How thoughts fool your stomach

 NPR - How Your Thoughts Fool Your Stomach 

Infertility in obese women may be due to damaged eggs, Brigham study finds

Infertility in obese women may be due to damaged eggs, Brigham study finds

Obesity has long been associated with infertility as well as lower success rates with in vitro fertilization, and now researchers think they understand why: Obese women are more likely to have abnormalities in their eggs that make them impossible to fertilize.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital infertility researchers examined nearly 300 eggs that failed to fertilize during IVF in both severely obese women and those with a normal body weight.

They found that severely obese women were far more likely to have abnormally arranged chromosomes within their eggs compared with women who weren’t overweight, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Human Reproduction.

 

Magic Mike! In which I realize I am not a typical girl.

I wrote this on my MM Facebook page yesterday, and got varying reactions from full-on apathy to You Simply Do Not Understand The Art!1!1!

Melting Mama Â· 2,444 like this

21 hours ago Â·  

• Dear target audience, Are you serious? Really? Magic Mike? The collective lot of you are squealing over a boy born in 1980. 
  
  http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi889627417/

And last night, I went to see the movie.  I apologize, internet, curiosity sucked me in.  The online female SQUEE over this movie is palpable.  Moist, even.

No really.   The response online so far has been  -

Hunger Hormones May Be Dieters' Worst Enemy - in Primary Care, Obesity from MedPage Today

There could be a REASON why we fail diets. Or -- diets fail us.

One year after initial weight reduction, levels of the circulating mediators of appetite that encourage weight regain after diet-induced weight loss do not revert to the levels recorded before weight loss. Long-term strategies to counteract this change may be needed to prevent obesity relapse.

Ghrelin.  You may have heard of this evil little hormone.

Nature -

Do you follow?

*blink blink*  Wikipedia tells me --

Ghrelin  is a 28 amino acid peptide and hormone that is produced mainly by P/D1 cells lining the fundus of the human stomach and epsilon cells of the pancreas that stimulates hunger.^[1] Ghrelin levels increase before meals and decrease after meals. It is considered the counterpart of the hormone leptin, produced by adipose tissue, which induces satiation when present at higher levels.

In some bariatric procedures, the level of ghrelin is reduced in patients, thus causing satiation before it would normally occur.

Medical News: Hunger Hormones May Be Dieters' Worst Enemy - in Primary Care, Obesity from MedPage Today.

Hormones regulating when a person feels hungry or sated do not rapidly adjust to weight loss, which may be a factor in the yo-yo effect observed among dieters, researchers found.

One year after losing weight, levels of appetite-regulating hormones didn't revert to baseline levels, Joseph Proietto, PhD, of Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in Australia, and colleagues reported in the Oct. 27 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The findings suggest that the "high rate of relapse among obese people who have lost weight has a strong physiological basis and is not simply the result of the voluntary resumption of old habits," Proietto and colleagues wrote.

It's well established that heavy patients who lose weight dieting often fail to keep the pounds off, the researchers explained.

Studies have shown that restricting calories can lower levels of the hormones leptin -- which tells the brain that the body is full -- and ghrelin -- which stimulates hunger.

Doesn't this also help explain why some forms of weight loss surgery ... work better overall in the long term?  In certain types of WLS -- most of ghrelin producing factor -- is removed. 

Go DS.  Or not. It's up to you.  Surgery flame wars!

DSFacts.com -

Approximately 70% of the stomach is removed along the greater curvature, also called a vertical sleeve gastrectomy (VSG). The remaining stomach is fully functioning, banana shaped and about 3 - 5 oz in size which restricts the amount you can consume. The pylorus continues to control the stomach emptying into the small intestine; as a result patients do not experience "dumping". The upper portion of the duodenum remains in use; food digests to an absorbable consistency in the stomach before moving into the small intestine. This allows for better absorption of nutrients like vitamin B12, calcium, iron and protein when compared to gastric bypass procedures.

A benefit of removing a portion of the stomach is that it also greatly reduces the amount of ghrelin producing tissue and amount of acid in the stomach.

Ghrelin is the "hunger hormone" and by reducing the amount of the hormone produced the appetite is suppressed.

Study -

Sumithran P, et al "Long-term persistence of hormonal adaptations to weight loss" N Engl J Med 2011; 365:1597-1604.