If you’ve ever thought that your favorite food was “calling your name,” irresistibly drawing you to the refrigerator, it’s not just all in your head. Well, actually it is in your head. But, it’s very real. Let me explain…

A study at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas has found that fat from certain foods goes to the brain and triggers the brain to send messages to the cells in the body, telling them to ignore the appetite-suppressing signals from leptin and insulin.

The interference with the leptin and insulin hormones, which are involved in regulating your weight, goes on for up to three days.

There’s a new possibility for suppressing appetite, and hopefully dropping weight. An antibody has been discovered that breaks down and suppresses an appetite stimulant produced by the human body.

Scientists with The Scripps Research Institute say the antibody catalyst, GHR-11E11, increases the metabolic rate in fasting mice and curbed their eating even after the rodents went 24 hours without food.

I’m not sure if this is known to translate in human subjects, but since recent reports from the World Health Organization say about 1 billion people worldwide are overweight or obese, anything is worth a shot.

It’s not being touted as a be-all, end-all cure for obesity. It will still take the usual combination of things to lose weight: optimum nutrition, exercise, and psychological components.

We are truly living in an era of mind-boggling technological innovations. When it comes to food, science is creating some pretty wild stuff that is making genetically-modified tomatoes look like cell phones from the early nineties.

One of the latest class of products that are designed to help us lose weight are tasteless food additives that are sprinkled on food. Once ingested, they have the power to induce feelings of fullness by acting on certain areas of the brain. It’s kind of like what may happen if hoodia were to meet your salt shaker. But unlike many dietary supplements, these food additives don’t contain hoodia, drugs or any other stimulants.

One such product is Sensa.