Literatus: The body that binds

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

IF YOU you think sweets sabotaged your, already-heavy weight, think again. A German study found out that it is not the reason. Instead, it is stress; the more acute the stress, the faster it piles up those unwanted bulges in the last places you want them.

Achim Peters, Britta Kubera, Christian Hubold, and Dirk Langeman of Medical Clinic 1 at the University of Luebeck in Luebeck, Germany reported their findings in this year’s issue of the Frontiers of Neuroscience.

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The team confirmed two studies made in 2009 and 2010 that carbohydrate intake of the body increase by 34 grams when persons are under acute psychosocial stress (compared to those in non-stress situations). But there had been no preference for sweet or non-sweet carbohydrates. When your head is burning with tension and pressure, you simply take whatever carbohydrate-rich food at hand, and place them into your mouth.

Even mild mental stress increases energy supply in our brain by 12 percent. And evidence are increasing today that when things got tough for a person’s situation, the brain will have its way on how much extra it allows to be distributed to the rest of the human body. As far back as 1921, scientists know that during times of extreme need for food (inanition), all the organs of the body such as heart, liver, spleen, kidneys and pancreas lose about 40% of their mass. But the brain does not.

Researchers call the mechanism, cerebral insulin suppression. It simply means that the brain suppresses the secretion of insulin in stressful situations in order to prevent metabolism of blood carbohydrates, so that they become available to the brain in large doses.

Another quirk to this bodily mechanism is the brain’s inability to immediately process the extra glucose it has taken up. A study in 1988 noticed that even during mental stress, only slight rise in brain oxygen consumption happen. This explains why even if you don’t eat much under stress, there is a 55 percent chance you can still gain weight. (The same study found out that 42 percent of volunteers under severe stress experience decrease in food intake.)

Looks like people prone to obesity are in a difficult bind, aren’t they?

What these studies tell us however as the key to this weight gain chain is moderation in food intake. Obviously the extreme eating behaviors (decreased and increased eating) make the body swallow more than it can internally chew. Thus, fat deposits result.

So what does moderation mean? It means eating when you’re hungry, not when your head wants to look at food as an easy escape from the struggles of life.