Today, I would like to discuss abit about sugar and prolactin hormone. Sugar captured sunlight. The life giving energy of the sun is locked away in the plant life of the planet. When we eat sugar, the molecules of carbohydrates become ATP energy in the power centres of our cells. Any of the sun's energy that is not immediately used is reassembled in storage form as body fat against the day when the plants are dormant.
Now, survival is having enough sugar to store some for when there is non available. Survival, was never about eating fat, it was always about making fat. Survival, thy name is sugar. That's why the only truth there is, here and now globally, especially industrialized countries, and as far back as anyone can imagine. It was the same all the way back in prehuman history. At least as far back as the origination of a worm with no brain and no heart called C.elegans, survival was always about sugar.
Sugar scientific name is carbohydrate. Carbohydrates are the only food we can eat store, contrary to what you have been told. Many of the carbs we eat today came with the planet, such as apples, peas, carrots, sugarcane and beets, in their original form. We humans, always eager to improve upon nature, have invented quite a few more. Namely, Snickers, bread, sucrose, wine, pasta, spagetti, rice, cakes and of course, soft drinks. It doesn;t really matter if it's a complex carbs or a refined simple one, it's all just sugar, and to any organism with the magic molecule insulin, that means survival. Without insulin, our tissues starve, and cellular, mitichondrial mechanisms grind to a halt.
To most industrialized contries' folks, insulin is a medicine. I'm talking about people with Diabetes Type II. Certainly, all diabetics know that they can't live without it. Well, insulin is a fairly small molecule made in the beta cells of the pancreas. Insulin has the dual job of giving your cells access to the sugar in your blood and throwing the switches to store the rest of it in a 'lighter form' as body fat. Insulin is the storage hormone.
Besides giving the brain, muscles and liver access to blood sugar, insulin big job is to handle the overload of sugar. We have this insulin receptor mechanism for dealing with excess sugar intake. All the sugar u eat is very heavy, because the carbo-"hydrates" are hydrated. Carbohydrates are fuel and water together. Without the water attached, the carbon molecules weigh a lot less. You can pack on a lot more carbohydrate energy as lightweight fat. How much fat do you actually need to store as mammal depends on how long you plan to go without food and how long it takes you to reproduce. That brings us back to survival.
As I've previously discussed a bit on prolactin hormone, it is in fact a survival hormone. Most of us would assume prolactin only makes human milk. It does, but its most important role is to keep us surviving throughout our lives by controlling our appetites. As newborns, our first taste our survival is sweet. We must make fat from sugar from day one.
The milk of all mammals has an astronomical sugar content. Breast milk is a carbohydrate rich body fluid laced with some protein to create the molecules necessary for immune function and a huge array of molecular fatty acid chains to make hormones that will interface with the infant's new environment. It's mum's prolactin, that create our link with the planet's immune system by fostering that addiction. Equally important, mum's prolactin goes through the roof while she makes this juice because sky high prolactin means an autoimmune state of being. Autoimmunity just means that mum's immune system is in overdrive, pouring immune functions into the breast milk to program the baby's immune system with all the collective memory that mum's and her mum's and her mum's (greatgrandmother), immune systems have been passing on about their environments since before time had a name.
While insulin makes us capable of rolling with the punches when wrestling with nature by storing sun/sugar energy for later, it's the prolactin that truly controls our appetites for the rest of our lives, by suppresing leptin, which of course, is the switch for NPY, which is in charge of our appetite for the foods that can be stored. Even with the ability to store carbs, survival, before grocery stores and invention of freezers, was competely dependent on timing, especially during scarcity brought about by weather changes. Our feast or famine metabolism gave us that edge.
Bear in mind, our driven internal light responsive genes actually 'clock' how long melatonin is produced, to give prolactin the 'weather report' to time our appetites in sync with the spin cycle. The resulting length of prolactin production from melatonin's report will determine whether or not prolactin is produced the next day.
In winter, the 'melatonin clock' keeps the 'prolactin timer' going longer at night, which in turn means you secrete no prolactin in the daytime. Because if prolactin happens in the daytime, not only will it suppress leptin action and leave your sweet tooth exposed, but it means in nature glossary that you are (men and women) lactating, so thanks to aging and broken clocks, we are all very autoimmune at this point. This is the side effects of being out of rhythm that creates a hugr profits for makers of antihistamines like Claritin, Zantac and asthma and arthritis drugs such as Advil.
Leptin production from our fat base is the 'dipstick' that tells NPY what our fat levels are and whether or not to make us crave sugar. The premise is that if you have enough fat, the leptin it it produces will turn off your appetite for sugar. When prolactin happening in the daytime suppresses the leptin from your fat base, it reads to NPY as no fat and your appetite for sugar stays turned on all day and some of the night.
If you don't sleep, and the light, or its absence that would time your melatonin clock through all of those cycles never goes off, you just continue to eat sugar and make fat until you explode because your clock is running so fast. Your mainspring is broken. That's about where we are folks. This feast or famine metabolism embodied in the insulin/carbohydrate system facilitated our survival by storing those carbohydrates as fat. This programmed connection to the environment made the adaptation to a different climate possible, as we headed north out of Africa. As we moved into colder and colder climates, which ever widening variations in seasonal abundance, our body's ability to clock light and dark cycles took on even more importance.
Having a solar connection controlling the timing that directed our appetite for carbohydrates and our arousal for reproduction was not only what kept us alive day in day out, but what actually kept us living. Survival as a species depended on eating enough to reproduce and on timing that reproduction to coincide with spring, when there would be food to keep mother and baby alive.
The sudden appearance of a 'sun' that never sets is killing the slower evolvers among us in the no more then 80 years or so of existance, which is not even by today's standard, an entire length of a human lifetime. The irony is that, we managed to use fire for at least 45000 lifetimes added together!
Until now, after the cold dark sleepy winter of short days and long nights, the sun came back, plants grew and babies were born. The days mirrored the years. With one revolution of the planet, out the light and into the dark, when the sun dropped, everything lay dormant until it rose again, just as summer always turned into winter and then back again. It was a perfect system, until we mastered the art of portable fire. Once we could carry away and eventually re-create the aftermath of lighting strikes, it all began to change.
With portable energy, we could extend the day for our own use inside, at night. No other living thing could do that. We, human beings, had set ourselves apart from all other living things. It was this light after nightfall on a regular basis that shortened melatonin cycles enough to let testosterone and estrogen surface, big time, all year round. This seemingly simple change removed the normal seasonal cues for the timing of breeding.
The light would change us more then what we might have dared to imagine. The light itself was far more seductive than any serpent with a carbohydrate. The light bought us more learning time than all the other species could ever have and ultimately gave us the ability to outbreed them too. Of course, there would be trade offs. People began to die in new ways. Things like the smoke in the enclosed spaces and increased sex hormones took alot of us out right away.
We didn't know that the fire, through it's light, could kill without leaving a mark, without so much as a blister. We had no idea then, nor do most of us now, being bathed in artificial light during those hours of the night when it had always been pitch black was changing us inside.
Molecules like melatonin, a hormone that we know is secreted during dark time, report on the planet's angle and orbit. When the hours of light stopped varying acutely with the seasons, thanks to the light of fire, our sentinel molecules became stuck in a springtime report. Dreams that used to come in the night, sometimes came in the day, thanks to the shifting of prolactin production toward morning. We began to imagine. The urge to communicate and symbolize those daydreams gave us language.
Memory too, thanks to more dopamine from the light, began to crisscross our expanding brains with reward pathways to give us an intellectual edge. That phenomenon, along with all of the meat we ate in the winter, made brain expansion a physical reality too. Imagine, the homeostatic mess that all of the up-all-night-winter, big brained, small minded, eternally hungry, sex crazed, have created for the rest of the earth's creatures still living in sync with each other.
Next post coming up hopefully few days time. I will make some time to write, I need to get some rest and looking forward to my workout later today. Stay tuned.
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