ILMAO..you know what really pisses me off? A know-it all who thinks he knows everyhting, but really knows nothing. Hunger while smoking weed is not in ones head partner...its a commonly known side effect, hunger is triggered by some chemicals in weed. You say an awful lot of garbage...
"Raiing the fridge in the middle of the night is an all too common side-effect of smoking cannabis. But you don't have to smoke dope to get the munchies. Certain chemicals you're born with can spark off an attack of hunger as well.
Even the most upright citizens have naturally occurring cannabis-like molecules circulating in their brains. Now scientists are suggesting that these molecules trigger intense hunger pangs and may even contribute to obesity.
Normally, mice that have been starved eat voraciously. But George Kunos and his colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond found that the absence of cannabis receptors makes the mice much less hungry.
Genetically modified mice lacking the receptors ate far less food than usual after being starved for 18 hours, as did unmodified mice that had been given drugs to block the receptors.
But you can have too much of a good thing. In a finding that could link cannabinoids to human obesity, Kunos and his team found high levels of cannabis-like substances in the brains of excessively fat mice. The mice were born with a genetic defect that prevented them from making leptin, a hormone that is known to have a key role in curbing appetite.
Appetite suppressant
It was the discovery of leptin's role that transformed obesity research in the 1990s. But how the hormone tones down hunger has never been quite clear. Now Kunos believes naturally occurring cannabinoids could be a vital piece of the puzzle.
In its latest experiments, his team has found that injecting leptin into rats and mice automatically led to a sharp drop in cannabinoid levels.
The finding backs up earlier work by Raphael Mechoulam and his colleagues at the Hebrew University in Israel, who found that injecting newborn mice with drugs that neutralise the effect of cannabis dramatically depressed the mice's appetite. The mice stopped suckling and died.
So could too much natural cannabinoid in the brain make people fat? "It's reasonable to speculate that it contributes to some forms of obesity," says Kunos. "But so far we have no direct evidence."
In France, though, scientists are already giving obese people an experimental drug designed to block cannabinoid receptors. In a trial lasting 16 weeks, a compound codenamed SR141716 was given to the patients to see if it would help curb their hunger pangs.
The full results won't be revealed until later this year, but Francis Barth of the Montpellier-based drugs company Sanofi-Synthelabo, which ran the study, says the patients lost more weight than a control group.
More at: Nature (vol 410, p 822) Correspondence about this story should be directed to
letters@newscientist.com
David Concar
From New Scientist, 11 April 2001
Source: BBC
Scientists believe the hunger-inducing effects of cannabis can be used to tackle obesity.
Smoking cannabis often triggers an urge to eat - what smokers sometimes refer to as "the munchies".
But researchers at French pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Synthelabo believe this chemical effect can be manipulated to curb hunger.
They are currently testing a drug which uses the scientific knowledge about cannabis to suppress appetite.
Early results from clinical trials on the experimental drug Rimonabant in the United States and Europe have been promising.
Patients taking the drug lost up to four kilos over a 16 week period.
Early theory
Doctors originally thought that cannabis affected the brain in a fairly random manner and that one of those random effects was hunger.
However, studies in the late 1980s showed that cannabis has a direct impact on appetite.
It triggers a surge in the brain's own cannabis-like chemicals.
These chemicals, called cannabinoids, play a role in regulating appetite.
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