The Nerdy Foodie

Fat Monkeys Have All the Luck

Posted on November 11, 2011 Updated on November 11, 2011

Like all people who have “tried every diet” and suffer being “fat from birth”, any miracle drug completely excites me. Part of that is because science amazes me. Much of the pills we take come with both positive and (many) negative effects, many simply cannot be good for the human body, but we take them anyway in a desperate attempt to achieve whatever it is we’re seeking. After all, even placebos are often more than 10% affective. When one views medical science’s studies, failures, and new policies of the past 100 years – hell, even in the past 50 years – they surpass the previous 1000 years by leaps and bounds. And there’s something very mad-scientist about everything. I like to believe that it’s all for the betterment of mankind, but medicine, like American Universities, are now merely businesses with the prize being cash and not an advanced human population. We’re a people of instant gratification so we jump at cures, damn the long term affects.

I am no different, and I might carry a little shame, but not enough to stop me from getting in line for the following drug, if it one day winds up on the market. The good people at the Medical School at the University of Texas at Houston have developed an injection that kills blood vessels that feed fatty deposits. This means the blood vessels shrivel away, the fat is starved and then reabsorbed into the body, at which time the lucky recipient urinates or sweats out the excess just like regular weight loss. While all animal testing has its ethical issues, it is good news in the medical world that this drug is proving so effective on monkeys, as frequently drugs that may test well in the first stages (on rats) may not work well during the next point of testing, on our cousin primates. The drug may also help with insulin resistance.

I assume UT Houston purchased the primates from lab supply centers, and then fattened them up with a healthy diet of American junk food and Lifetime Television. I imagine they might have even turned binge eating in front of the BoobTube into a sort of drinking game with food instead of booze: Every time there’s an episode of Golden Girls on, the monkeys get cheesecake. A made-for-television movie featuring Jennifer Love Hewett would warrant a pizza and a pint of cookie dough ice cream. Designing Women means fried chicken and bourbon. Paradise… But I digress.

Once their test subjects had the “fatty deposits” necessary, testing began, and thus far has been excitingly successful. The average monkey on the injection lost 11% of their body weight in a month, an amount most humans struggle to lose and keep off within a year’s time. The placebo monkeys only lost a maximum 1% and their thighs now make a shwishing sounds whenever they wear track pants.

Much to the chagrin of curvacious ladies everywhere, the next stage of testing will be on humans, but only on men with prostate cancer. It is not clear why this would be and the NPR article offers no explanation. It has occurred to me, however, that this might be so that in the event of complications, i.e. death, the scientists would have the option to say “Oh, the cancer killed them. P.S. the drug is now for sale through Phizer.”