The times, they are a’changing. Endocrine poobahs recently discovered some new things. Well, they’re old things because they’ve been around, doing their thing, forever. But who knew?
Anyway, they added some new members to the endocrine system, including our body fat. While our blubber isn’t actually a gland, what it does and how it does it (emitter/receptor) makes it part of the endocrine family.
Anyway, our white fat-our blubber, as opposed to brown fat, which is good fat-is chock-a-block full of endocrine hormones-with new ones being discovered, it seems, almost daily. Chief among these hormones is Leptin, which tells us to stop eating, and grehlin, which encourages us to chow down. When both work well, we tend to remain slim and trim.
But the food industry and our lack of knowledge are conspiring against leptin, which is very bad news. We need to talk about this.
Case in point: High Fructose Corn Syrup. Our bodies don’t know how to handle it, so it marches into our bodies and starts breaking the furniture.
Whenever we eat or drink something that confuses our bodies, such as Hfcs, it gets dumped into our liver for clean-up. Well, even the liver doesn’t know what to do with HFCS, so it hits like a toxic bomb. And leaves our dazed liver inflamed and hurting.
And what does HFCS have to do with leptin? Leptin takes one look and says, “Who Dat?,” and it’s not talking football.
Leptin can’t handle HFCS, so it ignores it. Which means leptin never signals the brain to stop eating/drinking because you’ve had enough. Can you say “obesity epidemic?” And, as the dominos fall, can you say “diabetes?” Or “osteoporosis?” In fact, pick a disease, any disease, and HFCS will help you get there.
Need more unhappy news? Okay. Remember the all-for-one, one-for-all nature of the endocrine system? Whenever a part of the endocrine system, leptin for instance, takes a hit, all the other endocrine glands try to make things right, often with unfortunate results.
Who knew drinking a Coke-or any other soda-could cause chaos?
My obvious advice? Get HFCS out of your life. Don’t include even a little bit in what you eat or drink. It’s everywhere, so this will involve reading lots of labels, but your health will thank you.
To read other articles in this series, search on “This Is Your Endocrine System”
