Health stores are chock-full of products that are claimed to suppress the appetite, but clinical evidence for the effectiveness of these products is often thin on the ground. However, a paper presented at the American Physiological Society's Experimental Biology conference seems to confirm the effectiveness of one new supplement, extracted from Korean pine nuts. In the report, pine nut oil - which consists of polyunsaturated fatty acids - was found to stimulate two well-known appetite suppressing peptide hormones. The pine nut extract, when compared with an olive oil placebo, was found to significantly reduce the desire to eat.
The study used a product called PinnoThin, which is marketed by Lipid Nutrition, of the Netherlands. The researchers found a significant increase in the peptide hormones cholecystokinin (60 percent) and glucagon-like peptide 1 (25 percent) that remained in effect for as long as 4 hours after ingestion. These hormones are appetite suppressors, which "send signals of satiation to the brain diminishing the desire to eat," said researcher Alexandra Einerhand.
Einerhand said that 30 minutes after ingestion, the female subjects reported a 29 percent reduction in the "desire to eat" and a 36 percent drop in "prospective food intake" scores, based on visual analog scales. "Appetite suppressants are increasingly interesting because they work on the very simple premise of 'What you don't eat now, you won't need to lose later,'" she concluded.
Source: American Physiological Society
