Leptin Is Part Of Weight Gain
Tuesday, June 7th, 2011In nineteen ninety four the medical community was excited to have discovered a new hormone in the human body that seemed to be connected in some way to patients’ problems with weight gain. Initially touted as an obesity hormone or a fat hormone, leptin is actually more properly defined as a starvation hormone.
It is the regulation of hunger states that gives this hormone its power over our weight gain. Our bodies run on a principle of homeostasis, generally speaking, and this is one of the monitor compounds that allows us to track our metabolic state and fat reserves.
People have different levels. This hormone is produced normally in the fat cells which are stored throughout your body, and as they enter the blood stream to communicate with the brain they carry information about how much energy there is left in storage. If everything is normal, the brain knows that it is safe to engage in all kinds of normal activity. It’s a bit like a thermostat in that everything works fine until a threshold level is reached.
Everything uses energy. Maintaining your core temperature, the basic exchanges of chemicals, and all overt action uses energy which is derived from stored fat cells. As long as we know that our reserves are adequate, we are happy to engage in activity. There are periods in our individual development, pregnancy and puberty to name two of the big ones, which will require higher resting reserves than usual as they are very intense biological processes.
If you don’t have sufficient fat reserves, the amount of starvation hormone produced in the fat cells will be reduced. This in turn will alert your brain that there is insufficient energy in the body to engage in normal activity. Your nervous system now switches into a starvation state as it realizes that it will need to bring in more calories than it expends, and this in turn makes you hungry.
Hunger is controlled by the vagus nerve. This is a pathway that runs straight from your brain to your belly and it is in charge of energy storage levels. Its sole purpose is to encourage you to eat more and store the excess calories as fat. Once the fat reserves have reached normal levels again, the hormone production will be back at a point that shuts the vagus nerve down again for a while.
Resistance to this hormone switch is sometimes implicated in cases of obesity. Essentially, the brain isn’t understanding the signal to shut the vagus nerve cluster down. This is similar in concept to Type II diabetes in which the body fails to respond to increases insulin levels in the blood.
If you are suffering from weight gain, you might find some relief with leptin supplements. Talk to your doctor to see if he or she thinks that you might benefit from artificially increasing your resting levels. For some patients this is really helpful.
Elizabeth Roster is a dietitian and raw food chef. For more information on leptin, visit www.thehealthyvillage.com.
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