Leptin means 'thin'

Your post Jac, made me ask some new questions, so thanks! I'd heard of leptin, but it made me curious.

Leptin is from the greek word 'leptos' meaning thin. It's a protein hormone that is important in regulating body weight, metabolism, and reproduction-all of which are regulated via hormonal secretions.

Leptin receptors are highly expressed in the hypothalamus in the areas that regulate body weight. So just like Jac posted, the leptin effects the hypothalamic center which then controls our eating behavior, hunger, body temperature, energy use, or in other words, our metabolic rate.

Now, if everything is working, increasing leptin should decrease our fat, and increase our muscle mass. But we could have a problem with our messaging-in other words, our receptors for leptin may not be open for business. The message could have been confused via dieting, or genetics or nutritional imbalances.

When our body fat index drops, say from dieting and not from faminine and starvation circumstances, our body wants to replace it and our body secretes LESS leptin so that the body can store more fat. Remember-leptin means thin. Less leptin, more fat.

What turns our leptin receptors back on, speeding up our metabolism and burning our stomach fat? Well it's more complicated than that, unfortunately.
It was found that obese people are unresponsive to leptin due to development of leptin resistance in the brain! In other words, our body self learns. It resists starvation.

This is exactly what we have found-those of us diet-aholics. The more we diet the fatter we get.

Says Umut Ozcan, MD: "Most humans who are obese have leptin resistance. Leptin goes to the brain and knocks on the door, but inside, the person is deaf." That would be in the hypothalamus. But why? And how do we reeducate the hypothalamus so we can lose weight and stay slim without the rebound effect? We end up with a thin allergy!

Here's the article in full for more information: Obesity:reviving the promise of leptin

Well, we've got to be nutritionally fit in order to circumvent the 'I'm starving' scream from inside us that sets this all off. We can't fight our body's needs, and shouldn't for obvious reasons, but do we really even know what they are?

Ozcan's study showed that ER (endoplasmic reticulum) stress, which is the stress in the hypothalamus btw, caused them to become leptin resistant. It also causes a genetic shift-ah! So as cells replicate, the next generation is genetically altered-from having LEARNED from the stress.

So essentially the system becomes desensitized to leptin-it ignores the knock knock, and we get fatter, with the best of intentions. The study pretreated mice with a chemical chaperone so that leptin sensitivity increased...as much as 10x!
Skinny mice were the result.

Recumbinant human leptin commercial rights-bought in 1995 for 20 mil. Do we have anything on the market yet? Um-no.
It's been 14 years. Sad...guess there is more money in keeping us fat and fatter than thin.