Discover How to Harness Your Hunger Hormone to Lose Weight

AHA Publisher — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 07:00:12 +0000

Stephanie Woods via NaturalHealth365 – Did you know that you have a “hunger hormone” which controls your desire to eat? It’s true. In fact, two hormones work in concert to keep your hunger in balance. One, ghrelin, turns your hunger on and the other, leptin, turns it off. When these two hormones are in perfect balance, you have a healthy appetite and are not inclined to overdo it. However, if one or both are not working as they should, it can cause you to chronically overeat, which can lead to obesity and health conditions that are linked to obesity. These TWO Hormones Regulate Your Appetite – Here Is How Ghrelin and leptin work together to let you know when you are hungry and when you are satiated. They are the regulators of your appetite. Ghrelin – This hormone tells the body when it needs to eat to prevent starvation and to encourage the intake of necessary fuel for energy. The stomach releases ghrelin, which acts quickly and should significantly decrease once you are full. Leptin – This hormone is the appetite off switch. It signals your brain that your body has consumed enough fuel and is now ready to begin burning fat for energy. It works in a more long-term capacity where ghrelin is more of a rapid rise and fall. Many issues can throw these hormones off balance. For example, health conditions, lifestyle choices, genetics, sleep habits, and obesity can affect how well or poorly hunger hormones function. What Is Leptin Resistance? Leptin is created in adipose tissue or fat cells. People who are overweight or obese have more fat cells and often have higher leptin levels in their bodies. This creates an environment where the body is constantly exposed to high levels of leptin, and the body often responds by building a resistance to it. This decreases, often dramatically, the hormone’s appetite suppression abilities. When the brain doesn’t receive that “I’m full” signal, it thinks that the body requires more food or it will starve. This leads it to continue sending the message to eat, which increases the fat cells, increasing the leptin, and causing the body to become even more resistant. It is a difficult cycle that isn’t easy to break. Here Are Some of the Best Ways to Get Your Hunger Hormones Under Control When your hunger hormones are out of balance, it is best to address both the potential for leptin resistance as well as malfunctioning ghrelin. Remove processed foods from your diet. Switch to healthy fats like olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil Consume healthy carbs like whole grains, quinoa, and stone-ground whole wheat Opt for lean protein and healthy animal fats such as fatty fish (salmon, and sardines), pasture-raised, grass-fed beef, chicken, and lamb Choose plant-based proteins like legumes or spirulina Exercise regularly. Even moderate aerobic exercise can reduce leptin resistance Eliminate added sugar in all forms and high-fructose corn syrup from your diet. Get quality sleep every night. 8 to 10 hours of sleep is considered optimal, especially when increasing leptin sensitivity Stay hydrated. Plain (clean) water is always good, but broths and soups also count, and foods with a lot of water like salads, melon, and eggplant. Chew your food – very well. And, finally, look into the health benefits of intermittent fasting. Simply put, if you believe that your hunger hormones are working against you, talking with your integrative healthcare provider could get you on the right track to getting them under control. There are treatments available, and a good health coach can help you create a plan that works best for you. Sources for this article include: EndocrineWeb.com NIH.gov NIH.gov To read the original article click here.

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From Adequate Nutrition to Optimum Nutrition

The AHA! Team — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Michael Greger M.D. FACLM via Nutrition Facts – We need to shift from the concept of merely getting adequate nutrition to getting optimal nutrition. That is, we shouldn’t just aim to avoid scurvy, but we should promote health and minimize our risk of developing degenerative diseases. Research in human nutrition over the past four decades has led to many discoveries as well as a comprehensive understanding of the exact mechanisms behind how food nutrients affect our bodies. As I discuss in my video Reductionism and the Deficiency Mentality, however, the “prevalence of epidemics of diet-related chronic diseases, especially obesity, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, cardiovascular diseases, and cancers, dramatically increases worldwide each year.” Why hasn’t all this intricate knowledge translated into improvements in public health? Perhaps it has to do with our entire philosophy of nutrition called reductionism, where everything is broken down into its constituent parts; food is reduced to a collection of single compounds with supposed single effects. “The reductionist approach has traditionally been and continues today as the dominant approach in nutrition research.” For example, did you know that mechanistically, there’s a chemical in ginger root that down-regulates phorbol myristate acetate-induced phosphorylation of ERK1/2 and JNK MAP kinases? That’s actually pretty cool, but not while millions of people continue to die of diet-related disease. We already know that three quarters of chronic disease riskâ€“â€“diabetes, heart attacks, stroke, and cancerâ€”can be eliminated if everyone followed four simple practices: not smoking, not being obese, getting a half hour of exercise a day, and eating a healthier diet, defined as more fruits, veggies, and whole grains, and less meat. Think what that could mean in terms of the human costs. We already know enough to save millions of lives. So, shouldn’t our efforts be spent implementing these changes before another dollar is spent on research such as figuring out whether there is some grape skin extract that can lower cholesterol in zebra fish or even trying to find out whether there are whole foods that can do the same? Why spend taxpayer dollars clogging the arteries of striped minnows by feeding them a high cholesterol diet to see whether hawthorn leaves and flowers have the potential to help? Even if they did and even if it worked in people, too, wouldn’t it be better to simply not clog our arteries in the first place? This dramatic drop in risk and increase in healthy life years through preventive nutrition need not involve superfoods or herbal extracts or fancy nutritional supplementsâ€”just healthier eating. When Hippocrates supposedly said, “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food,” he “did not mean that foods are drugs, but rather, that the best way to remain in good health is to maintain a healthy diet.” (Note: Hippocrates probably never actually said thatâ€”but it’s a great sentiment anyways!) The historical attitude of the field of nutrition, however, may be best summed up by the phrase, “Eat what you want after you eat what you should.” In other words, eat whatever you want as long as you get your vitamins and minerals. This mindset is epitomized by breakfast cereals, which often provide double-digit vitamins and minerals. But the road to health is not paved with Coke plus vitamins and minerals. This reductionistic attitude “is good for the food industry but not actually good for human health.” Why not? Well, if food is good only for a few nutrients, then you can get away with selling vitamin-fortified Twinkies. We need to shift from the concept of merely getting adequate nutrition to getting optimal nutrition. That is, we shouldn’t just aim to avoid scurvy, but we should promote health and minimize our risk of developing degenerative diseases. Bringing things down to their molecular components works for drug development, for example, discovering all the vitamins and curing deficiency diseases. In the field of nutrition, “[h]owever, the reductionist approach is beginning to reach its limits.” We discovered all the vitamins more than a half-century ago. When is the last time you heard of someone coming down with scurvy, pellagra, or kwashiorkor, the classic deficiency syndromes? What about the diseases of dietary excess: heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and hypertension? Ever heard of anyone with any of those? Of course we have. Yet we continue to have this deficiency mindset when it comes to nutrition. When someone tries to reduce their consumption of meat, why is “where are you going to get your protein?” the first question they get asked, rather than “if you start eating like that, where are you going to get your heart disease?” The same deficiency mindset led to the emergence of a multibillion-dollar supplement industry. What about a daily multivitamin just “as ‘insurance’ against nutrient deficiency?” Better insurance would be just to eat healthy food. This article has been modified. To read the original article click here. For more articles by Dr. Greger click here.

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Discover How to Harness Your Hunger Hormone to Lose Weight

From Adequate Nutrition to Optimum Nutrition