This morning I did something I don’t normally do, I stopped eating. I still had food on my plate, I just didn’t feel hungry anymore. Even though it seemed like the right choice I still got scoffed at from my girlfriend for not finishing my plate, I almost felt peer pressured to eat more then I wanted to! This isn’t just my girlfriend either, it can be seen with others like from parents telling their child to finish his/her plate. Along with pressure, boredom or procrastination on homework are other pitfalls for eating.In fact in a effort to procrastinate another 5 minutes on writing this blog post I finished off the role from this morning. So with procrastination and peer pressure it would seem that our body figures are doomed. But wait, something is amiss, there must be something stopping us from eating all of the time, and as with everything else the answer lies in chemistry.
Fat is deposited into adipose tissue, so it would seem that this adipose tissue would have to communicate with the brain in some way to control how much we eat. It was proposed that there exists molecular signal that acts in the central nervous system that is proportional to body fat. So the more fat we obtain the stronger these signals are, and these signals would stop us from eating. A pretty nifty checks and balance if I do say so myself. But obviously with the level of obesity we have something must go wrong.
At the moment there are two signaling molecules that have been determined to be part of this signaling cascade. Insulin and Leptin. The paper we looked at for this week tried to tie together the different signaling pathways of the two molecules, in a effort to paint a more holistic shot of the chemistry of obesity. Our authors were able to conclude that “[both insulin and leptin] may share both intracellular signaling properties and mechanisms by which these pathways become disrupted leading to resistance to their actions.” What I would take from this message (just like my other blog posts) is that scientists are still working to get a true understanding of the body. Everybody wants the body to be simple, it would be much easier if just one chemical was responsible for obesity, and it would be great if that was the only molecule in the body. Then researchers would be able to just target that molecule and eradicate it, and obesity would be a thing of the past. Sadly this is not the case all of these molecular systems are intertwined everything seems to be dependent on everything else. There are so many factors that go into obesity, especially at the mental level. We are wired to love fatty foods, we would much rather eat a meal then write a paper, there is eating when your board, or eating when your depressed. Meaning all of these different pathways that are created by our different states of mind are connected. And it will be a long time till we are able to untangle this mess.
Chemistry and Obesity
