SEP  07 Most Americans you've probably tried a few approaches to weight loss - and without much lastingsuccess. The problem, according to experts is the combination of our sedentary lifestyle and our strong tendency to overeat.

Most of us spend 8 to 9 hours a day, 5 days a week sitting at our desks, plus more time sitting on our daily commute.  And exercise is apparently of little help when it comes to dropping pounds.  Even though Americans spend $19 billion dollars a year on gym memberships, and most of us say we exercise regularly, two-thirds of the population is still overweight or obese by government standards. Something just doesn't add up.

Overeating seems to be the main problem. To lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you consume and unless you're following a strict diet, it's very difficult to "work off" the excess amount of calories that most of us take in. For instance, for a 140 lb. woman to burn off the calories in a bagel with cream cheese, she would have to jog for an hour. And that's just breakfast.

That hasn't left people with too many effective options. You can rely on willpower and ration your food intake, turn to fat blockers that have embarrassing side effects, or worse, use dubious stimulants that could put your health at risk for the sake of losing weight.

So, is there a solution to this dilemma?

Apparently a new California Company called Sensa may just have one. They have just launched a remarkable new product that has been shown to control the appetite and convince the brain to stop overeating.

Sensa was developed by Dr. Alan Hirsch, an intrepid doctor and neuro-scientist, whose lifelong specialty has been to study how our senses, and in particular, smell and taste affect the brain's functioning. Dr. Hirsch's breakthrough occurred when he discovered that many of his patients who had lost their sense of smell and taste due to illness or accident experienced rapid weight gain.  He recognized that certain smells and tastes seemed to be acting on the brain to control the appetite.

Dr Hirsch studied hundreds of compounds and after years of research developed a set of virtually odorless and tasteless food sprinkles that showed a strong impact on the body's appetite-control center, which he called "Tastants".  Then, in one of the largest studies of a non-prescription weight-loss system, these Tastants were tested for effectiveness as a means of weight loss.

The results were significant. Over a 6 month period, 1,436 women and men sprinkled flavorless "Tastant" crystals on everything they ate, and lost an average of 30.5 pounds - nearly 15% of their total body weight.

Participants achieved these results without having to follow any special exercise regime or diet.Best of all, because it is tasteless and odorless and contains no stimulants and does not directly interact with the digestive system, there are no unpleasant side-effects.  According to Dr Hirsch, "With Sensa, you can eat all the foods that satisfy your senses and you don't have to deal with any intense food cravings or feelings of starvation. Sensa merely helps you eat less of the foods you love and gain greater satisfaction from smaller portions."

How to try it free

Real weight loss without diet and exercise - too good to be true? Apparently the company anticipated a somewhat skeptical response from consumers so they have launched the Sensa Challange.

They are so sure you will lose weight with Sensa that new customers get to use the product for 30 days so that you can see real weight loss before deciding if they want to pay for it or not.

Director of the VHS Blood Bank J. Balsubramaniam, Medical Director of Star Health and Allied Insurance S. Prakash and Director of Medical Education V. Kanagasabai participated.

WASHINGTON, September 3-The fat tissue in those spare tires and lower belly pooches - is not just a dormant storage depot for surplus calories, but is an active organ that sends chemical signals to other parts of the body, perhaps increasing the risk of heart attacks, cancer, and other diseases, according to scientists. They have discovered 20 new hormones and other substances not previously known to be secreted into the blood by human fat cells and verification that fat secretes dozens of hormones and other chemical messengers. Anja Rosenow and colleagues note that excess body fat can contribute to heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other diseases. Many people once thought that fat cells were inert storage depots for surplus calories. But studies have established that fat cells can secrete certain hormones and other substances much like other organs in the body. Among those hormones is leptin, which controls appetite, and adiponectin, which makes the body more sensitive to insulin and controls blood sugar levels. However, little is known about most of the proteins produced by the billions of fat cells in the adult body. The scientists identified 80 different proteins produced by the fat cells. These include six new proteins and 20 proteins that have not been previously detected in human fat cells. The findings could pave the way for a better understanding of the role that hormone-secreting fat cells play in heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases. The study appears in ACS’ monthly Journal of Proteome Research.

Furthermore, in the total sample each additional obesity-susceptibility variant increased the odds of obesity by 1.1-fold.However, the increased odds per variant for obesity risk were 40 per cent lower in physically active individuals compared to physically inactive individuals.

The conventional thinking is that continuous exposure to antibiotics or exposure at sub-optimal levels can facilitate some bacteria to develop mutations that render them resistant to a particular antibiotic. And this antibiotic-resistant mutation is then passed on to succeeding generations, and in time the antibiotic-resistant bacterial population becomes dominant.But a paper published today in Nature reveals how drug-resistant mutants resort to a quicker way to make the overall population of bacteria resistant to a particular antibiotic in the very same generation.The antibiotic-resistant mutants lend a helping hand to protect other drug-susceptible species, the study shows. This is the first time a study has shown that drug-resistant mutants need not become the dominant species to become a threat. Surprisingly, the mutants protect the entire population even though it is at some cost to themselves.The study also highlights the danger of using antibiotics at sub-optimal levels.A study done in a bioreactor used the drug, Norfloxacin, at lower concentrations than was actually required to kill Escherichia coli bacteria. In fact, the dosage of the drug was chosen such that only 60 per cent of growth was inhibited.The concentration of the drug was increased every day. Surprisingly, despite increasing the dosage on a daily basis, even the bacteria that had not developed the drug-resistant mutation, and therefore had low-resistance to the drug, still managed to survive.Even on day nine, the bacteria with low-resistance survived despite the fact that the drug concentration was much higher than what was required to kill the bacteria. The researchers note that a vast majority of individual E. coli were “less resistant to the drug than the population as a whole.”

They also found that the norfloxacin-resistant mutants increased in number first, followed by an overall increase in the population of low-resistance E. coli.So how was this achieved? “A few highly resistant mutants improve the survival of the population's less resistant constituents,” the researchers note. And this was through the production of a small signalling molecule called indole that improves stress tolerance (in this case, the ability to survive the drug) in E. coli.“We propose that indole produced by the drug-resistant mutants was protecting its less-resistant neighbours,” the authors write.To further ascertain the role of indole, the researchers added the molecule and found those E. coli, which had low-resistance to the drug, increased and survived at drug concentrations that were many times more lethal.The results were the same when the experiment was repeated using a different drug — gentamicin.This shows that the mechanism by which the drug-resistant mutants protect the rest of the population is the same, immaterial of the drug in question.