Abstract

Objective: Obesity is a complex chronic disease linked to over 200 chronic diseases and has increased in prevalence worldwide to date. This absolutely requires drastic lifestyle changes including practice of exercise and intake of low-calorie diet. However, many pharmacotherapies, approved by FDA, have recently been developed to improve obesity. Especially glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), a gut hormone that reduces appetite and promotes insulin secretion, has recently attracted much attention as a promising anti-obesity target. We developed ‘NEXITOP’ consisting of several natural substances that have previously been proven to help with obesity and aimed to evaluate the anti-obesity effects via GLP-1 modulation in high-fat diet (HFD)-induced obese mice. Method: After early feeding HFD for 2 weeks, forty of C57BL/6J mice were divided into five groups: normal diet, HFD control, metformin (200 mg/kg), and NEXITOP (1300 or 2600 mg/kg). And then, NEXTOP and metformin were administered for 8 weeks. Results: Feeding of HFD for 10 weeks dramatically increased both caloric intake and body weight (1.4 and 1.6-fold, respectively). While the administration of NEXITOP significantly improved both elevated caloric intake (19%) and body weight (12%). The administration of NEXITOP also showed reducible effects of abdominal fats (visceral; 2.1-fold, epididymal; 4.8-fold, retroperitoneal; 1.5-fold) in HFD-fed mice. Also, the administration of NEXITOP greatly elevated serum GLP-1 levels at 2, 4 and 6 weeks as well as its effects were superior to metformin at 2 and 4 weeks. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that NEXITOP exerted an anti-obesity effect, and its underlying mechanism may involve regulation of the serum GLP-1 level.