Anti-smoking pill may also fight fat

A new pill created to fight obesity and smoking is now being tested on humans for other benefits.

The drug, which appears to encapsulate a treadmill, rehab and self-control, is called Rimonabant, or Acomplia. Creators say Rimonabant can fight obesity, kill the urge to smoke, stop cocaine addiction and obliterate marijuana and alcohol cravings.

A dream for many, Rimonabant's testing last week showed that people on the pill could not just lose weight but keep it off for two years - a feat no other diet pill has achieved.

Like double-action birth control pills that fight off acne and pregnancy, Rimonabant combats the country's two leading causes of death: smoking and obesity. The drug affects the brain's reward system, which tells the body to keep doing something.

Developed by French Drug Maker Sanofi-Synthelabo, Rimonabant has also been called anti-marijuana because it blocks hungry signals experienced by smokers of the herb.

Rimonabant can be easily pushed into the same category of unbelievable Hollywood diets that suggest two-day transformations and exercise tapes that guarantee steel everything. However, researchers doing human testing of Rimonabant say they aren't looking to make a miracle drug.

"No drug is going to do that," researcher Luc Van Gaal of the University Hospital in Antwerp, Belgium, told Reuters news agency.

In fact, during initial human testing, 15 percent of subjects stopped taking the allotted 20 milligram doses mainly because of nausea and dizziness. That's one in eight patients who thought the weight loss and urge suppressions of alcohol, smoking and other drugs were not worth the side effects.

Almost two out of three Americans over the age of 20 are overweight, and many are at the point of being obese, according to Obesity Week, a news and commentary source on the obesity crisis. Obesity is a major public health burden and one of the most frequent causes of death worldwide, mainly through cardiovascular disease.

Obesity is typically measured by body mass index. However, recent findings show that visceral, or abdominal fat - simply measured by waist circumference - is a better predictor of heart attack than weight or BMI. Forty-four percent of adult Americans have a waist circumference size exceeding the at-risk level (40 inches for men and 35 inches for women).

Visceral fat is associated with the cause of metabolic risk factors such as dyslipidemia or insulin resistance that may lead to diabetes, heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular disease. Reducing abdominal fat is a recognized priority for preventing cardiovascular diseases. Also, obesity has recently been linked to infertility in men and women.