Is It Leptin That Won't Let You Lose Weight?

The old curse says “May you live in interesting times.” Well, ‘interesting’ is one way to describe the times we live in. ‘Mind boggling’ might be another. In either case, I think my head’s going to explode.

Let’s talk about the new ugly of body fat.

Researchers discovered leptin in 1994, and it turned medicine upside down. The research flying out of labs around the world makes Vesuvius look like a piker. The National Institutes of Health alone has produced more than a million reports. My Google alert for leptin brings pages of news every day.

You may have never heard of leptin, but it changes everything in medicine. Some of Big Pharma’s most productive cash cows will run dry, and Big Pharma has yet to find a way to birth new ones for the leptin revolution, so they’re mum on the subject. And, since doctors learn what they know from Big Pharma, they are, too. And you don’t find leptin discussed much in the media. It’s a 500-pound gorilla secret.

So, let’s talk about it. Kind of. As with anything new and profound, the research is all over the place. Researchers’ brains are in a sling from straining to understand it all–which nobody does. But glimmers of light are appearing.

Leptin is a hormone produced by your body fat. Not the good brown fat that enhances your metabolism, but the ugly, white, stretch-out-your-slacks fat. Turns out blubber is part of the endocrine system! Who knew?

And there’s this circular thing going on with leptin, our bones and our thyroid. They all impact each other. And at every step there are so many “on the other hands,” it’s like grappling with an octopus.

For instance, as part of the constant regeneration process called life, osteoclasts destroy dying bone so osteoblasts can rebuild it. Well, look who shows up at that party! TSH, you know, the thyroid stimulating hormone that tells your thyroid when to stop and when to go. What’s TSH got to do with bones?

It turns out if you have too little or too much TSH, your osteoblasts, the bone builders, can’t get the job done. Same thing if you don’t have enough T3. Even mild, sub-clinical hypothyroidism can do a number on your bones.

And, if the destructive osteoclasts become too plentiful, your blood sugar careens out of control. You also get fat, and obesity creates chaos in the bone-building process.

Want another news flash? Bones are also a part of the endocrine system. Metabolism and bone health are two peas in a pod.

Adding complexity to complexity, leptin can somehow trump both bone and thyroid hormones. Details to be discovered, and discovery probably won’t happen by tomorrow.

So we have a bunch of leptin pieces, but no complete picture of how to put the pieces together. Even so, just hoping for the best won’t help us. So let’s look at one big thing we know to do.

We need to get serious about our nutritional health. A healthy body can deal with most things that come its way. A good program of nutritional supplements, then, overcomes many, many problems.

For instance, inflammation is behind leptin/bone/thyroid malfunction. Vitamin B complex plus additional B6, B9, and B12 tame inflammation.

And, the mineral boron protects us from a very bad enzyme created by the destructive osteoclasts whenever they get too numerous. The enzyme creates fat cells all by itself.

Also, the mineral selenium undoes a lot of leptin-caused problems.

And so on.

Yes, leptin is huge. Besides inflammation and obesity, with all their grim consequences, leptin is implicated–big time–in cachexia, the disease that accompanies all the others; it’s cachexia, not heart disease, cancer, etc., that actually kills you. Yikes!

But vitamins and minerals are also huge, so why roll over and play dead when we can fight? Buffing up our defenses with a solid foundation of vitamins and minerals will increase our odds big time.

The best time to act is before the storm hits.