What Is Leptin? Hormone levels for Weight Loss and Obesity, Why You Need It
What Is Leptin?
Leptin hormone levels for weight loss or obesity, why do you require this hormone for weight reduction vs obesity?
What Is It?
Leptin Defined
Even now, researchers are busy exploring the new possibilities and potential for weight loss heaven following the recent discovery of two hormones leptin and ghrelin, that affect hunger and appetite.
Leptin is another hormone that comes into play to let our brains know how much fat we have stored in our bodies. Leptin is made by fat cells, so as fat stores rise more leptin is secreted and makes its way to the brain with the command to stop eating because the fat levels are high enough. When fat levels fall, so does leptin and then appetite increases.
The Research
Research on Leptin
♥ Researchers believe that a glitch in someone's individual body makeup could be the reason people gain weight.
♥ They also suggest that obese people may have resistance to leptin. In other words, the leptin message to stop eating isn't getting through. This appears to have been proven in tests on mice. Mice don't have any naturally occurring leptin, so they can grow enormously obese if given the chance.
What Is Ghrelin?
♥ Ghrelin is another hormone that is produced in the stomach and is said to have a role in stomach-brain communication that alerts us when to eat and when to stop.
Ghrelin levels rise after about three hours and cause us to feel hungry. After eating, ghrelin levels drop again, only to rise once more about three hours later.
Your Set Point and Drugs
♥ Another avenue of thought suggests that our body weight has a set point because of our genes, so that people who become obese do so not because of bad lifestyle, but because that is always going to be their natural genetic state.
Thus, losing weight is always going to be an uphill battle, as willpower alone will not be enough to stop obese people from eating.
So, naturally enough, the quest is now on to find a way to limit ghrelin and stimulate leptin, and, you guessed it, with drugs.
But although these new drugs to help obesity may prove successful, one doctor involved in the research has been quoted as saying the body would more than likely find other ways to stimulate appetite anyway through genetics and evolution.
Future Research
Ghrelin and Leptin Future Research
Hence, it does beg the question, is it all really worth all this time and effort on research when nature usually finds a way to triumph over man's efforts to tinker with it? Well, yes and no.
♥ Yes, because the latest revelations about ghrelin and leptin are important because it could give those providing healthcare and nutritional expertise another avenue to explore when ascertaining the best course of exercise or weight loss programming.
♥ No, because regarding reliance on drugs, the bottom line is the drugs just don't work for long-term benefit.
Drugs don't cure anything. They just provide short-term relief.
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