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Find it hard to say no to dessert? Blame it on your brain, for after you've eaten your fill, it's the pleasure centres that tell you when to put down the fork. The discovery comes from an experiment that measured the brain activity of volunteers offered an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet. Rachel Batterham at University College London and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of eight people while they received an intravenous drip either of saline or PYY, a powerful appetite-suppressing hormone that is naturally secreted by the gut after eating. Half-an-hour after being scanned, Batterham...

Stanford Scientists' Discovery of Hormone Offers Hope For Obesity Drug STANFORD, Calif. — When the appetite-enhancing hormone ghrelin was discovered a few years ago, researchers thought they had found the last of the major genes that regulate weight. They were wrong.Introducing: obestatin, a newly discovered hormone that suppresses appetite.The finding, published in the Nov. 11 issue of Science, offers a key to researchers developing treatments for obesity. In a nation that desperately needs to slim down—the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 65 percent of Americans over the age of 20 are either overweight or obese—obestatin is likely...

<p>Thick as a phone book, a new state report on the environment cites a little-recognized danger to global forests: California.</p> <p>By consuming "vast amounts of ... wood products" while increasingly protecting our own forests from logging, Californians are sharpening the pace of cutting elsewhere, including Canada, says a draft of the report "The Changing California, Forest and Range 2003 Assessment," obtained by The Bee.</p>

<p>Scientists have isolated a hormone that makes us feel full when we eat, and they demonstrated its potential as a new weight-loss drug by injecting volunteers with the substance before a big buffet lunch.</p> <p>The participants injected with the so-called "third helping hormone" ate one-third less than usual and resisted snacking for up to 12 hours, scientists reported.</p>