A new study claims that celastrol, an extract from the Chinese “thunder god vine,” could be helpful in controlling obesity and helping people lose weight.
Researchers conducted tests with a number of mice, with some of them given high doses of celastrol. As it turned out, those who ingested a high amount of celastrol consumed as much as 80 percent less food, and lost as much as 45 percent of their weight in just three weeks’ time. That’s because the extract was proven to enhance leptin, a hormone that helps suppress appetite. Leptin is responsible for telling the brain that the body is full, and previous studies have shown that humans and mice without leptin tend to eat much more and become obese. However, celastrol is the first substance found to be capable of ending leptin resistance.
“During the last two decades, there has been an enormous amount of effort to treat obesity by breaking down leptin resistance, but these efforts have failed,” said Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School endocrinologist Umut Ozcan. “The message from this study is that there is still hope for making leptin work, and there is still hope for treating obesity. If Celastrol works in humans as it does in mice, it could be a powerful way to treat obesity and improve the health of many patients suffering from obesity and associated complications, such as heart disease, fatty liver, and type 2 diabetes.”
Still, Ozcan warned that celastrol may not be the cure-all it appears to be, as it has only been tested in mice, but not on humans. He says that the thunder god vine has other compounds that may make it dangerous for people to ingest thunder god vine extracts as a weight loss agent.