‘Okay. First of all, it's cretin. If you're gonna threaten me, do it properly.’ ~ Mike - Monsters Inc
People who take programs with HPC-UK are often surprised at the lack of emphasis placed on Calories in vs Calories out, or, as it’s otherwise called, energy balance. Now, while energy balance is important in the overall scheme, it is dependent, and this is key, on how your mind and body react to food.
If you’ve read my previous work you’ll notice that as much as possible I like to modulate bodily function by focusing upstream, rather than directly affecting end stream processes. This method is used so that the body can put all the checks and balances in place to control the end process. If you would like an example of this top-down protocol read my article on how to increase Testosterone. The article is called ‘The Brain Game’, and can be found here http://hpc-uk.net/2.html
A new study (1) has just added support to the way I design protocols from a number of perspectives, let’s have a brief look at what the study found.
The recent study (a summary can be found here http://tinyurl.com/c3nnjr5) was focused on a group of cells located in a part of your brain called the hypothalamus. Your hypothalamus is responsible for regulation of hunger, thirst, and temperature, as well as feelings of excitement, pleasure, anger, anxiety and fear. It is a very important structure that an optimally functioning body is intimately dependent upon. The specific cells the study looked at are called Orexin neurons.
Orexin neurons are responsible for your state of wakefulness and partially your reward circuitry. Also, until this study came along Orexin cells were only thought to influence metabolism via signals that promote hunger. Well this new study shows that they do more than that, they actually alter your metabolic rate and the way your body partitions and metabolises nutrients.
The activity of Orexin cells can be turned up, which stimulates metabolism, or turned down, which does the opposite and reduces the metabolic rate. Glucose (sugar) has been shown to cause a reduction in the activity of the Orexin cells, which will cause a drop in the metabolic rate, and also cause your state of wakefulness to become subdued. Essentially glucose causes you to be and feel sluggish.
A class of amino acids (non-essential), were shown in this study to strongly increase the activity of the Orexin cells, which stimulated the metabolic rate to increase and promote a state of wakefulness and reward seeking behaviour. Fundamentally, this is the opposite state to that which is induced by glucose.
So carbohydrate alone tends to cause reduced activity in Orexin cells, and protein alone causes an increase in their activity. However, we generally do not eat our meals as separate nutrients, most meals are mixed. The study also commented on this too.
Although the presence of glucose reduced the activity of the Orexin cells, the concurrent presence of non-essential amino acids actually restricted the effect of the glucose. Therefore, consuming sufficient protein (to provide the amino acids) at each meal will not only stimulate your metabolism in its own right, but will attenuate the negative effect of carbohydrate on your metabolic rate.
The study also provides another huge implication. One way the body alters metabolism is through sensing total energy balance. However this study demonstrated that the body also alters metabolism via other key measurements in this case the glucose/ (non essential) amino acid ratio. I won’t go into too much detail here, but in evolutionary terms this makes perfect sense. High glucose levels equate to a fed state, therefore your body reads into this situation as ‘Okay, we have sufficient food, let’s rest and recuperate’. Hence the action of glucose to reduce wakefulness and reward seeking behaviour.
High ratio’s of non-essential amino acids generally occurs under fasting and starvation conditions, not really a time to be kickin’ back. In this situation the body is reading ‘Okay, we are starving, let’s go hunt and forage for food’. This situation requires you to be on high alert (for both predators and prey) and also to be physically capable of chasing down your meals, or if foraging, up to the task of sustaining long periods of physical activity in order to collect sufficient edibles.
I have a feeling this area of study is going to be ‘big’. What I’m going to do is curtail this quick little article here, then, I’ll expand in later articles on how Orexin cells can alter the way your body metabolises nutrients, and how we can manipulate this pathway to our advantage.
References
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