A DRUG-FREE fat pill could help weight loss by preventing over-eating.
Scientists are trialling a capsule that tricks the body into thinking it is full.
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It works in a similar way to fat jabs but is totally natural — containing vegetable and fruit ingredients — making it cheaper, potentially side effect-free and available without a prescription.
Early trials on 60 people found eight in ten ate less food after taking the twice-daily pills, cutting 13 per cent of calories from a single meal.
Developer Enterika has now won a £50,000 government grant to scale up tests to 150 patients in the summer.
Dr Madusha Peiris, a neuroscientist at Queen Mary University in London and the pill’s chief inventor, said: “We developed a way of hijacking the system that all humans have to sense nutrients and make us feel full.
“So far nobody has had any side effects and we suspect that is because these are nutrients that are in your diet anyway, which is very different to a drug.
“No other company is taking this nutrient-based approach.”
Dr Peiris has patented the pills’ secret recipe, which includes fatty acids from broccoli, coconut and perilla oil.
She must now carry out larger trials to prove they are safe to take long-term and actually lead to weight loss.
The potential market is huge as two thirds of Brits are overweight and half of those — around 30 per cent of the population — are obese.
Excess flab is one of the NHS’s biggest challenges as it is driving up rates of type 2 diabetes, heart diseases and cancers.
Dr Peiris said obesity makes the gut become desensitised and release smaller amounts of fullness hormones, so people keep eating more.
She claims her pill tricks the body into pumping out more of the hormones, known as GLP-1, from natural reserves — whereas drugs like Ozempic are synthetic and copy them.
Bowel scans lift
A NEW way to diagnose and treat bowel cancer without a risky biopsy has been found.
Positron emission tomography scans produce a detailed image of a growth.
By using them along with genetic data, researchers could identify several types of tumour.
It means the scans can be used instead of biopsies, which require an invasive procedure, risk infection and give a limited view.
Dr David Lewis, who led the research at the University of Glasgow, said: “Precision medicine has the potential to revolutionise cancer diagnosis and treatment.”