sleep

Hormone CPC #1: DHEA

This blog post was created for my members who just heard my webinar on bioidentical and synthetic hormone replacement. It is specifically designed to further our discussions in that talk. DHEA has been an enigma to the public and to most physicians. I never once heard about this hormone in four years of medical school, seven years of residency or in any endocrinology lecture from my training. The general public did not learn about DHEA until 1996, when its benefits were mentioned in the media and several popular books that showed up on daytime TV shows. Most in mainstream medicine continued to ignore the science these books contained because they were not found in the usual ways via journals and continuing education classes. You actually had to be on the lookout for this information. With a busy medical practice, this is no easy task. DHEA became credible to the medical establishment when the New York Academy of Sciences published a book called DHEA and Aging. That book provided scientific validation for the many life-extending effects of DHEA.

Cold Thermogenesis 7: ENVIRONMENT TRUMPS NUCLEAR GENOME

CT-7 is about how we are shaped by our environment by the evolutionary erosion of time that our ancestors faced. All life on this planet is shaped by two major variables in our environment: the sun and the seasonal changes. No matter the place present on earth, there are always alterations in these two factors that are cyclic, and always accounted for by all living organisms at some fashion. In some mammals, like man, it is accounted for centrally in the brain and peripherally in our organ ultradian clocks. This is why we have different patterns of aging in certain organs. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes a tremendous amount of sense because life is using the “knowns” of its environment to construct a reality that will ensure its survival. This is the basis of epigenetic signaling that we now know to be the major genetic modifier of the genome of all animals. The major signal transducer in Epigenetics is found in the cellular signaling in our cell membranes that interact with the environment and our inner hormones that signal our epigenetic switches sitting on our genes inside the nucleus. Since it is clear that our cold adapted pathways use sensory afferents to signal to open the Ancient Pathway, I think it is time we just have a blog in the CT series that discusses what a normal 24 hour day is like in a human circadian biology.

Cold Thermogenesis 6: The Ancient Pathway

The best way to describe this pathway to the lay public is to explain this is how evolution allows for ideal form to meet function in a tough environment. This environment is likely the primordial environment for life on our planet. This makes astrophysicists excited, because life might also be evolving in places like Titan. After all 5 extinction events on this planet geologist have told us they were followed by an extended cold climate. In cold mammals live longer. You will find out more about why this happens in Energy and Epigenetics 4 and 5 blog posts. The pathway uses very little energy from ATP and gives a whole lot to the organism who uses it. Fat burning is required and it is tied to a biochemical pathway that paleo forgot to speak about. But it requires cold temperature to be present and used commonly. In the pathway, the less effort you give, the faster and more powerful you will be when this pathway is active. People who live in this pathway can run a marathon with no training. They can lift unreal amounts of weight with little training. Their reserve and recovery are just incredible. You have to see it to believe it. Many will say cold thermogenesis a hormetic process, when in reality it is created using a coherent energy source due to something called the Hall effect. When we have had extinction events on Earth before, the events usually affect the evaporation of water in some fashion from the surface of lakes and oceans. It also affects the transpiration from the forest trees, plants, and flowers and this change cools the air. You must understand how climatology works here; liquid water needs to absorb a lot of latent heat to in order to evaporate, so it sucks energy from the atmosphere to make this energy transfer. This loss of energy from the atmosphere directly cools the planet and this preserves the charge on life's inner mitochondrial membrane and in the nanotubes present in our cells that contain water. This is how life lives long in the cold. Those people don't realize this because they do not live in this pathway for the majority of their life, and few studies have been done to say otherwise. The link above is recently added to this blog post. It seems science is now proving me correct in my theories of extinction events.

Cold Thermogenesis 3

Evolutionary strategy is based upon finding an environmental niche and exploiting it. Evolution is based upon change and the natural adaptations to it. Today, we are going to explore how some environmental triggers might open a “biochemical trap door.” Why is circadian biology critical? For evolution to work, a cell first must adapt to its environment. So the first thing any living cell would see in an earth day is a period of day and night. It also has to find food to make energy (ATP). In addition, it has to control its own cellular division. The epic battle for the cell is the circadian cycle has to “yoke” the metabolic cycle to its growth cycle. Most people know that the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), is the circadian pacemaker that monitors this dance between darkness and light and the seasonal cold and hot temperatures in our environment. Evolution apparently agreed with this assessment, because we now know it to be true. What most people do not know is how leptin plays a massive role in regulating it. Research has revealed that leptin can induce expression of a neuropeptide gene called vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) through the VIP cytokine response element. VIP actually is what sets the circadian pacemaker to light. Leptin yokes metabolism and sleep to the light and dark cycle. When temperature becomes the dominant environmental trigger and not light cycles, leptin induces endothelial nitric oxide synthetase (eNOS), that shuts down the photic effects of VIP on the SCN. This means that leptin forces the SCN not to be able to use light any longer to yoke circadian cycles! Once temperature begins to yoke the circadian rhythms, some very special things happen to our biochemistry that normally does not occur in other environments. These are ancient epigenetic programs that are hardwired into the DNA of every descendant of a eutherian mammal. We are descended from these animals.

Cold Thermogensis 2

Now that you understand that I believe cold environments were how life first evolved, what implications does this hold for all life and humans today? I think with this thought experiment we need to begin to talk about another aspect of evolution to fully conceptualize how cold works for biology. Let’s talk about sleep for 4 short minutes. First, I want you to watch this video before you proceed. Recently, one of my readers pointed out he was confused by Dr. Gamble when she said the normal pattern of sleep in a natural environment had two cycles. He wanted to know why her version and my version for sleep as written in my post “Rx for the Leptin Rx” were not congruent. It was a great question that really opens the discussion to the idea of evolutionary mismatches. These mismatches occur in many modern systems of biology, and they are actually increasing in frequency and severity as time elapses. The reason is quite simple. Evolution is constantly getting faster as time goes on, relative to the current state of our genome. This is really how the “cellular theory of relativity” is currently affecting our own genome today. The speed of evolutionary change has far out stripped the ability of our paleolithic genes to catch up. This mismatch causes major problems for modern humans. When they further exacerbate the system with choices not congruent with our biology, the results are magnified in disease incidence and prevalence. She also mentioned in passing, early in her talk, that people who went deep into the ground have been found to be “very productive” while in a cold dark environment. She did not expand on this concept at all, but I would strongly suggest you remember this as the cold thermogenesis series progresses on. There is a deep biologic reason this occurs. As we use this pathway, lots of things improve that we do not expect.

Your Gut, Neurotransmitters, and Hormones

READERS SUMMARY: 1. HOW YOUR GUT BRAIN AND RESPONSE OF YOUR BRAIN ARE ALL TIED TOGETHER? 2. WHAT ARE THE 4 MAIN NEUROTRANSMITTERS? 3. WHAT DO THEY DO AND MEAN? 4. WHAT AFFECTS THEIR PRODUCTION? 5. HORMONES ARE THE BRAINS ENDOCRINE SECRETION THAT TELLS YOU HOW YOUR EPIGENETIC SWITCHES ARE SET. 6. HOW WE USE [...]

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