SLEEP : Why is it so important for us? (Part 11)

How long have we owned the night? Approximately four hundred years ago, the duration of light in only one place substantially changed. Paris, became the first city on the planet to hang tallow candles across the streets at night. Our word "curfew", is really two French words, couvre feu, meaning, "cover fire", lights out, go back home. Until the French idea caught on, the average citizen in all big cities hired a chaperone with a torch to accompany him  after dark. Paris, retained her title as the City of Light for almost two hundred years, until gaslights were installed in some other cities in the mid 1800s.

Ok, let's move on from Paris to sleeping. Now, what happens when we don't get enough sleep? Not just fatigue,  but Obesity, Diabetes Type II, depression, heart disease. infertility and cancer are on the horizon, if you don't fall asleep at the wheel first. Mental and computational insufficiency are garden-variety symptoms of fatigue. But, everyone knows the signs are really physical. When you get really tired, you ache all over, your eyes burn, and some people actually get a stomachache. These flu-like symptoms would support the bacterial endotoxin LPS buildup theory. As the endotoxins from the bacteria living in your middle build up from no sleep, you actually get sick from it. But, that's just what we cognitively feel as symptomatic cues. Feeling lousy when you lose sleep is a symptom of much bigger, life threatening things that are unraveling inside of you.

On the big screen, molecules called chemophores are present in all animals, plants and bacteria. Think of them as tranducers of energy. When hit by light, chemophore cells capture the energy and pass it along. The photons of light enact chemical and electrical changes to the nuclei of all cells. This electrification by radiant energy takes place everywhere inside you. Each of your cells is a clock that times exactly one revolution around the sun. All the molecular machinery that you need to keep the beat of the cosmos resides in each individual cell. Every cell in your body is a clock.

Bear in mind, you have a gene expressed in every cell of you call dCLOCK, and another one called dBMAL1. The proteins that these two genes code for build up in the cell and join together. The proteins from dCLOCK and dBMAL1, as they join, bind to and throw the switches on two more 'clock genes' called per and tim.  Per and tim, once bound and activated, begin to produce proteins of their own that in a very general way accumulate inside the cell, just floating in the crotoplasm, around the nucleus, where they join as the hours of the day wear on. That's the 'tick'.

Now, it's the 'tock' that rocks. The tock happens when the proteins of per and time reach a critical mass floating in the crytoplasm and reenter the nucleus, where they block the function of good old dCLOCK and dBMAL1. And, the clock stops to reset. This negative feedback loop, by stopping dCLOCK and dBMAL1, self limits per and tim's protein production. In a mechanical clock, the swing of the pendulum to one side and then the other involves an ever so brief halt before it returns to the other side. In the cell, this 'hiccup' only lasts as long as it takes for the proteins of per and tim to dissipate in the nucleus. Then, it starts all over again.

Of course, in yor cells, it takes exactly one day, or one turn around the sun, for a complete feedback loop. This cellular metronome was evident when scientists found photoreceptive cells on the legs of flies called drosophila. To test the same location in humans, researchers at Cornell University put a fiber optic cable behind the knee of a study subject. They illuminated a patch of skin no bigger then a size of a quarter. The subject was in complete darkness, yet this small amount of light affected the subject's temperature and melatonin secretion. Imagine what sunbathing, all night TV or computer usage, or even air travel in and out of brightly lit airports at all hours, and staring at computer screens do to confuse your life support systems.

Since you are no more than clocks upon clocks upon clocks, if the duration of lights changes it's only matter of time before ancient switches on millions of genes controlling your physical and mental states are turn on. All of you, every cell in your body, ticktocks. So, just turning off the lights at 11.30pm, and closing your eyes to the street lights shining in your windows, the green glow of your VCR or DVD player, or ironically, your alarm clock isn't fooling even one of your cells.

This unending artificial lights constantly glaring around you all hours of the day and half of the night, which registers as the long days of summer prior to winter on your internal sundial, is the reason it's so hard to stay thin or sane. As a mammal, you are hardwired to eat sugar, make babies, store fat, and then sleep it off, and then do it again and again.

One of the primary reason, the diseases that we know to correlate with obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, depression, etc, are all related with hibernation instinct, brought on by too much artifical light. In the hormonal state brought on by long hours of light, the urge to consume carbohydrates or drink alcohol to put on fat base for upcoming winter become metabolically and psychologically impossible to resist. In order to control our appetite for carbohydrates to lose weight, bring down insulin levels and stay sane and fertile, we MUST sleep more and tune back our circadian rhythm. That is why almost all of us are eating ourselves to death and killind each other! Dead tired.

Question. How does end stage insulin resistance stop weight gain and keep you from freezing? Well, we know that when it was too cold or too dark to sustain the plants and animals that we feed on, the unpredictability of the food supply left evolution only one solution, obesity.

Obesity was the key to survival, the key adaptation for all mammals. In order to put on enough fat for the winter, you had to become insulin resistant. The insulin receptors that allow glucose or blood sugar into your mucle cells after your liver is full to have to close shop so all of the sugar you eat can be sent to fat cells for storage. Insulin's immediate purpose is this dispersal. Insulin evolutionary purpose is insulation.

The point of being really fat is to keep you from starving and freezing. Insulin stores excess energy as internal fat around your vital organs first, before you ever see it ripple under your skin. The purpose is to insulate your heart, lungs, and digestive system from the cold, just as the fetus in a pregnant woman is protected with a layer of fat energy.

If you are diabetic, you wouldn't freeze to death death because of the natural antifreeze effect of glucose. A higher then normal concentration of blood sugar would keep the interior of your cells from freezing because of the effect carbohydrates have on water molecules. All antifreeze, even what you use in your car, tastes sweet. No? Do your own research and experiment, let me know.

Folks, check this out. Off the Antartica, fish play at the feet of the glaciers pouring into the sea. if you could take temperature of their blood, you would find it to be below freezing, yet unfrozen. On the other end of the globe, at the water's edge of icy pond in Canada, wood frogs sit absolutely still, with not even a sign of smoky breath in the frozen air. They are frozen stiff. If you picked one up of these frogs and hurled it against a tree, would it shatter? Believe it not, as soon as the ice on the  pond melts, so will these frogs. The blood in their veins will warm up as soon as their hearts start beating again and within a day, their blood will run hot enough to mate.

The Antartic fishes and the frogs, along with cold-resistant insects and people, all share the protection of blood-borne antifreeze in the form of glucose. In the fish, it has another name, called glycoprotein, but it functions the same in all of us. As blood starts to freeze, the formation of ice crystals actually dehydrates the red blood cells by sucking all of the  water out of them.

Once frozen, the ice crystals are as sharp as microscopic glass. These sharp crystals are formed when V shaped molecules of water lock together at hydrogen bonding sites to form a snowflake like latticework. The sharp points on the daggers of the ice slice through the cell membrane walls, and the animal dies. This end would allow hypothermia and exposure, not hibernation. Hibernation is very different from hypothermia. In hypothermia, an unprepared animal not in a diabetic state just freezes.

In the hibernation scenario, the glucose from end-stage insulin resistance protects cells by lowering the freezing temperature of blood, just as it does the water in the car by coating the water molecules with sugar to keep them from sticking together to form jagged crystals.

So, the wood frogs only looked hard as a brick, but in reality, only the water between their cells has frozen. The frogs, like any other living thing with a sugar based antifreeze blood system, freeze in slow motion. The colder their extremities get, the more sugar their livers pour into their bloodstreams to circulate as antifreeze.

When the frogs begin to thaw, the organs that were the last to freeze are the most 'coated' with sugar and therefore the first to thaw. The heart actually begins to beat in order to pump warmed blood to thaw the extremities. That way, no part of the frog is ever deprived of oxygen. They literally thawed from inside out. Isn't that cool? Stay tuned for the last couple of posts for this topic.

SLEEP : Why is it so important for us? (Part 10)

Ice Age. Anyone watched that nice little animated motion picture? Kids loved it and I think it's nice and mildly hillarious too. Today, I will write abit about Ice Age, how we evolved and survived, as well as farming, how both associate with our circadian rhythm. 

For the last few hundred thousand years or so, our family of man (ancestors @ caveman), hunted for protein in the form of fish, animals, nuts and insects, and gathered fruits, edible roots, bark and weeds in season during the dormant period we call winter. For much of that time, climatic conditions were slowly chilling the planet and a lot of its inhibitants into a many millennia long deep freeze that rendered vast amount of vegetation permanently out of season. 

If we hadn't already had fire, we wouldn't have made it either. The most recent of these 100000 year long cyclical glacial periods ended about 10000 years ago. This last Ice Age buried most of the continental Europe and North America, in a layer of solid ice that was in some places almost three miles deep. We humans, didn't experience any of the previous ages of ice, because we hadn't move north until the last one.

The ice will come again. It will crush cities and suck up the seas. But we will survive, as out ancestors survived. The ice will always come again until the end of the earth's time in the universe because its arrival is timed by our trip around the sun and the angle at which we travel. The less sun up north at the poles, the more ice, the more reflective ice surface, the more the sunlight is reflected away from the earth, meaning less sun, and more ice, and so on. 

These Ice Age centuries changed our metabolism permenantly. During very short, not terribly warm summers, we scored enough carbohydrates to barely get by. Those who were exquisitely light sensitive and had great storage potential lived, and we their children. Now, these traits are a death sentence.

Had a paleolithic man not eaten a predominantly protein and fat diet for the better portion of each year, it would mean that he would have had to go without food for thousands of years at a time. Sorry vegans, but that's not very likely. 

Those thousands of years of heavy protein and fat intake directly increased brain weight, which fostered the evolutionary neural expansion we've cited. For all human time, mean lived and thrived on a diet compromised of eighty to ninety percent protein and its attendant fat content at least seven or eight months out of the whole year, and the rest of the time on vegetation only in season.

Their skeletal remains also testify to their diet. By studying the skeletal remains from the late paleolithic period and analyzing the attributes of recent hunter gatherer groups, it's possible to develop a detailed anatomical and to some extent a biochemical profile. With as little as one limb bone and a formula which relates overall height to limb-bone length, the stature of early man has been deduced. Eastern Mediterranean males stood an estimated average 5'10", but the Leakey-Walker fossils indicate more like an average of 6'2". 

These people attained heights comparable to or greater than those reached by today's 'well-nourished' populations. Bear in mind, these skeletal remains also reflect strength and muscularity, the size of joints and sites where muscles are inserted into bones indicate these people's mass and the amount of of force they were able to exert. The average Cro-Magnon was easily as strong as today's superior male and female athletes. They worked many fewer hours than the coming Agriculturists, but were significantly more robust.

Even 50000 years ago, the hominid Homo Sapiens was biologically indistinguishable from us. If he were wearing a hat and sunglasses, you couldn't pick him out in a lineup. Culturally and socially, the same traits that kept them alive keep us alive today. 

Anthropologists and forensic experts who re-create actual faces from fossilized jaws and skull parts say Cro-Magnon faces were completely modern. Although people living between 40000 and 10000 years ago had not altered the natural world around them to continue their existence for one million generations. It was only 10000 really short years ago, give or take a millennium, that we become capable of controlling the interactive earth given food supply that assured our survival. 

Until this last century, from that distant point ten millenia ago, example, during our entire prehistoric existence, we could eat only the carbohydrates that we could steal and tame from the planet's cornucopia (see below pic). What that means is we've eaten the same kinds of 'natural' carbohydrates for the last 9900 years, and the same amounts. Well, not anymore my friend. No other species has ever had unlimited access of carbohydrates energy without regard for effort, season, competition, and natural disaster. Guess what, farming forever altered the balance of nature.

If we were in trouble before, from that moment on, we were in serious danger. The coming of agriculture 10000 years ago as a viable alternative to hunting and gathering effectively ended the paleolithic period and pretty much eliminated the hunter-gatherer lifestyle worldwide. In reality, the sudden abundance possible when the food supply became controlled by the consumer also provided enough calories to further support the changing patterns of reproduction. 

Now, after we learned to grow crops and foods outside the door, we stopped moving as much. Instead of following the herds to eat what we needed, we started to store the increasingly tame grains and fruits and meat. In the old days, one hunter could support himself and one pregnant woman and maybe two children and even an aged parent. Pregnant women and the elderly, along with a child or two, added to provisions by gathering insects and nuts to supplement protein.

The hunter gatherer, man-woman pairing was an economically equal division of labor. When we settled down to farm, however, the dynamic became weighted toward male economic control. This is where sexual inequity was born.

For the first time since we learned how to lie to one another, we were eating on a regular basis by duping other species with offerings of food. All the extra light and learning was evolving a new kind of memory and instinct in us, one the other animals couldnt share. This pact we called farming, fostered an enormous population explosion. There were enough of us to 'transform' the earth to our needs and enslave most other living things. This in no way resembled our humble beginnings as hunter gatherers.

Farming, like fire, not only isolated us from all other living things, it also made us very sick again, too. Just as when the babies began to come all year round, the death rate increased, but this time it was barely noticed because of the great increase of the population in general.

If we ground the grain into smaller pieces, it went further. A loaf of bread made from two handful of grains could feed more than two people, and the increase of man meant many, many, many more people wanted more and more bread. This increased continous consumption of carbohydrate for a people who had evolved to eat them only a few months of the year killed just as many then as it does now. Ground grains and later, the dried, powdered sweet juice of beets and sugarcane registered into our insulin/blood sugar system like birds on the bottom of the ocean. The was no place for much energy coming in all at once could fit into our systems. More and more people are getting fatter and sicker too. I've mentioned previously, agriculture is one of the biggest disaster in the history of human existence. Stay tuned folks. 

SLEEP : Why is it so important for us? (Part 9)

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. 

SLEEP : Why is it so important for us? (Part 8)

Today, let's talk abit about sex and self control. How both these could come into place to crosslink with circadian rhythm and sleeping cycles. How is everyone sleeping cycles lately? Have you been sleeping well? Non interrupted quality sleep throughout the night? Able to sneak into bed and sleep within 10-15 mins? 

Well, life goes on. The prime survival is reproduction. So, after hearts beating and lungs breathing, all energy is directed to reproduction. Life, without all we do to kill time, is only sleeping, eating and sex. These activities must be maintained at all cost or nature percieves you to be a liability. Sleeping, then eating, is the pre-requisite for reproduction, in that order.

Human primates were always seasonal breeders until fire came in to stay. Seasonal breeding, needles to say, is run by a clock that is wholly dependant on light and dark cycles. Reproductive function depends on metabolic clocks and mechanisms. You can't reproduce without enough fat to survive. That's the reason why lean female athletes often stop ovulating and having menstrual periods. Sorry to tell you women out there. No fat, no future, for you or your offspring. So, why waste the eggs? Thats how nature reads it. Fertility and sleeping are as closely linked as eating and sleeping because in the end, it's all one thing. This is the painful truth. 

In the real world, perfect function, whether it be reproductive, a good night's sleep, or weighing the right amount, exists in a tight boundary that is dynamic with all other living things. There's really no margin for error. The 'give and take' among the life forms on our ball of rock creates our bio-ecosystem, our world. The lifeforce of the bio-ecosystem is all the energy of the sun circulated in what's known to science as the food web. Simple food chains interlace through their interaction with each other to web all substances and species into smaller 'feedback loops' where in each species affects another. Big fish eats little fish, who eat much little smaller fish, who then eat plants that suck nourishment from the rocks, and so on and so on. This is positive feedback loop. Many feedback loops are 'negative' or fail-safe feedback loops. 

All feedback loops work like the automatic transmission in your car. If you increase the pressure on the accelerator, as the car goes faster, the transmission will jump up a gear to compensate. If you glide downhill, slowing as you go, the transmission naturally drops down a gear to slow you down. The transmission works perfectly well unless you keep up the pressure on the gas pedal while you hold your foot down on the brake. Well, keep this picture in your head. Try imagine and you will understand.

Not only you are going nowwhere, but you are destroying your car. Feedback loops are delicate mechanisms that read a signal from one system in the body and send it back to another. Negative feedback loops read a signal and control the reaction in that system, like the transmission in a car going downhill. Usually the signal sent back in a negative feedback loop will be stop, or at least slow down. These loops feedback within you and all other species and then feedback to the larger ecosystem. The cosmos, the planet, the little animals, and the people are all connected biologically in one big feedback loop. 

Sitting at a desk or in meetings under a fluorescent lights wearing Armani way past sundown totally screws with your feedback loops, and of course, your circadian rhythm. According to a study in the journal Nature, even too much or too litle sex changes the size of your neurons. If that's true, then we can certainly conclude that the amount of sleep you get affects appetite and fertility, which affect metabolism. All of these actions together are part and parcel of the immune system.

Now, let's talk abit about self control. Remember that adaptive intelligence continues to evolve by reacting to input from the environment provided by information-driven feedback loops. These feedback loops are really just streams of information that report back the various 'outposts' to their points of origin to control the process.

Let's take a trip to an imaginary place, the natural world, where you don't live anymore. You are just tagging along with your buddy when you see a big breadfruit. The fact that you saw a big breadfruit means the tree are fruiting, not flowering and that it's late spring or summer. The smell get's your juices going and you remember eating one before and, since it was a good experience, you make the decision to eat another. What happens? The sugar hits the portal vein between your liver and stomach and your pancreas kicks in with a big shot of insulin. Just as the sugar from the fruit is crossing the blood brain barrier, sending you to HappyLand, that the big shot of insulin simultaneously sends the excess sugar to shirt term storage. 

Short term storage in your liver and muscles can't take in too much more, because you ate that other kind of fruit with the larvae in it and that shrub with the thorns and berries on it about an hour ago. So, instead insulin converts some of this breadfruit to cholesterol and the rest is sent to your inner thigh for fat storage because if you are eating breadfruit and berries and whatever that other fruit was your immune system knows winter must be around the corner and, as every immune system also knows, that means no more breadfruit.

So, the insulin and the stored sugar, in the form of fat, hits your leg for long term storage. Your are a big eater and you've already got twenty pounds of fat, so leptin from your fat cells sends a signal to your brain. This leptin nails a button in your brain called neuropeptide Y that controls the appetite for carbohydrates. That appetite now goes off. 

You stop eating because you have enough energy  in shirt term and long term storage to make it through tomorrow. That's a negative feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is a self controlling program that works day by day.

There are also self perpetuating feedback loops. They tend to work year by year and season by season. For example, if it's late summer and the days are long, and you already have more then 20 pounds of fat, plus a full supply of short term storage, it's a different story. It's a winter's tale. Instead of a negative feedback loop, a positive one will ensue.


A different adaptive hormonal and behavioral scenario kicks in, because different environmental buttons have been pushed. The positive feedback loop on your newly gained 20 pounds means you can continue to gain, self propelled by your own expanding fat base, until all the carbohydrates are really gone.

Prolactin pushed into daytime by short nights suppressed leptin and left your appetite far carbohydrates and neuropeptides Y are turned on. This gave you the 20 pounds to get the ball rolling. Then, the leptin from your own fat base took over to create leptin resistance.

This leptin shutdown mechanism serves the purpose of saving you from longing for something as such sugar, that's long gone until next summer. Your leptin receptors on the NPY button go dead from overload. With no receptors to read the leptin, it's as if you have none, and your appetite for carbohydrates stays permanently switched on until all of the carbohydrates run out. This mechanism exits because in nature you would never get that fat unless you needed to, because all the food will be gone.

The problem in the world now we live in, is that the food and sugar will never be gone. In our unnatural world of endless summer and sugar, this leptin 'overdrive switch' gets flipped. In our world, all you have to do is get 20 pounds overweight for the leptin streaming from your expanding fat base to cause the leptin receptors in your brain to retreat, creating leptin resistance and causing the fat to get fatterm because fat people are always hungry people. Why? Because their negative feedback loop is broken, their leptin receptors burned out, and there is no longer a curb on their appetite for sugar.

SLEEP : Why is it so important for us? (Part 7)

In this post, I want to discuss about our brain, and the other second 'brain'. Yes, it is called, the gut. If any of you who had studied intensively about gastroenterology before, you would know what I mean. Our gut, is the second brain. It mirrors whatever happens in the gut, reflex to the brain as well. You could call human species as man or woman, with two brains. Besides, I will also discuss about temperature regulation as well, how it affects our sleep wake cycles. 

Now, it is your central nervous system in the form of your brain and gut that responds to your endocrine system. Your hormones report changes in your HPA axis to your immune system, which uses cytokines ir neuropeptides to direct all traffic with regard to homeostasis. The immune system is much more than bone marrow or spleen, peyer's patches or thymus cells. Even the lymph system is only a part of what we call the immune system. Those sites are actually just factories for the production of white cells, lymphocytes, or now the infamous T cells. 

About 85% of the full force of your defensive immune system resides in your intestines or gut. I did discuss about about the importance of gut flora in the last post, and I will stress a bit more in this post as well. Well, this makes sense, since most toxins will enter through your mouth. 

Even though we are led to believe that the immune system is our defense system, nothing could be further from the truth. The immune system is a planetary, not individual. Our hormonal interface with the world in the form of HPA axis means the immune system is really "the man behind the curtain", working the knobs and dials that make the brain seem so competent.

The element of the immune system, gut, skin, fat, lymph, brain and glands, all recogniz, communicate, memorize, react and even plan to survive earth changes that have been timed into our programming by millennia of experience. These capabilities mean that the immune system is a sentient, on its own, as yo think you are.

It also makes sense that approximately 85% of the immune system is located in the gut because the gut was your ORIGINAL brain! Sound surprise? Do your own research and find out. The real clue to the overwhelming power and control the immune system has comes in the realization that it is completely mobile, so like the free thinking individual you perceive yourself to be, The immune system within is, at least, your equal.

Your immune system controls your behavior by controlling neurotransmitter activity. All immune cells have receptors to read both neurotransmitters and hormones controlling energy regulation and sex hormones as well. By the same token, the immune expressions called cytokines are active in your gut and your brain and your fat base and gonads.

It's the immune system, locked in step with environmental pressure and the bio-ecosphere, that can spell Judgement Day, either by lack of defense or an all-out attack on your body. If you lose your balance with other life forms or the cosmos, the immune system reacts to compensate. Sometimes, it's really just the compensatory mechanisms that are the real causes of what we perceive to be disease. When you experience a sore throat in the form of a viral infection, the pain you feel is not borne of the virus at all. It is instead, the pain of dying cells being sacrificed or killed by your own immune system. The same goes for the body aches, fever, and headache. It's not the pathogen at all making you sick. It's a planetary immune system in you making you sick in an attempt to rid you of the virus infected tissue at the point of origin, which is your throat or nose, all to restore order to all living things. If the virus makes it all the way to the stomach, your immune system will sacrifice the lining there too, to shed the virus. Then, you will have a stomachache and diarrhea to add to your misery.

Now, let's talk about temperature regulation. During sleep, temperature regulation is another antibacterial strategy we have evolved. While a very warm organism has more of an adaptive advantage through flexibility in acquiring new habitats, the constant heat provides optimal conditions for the growth of most bacteria. The best bet is to cool down. That's why our temperature drops at night. Make sense?

Since you can't food in the dark, in fact, it's more likely you would become food. Melatonin acts as a rheostat that lowers body temperature during NREM (non rapid eye movement) sleep, in order to slow metabolic processes and stave off hunger. the bonus is that the bacteria also respond to the less than soothing temperature, the cold that slows our metabolism also slows theirs.

At the beginning of sleep, you dream a little, while you cool down as melatonin rises, you dream again during the predawn hours before you wake up, as melatonin falls and you warm up. Mammals in cold climates sleep for months at a time, or hibernate, to slow metabolic processes during food scarcity and darker days. Cooling us down in the dark, melatonin does antioxidant work, times ovarian and testicular function, and revs up the immune system for the next waking period, when we must keep harmful microbes out from behind the front lines.

Sleep is the biggest immunological defense scheme we have come up with yet, because not only does it defend us against other organisms in our environment, it defends us against starvation by the insulin-melatonin system. Insulin is produced only when your body senses sugar or stress. Since stress is heralded by cortisol, and cortisol is elevated as long as you're bathed in light, circidian rhythmicity or day night cycles, along with carbohydrates, control your insulin production.

Light and dark cycles control insulin so you can store fat for hibernation, or dormancy. Long days meant the end of summer and food supply. The short sleep cycles of long days translate hormonally into an increased need for carbs to store fat and cascade other hormones to put you to sleep. Carbohydrates craving is a precursor to sleep that we all still respond to even night that we are up late.

Hibernation drives us to eat ice cream or have a glass of wine after a long day. Remember, a midnight snack is never a hard boiled egg. Ask yourself, what would you go for when you have midnight craving or hungry? Steam fish over pizza? or raw eggs over donuts? You know the answer to it. The last thing you think about, the last thing you want to eat before surrendering the light, is always any kind of sugar you can get your hands on. Agree?

Insulin secretion is controlled by how much carbs or sugar you eat, the food you eat, but the food you want is controlled by your immune system responding to perceived seasonal variation in the light. When your body and brain need sleep to maintain immunity and reproductive capacity, melatonin and prolactin must surge. We even have melatonin receptors on our ovaries and testes that read light and dark cycles. Yes, you did not read wrong.

Melatonin is a potent antioxidant that along with prolactin, controls immunity while you sleep. Without sleep, you become defenseless and autoimmune. Bad news! Your immune system too, like every other mechanism of life, is comprised of a sacred duality. Before I sign off this post, remember this, 'Get up with the sun, sleep with the moon, eat only your share, and be fruitful and multiply". That's it. That's what you were built for, no more, no less. Evolution has fine tuned you for, really, nothing more.