If you are awake in the night watching TV or just living in the USA, you have to be aware of how our society is obsessed with weight loss. I guesss it is because such a high percentage of us is overweight.
There are exercise programs and machines, food plans to control your caloric consumption, surgery to alter the digestive system, and drugs to limit appetite or change absorption. It's all iffy.
But now there is something new and more promising, something old actually. A plant used in ancient China to treat a variety of medical problems including inflammation and fever is looking very promising. The thunder god vine (tripterygium wilfordii) produces an extract that, when tested on mice, resulted in an 80% reduction in food intake after just one week. After three weeks test mice lost 45% of their initial body weight.
The next step is to learn if it is safe and effective for people.
This just reinforces the idea that these old folk medicines have tremendous potential. The classic example is the "old woman of Shropshire" who treated local people with dropsy with leaves from the foxglove plant. "Real" medical doctors, who were not having much success with congestive heart failure (aka dropsy), beat a path to her door. Foxglove turned out to be the source of digitalis, still the pharmaceutical treatment for heart failure.
In error I filed post number 351 twice so to catch up this will be post 353.
There are exercise programs and machines, food plans to control your caloric consumption, surgery to alter the digestive system, and drugs to limit appetite or change absorption. It's all iffy.
But now there is something new and more promising, something old actually. A plant used in ancient China to treat a variety of medical problems including inflammation and fever is looking very promising. The thunder god vine (tripterygium wilfordii) produces an extract that, when tested on mice, resulted in an 80% reduction in food intake after just one week. After three weeks test mice lost 45% of their initial body weight.
The next step is to learn if it is safe and effective for people.
This just reinforces the idea that these old folk medicines have tremendous potential. The classic example is the "old woman of Shropshire" who treated local people with dropsy with leaves from the foxglove plant. "Real" medical doctors, who were not having much success with congestive heart failure (aka dropsy), beat a path to her door. Foxglove turned out to be the source of digitalis, still the pharmaceutical treatment for heart failure.
In error I filed post number 351 twice so to catch up this will be post 353.
What a great post! Fascinating! Thank you.
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