Achyranthes Aspera - A Herb Against Obesity

Obesity is excessive accumulation of body fat which leads to several complications. It is the fifth leading cause for global deaths and is associated with diseases like diabetes, coronary heart diseases, hypertension and some cancers. It arises out of imbalance between energy intake and energy expenditure. Now a days this imbalance is caused mainly by high fat diets, lack of exercise, and sedentary lifestyles.Out of the several causes that cause obesity the researcher has chosen high fat diet to induce obesity in male wistar rats. Because the physiological aspects of these animals closely resemble humans the results can be reliably extrapolated. Four sets of parameters, the body weight parameters, lipid profiles, oxidative stress parameters and insulin resistance parameters were used to notice the devastating effect of high fat diet and the protective role of saponins of A. aspera. In this study the protective action of the standard drug orlistat, a pancreatic lipase inhibitor is also compared with that of saponins of A. aspera and it was found that the saponins of this herb have an edge over the standard drug orlistat.