Let's be clear about one thing: hunger is a physiological process that's hardwired into your body as a survival mechanism. As this research shows, your genetic makeup has a lot to say about how frequently you get hungry, how hungry you feel, and how quickly your hunger vanishes after eating. The idea, of course, is that if we better understand hunger, perhaps we can come up with ways to treat it.

Everybody wants to lose weight, and this search is nothing less than the Holy Grail of modern medicine: a magic anti-obesity pill that could be sold to hundreds of millions of people for thousands of dollars a year to help them with weight loss. Do the math on that. What may be shocking to learn is that we don't necessarily need to understand the genetic basis for hunger at all. Why? Because we can turn it off with the help of yet another gift from nature: Hoodia Gordonii, a succulent native to South Africa, that turns off your appetite in mere minutes. 

Hoodia offers the best hope for an anti-obesity pill that I've ever seen. Eat some hoodia, and you just don't feel hungry anymore. Weight loss occurs naturally. The point is that you don't necessarily need to understand all the complex genetic factors and biochemical signals for hunger if you have a substance that turns it off anyway. You won't hear about hoodia in the popular press for quite some time, of course. That's because the big pharmaceutical companies don't have patents yet. But once they gain FDA approval on a patentable compound derived from hoodia, rest assured this will be front page news for months, if not years. It will be the next miracle drug, and some pharmaceutical company is going to make a fortune with it.

• An international team of researchers has identified the role of a gene which may explain why some people overeat and become obese.
• Their research, published today in Public Library of Science Biology, shows that the gene GAD2 has an appetite stimulating role, and that one form of the gene is strongly associated with obese people.
• While the researchers recognise that obesity is a result of the interactions of many genes and environmental factors, this is one of the first genes to be strongly touted as a candidate 'gene for obesity'.
• The team compared genome-wide scans of 576 obese and 646 normal weight adults in France, from which they identified two alternative forms, or alleles, of the GAD2 gene.

Reference

Sciencedaily.com