Some things you may not have known about your body
By Kat • Jul 9th, 2008 • Category: Site Stuff
Your Stomach Secretes Corrosive Acid
There’s one dangerous liquid no airport security can confiscate from you: It’s in your gut. Your stomach cells secrete hydrochloric acid, a corrosive compound used to treat metals in the industrial world. It can pickle steel, but mucous lining the stomach wall keeps this poisonous liquid safely in the digestive system, breaking down lunch.
Body Position Affects Your Memory
Can’t remember your anniversary, hubby? Try getting down on one knee. Memories are highly embodied in our senses. A scent or sound may evoke a distant episode from one’s childhood. The connections can be obvious (a bicycle bell makes you remember your old paper route) or inscrutable. A recent study helps decipher some of this embodiment. An article in the January 2007 issue of Cognition reports that episodes from your past are remembered faster and better while in a body position similar to the pose struck during the event.
Bones Break (Down) to Balance Minerals
In addition to supporting the bag of organs and muscles that is our body, bones help regulate our calcium levels. Bones contain both phosphorus and calcium, the latter of which is needed by muscles and nerves. If the element is in short supply, certain hormones will cause bones to break downeupping calcium levels in the body until the appropriate extracellular concentration is reached.
Much of a Meal is Food For Thought
Though it makes up only 2 percent of our total body weight, the brain demands 20 percent of the body’s oxygen and calories. To keep our noggin well-stocked with resources, three major cerebral arteries are constantly pumping in oxygen. A blockage or break in one of them starves brain cells of the energy they require to function, impairing the functions controlled by that region. This is a stroke.
Thousands of Eggs Unused by Ovaries
When a woman reaches her late 40s or early 50s, the monthly menstrual cycle that controls her hormone levels and readies ova for insemination ceases. Her ovaries have been producing less and less estrogen, inciting physical and emotional changes across her body. Her underdeveloped egg follicles begin to fail to release ova as regularly as before. The average adolescent girl has 34,000 underdeveloped egg follicles, although only 350 or so mature during her life (at the rate of about one per month). The unused egg follicles then deteriorate. With no potential pregnancy on the horizon, the brain can stop managing the release of ova.
Puberty Reshapes Brain Structure, Makes for Missed Curfews
We know that hormone-fueled changes in the body are necessary to encourage growth and ready the body for reproduction. But why is adolescence so emotionally unpleasant? Hormones like testosterone actually influence the development of neurons in the brain, and the changes made to brain structure have many behavioral consequences. Expect emotional awkwardness, apathy and poor decision-making skills as regions in the frontal cortex mature.
Cell Hairs Move Mucus
Most cells in our bodies sport hair-like organelles called cilia that help out with a variety of functions, from digestion to hearing. In the nose, cilia help to drain mucus from the nasal cavity down to the throat. Cold weather slows down the draining process, causing a mucus backup that can leave you with snotty sleeves. Swollen nasal membranes or condensation can also cause a stuffed schnozzle.
Your Skin Has Four Colors
All skin, without coloring, would appear creamy white. Near-surface blood vessels add a blush of red. A yellow pigment also tints the canvas. Lastly, sepia-toned melanin, created in response to ultraviolet rays, appears black in large amounts. These four hues mix in different proportions to create the skin colors of all the peoples of Earth.
The World Laughs with You
Just as watching someone yawn can induce the behavior in yourself, recent evidence suggests that laughter is a social cue for mimicry. Hearing a laugh actually stimulates the brain region associated with facial movements. Mimicry plays an important role in social interaction. Cues like sneezing, laughing, crying and yawning may be ways of creating strong social bonds within a group.
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:15 am
http://www.thefactsaboutfitness.com/news/hfcs.htm
High fructose corn syrup is a sweetener produced using cornstarch. It contains a mixture of glucose and fructose. Although high fructose corn syrup can contain up to 90% fructose, most of the high fructose corn syrup used in soft drinks contains 55% fructose [4].
According to records from the Department of Agriculture for the period between 1967 and 2000, Americans eat an average of 132 calories of high fructose corn syrup each day. The figure is closer to 300 calories for 2 out of 10 Americans [2].
High fructose corn syrup can raise both blood sugar and insulin levels [5], both of which play a role in regulating hunger, but it doesn’t have the same impact as other forms of carbohydrate such as glucose [6].
In other words, the calories in a soft drink don’t cause a feeling of fullness in the way that calories from food do, promoting the "passive overconsumption" of calories and sugar.
Publishing their findings in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania looked at the effect that high fructose corn syrup has on various hormones that help to regulate hunger [1].
The researchers recruited 12 women of normal weight. On two different days, the women ate the same three meals. After each meal, they received a drink sweetened with either glucose or high fructose corn syrup.
When subjects were given the drink sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, levels of the hormones insulin and leptin were lower than when they drank glucose. Rising insulin and leptin levels trigger a feeling of being "full."
Following the high fructose corn syrup drink, levels of the hormone ghrelin were also higher compared with the glucose drink. A rising ghrelin level is linked with increased feelings of hunger…
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May 8, 2006
Ghrelin, Leptin, Insulin, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Olive Oil, and Shangri-La
I’m going to preface this whole thing by saying its all highly speculative. Also, here’s a quick review of several other factors at play.
Seth Roberts, a psychologist at Berkeley, has posited a rather intriguing diet theory for the citizens of developed countries, and offers explanations of how his theory addresses a host of studies in humans and other mammals (dogs, rats, mice, cats, etc), but he doesn’t address the physiological set point that must exist for his theory to work. Surely he has heard of leptin and ghrelin and insulin, but it doesn’t appear he has decided they, or any of the other many molecules involved, are worth talking about. Perhaps he believes the theory stands on its own merits, regardless of the ultimate molecular mechanisms. Here’s a quick redux:
A Body-Fat Setpoint
What Dr Roberts doesn’t address
Adipocytes secrete leptin, which depresses appetite, when they have a usual-to-high amount of fat on board. If the adipocytes are chronically engorged it has been hypothosized (Friedman, Nature, 1998) that the hypothalamus may reduce its response to leptin. This could be done by invaginating some of the leptin receptors, a well documented mechanism in other membrane proteins, like aquaporons, or the hypothalamus may reduce the response to leptin by some concordant intracellular downregulation.
Ghrelin is secreted by endocrine cells in the stomach epithelium, into the blood, in advance of a meal. This preprandial secretion suggests the vagus nerve, which originates in the brainstem, controls ghrelin secretion, probably via acetylcholine synapses. Why ghrelin is produced in the stomach, I don’t know, but ghrelin acts on receptors in neurons of the hypothalamic feeding centers of the brain to increase hunger via neuropeptide Y. Anorexics report being always hungry and have been found to have high ghrelin levels. Gastric bypass patients, who find excess eating painful, have low ghrelin levels, particularly those whose surgery included removal of the fundus, which contains the P/D1 cells that secrete ghrelin. In normal people, there is a sharp rise in ghrelin before a meal, and a sharp drop toward the end, or possibly after a meal.
There is an insulin receptor in the brain, and absence of this receptor in knockout mice causes obesity. The body doesn’t detect calories. It can detect bulk (stomach stretch), and it can detect fat (cholecystokinin), and it can detect sugar via pancreatic beta cells, which secrete insulin in response to blood glucose. Insulin is the closest thing we have to a calorie detector …
http
//
nielsolson.us/archives/2006/05/ghrelin_leptin.php
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:18 am
Fighting the myths on food additives:
MSG is injected into laboratory rats to induce obesity. It also has been shown to increase appetite in male rats and to induce obesity in female rats and chickens. Scientists in Spain have recently concluded that MSG when given to mice increase appetite by as much as 40%.
http://www.msgtruth.org/obesity.htm
(certain scriptures come to mind about eating and not being satisfied)
the inhabitants thereof have spoken lies, and their tongue is deceitful in their mouth.
*(Micah)
13 Therefore also will I make thee sick in smiting thee, in making thee desolate because of thy sins.
14 Thou shalt eat, but not be satisfied; and thy casting down shall be in the midst of thee; and thou shalt take hold, but shalt not deliver; and that which thou deliverest will I give up to the sword.
15 Thou shalt sow, but thou shalt not reap; thou shalt tread the olives, but thou shalt not anoint thee with oil; and sweet wine, but shalt not drink wine.
(yuk yuk another reason to drink?((in moderation, ‘hick’))
///
Isaiah 9:20 They slice off what is on the right hand but still are hungry, And they eat what is on the left hand but they are not satisfied;
…17 Therefore the LORD shall have no joy in their young men, neither shall have mercy on their fatherless and widows: for every one is an hypocrite and an evildoer, and every mouth speaketh folly. For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
(pretty rough stuff eh?)
14 Therefore the LORD will cut off from Israel head and tail, branch and rush, in one day. (derrrrr when did this occur? 70AD.)
His hand is outstretched still
For more related MSG research the original has more links:
www
.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=npg&cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=3785512&dopt=Abstract
www
.obesityresearch.org/cgi/content/abstract/11/1/87
www
.lf2.cuni.cz/physiolres/2000/issue2/suppl/suppl12.htm
www
.uth.tmc.edu/apstracts/1997/endo/April/71e.html
Although it is often brought up by glutamate industry representatives that injected MSG is somehow different than ingested MSG it has actually been proven in studies with human subjects that ingested MSG results in raised blood levels of glutamic acid and that this free glutamic acid does increase insulin levels in the human body. The other argument often made by representatives from the glutamate industry - that the blood brain barrier protects the brain from increased glutamate levels in the blood does not address the fact that the part of the brain responsible for hunger - the hypothalamus, is not protected at all by the blood-brain barrier. They also do not address the fact that the blood-brain barrier is compromised in individuals in a hypoglycemic state, which may occur when levels of insulin - the very hormone increased by ingesting MSG, is high. . . .
(don’t ask me how to avoid the stuff just keeping a low salt diet is tough enuff
let alone avoiding estrogen mimicks like plasticisors and pesticides and
hormones in the drinking water and juices and et cetera ad nasium…)
"HIS hand is outstretched still"