It sounds like a weight watcher's dream come true: a simple hormone, long thought to play an obscure function in the pancreas, turns out instead to be a powerful appetite suppressant―the body's way of telling the brain it's time to push the plate away. If a pharmaceutical company could put it in a pill and sell it at the drugstore, you might, just might, never again have to count calories or wrestle with your willpower. Just pop one of these things before a meal, and your stomach says―entirely on its own―"No, thank you, I've had quite enough." The scientific name for this remarkable substance is PYY_(3-36), or PYY for short, but the researchers who discovered its new function have dubbed it, appropriately enough, the fullness hormone. "If you give it prior to a meal, it switches off the appetite," says Dr. Stephen Bloom, an en-docrinologist at Hammersmith Hospital in London. "PYY is what makes you less hungry after a meal."
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