The title of this blog-entry is not mine but a quotable quote from one of the greatest classical poets of Rome, Virgil(Publius Vergilius Maro). I felt this quote will be befitting title for the kind of content that I'm intending to throw into this blogosphere. There is one challenge that invariably featured in all my new year's resolutions, that's about "getting slimmer, lighter and fitter....yes it's all about getting rid of my embonpoint".
But believe me this has been one of the things on which, I've made some conscious effort so far, but none of them have seen any encouraging results so far. Repeated set-back's and failures made me think of a systematic approach to the problem. I thought of the factors that generally seem to influence our Body Mass Index(BMI), the food I eat, my active side of life and other potential hormonal imbalances. Out of these three, the first one, the food we eat is the factor that I chose to do a "deep-dive" into. For the past two days, I've been looking at the kind of food I eat, the quantity I eat and also when and how I get hungry. I was researching around the ways to naturally control hunger and consequently control the food intake. In this blog post, I wanted to share some interesting stuff that I figured out on how do we feel hungry, how does our body deal with this hunger in physiological terms.
As we all know, it is our brain that coordinates various parts of our digestive system on when to ask for food and when to stop eating etc., essentially controlling appetite and our reactions to the appetite. Specifically Hypothalamus is the portion of our brain that controls a number of hormones driven bodily functions. Here’s a high level summary of how our food intake is regulated.
Control Point 1 : There are some fibres in the walls of our stomach which detects the stomach expansion levels caused by the ongoing food intake(as we eat) and they send signals to our brain with which the brain calculates/estimates the amount of food consumed and brain(Hypothalamus) orders our nervous system to stop when the quantity seems sufficient
Control Point 2 : This is a hormonal control point.There are two hormones that detect the energy needs of our body. This detected by measure the depleted energy sources of our body : Sugar level and Fat levels. Mainly there are 2 hormones that keep vigil on Sugar and Fat levels in our body. Those hormones are Insulin and Leptin respectively. They detect our body sugar and fat levels and send strong signals to Hypothalamus in our brain, which then directs the nervous system to stop or start eating food.
These control mechanisms are effective, but again their proper functioning and effectiveness depends on what we eat. If these control points and the part of the brain that controls food intake(Hypothalamus) doesn’t restrict them, we are either going to over-ear or starve. So before getting on to diet or any serious physical work-out plans it is important to ensure “Hypothalamus” works effectively on food control or not.
It has been identified that saturated fat called paltimore (mostly found in meat and milk products) works against the Hypethalamus and slows it down. But the point is the “oleic acid” helps a lot in getting this Hypethalamus and the related neurons works really well. So to me oleic acid seems to be a panacea for obesity related items yet but remember “Hypothalamus” is only just one of the factors that controls or drives food intake, there may be many others as well.
Now where do we find Oleic acid? It seems that Oleic acid is one of those Omega – nine acids and is one of the health fats that everyone should have. Surprised to figure out that Olive oil has a lot of it but it’s also found in large quantities in Canola and Grapeseed oil.
I will try and compile the list of reference sites and I went through:
Reference
http://journals.cambridge.org/production/action/cjoGetFulltext?fulltextid=654024
Comments
Thanks
Venkatachalam.