SRT1720 Drug Tricks Your Body Metabolism to Lose Fat
The Holy Grail of Dieting for the increasingly overweight population is an effective safe and easy method of losing weight in the face of our modern lifestyle that has too much food and too little exercise. A new drug compound that is related to resveratrol, tricks your body into burning fat by making it think that food is scarce. The metabolic benefits of the new drug wweould help people who are not obese become healthier as well.
SRT1720 is designed to specifically target a protein linked to the life extending benefits of a low calorie diet. SRT1720 can trick the body into acting like food is scarce even when it is not. This is reported in the November 2008 Cell Metabolism.
The drug SRT1720 acts through the protein SIRT1. SRT1720 increases running endurance in exercised mice. It also protects the animals against weight gain and insulin resistance even if they eat a high fat diet. SRT1720 works by changing the metabolism to a fat burning mode that normally occurs only when energy levels are low.
The findings support the idea that SIRT1 may be a useful target in the fight again metabolic disorders such as adult onset diabetes and obesity. SRT1720 further supports the scientific data showing the metabolic benefits of the red wine component called resveratrol. Resveratrol also acts on SIRT1, but its influence on other metabolic actors had left room to question exactly how it works.
” There has been a lot of controversy in the field about resveratrol action,” said Johan Auwerx of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. “We find that the majority of the biology of resveratrol can be ascribed to SIRT1.” While SIRT1 might not explain all of resveratrol’s effects, the new results suggest that the central metabolic protein is responsible for about “80 percent of the picture,” he said.
The scientists had previously done similar studies to understand many of the benefits of resveratrol. They ran essentially the same experiments with the new more potent and specific SIRT1 activating compound SRT1720 developed by the company Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
A low dose of SRT1720 partially protected mice from gaining weight on a high-fat diet after 10 weeks of treatment. At higher doses, SRT1720 completely prevented weight gain in the animals. SRT1720 also improved blood sugar tolerance and insulin sensitivity and gave the animals with greater athletic ability.
” SIRT1720 made the animals run twice as long,” Auwerx said. That improvement was seen only when the researchers specifically exercised the animals. Their voluntary activity actually declined in the study as they hunkered down to save energy.
They found further evidence that the SIRT1 activator induces chronic metabolic changes that involve the indirect activation of AMPK, an enzyme that controls skeletal muscle glucose and the metabolism of fatty acids.
The presumed advantage of SRT1720 or any specific SIRT1 activator over the natural compound resveratrol is that will probably have fewer side effects.
Read the study Here
