IF SCIENCE COMES UP with a pill that will give me the hard, slim body of my teens, I'm not sure that I would take it. I'd want to see how many divorces it causes first.
This new weight-loss protein called OB sounds too good to be true. And everyone knows that anything that sounds too good to be true generally is.OB (short for obese) sounds like something for nothing, which is the definition of a perpetual motion machine. I'm old enough now to remember dozens of perpetual motion machines. All were supposed to be the salvation of the human race. Not one worked, of course.
The phones are ringing off the walls at Rockefeller University where a researcher first cloned a gene that makes leptin (Greek for thin) and then isolated the OB protein itself. Fat people want their leptin-laced OB protein. And they want it now.
Americans spend between $30 billion and $50 billion each year trying to lose weight. They exercise and eat, drink or store for future garage sales every imaginable weight-loss product.
All this excitement has been caused by experiments on fat mice. They had both slow metabolisms and hearty appetites. After several weeks on the OB protein, the fat mice were transformed into the rodent equivalents of hard-bodied teens.
The fat mice lacked the protein to tell their brains that they had more than enough fat. Failing to get that message, the brains of the fat mice failed to send out the second message to stop eating.
But given the OB protein, the fat mice suddenly got the message. Their metabolisms picked up, they pulled their fat heads out of their little rodent buffet lines and they started exercising.
The smart money is betting that this OB protein can be refined to work on humans. A company called Amgen Inc. won a bidding war for the right to license the pending patent on the OB protein. Amgen stock quickly soared.
I hope it works. But I'm skeptical. For one thing, fat mice may be too stupid to know that they are fat. They may need a special protein to whisper a message to their tiny little rodent brains that they are fat. Humans don't need a protein to tell them that they need to lose some weight. That's what mirrors and spouses are for.
And fat humans already know that they should eat less and exercise more.
So for this magic-bullet, something-for-nothing protein to work, it has to actually do for humans what they cannot do for themselves. It has to make people refuse to eat. At the same time, it has to make them want to start exercising.
Sound familiar? This sounds a lot like those old speed-ball diet pills women used to buy before the feds thankfully yanked them off the shelves. I once was married to a woman hooked on those diet pills. She lost her appetite, lost sleep and stayed in a constant frenzy. But, boy, was she thin and the house clean. She would lie awake at night waiting for me to wake up and go to the bathroom so she could remake the bed.
Maybe science finally discovered the magic diet pill that takes over all human eating and exercise duties. But I doubt it.