Leptin, The Hormone That Makes You Fat…Or Is It Thin?
Leptin is a hormone produced by your fat cells. Okay, technically Leptin is produced by adipocytes, but fat cells are a lot easier to pronounce and it basically means the same thing. Once the leptin is produced, it has two major roles in the body. First, leptin binds to your hypothalamus (a part of the brain that controls hunger) and sends the signals – "hey mouth, we're full, stop eating!" Yes, leptin signals satiety, or a feeling of fullness in the body.
The second role for leptin is to help the body use stored fat as energy. Fat in your body is not always a bad thing, fat can be burned for energy, but there are a few biological processes that need to take place for the body to burn stored fat. Leptin enhances your body's ability to burn fat and use it as energy.
Clearly, given leptin's role in signaling satiety and burning fat, the key to weight loss is to increase leptin levels – right??? Of course not, nothing is easy when it comes to weight loss! It turns out that while injecting obese mice with leptin can lead to weight loss, the same effect does not happen in humans (at least comforting to know we are not the same as mice). In fact, numerous studies have shown that overweight people have HIGHER leptin levels than people of average weight.
It is Not Enough to Have Leptin, You Need to Use Leptin
For a number of years scientist scratched their heads at this paradox, overweight people had much higher levels of leptin, yet they clearly were not seeing a reduced appetite or increased fat burning. Finally they figured out the problem, overweight people tend to have leptin resistance.
The more you eat, the more your body produces leptin to try to tell your brain to stop eating. The problem is your brain, and its receptors, in addition to the fat cells themselves, can get overloaded. Once the receptors in the brain and on the fat cells are overloaded, you become Leptin Resistant, and stop responding to the leptin. Your fat cells don't "know" about the resistance problem, so they just keep producing more leptin to say "We're full, stop eating". Of course, this just overloads the receptors more and the cycle of leptin resistance continues.
Fat cells get larger, your ability to burn fat decreases and your hunger remains and weight gain increases. Clearly Leptin Resistance is one of the major reasons overweight people have so much trouble losing weight.
Decrease Leptin Resistance and Increase Weight Loss
Wondering when any of this is going to tie back into African Mango? How about right now! It turns out that African Mango Seed extracts (IGOB131) can help
correct leptin resistance. Researchers have found that people with Leptin Resistance have high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP). For fear of putting you to sleep, we will skip the advanced biology lesson and just say that too much CRP in the body is a bad thing and is one of the major reasons we become leptin resistant.
Studies have shown (we will go through the specific studies in the next article) that African Mango Seed extract can decrease CRP levels by 52% over 10 weeks. You probably don't step on a scale and say "Oh,I hope I lost 10 CRP this week", but that drop in CRP means your body becomes more responsive to leptin. Increased response to leptin means you feel full faster and your body burns fat more easily. This can all lead to increased weight loss.
Irvingia Gabonensis Is No One Trick Pony
You might think that African Mango would be satisfied with helping the body reduce leptin resistance and call it a day. Nope, African Mango and its seeds are very hard working and clever!
The science can get complicated enough to have you reaching for a triple espresso to try to stay awake, so we will keep things simple…
Studies have shown that African Mango can increase body levels of adiponectin, a hormone that has been shown to have anti-inflammatory and positive weight loss effects.
One of the problems with eating a great deal of carbohydrates is that the body quickly breaks the carbs down into simple sugars and floods the bloodstream with glucose. Hello insulin spikes, sugar highs and andenergy crashes. Amylase is the enzyme that does the dirty work of breaking down complex carbs into sugar. Irvingia (African Mango) is believed to inhibit amylase production, which means it takes longer for complex carbs to convert to simple sugars and flood our bloodstream with glucose. Hello, improved insulin levels and lower glycemic index!
If you want to lose some real weight, just say glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase 10 times fast, the workout that will give your tongue is sure to burn a ton of calories. Seriously, glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase is an enzyme that helps convert sugar to stored fat. Clearly, not what we want if we are trying to lose some weight. African Mango has been shown to help inhibit the production of glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, thus decreasing the rate at which our body stores sugar as fat.
African Mango – The Little Fruit with a Big Impact
As the quick science lesson on African Mango (and its seeds) has shown, this is a fruit with a great impact on many hormones, enzymes and functions of the body. The key to weight management is getting all the parts of the body to work together in a positive way, and African Mango seems like the perfect catalyst to get you going in the right direction.
Of course with claims of weight loss often come hype, exaggeration and the bending of the truth. In our next article, The Clinical Research Behind African Mango, we look at exactly what the clinical studies have found to be true about African Mango.
