Word: wurtman
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...simple sugars and refined carbohydrates from your diet, great. But if you are skimping on produce and whole grains and instead shoveling animal and dairy fats into your body, you are short-changing your health. "The diet-industrial-complex is now pushing low carbs full steam ahead," says Wurtman. "It may take a long time, but 10 years from now, people are going to look back on this and say, 'Boy, were we really stupid.'" --By David Bjerklie
Bear in mind too that carbs are linked to the regulation of a key neurotransmitter called serotonin, which, says M.I.T. brain researcher Judith Wurtman, "is essential for feelings of fullness as well as a good mood." And again, complex, not simple, carbs are the best way to maintain an even keel when it comes to both appetite and mood...
Their efforts failed, but Richard Wurtman, an M.I.T. neurologist and Lilly consultant, took a different approach. Instead of using Prozac as a starting point, he turned to fenfluramine, a European weight-loss drug. Because fenfluramine acts on both serotonin and dopamine, it has the unfortunate side effect of putting its users to sleep. That is why doctors came up with fen/phen; the "phen" (phentermine) is an amphetamine-like drug that wakes the patient up again and boosts the metabolism to burn calories faster. Wurtman separated fenfluramine into its two component chemicals, levofenfluramine and dexfenfluramine. The latter has revealed itself...
Meanwhile, Servier had finally figured out how to produce pure dexfenfluramine, without its mirror-image molecule. This was a potentially profitable discovery, since the patent on fenfluramine was about to run out, and the new formulation could be considered a novel, patentable drug. Servier approached Wurtman in the late 1970s with a proposal that he purchase the U.S. rights to dexfenfluramine. Wurtman tested the drug, found it was indeed effective and agreed. The actual purchaser would be Interneuron Pharmaceuticals, a company co-founded by Wurtman to market discoveries by M.I.T. scientists. Interneuron subsequently licensed the drug to Wyeth-Ayerst...
...fact, there is more than one way to interpret the neurotoxicity research. For one thing, observes Wurtman, animals don't necessarily respond to drugs the way humans do. The toxic dose of Redux in a monkey is only twice the therapeutic dose, but the therapeutic dose in a monkey is much higher to start with--as much as 10 times that of a human. It's therefore highly unlikely, he says, that a human user would...