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Find it hard to say no to dessert? Blame it on your brain, for after you've eaten your fill, it's the pleasure centres that tell you when to put down the fork. The discovery comes from an experiment that measured the brain activity of volunteers offered an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet. Rachel Batterham at University College London and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of eight people while they received an intravenous drip either of saline or PYY, a powerful appetite-suppressing hormone that is naturally secreted by the gut after eating. Half-an-hour after being scanned, Batterham...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A hormone produced by the intestines, called peptide YY3-36 (PYY), could help obese people lose weight, new research suggests.  "This is the first time that a hormone has been shown to cause a long-term reduction in calorie intake in obese volunteers," lead author Dr. Rachel Batterham, from Imperial College in London, said in a statement. "We now need to do studies over a longer period to see whether the decrease in appetite and food intake...translates into weight loss."   PYY has been shown to curb the appetites of normal weight individuals, but it was unclear...