On Eating - a row of smithereens about hunger and eating No 12

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shelves with bags of different kinds of sweets and bonbons c ignazwrobel

last: the combination of fat and sugar

today: insulin and blood vessels

A rising BMI is not much more than a visible sign of a constant stress of the regulatory circuit system in terms of an oversupply of fuel, known as food.

The pancreas gland – like the whole body – is set to alternating phases of work and recreation. Each and every Code red! Alarm is a remarkable stress for the pancreas.

As this gland is a creature of polite character, it tries to cope with the high expectations high energy food is constantly applying. The pancreas starts to work hard, harder, hardest. – The next step is forseeable.

The pancreas will work until a complete nervous breakdown, called diabetes mellitus type II.

The phase shortly before the complete crash is a phase showing the exhaustion of all members of the system.

Insulin production rises to a higher level to be able to shovel all this glucose from our blood to our cells, the cells start to feel tired of constantly open their doors for more fuel to stock inside and they start shaking their heads saying no, sorry, not today, if a insulin ship is ringing the doorbell.

Glucose starts to hang around in the blood vessels: diabetes mellitus II.

Well, Glucose is rushing through our blood vessels. So what? Glucose is not willing to run all the time.

The glucose will find itself a set of chairs to sit down. The chairs are called: the walls of the blood vessels. We can imagine the next step.

If glucose clings to the walls of the vessels these walls become thicker and loose their flexibility. The blood vessels suffer. Suffering blood vessels have problems above all to do their job for two mostly important organs:

our brain, our heart.

Tomorrow: blood vessels, nerves and diabetes mellitus II

On Eating - a row of smithereens about hunger and eating No 11

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shelf with sugar-fat breakfast cereals like Trio, Lion, Choco, White flakes - chips pops and flakes c ignazwrobel
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last: the instinct to keep on looking for food

today: the combination of fat and sugar

The message is as short as disappointing. The nice advertising headlines inspiring confidence in the power of energy bars made of fat and sugar will empower you immediately – is an invention of blossoming marketing phantasies.

White or brown sugar is a food creation not older than two hundred years. Cane sugar, beet sugar, all these concentrated sugars weren´t in use as a white crystalline substance before.

As our body is working today like it did ten thousand years earlier, it didn´t accommodate to an input of a concentrated fat-sugar substance.

The pacreas gland in our body literally gives a startle response of releasing the whole royal fleet of insulin ships when feeling this substance coming into the system. Code red says: Battle stations! The complete available fleet of insulin ships rushes into our blood to store all this glucose and fat immediately into the energy warehouses of our body: the fat cells.

There is no exception to the rule. Even if we urgently need energy, the immediate release of insulin grasps this energy supply if it comes in a concentrated combination of fat and sugar and stores all of it to our fat cells.

And herewith we slowly slowly shift to a topic that comes with overweight: the danger to collect a diabetes.

Next: overweight and the progressing exhaustion of our pancreas gland

On Eating - a row of smithereens about hunger and eating No 10

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different kinds of cabbage and comestible roots c ignazwrobel

yesterday: the sparrows

Today: conformity and the instinct to continuously look for food.

Next: insulin, fat and sugar.

Some people never seem to have to think about their BMI. They are never too thin, they are never too thick – and they never have to monitor their food intake. This is a vast injustice? No. This is a result of lack of extremes.

These people never taught their bodies by bringing down food supply that they – from the point of view of the body – seem to live in an insecure surrounding where food supply will terminate from one moment to the next.

Their body is not set to store each and every calorie of the daily intake they can´t burn at the moment. Conformity, steadiness, no changes in amount ouf food supply is a joker helping to maintain a healthy BMI.

Cooked food.

Cooked food is an invention some scientists say it´s responsible for the development of high culture. Why? Cooked food contains much more energy than crudités. In Greek mythology the act of bringing fire to men was a very big deal. Very big. It was regarded a crime and the guy who did this had to face a very hard sentence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus

Fire was the key for the development of high culture. Why? People were able to stop running all over the place the whole day and do nothing else but search for bits and bites of low energy crudités. Fire helped them to increase energy amount of their food.

Ten minutes of eating secured energy supply for half a day. So they had time to invent things.

(Caricature: Group of Neanderthals, 10.000 B.C. One of them is carving the first wheel ever. His friends: Do you want to come hunting or do you want to keep sitting around all day inventing?)

To get enough energy to keep the regulatory circle system running properly people had to go searching food about up to ten hours a day.

Remember for example the inuit. - Europen friend to an Inuit friend on the phone:

…nice to hear from you! long time no see. ..and what did you do between January and March?

Answer inuit friend: I hunted two seals. -

An example how time consuming it is to chase food.

The trap:

Walking around looking for food is a function of the oldest part of our brain.

It´s written in our BIOS.

With other words: people who suffer from a binge-purge syndrome are continuously chased by men´s disposition of constantly looking for food. This starts to run out of control and we can´t but run around and look for food all day.

On Eating - a row of smithereens about hunger and eating No 09

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a butcher´s showcase with different kinds of meat, already cut and flavoured, ready to roast. c ignazwrobel

Last time: constancy of the system

Today: the sparrows.

Why do we suffer from constant hunger, walking around with a nearly ininterrupted wish to eat and others don´t? Of course we learnt during our life the soothing effects of being sated, effects efficient not only for our stomach but also for our soul.

The feeling of satiety comes along with other comfortable feelings of feeling peaceful and secure. So people who don´t need to eat a lot, may have other sources to generate feelings of peacefulness, to feel secure, salvaged and rescued.

But besides all that they really don´t feel very much hunger. Why? When we are children, small children, we follow the reflex that says: we had enough, we are sated now. NOW. We didn´t care if there was still food left on our plate. The reflex telling us: stop eating, you are sated, was awake, alive, uninjured and intact.

Very soon social life makes us learn to eat more than we need for the next – say – three hours. Just for reasons of practicability. The child should stop asking for food at least for five hours. So we force children to eat more.

Our children would learn to eat amount that keeps the reflex I am hungry away for at least five hours. Having lost our ability to hear and feel the saturation reflex we start eating more than we really need. We explicitly train to eat more than we need during the next three hours.

At times this will run into a situation of constantly overeating, even if we feel bad and maybe even guilty afterwards. The very important saturation reflex is out of commission.

The sparrows never allowed their surrounding to break their ability to feel the satiety reflex.

They kept listening to their inner voice, saying. I´m fed exactly in this very moment. I´m stopping to eat exactly now. – Later I´ll find me some new food in time, I´ll think about it when hunger will return.

This – as you might feel – is also a sign of trust in the future. Trust in the future. That in the future things we urgently need will be at our disposal. Please think that over.

Tomorrow:

sparrows: conformity; A very time saving invention: cooked food.

On Eating - a row of smithereens about hunger and eating No 08

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fruit boxes with different kinds of apples: boscop, idared, golden delicious, pink lady c ignazwrobel

Yesterday: The just in case safety margin.

Today: constancy of the system

This news will certainly not contribute a lot to rise our level of hilarity. Our body has a complete different point of view towards weight than we have.

The instruction mother nature gave to our feedback control system is: keep and hold whatever you can get and try to get more.

Why an instruction like this? Our body has no idea of the invention of super markets.

To find food at the right time is a constant gambling between life and threat of death by lack of energy supply. – lack of food.

We might be lucky enough to kill the uggly saber-toothed cat – or not.

We all heard of a thing called set point. The body has a benchmark in it´s system saying: we are satisfied if the body weight is bobbing up and down a weight of NN.

To sustain the status quo of the system the body will give away the profusion of energy by developing heat, widening our blood vessels.

If there´s not enough energy on the other hand the body saves energy by constricting the blood vessels. But this is just a very weak mechanism, widely overframed by the tendency to store whatever the body can get.

The trap is: If there´s constantly an overflow of energy in form of food available, the body simply rises the benchmark of our setpoint.

We easily can imagine the consequences. If our body has the opportunity to store the experience our body fat storage magazines were filled at one point in time to 125 kilo there´s a hooray cry inside the system.

We can get more! So the old benchmark 81 kilo becomes obsolete, the new one is 125 kilo.

The system tries now to keep the substance. – by what means?

By challenging energy supply for 125 buddies instead of for troops of just 81 of our comrades.

With other words: if our weight is higher, we do indeed suffer from a bigger desire for a higher amount of energy supply.

Our body doesn´t judge between our "good" organs and muscles and our "bad" fat.

For our body everybody on board has the same rights. The right to get nourished in a satisfactory way.

Tomorrow: constancy of weight: the sparrows.

On Eating - a row of smithereens about hunger and eating No 07

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.German rolls: pretzel rolls, pretzel pigtails, pretzels, poppy rolls, sesame rolls, italian rolls with olives, kaiser rolls, grain rolls.

Today: Energy needs and body weight. Part II

There are two things about our feedback control system. The system tends to store a small additional security amount of energy – just in case. Just in case we might find exactly now our prey and this prey is a runner.

So we have to start running after the animal. Maybe 10, 20 , 30 kilometres. After that we have to wait and watch, and once again start running 5 kilometres - until our hunting spear sets the an end to the animals life.

No time to sit down and have a nice lunch. But – lucky – our body stored away yesterday and the day before energy, yes, also in form of the security margin of body fat. Maybe you remember the old days of endurance running.

After a run of six hours the body weight was up to two kilos less (yes, lesser water in the first place) and our waist shrinked up to the width of a palm.

The trap: although we don´t need the just in case energy storage no more today, our body keeps storing. According to our observation a body usually only feels like having had enough food, if we took in 300 Kcal more than we´d need when just sitting around.

The security margin our body is claiming by signaling hunger to built a security margin of energy storage is 300 Kcal a day.

Imagine, you´re just sitting, but you continue eating normally until you feel sated. Within 20 days living a quiet indoor life at our desks we will have stored an amount of 6000 kcal which equals exactly to one kilo of body fat.

So the consequence would be: we mustn´t eat until we are sated? Who does such a thing? Nobody.

Next: Energy needs and body weight Part III. Energy claim of the feedback system to keep the status quo - in any case. And: why do some people need just need the amount of food a sparrow would eat.

On Eating - a row of smithereens about hunger and eating No 06

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different kinds of bavarian meat and sausage on metal plates: pork hock, meat balls, debreziner sausage, liver loaf. c ignazwrobel

last: insulin and glucose

Energy needs and body weight, Part I

The energy management system of our body never heard of the industrial revolution. The biological status quo of our body is still the same like it was 10.000 years ago, when we were hunters and gatherers. A hunter must be aware of lacking hunting fortune over a period of maybe even weeks.

So mother nature invented a really miraculous mechanism. The regulatory circuit responsible to help the system to survive will turn adjusting screws to keep the system – our body – running in a state of power capacity without food intake.

The only catalyst the system needs is H2O – a dipolar solution medium to keep chemical reaction going- Better known as water.

Nevertheless our body will not forget the existence of periods with low or no energy supply in form of food. The system becomes wide wide awake listening to any prognostic symptom indicating a forthcoming period of low external energy supply – food. Every single body in the world undergoes this learning process.

So if a body witnesses a low supply of energy at the age of about twenty something, maybe we were students with a lot of hopes and no money in our pockets and had to survive for a while on roasted rice, - the body takes a livelong lasting record of this period.

Maybe in our late 30s we slim down for a purpose our mind is set to achieve for let´s say 29 kilogram.

The body takes the record of this. The logic conclusion of the body: My owner lives in an environment with low energy supply from time to time.

The body says: We have urgently to take care of any incoming calorie to store it for the next hunger period in form of body fat.

next: energy needs and body weight Part II

On Eating - a row of smithereens about hunger and eating No 05

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a shelf with different sorts of noodles and pasta, tomatoe sauce, pasta sauce, c ignazwrobel

O.k. We had our meal. Our digestive tract is extracting or producing all available glucose from the foodstuffs und places it into our blood.

A regulatory circuit always wants to get back to equilibrium.

If somewhere in the system a component is changed and the equilibrium of the system is out of balance, the regulatory circuit changes another component to reachieve balance.

The first change in the system is a change of the amount of glucose in the care system nourishing our cells: in our blood.

The second change is a rebalancing attempt. The glucose is supposed to vanish from our blood. Our hypophysis receives a message blood sugar level is rising to – let´s say – 200 ml /dl .

The hypophysis sends an order to the pancreas gland to produce a fleet of transport ships to bring glucose away from blood, into the storage rooms, our cells: The fleet of transport ships is called Insulin.

The fleet of insulin ships however is not just Robin and a few merry men, it´s a royal fleet of many many ships to do the job. Too many, to tell the truth. All these insulin-ships take glucose on board and store it away into the cells.

What now? No more glucose at all in our blood.

The message to our hypophysis is: very very low level of glucose in our blood. Code orange not enough energy fuel available for ongoing energy production in our muscle cells!!

Low level of glucose? The answer of the hypophysis is: low level of glucose!! Code red!! Low level of glucose!! All hands on deck!! Code: HUNGER!! HUNGER!! HUNGER!! Make our owner get up, run to the next food source and make him eat.

And thus…

…not the legend begins,

but: if our food supplied a high amount of stuff making it possible to release a lot of glucose into our blood, the insulin – reaction is far over the top.

The hypophysis orders to overflow our blood with a giant fleet of insulin ships.

So even after food intake we might be sitting here and become hungry again a very short time after our meal..

Tomorrow: energy needs and body weight.

On Eating - a row of smithereens about hunger and eating No 04

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oranges, apples, pineapples, mandarines , bananas c ignazwrobel

Yesterday: salivary production.

Today: insulin and glucose.

Whatever we may eat, the chemistry in our digestive system is set to produce the energy supplier number one our muscle cells are able to process: glucose.

Glucose is like the wood in a woodfire, like the fuel oil in the central heating of our house (outside temperatures today in Holzkirchen, Bavaria, Germany, Europe: -1,5 degree Celsius central heating very welcome), like the gas in our cars.

The glucose is being produced by splitting in our food long molecule chains into shorter ones or extracting glucose from food.

Let´s assume we ate, our digestive system produced glucose, now the fuel is in our system- our regulatory system.

But where is it? The walls of our intestine are permeable.

The glucose diffuses through theses walls into the medium available everywhere in our body, the medium that reaches every single cell of our body: our blood.

So we might imagine what happens.

The blood is a delivery system not only for nicotin, but also for glucose. Assume we ate, assume a tankful of glucose rushes through our blood vessels, but – what next?

The glucose molecules still haven´t found the combustion chambers in our muscle cells, the so called mitochondria. Mitochondria are like the combustion chambers in our cars (remember? engine, cylinders, valves, fuel, explosion: turning high energy liquid into motion energy of the piston rods…. ).

The glucose in our blood needs a door opener into our muscle cells: the door opener is a hormone called insulin.

Back to the fact our system is a regulatory circuit system. Our intestine releases the complete amount of glucose into our blood. No regulation here, no caring for tolerable amounts of glucose, the whole load.

Now insulin has to do it´s job.

Think of insulin as of transport ships. These transport ships patrol in our blood and take glucose as cargo on board, then sailing to our cells, open the doors and help glucose get into our cells.

now comes the trap:

The thing is, if there´s a very rich disposability of glucose, insulin addresses in first place another type of cells: our body fat storage cells.

Tomorrow: insulin and hunger.

On Eating - a row of smithereens about hunger and eating No 03

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A shelf filled with country chips, natural chips, oven chips, tortilla chips, taco chips. c ignazwrobel

Last: hypophysis and stomach wall extension reflex

Today: salivary production.

We sit in front of our meal and start eating. With the first bite our mouth has to do three major things.

The first is biting and chewing, the second is a task for the salivary glands in our cheeks: with the first bite the glands start releasing saliva into our mouth.

Saliva is good for two purposes: first it helps to make food slippery. Food has to glide down our esophagus and everybody who once tried to gulp a dry tablet will certainly remember that the tablet got stuck in the throat.

The second task is to fulfil the first step of digestion. An enzyme called ptyalin (nice word) starts to split long chains of molecules into shorter ones.

Now comes the trap:

there´s food that is challenging our salivary glands to continue with the production of saliva. ... for example when eating tacos or chips.

To swallow tacos or potatoe chips we need to change consistency of the food from dry and prickly with hard edges to a swallowable form: liquid. So far so good.

The trap is: as long as the salivary production of our glands is running our hypophysis doesn´t stop sending the message: you are still hungry. More food intake, please.

The rest is subject to your imagination….

Tomorrow: our regulatory circuit and insulin