THE RAT RACE SHAUN SMILLIE
towards obesity
International junk food corporations, the marketing of sweets and sugary drinks to children, the fast food generation – all of these have trapped us into an “obesogenic environment”. To get out of the trap, we need some out of the box thinking, including looking for answers in traditional medicinal plants.
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amburgers, a side of chips, and a doughnut for dessert, all washed down with a sweetened carbonated drink. If the young rats in the Endocrinology and Metabolism Research Lab in the School of Physiology at Wits were the human children they were modelled on, this might have been
a typical meal. But these lab rats had consumed a high-calorie fructose [fruit sugar] solution designed to mimic the sugar-enriched Western diet behind the obesity pandemic that is hitting South Africa hard. The rats were fed a high-fructose diet to test: a possible new weapon in the arsenal against obesity and the metabolic diseases associated with it. Surprisingly, it
is a weapon that humanity has known for millennia – it’s the Terminalia sericea, the silver cluster-leaf tree, widely distributed in southern Africa. Traditionally this plant has been used to treat a host of ailments, including intestinal infections, hypertension and diabetes. Studies have shown that the silver cluster-leaf contains chemical compounds that break down fat.
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