Word: orlistat
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...friend told her about an experimental diet drug being tested at nearby Baylor University, and Smith signed up. For two years, she and thousands of other overweight patients maintained a low-fat diet, exercised--and swallowed a medication called orlistat three times a day. "My clothes started fitting a lot looser after a month," she says. Today Smith is down to 150 lbs., her prepregnancy weight. Not only that, but she's maintaining the loss and hopes to drop even more...
...millions of Americans will be getting the chance to see if orlistat works for them as well. The FDA ruled last week that the drug, made by Hoffman-LaRoche, can go on sale in the U.S. The dark blue capsules, under the trade name Xenical, could be available by prescription as early as this week...
Officially, orlistat is supposed to be taken only by the obese--those whose weight is at least 30% higher than it should be (27% for those with high blood pressure, high cholesterol or diabetes). But this is just a guideline: once a drug has been approved, doctors can prescribe it any way they want. And given Americans' obsession with getting slim, the demand could be enormous. "The reality," says Dr. Steven Heymsfield, deputy director of the Obesity Research Center at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, "is that millions of people who have tried everything else...
...pill Viagra in 1998. The Redux fad ended abruptly a year later when some users developed serious heart-valve defects--and major side effects are always a possibility with Xenical as well. With Redux, though, hints of danger had shown up in clinical testing. That's not true of orlistat, either in animals or in human studies conducted in some of the 17 countries where the medication is already available. (An initial suspicion that users had a higher incidence of breast cancer proved unfounded...
...reason may be that hardly any of the drug is absorbed into the body. Unlike all previous diet drugs, orlistat doesn't reduce appetite. Instead, it interferes with an intestinal enzyme that breaks down dietary fat into an absorbable form. In essence, orlistat turns normal fat into something akin to Olestra, the fat-free fat Procter & Gamble has been using in snack foods since...