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U.S. researchers are hoping they have found a way to help people lose weight by "turning up the volume" on a gene that may control whether the body burns fat or packs on the pounds.

The researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center say the discovery could lead to drug therapy that prevents obesity and diabetes.

"There's a 'skinny gene' out there, and when it's reduced in function, animals become fat," said Jonathan Graff, the study's senior author and a professor of developmental biology and internal medicine at the medical centre. "It works in fat cells and not by changing appetite, and could account for what I would call this epidemic of obesity and diabetes."

The study, published in today's issue of Cell Metabolism, is based on research conducted over about five years that involved isolating and stimulating to various degrees the adipose gene in mice, fruit flies and tiny worms.

Dr. Graff and his team of researchers found that the more stimulation the adipose gene received, the skinnier and healthier the subjects became.

On the other hand, the less stimulation they received, the more weight they gained.

Moreover, the overweight mice became diabetic, while the leaner mice had healthy levels of blood glucose.

"It's a volume control," he said. "We can just keep making you skinnier by turning the volume of this up."

The adipose gene was discovered more than 50 years ago in a fat fruit fly, Dr. Graff said, but until now its specific functions were not known.

Because humans also possess the gene, Dr. Graff believes they will exhibit a similar response to its stimulation, which is yet to be tested.

"What we want to do now is to get a medicine to rev this thing up, to help you be skinny, to get your blood sugar down, to get your insulin down," he said, adding that he hopes his research will continue to a point where an oral drug is developed to conquer obesity and diabetes, a project he estimates is at least 10 years away.

A 2006 Statistics Canada study found that 36 per cent of Canadian adults were overweight and 23 per cent were obese.

Obesity is widespread because we live in a time of plenty, Dr. Graff said.

"In our current environment, it's easy to go to the corner and buy a bag chips," instead of foraging for food like humans did thousands of years ago.

Earlier this year, British researchers found a gene called FTO in a study of 39,000 white Europeans. The presence of a version of FTO increased a person's risk for obesity.

And in July, researchers at Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego, found a social connection to obesity:

If a close friend becomes obese, a person's likelihood of becoming obese soars by 171 per cent.

Khosrow Adeli, professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Toronto and Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, who studies obesity, called the most recent finding an important one.

"Many of the genes we have found so far appear to promote obesity," he said. "This one appears to basically control it."

However, multiple factors are involved in obesity, including metabolism, fat cells, liver, and most recently, the brain, Prof. Adeli said.

"We certainly are going to see more of these similar discoveries to fully understand all of the factors involved," he said, adding that it's more difficult to design drugs that increase, rather than inhibit, something.

"If one can devise a way to increase activity of this adipose [gene], then it can certainly be very helpful in treating cases of obesity."