With summer coming, we’ll soon be bombarded with the media’s favourite term – “summer body”.

Yup, it’s the thing you’re supposed to get back after a few months of happily eating soups and roasts whilst wearing baggy jerseys to hide your shame.

Terms like this are designed to encourage an ideal body type, and in doing so have made dieting into a billion dollar industry. There are pills, scrubs, procedures and, of course, a new “miracle” diet every week.

Now there’s a new drug, claiming to be the “holy grail” of dieting pills, that actively targets “middle-aged spread”.

Over to the Telegraph:

Slimmers taking the pills lost three times as much weight as those simply trying to diet and exercise, a landmark trial found. The drug also cut the risk of diabetes by a fifth.

Experts hailed lorcaserin as the most effective weight-loss pill yet, suggesting they could help the two in three adults battling weight problems.

Research in the US found that four out of 10 people taking the drug lost a significant amount of weight throughout the course of a year:

On average, slimmers taking the twice-daily pills lost nine pounds (5kg) – around a dress size for the average woman – while those who stuck to traditional diet tips shed just three pounds.

And more than three years after the trial began, they had kept the weight off, the study found.

The medication was created in an attempt to “combat the growing global obesity epidemic”:

Until now, drugs which showed early promise have had little success – or been dogged by safety concerns, in particular about potential dangers to the heart.

Harvard researchers said their results, presented at the world’s largest cardiac conference, show for the first time that a weight loss drug can cause consistent and sustained weight loss with no such increased risk.

Scientists said the breakthrough was particularly significant, because the drug targets signals in the brain which have been linked to weight gain in middle age.

So, how does it work?

The drug, called lorcaserin, works by activating the neurons in the brain that control “satiety” – and signal fullness. These become less efficient with age, which is believed to be a key cause of middle-age spread.

Experts said the new drug – which is currently licensed in the United States, and costs around £220 a month – works by reinvigorating the cells, helping people control their appetite better.

That’s around R4 041 a month for the pill if it should make its way to South African shores. It’s also still awaiting approval before it will be officially released.

Professor Jason Halford, an obesity expert at the University of Liverpool, said the drug could help millions of Britons, if it is then given the go-ahead by NHS watchdogs.

“We don’t have any appetite suppressants available on the NHS. We have a massive great gap between lifestyle modification and surgery. At the moment you either get support and advice, or you get to surgery – there is nothing in between,” he said.

“This could be widely prescribed if it is approved by Nice (the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence) in the UK,” he said.

The drug is being developed in response to the increase in obesity rates worldwide, as you can see in this handy graph:

Lead author Erin Bohula, a cardiovascular medicine and critical care specialist at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said the findings were an “important milestone” after decades of failed attempts to develop a safe drug, while global obesity rates have tripled.

“We have been able to demonstrate for the first time in a rigorous, randomised way that this weight loss drug does what it is intended to do – it helps people lose weight – without causing an increase in adverse cardiovascular events in a population at higher risk for heart attacks and strokes,” she said.

Those taking the pills saw “small but significant” improvements in a number of factors related to heart disease, including blood pressure and sugar levels.

While this might look like a miracle drug, however, best practice is always to focus on exercise and healthy eating. It might take longer, but a lifestyle change will be more effective in the long run.

[source:telegraph]