Until a very few years ago there was a widespread belief that obese people were obese because they had little will power to diet and eat less. Today we know that obesity cannot be reduced to a behavioral problem, but rather a disease , and that behind it there is a significant hormonal imbalance.
The first to realize that there was a physiological factor that controlled appetite was the biochemist Douglas Coleman, who in 1969 conducted several studies with mice carrying a mutation that made them extremely obese. In the 1980s, the physician Jeffrey Friedman became interested in these works and in 1994 he described the gene for the hormone leptin, which worked by regulating appetite, just as Coleman had predicted. “At the time there were no technologies currently available to isolate genes,” explains Friedman, “so I already knew it was going to be a daunting task; I decided to call Coleman to get more information.”
This discovery caused a paradigm shift in the study of obesity and its perception: it was no longer considered a personal failure to understand that it was a medical problem. Due to this, the BBVA Foundation has decided to present the Frontiers of Knowledge in Biomedicine award to both scientists.
How leptin works
“Leptin is a hormone designed to control body weight,” explains Friedman. The system works in such a way that the more body fat there is, the more leptin is produced and the less appetite you feel. The ultimate goal is for a high-fat individual to end up eating less, so they don’t keep gaining weight. And vice versa: when you lack body fat, you lack leptin, and your appetite increases . The cause of the body having such a mechanism is in evolution: “It would be very dangerous not to have fat, because you risk starvation, but it is also dangerous to be too fat, because you are at the mercy of predators. system seeks to maintain a balanced level of fat. “
Leptin is not the only gene related to obesity but it does have a major role, and it will surely be important in eventual future pharmacological treatments of obesity: “Much remains to be known about the regulation of obesity, but the identification of leptin does not allow us It will certainly lead to a much better understanding of the factors that control appetite, and that will allow new treatments to be developed. “
