Maybe we're just normal.
I remember when Leptin was touted as the hormone that would cure fatness forever. There would be drugs to fix fat and you would become slim, trim, and be able to live like a first class citizen.
When it turned out that Leptin wasn't the fat hormone but the starvation hormone, and only worked in a small amount of people it, vanished as a miracle cure. Although if you search Leptin in Google, you'll find a bunch of leptin diets.
Now the new leptin is gut bacteria. Researchers took gut bacteria from two twins, one thin, one fat and injected it into lab mice .
Researchers found pairs of human twins in which one was obese and the other lean. They transferred gut bacteria from these twins into mice and watched what happened. The mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that got bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.
The thin mice were then adored about their mouse peers as being healthy despite all the cheese they ate.
The next step, transferring thin people's shit into fat people.
“I’m very excited about this,” he added, saying the next step will be to try using gut bacteria to treat obesity by transplanting feces from thin people.
I had to double check to make sure the article wasn't the Onion. New York Times? Check. Written by Gina Kolata check. Based on a study in Science, check.
Zoe Williams of the Guardian points out the crazed obsession with "curing" fatness as a moral issue:
Other people's weight became all our problem when we started a) calling it an "epidemic" and b) totting up how much it costs the NHS. This is illogical.Malnutrition costs the NHS significantly more and yet no moral judgment accrues around people who are too thin or, for reasons of incapacity, aren't being fed properly by the people who should be caring for them...
Except there is one more issue. The mice with the thin bacteria were put on diets.
The team also showed that a “lean” microbial community could infiltrate and displace an “obese” one, preventing mice from gaining weight so long as they were on a healthy diet.
Diets usually work in the short term. This is no different than diet pills. All of them require you to also do a low calorie diet and pills will help you lose a little more weight. But none have proved to work in the long run.
Sometimes it gets tiring to be experimented on. To be given pills, surgery and shit in hopes that I conform. Instead of treating all disease as weight loss, why not look into actually curing the disease?
