A PROTEIN that can stop you feeling hungry might also make you crave a stiff
drink.
Leptin is a protein that reduces appetite. Scientists know that when they
give mice alcohol and then withhold the drink, injections of leptin make the
mice drink more alcohol when given the chance. To find out if high levels of
leptin also make people crave alcohol, psychiatrist Falk Kiefer and his
colleagues at the University of Hamburg measured leptin levels in the blood of
60 alcoholics.
Sure enough, the alcoholics’ leptin levels correlated with how much they
wanted a drink, the team will report…
