There’s always some miracle pill or fad diet to try, but these are never as effective for your weight loss wellness as you want. Now, researchers have addressed the obesity epidemic with some brand new therapies but thought they may promise results, they’re so horrifying that you might not want to put your wellbeing in their hands.
If you have a problem rationing your food intake, there’s the AspireAssist Aspiration Therapy System, which pumps food out of your stomach right after you finish eating. The device was invented by a group of bariatric surgeons and Dean Kamen — who brought you the Segway personal transportation device — and essentially allows you the luxury of eating until you feel you’re about to burst, but without any weight gain. You use a small pump on a tube that connects directly to your stomach, so that 30% of what you ate 20 minutes ago ends up in the toilet. However, critics are calling the AspireAssist “mechanical bulimia” and pointing out that large portions of food can clog the device and that there’s a high probability of infection.
Still, if you don’t want to pump out that weight, scientists have found a way to worm it out of you. A study published in Nature Medicine has shown that some parasitic worms secrete a sugar-based anti-inflammatory molecule called glycan. This decreases inflammation in the host so that the worms can better navigate through tissue, but it may also treat metabolic disorders associated with obesity. Donald Harn, the study co-author who worked on the research while at the Harvard School of Public Health, commented, ‘Obesity is an inflammatory disease, so we hypothesised that this sugar might have some effect on complications related to it.
For the study, the researchers used the parasite’s sugar by-product on fat mice, and found that these mice were better guarded against insulin resistance, high triglycerides, and high cholesterol than their control counterparts. While the worm sugar won’t make you skinny, it may have a beneficial effect for your wellbeing. Harn noted, ‘We see great promise in this sugar, and we hope that future research and collaborations will eventually lead to marketable therapies for people suffering from disease.’
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