In the News: the Obesity Vaccine

Well, I suppose that everyone saw the teaser headlines on last night's TV news about the new "Obesity Vaccine", only to find out it's fine if you have a fat rat for a pet; otherwise it's probably not going to help you much in your lifetime.

However, buried in the newspaper report I read, there's an important snippet:

The vaccine targets the hormone ghrelin, a gastric endocrine hormone produced primarily in the stomach, which ... helps control appetite in animals and people... The vaccine appears to help control whether the body stores fat or burns it off. It seems ghrelin has to move from the bloodstream into the brain in order to have an impact on appetite and weight gain. [emphasis mine]

What this observation signifies to me is that John Walker's contention in the Hacker's Diet that I am fat because either I don't receive or I don't process corrrectly "fullness signals" is right on the money.

The idea that I cannot responsibly control the amount of food I eat without artificial assistance is not something I cannot hear just once and fully ascribe to [see for example, what happens when I try to wing it at a picnic or luncheon]. But each report like this one, and each experience like the picnic, leads me to more fully integrate the calorie log into my dialy life. And the more integrated it becomes, the more automatic it becomes, to the point that I can now see a time in the future when I can drop the calorie log because I have fully replaced my missing chemical "fullness" signals with a mental alternative. But not yet.