products can create a vicious cycle of food bingeing.

Lead author Dr Deborah Clegg of the study by UT Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas, said: “Normally, our body is primed to say when we have had enough, but that does not always happen when we are eating something good.

“What we have shown is that someone’s entire brain chemistry can change in a very short period of time.

“Our findings suggest that when you eat something high in fat, your brain gets ‘hit’ with the fatty acids, and you become resistant to insulin and leptin. Since you are not being told by the brain to stop eating, you overeat.”

The hormone leptin is produced in the brain and suppresses hunger while insulin is produced by the pancreas and regulates blood sugar levels.

Although the study was performed on rats and mice the scientists said their results reinforced common dietary recommendations to limit saturated fat intake as “it causes you to eat more.”

The animals received the same amount of calories in one of three forms of fat – palmitic acid, monounsaturated fatty acid or unsaturated oleic acid which is found in olive and grapeseed oils.

The biggest affect on leptin and insulin was caused by molecules from palmitic acid which is found in beef, butter, cheese and milk.

Dr Clegg, whose findings are published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, said: “The action was very specific to palmitic acid, which is very high in foods that are rich in saturated fat.

She said it may explain why many people who overindulge on a Friday or Saturday say they are hungrier than normal on Monday.

The findings may also have implications for diabetes research because although scientists have known a high-fat diet can cause insulin resistance, little has been known about the mechanism behind it or whether specific types of fat are more dangerous.

Dr Clegg said: “We found the palmitic acid specifically reduced the ability of leptin and insulin to activate their intracellular signalling cascades. The oleic fat did not do this.”

She said the other key finding is this mechanism is triggered in the brain – long before there might be signs of obesity anywhere else in the body.

Dr Clegg said the next step is to determine how long it takes to reverse completely the effects of short-term exposure to high-fat food.

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Vaccine raises hope for cocaine addiction therapy

in.reuters.com

Vaccine raises hope for cocaine addiction therapy

A vaccine helped block the high felt by cocaine users in 38 percent of people who took it, U.S. researchers said on Monday, offering promise of a new approach to treating those addicted to the drug.

The aim is to prevent cocaine’s rewarding effects — the high — in order to reduce cravings that trigger drug relapses.

“The concept works,” Dr. Thomas Kosten of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, whose study appears in the Archives of General Psychiatry, said in a statement.

Cocaine molecules on their own are too small to draw the attention of the immune system. To get the body to recognize cocaine, the researchers designed a vaccine that uses a harmless version of the cholera toxin with a few attached cocaine molecules.

When the immune system reacts to the toxin, it makes both cholera and cocaine antibodies.

“These antibodies bind to the cocaine, preventing it from leaving the bloodstream,” Kosten said. An enzyme called cholinesterase breaks down the cocaine and flushes it out of the body.

For the study, Kosten and colleagues studied 94 volunteers — mostly users of crack cocaine, which is a solid, smokable form of the drug — who were on methadone treatment at the Veterans Affairs Connecticut Healthcare System.

Over three months, the participants either got five shots of the vaccine or a placebo injection.

STUDY PLANS

Plans are under way to study the vaccine in many sites.

According to a 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 35.9 million Americans aged 12 and older reported having used cocaine, and 8.6 million reported having used crack. In 2006, cocaine accounted for about 14 percent of all admissions to drug abuse treatment programs.

Kosten said he plans to tinker with the vaccine to make it more effective. He has already tried a different carrier — a modified version of a meningitis bacterium — supplied by drug firm Merck & Co.

Animal studies showed it produced five times the antibody response as the cholera carrier.

He has used a similar approach on a nicotine vaccine called TA-NIC now being tested in Europe. Both the cocaine and nicotine vaccines are being developed through private equity firm Celtic Pharma.

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