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According to a recent article in Science Daily, a research study published in the FASEB Journal describes how your freckles might be making you fat. Apparently people who have trouble losing weight also make a common antioxidant called melanin in excess. The study was conducted at George Mason University and was a co-research project done in conjunction with INOVA Fairfax Hospital.

Melanin is a very common antioxidant and it helps regulate our skin and eye color. at cells in obese people produce melanin in excess–when they were comparing fat cells of obese people to those of people with normal weight. After the comparison, they found that the gene responsible for making melanin was working in “overdrive” in the fat cells of obese people.

The thing that makes this discovery so exciting is that it makes the invention of a drug that specifically targets fats cells completely possible. In fact some of these drugs already exist and are already FDA approved and available. The fact that they are available is very encouraging should they prove effective for weight loss in the clinical trials that are mandatory to be done before these prescription drugs can be sold and used.

Obesity increases the risk of developing terrible health conditions, such as high blood pressure, stroke, osteoarthritis, dyslipidemia, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, gallbladder disease, cancer sleep apnea and respiratory diseases.

No pill can replace diet and exercise but these ones, if approved by the FDA, just might come close. Hopefully this drug will help reduce the enormous cost that obesity causes our culture.