Leptin not only determines how much fat you accumulate, but it also decides where that fat is stored. When you become more and more leptin resistant, the fat is stored mostly around your midsection. This leads quite often to the "apple shape" that we find so often correlated to disease. As this happens more fat permeates the liver, which impedes its ability to communicate with leptin, further quickening diabetes.
Leptin is much more important to your health than the ever popular "cholesterol", yet have you ever had someone you know mention a leptin test? Do you think most doctors measure it, or would even know what the results would mean if they knew how easy it was to measure?
Leptin has been linked to heart disease, obesity, inflammatory diseases, osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, as well as cancer. Each one of these are often referred to as "Chronic Diseases of Aging"
With leptin's role in the so called "diseases of Aging", could it play a role in the actual rate of aging?
The Biology of Aging
Researchers are now starting to look at the very question. There are two goals in which life is programmed to strive towards, these two main functions of life are: To Eat & To Reproduce.
If our forefathers had not been successful in both eating and reproducing we would not exist, and all of my articles would be mute. All of our physical embodiments from our hair down to our toe nails exist to help us achieve these two activities. This is the natural order of things, eat and reproduce, but to fulfill this purpose does not mean we must live long, healthy lives.
There has been a rising interest in the "Paleolithic" diets, which of course are much better than the standard American Diet, but it was not necessarily designed to enable us to live healthier or longer lives, but instead to maximize our chances of reproduction. The circle of life seems to care very little about what happens to us once we have had adequate chance to reproduce.
But, with more and more research we are finding clues to how we can live longer healthier lives. And this brings us back to leptin and fat.
It takes a tremendous amount of energy to create babies, and energy is and will always be a precious commodity, and the laws of conservation of energy say that energy isn't created or destroyed only passed from one piece of matter to the next. Therefore it makes no sense in trying to create babies when it appears you do not have enough energy at your disposal to accomplish that goal successfully.
Rather, is appears that nearly all life forms "switch gears" divert energy from reproductive mechanisms towards systems allowing our bodies to "bunker down", until there is a opportune time nutritionally speaking to reproduce. To break it down more simply, nature helps you live longer to achieve the primary goal of reproduction.
In order to help increase your lifespan your body goes into repair mode, and tells your body to repair the genes responsible for producing intracellular antioxidants, heat shot proteins (helping to maintain the shape of proteins), and other DNA repair enzymes. You body does this as a response to "restricted caloric intake", which has been show to greatly increase the life spa of numerous species, including monkeys. There seems to be a powerful correlation between reproduction, fat/energy stores, and longevity.
Researchers have show in simpler organism that this longevity - energy store link is monitored by insulin, and that when these hormone signals were kept low (meaning scarce energy is available), then maximum life span can be extended, and in the case of worms and flies up to over 700%.
As we can see looking around, the most abundant energy source for us humans is fat stores. And it is leptin that controls how much fat is stored, and ultimately whether or not we can reproduce.
We have all heard about how women with very low amounts of body fat stop ovulating. The main reason this happens is due to insufficient levels of leptin being produced. So it appears that to slow the downward cycle of aging we need to fight nature's instinct to reproduce, which appears to me regulated by leptin.
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