YOU on a diet - Interesting tidbits

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Oh, the Gall Your gallbladder may seem as unnecessary as bad goatees, but one of its functions is to help store bile-that digestive juice that helps your body absorb nutrients. Obese people have a greater than 50 percent chance of developing gallstones. Why? An overworked liver cased by being overweight makes bile, which is more like sludge than liquid, and predisposes them to developing stones. It's also more likely that you'll develop stones when you lose weight fast, like after weight-loss surgery-because the gallbladder doesn't empty enough when it doesn't see any fat. So it's not uncommon for a surgeon to remove the gallbladder during a gastric bypass procedure. The risk factors for developing the painful stores are easy to remember, because they sound like an R & B group. They're the 4 Fs: female, fertile, fat, and forty. (We don't mean this to

be a gender issue, but the fact is that women are more likely to have gallstone symptoms than men. Department of Energy The three major types of energy are contained in carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, which can come from healthy or waist-busting converted inefficiently to sugars, and fats cannot be converted at all. Fats come in forms our bodies recognize (like nuts) and naturally less common forms that poison us (like trans fats). Most foods, like meat, are a combination of energy sources; as the food digests (or sometimes rots) in your intestines, nutrients are

absorbed in different places. By the way, even the liver is the symbolic center of the metabolic universe, the intestines, as evidenced by your bathroom time, aren't really a closed loop. Food Use Simple sugars from carbohydrates are the most versatile energy source, so they're preferentially used by our organs, especially the finicky brain, which refuses to tolerate any other source. Fats are a backup system to supply muscle with energy; this is why actually using muscles is needed to selectively lose fat, and why exercise works so

well. Amino acids from proteins are crucial for building the body, but are used only as a last resource for exercise energy. Stop Sign Food entering the small bowel stimulates release of the substance CCK into the wall of the stomach. That's where the vagus nerve senses that we're full and informs the satiety center in our brains to tell our hand to put down the butter popcorn. The Word on GERD Fat doesn't just pose problems for your belly and subway turnstiles; it also can mess with your throat. About half of obese people have the chest-burning condition called GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease). The thinking is that extra fat in the belly pushes down on your stomach, thereby opening the angle of the GE junction and pushing it toward the chest. (Remember, it's at an acute angle to keep food from going back up your throat every time you eat.) The pried-open angle makes it easier for acid and food to be pushed back up. Plus, the extra fat in the belly puts

pressure on the contents of your bowel. More pressure, more GERD. What's the big deal? Besides the unpleasant sensation of tasting your food on the way up, GERD also burns your esophagus-in the same way that the sun burns your skin. After a burn, it takes a couple days to heal, but if the burning happens over and over, it means you're burning the tissues and are more likely to develop cancer there, just like repeated sunburns increase your risk of skin cancer. Taking half a full aspirin or two baby aspirin (you want 162 mg) with a glass of water decreases this risk by about 35 percent. By the way, alcohol, coffee, pepper, acidic foods like tomatoes and OJ, and to a lesser degree, chocolate increase GERD symptoms. The best way to manage symptoms until you lose weight is to avoid meals within three hours of bedtime and to put blocks under the head posts of your bed so that you sleep at a slight tilt. (Pillows usually don't

work, since your head will typically roll off the pillow.) Acid Trip Fat presses on the gastroesophageal junction and unkinks this connection, which makes acid and reflux move up toward the throat. Pressure on the stomach from intra-abdominal fat increases the backwash. The

System of Satisfaction Though it may seem that we have endless reasons to eat-to celebrate holidays, to beat stress, to pass time between Super Bowl commercials- there's only one real reason why we need food: for energy. That energy allows our organs to function, our muscles to move, and our bodies to keep warm. And to a large extent, our brains help control how we convert food to energy. To help understand the process that your body goes through to use energy, we'll break down the metabolic path into two phases. Digestive Phase: Your hypothalamus orchestrates this phase of metabolism by receiving signals from throughout your body about whether you're hungry or not, so that your body can use energy to power itself. Here's how: Your body has a short-term reservoir for energy in the form of Glycogen, a carbohydrate primarily

stored in your liver and muscles. After eating, when you have glucose (sugar) and insulin (the hormone produced in the pancreas to transport glucose), your body uses all of the glucose it needs for immediate fuel but takes the rest and stores it as glycogen. If your blood glucose level falls, your pancreas stops releasing insulin-and then releases another G substance, glucagon, which converts the stored energy (glycogen) to sugar (glucose). So the effect is that when your intestinal gas tank empties of sugar (in other words, when our ancestors were fasting between bison hunts), your body is still able to supply crucial energy to your central nervous system by converting glycogen to glucose. Fasting Phase: When you're sleeping or go long periods without eating, your body needs to have a supply of energy to keep your organs functioning. Once you use up all of your available glucose during the

digestive phase of metabolism (your body stores only about 300 calories in the short-term glycogen reservoir), it taps a long-term: fatty tissue in the form of triglycerides (molecules that include a carbohydrate- containing glycerol). This keeps you going until you break the fast with breakfast. First-degree Burning Feasting allows our livers to store excess sugar as glycogen, so we can access energy without eating for hours. Once glycogen stores are full, we save the excess energy from an ice cream sundae as fat. To break down fat, we first have to use up glycogen, which can take a

half hour of exercise, That's when the body automatically begins burning up fat. Factoids As you get older, you have fewer leptin receptors in your hypothalamus- meaning that you have fewer satiety signals, which makes you more prone to gaining weight. CART (cocaine-amphetamin e-regulatory transcript, for those scoring at home) is the reason why cocaine addicts don't gain weight. Cocaine and amphetamine stimulate4e this chemical, giving you a double brain bat to help you control appetite and increase metabolism.

It's unclear whether CART will be the basis for effective weight-loss treatments, but researchers are studying g the neurological effects these drugs have on appetite to see if they could lead to long-term pharmaceutical solutions to weight loss (without, of course, the dangerous side effects of illicit drugs). Marijuana, by the way, has its own receptors that overwhelm liptin, which is one big reason why pot smokers get the munchies. It's also an area that's a promising new approach to weight-loo drugs. By figuring out how the drug turns off the gene that produces leptin, we'll be able to figure out how to flick it on-to keep letin (and thus satiety levels) high. The prototype drug has done great in trials and symbolizes a new generation of smart weight-loss medications that work hormonally. Neuropeptide Y is a stress hormone that increases with severe or prolonged stress. This may be why some people in

chronically stressful situations tend to gain weight. Testosterone, the male sex hormone, seems to stimulate NPY secretion, while the female sex hormone, estrogen, seems to have a varying effect depending on the stage of a woman's cycle. Scientists found how reline works accidentally: in gastric bypass surgery, doctors cut out the part of the stomach that secretes reline. They soon realized that it wasn't just the smaller stomach but the reduced ghrelin production that helped sugar patients eat less food. The eat-everything signal was shut off, clearing the way for the satiety center to take care of its business. The average person has 10,000 taste buds, which are onion-shaped structures. People regenerate new taste buds ever three to ten days, but these regenerate at a slower rate as people get older. Elderly people may have only 5,000 taste buds. Maybe the old days

were right: It used to be that young docs would criticize older docs for giving B12 shots, calling them nothing more than placebos. But nearly 40 percent of Americans may suffer from a vitamin B12 deficiency. Eating nuts does not create the calorie intake that you might expect, because 5 percent to 15 percent of the calories are not absorbed by the intestinal system. That's because the nuts' skin and how well we chew nuts influence digestion. An added bonus: The slow release of calories throughout the intestinal system leads to prolonged satiety. While the majority of taste buds are located on your tongue, you also have taste buds on the roof of your mouth.