How Leptin Resistance Causes Obesity

In order for you to significantly gain weight, you must first become leptin resistant. Leptin is a hormone that helps you regulate your appetite. When your leptin levels rise, it signals your body that you’re full, so you’ll stop eating.

However, as you become increasingly resistant to the effects of leptin, you end up eating more. Many people who are overweight also have an impairment in their body’s ability to oxidize fat, which leads to a low-energy state.

What drives this basic process? Why do you become leptin resistant in the first place?

Refined sugar (in particular fructose) is exceptionally effective at causing leptin resistance in animals, and it’s very effective at blocking the burning of fat. When you give fructose to animals, they lose their ability to control their appetite, they eat more, and they exercise less.

Research also reveals that fructose has effects independent of this mechanism to induce this metabolic syndrome. Whereas fructose increases weight through the standard mechanism of stimulating more food intake and blocking the burning of fat, even when you control caloric intake, fructose can affect body composition.

This is because when you eat fructose, you actually generate more fat in your liver for the same amount of energy intake, compared to other types of sugar... For example, if you calorically restrict an animal but give it a high-fructose diet or a high-sugar diet, it will still produce fatty liver and will still become insulin resistant.

• It stimulates weight gain through its effects on your appetite and by blocking the burning of fat.
• It also changes your body composition to increase body fat even when you are on a caloric restriction.

The goal in maintaining a healthy body weight or to drop body fat is to limit your intake of fructose as much as possible and never exceed 15 grams of fructose in a 24 hour period.

It is important to understand that sugar and in particular fructose is addictive, in fact it effects the brain the exact same way as cocaine or heroine does.

Unfortunately the food industry has created the greatest epidemic of obesity and obesity related disease in the history of the world with a simple little product called, "SUGAR".

It is up to us to control our own cravings and avoid the addictive grasp of sugar. The FDA will never restrict it, there is far too much money being made from sugar and the diseases it creates.


Mark Harris, PhD
Exercise Physiologist/Nutritionist
TexasMetabolics@gmail.com
Texas Metabolics