Sometimes called “ecto-hormones”, they may help or hurt your upcoming date, strengthen or weaken your love life, promote gaining or losing friends, decide the outcome of your job interview and even secure or compromise your child’s health. Surprised? Don’t be. Just look carefully into this issue and do your best to use biology in your favor when possible.

The term pheromone is derived from ancient Greek ”pheran” – to carry, and “horman” – to excite. They are a diverse group of chemical messengers
used by animals to communicate fear, aggression, attraction, sexual excitation and many other signals to the members of their own species. We are going to discuss here sex attractants in particular.

Insects are not the only ones to fly for miles upwind drawn by the sent of their females. It is easy to picture canines, felines and other mammals lead by the noses to their mates in heat. Many primates like lemurs and other prosimians rely more on their well developed sense of smell than on their poor eye sight and mark the trees with their pheromones to induce the pursuit by possible mates. Humans are not much different in this respect. Human pheromones released by one individual are capable of changing the physiology and behavior of others. Or else, why do the menstrual cycles of women living together tend to synchronize?

Those short polypeptide chains released under the armpits, forehead, groin and other areas with more or less hair growth are the hot topic of many modern studies. Subconsciously men can sense when women are ovulating even though humans do not possess Jacobson’s organ in the roof of their mouth like felines do and cannot detect animal carcasses 20 miles away like bears do. There must be a reason the neuron pathway from the chemical receptors in the back of nasal cavity in humans to the olfactory bulb in the brain is the shortest as compared to all the rest of the senses ( even compared to the distance from eye retina to visual centers back in the occipital part of the brain).

So how can we use the knowledge of human pheromones existence to our benefit regardless of their possible amino acid structure? Expect this part to be quite controversial and shocking but most entertaining. Since it is mostly based upon inductive rather than deductive reasoning we do welcome any related comments, arguments and your own life stories. So be ware, here we go!

1. The love “chemistry” we are quite aware of is identified by the genetic match between the people since pheromones are proteins and therefore are coded by the sequence of nucleotides on your DNA. There are no way dating site pictures or social networks could provide this information for anybody. In fact, your possible real matches are often overlooked and dismissed and many wrong ones are picked out just because this vital piece of biological information is missing. You have to be in the same environment with your prospective partner to find the match. It doesn’t matter if he or she went to Harvard or Yale if genetic match is overlooked. Cannot fool the Mother Nature.

2. The use of steroid drugs and hormonal birth control pills alters the work of hypothalamus via the negative feed back control and therefore distorts production and release of both endo- and ecto-hormones in men and women. You may attract (get attracted) to genetically non-matching individuals and feel repulsive and reject (or get rejected by) your best genetic match. More and more marriages assembled for the wrong unnatural reasons are invading the human race. Overuse of hormonal drugs and contraceptives in the past decades coincides with the growing numbers of autistic and otherwise negatively afflicted children born to these marriages.

3. Have you heard about hormone based “sex drive solution” perfumes? Stay away! Do not distort your own unique pheromone scent. Similar to pheromone moth traps, those tons of individuals genetically matching Channel, Dior, Imperial Nights, and anything but you will soon reveal your trick and find out the sense was “leased”. Neither you nor they will ever consciously understand what hit them and why they left you after a few dates and/or cheated on you with your best friend. You are really better of using a relaxing pumpkin pie, lavender or cinnamon bun scent shown to be sexually stimulating and arousing without endocrine disruption.

4. The love “chemistry” works best within short distances and takes time to trigger the responses within the limbic system of the brain. Hang around your prospective match in close vicinity and give it enough time before acting up or pushing the relationship. Do not rely on looks, they may be deceptive. But even the best surgeon won’t be able to change the genetics and therefore pheromones. Cannot fool the Mother Nature.

5. There is no need to try hard to alter your physical appearance and inheritance. Why do it? There will be enough genetic “matches” for your unique genetic makeup, infatuated by your unique pheromones and sincerely loving your unique looks, weight, height, hair, color, etc. By drastic makeovers, fad diets and over exercising, or resorting to corrective surgery you are actually “hiding” the real you and making it harder for your true love to find you. There needs to be a correlation between the genotype and the phenotype, don’t try to fool the Mother Nature.

What’s the big deal about the genetic match, you might wonder, aren’t good looks and/or money enough for happiness? May be there are other reasons besides the nose job for people like Jennifer Aniston to have problems finding their true love?

It is sure possible. But please do not confuse genetic “match” with genetic similarity and kinship. The recessive diseases, mental retardation and horrific deformities brought about by incest are well documented and available for your view at hundreds of sites. Genetic “match” we define here by the highest possible genetic variation and the most vital combination of genes the child could inherit. One aspect of concern is the immune system of the offspring. Genetically “matching” couples provide the most possible diversity of the antibody producing plasma cells (APC) for their children and therefore provide better protection against the vast variety of the harmful microorganisms and other antigens. And it is not only the APC variation that provides best protection for life; there are other aspects of the work of the white blood cells that we can review at a different time. It is not a secret that children with stronger immune system develop much fewer mental and physiological problems if any. There is a reason Mother Nature gave all of us the unique scent and the big brains to understand and appreciate the significance of it.

Then why are these pills pushed so hard on the market and most internet articles praise them with rather positive reviews? Could it be the same reason one would have to dig really hard to find a detailed description of the illegal drugs detrimental health effects? The first few pages on most search engines about, say, opiates, will tell you a slightly hidden but mostly flattering story about the pain relieve and pleasure they provide. Get a clue? Correct, just follow the money!

Here’s an example: spirulina, a well known and widely advertised food supplement obtained from dried cyanobacteria. There is nothing cheaper to make any one could imagine: these are the most primitive prokaryotic organisms found in every pond and ditch, and make any bucket of water green if left outside for a few days or so. Though often referred to as blue-green algae, these organisms are unicellular monerians which contain liver-damaging toxins from their microcysts. Yet, many “promoters” call these organisms plants and assign magical almighty healing powers to spirulina in all aspects of human health and organ systems including digestive, circulatory, nervous, excretory, reproductive, immune, you name it! Harry Potter could just go take a hike here. If something seems too good to be true, there is big chance it isn’t. In fact majority of spirulina and other food supplement promoters do not even show signs of biological knowledge at all claiming for instance scientifically undocumented effects of chlorophyll on human blood composition and other Mickey Mouse “discoveries”.

Now back to overdose and how detrimental it could really be. Here are some well documented examples. Excessive intake of vitamin A (such as retinol) can cause vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, abdominal pain, blurred vision, dizziness, liver damage, brittle nails, loss of hair, severe depression, drowsiness, lethargy, anemia, muscle pain, gingivitis and many other problems including coma. It is easy to overdose by taking A supplements, while it is virtually impossible to do by just eating eggs, milk, beef liver, wild salmon or carrots. Like many other fruit and vegetables the latter contain beta-carotene, a precursor for retinol production in human body. If you made your child consume a lot of carrots the worst thing that could happen is his(or her) hands turning orangey. No liver damage.

Being a product of evolution our body is adapted to derive nutrients from food sources we had access to for millions of years. Mostly hunters and gatherers, our ancestors came to rely more on agriculture only in the past few thousand years, or a few seconds ago on the evolutionary scale. And yet that provided enough time to select for DNA mutations encoding for more salivary amylase to break down starches. We are evolving pretty fast, but not as fast as to catch up with the last few decades commercially produced concentrated food “bombs” like spirulina. It is claimed to possess in 1 kg the same amount of nutrients found in 1,000 kgs of “assorted vegetables”. Its promoters are trying to convince the users that with “such a high concentration of healthy nutrients, good things will happen”.

What an unfounded conclusion! Why would anybody need to consume that much of anything at once? The same logic is heard here and there from many vitamin consumers such as “you would need to eat tons of oranges to obtain the same amount of vitamin C as in the pill (capsule, powder)”. Why, why would you want to consume that much?! To get bloated, hypoglycemic and develop kidney stones?

The old biology textbooks used to tell how dangerous the vitamin and microelement deficiencies were, but did not have much information about over dosage. That was before the age of pills, powders and chews. Even a few generations back our great-grandparents could not have routinely overdosed on food nutrients. An apple or two a day couldn’t have harmed any body. A century ago you wouldn’t come across the reports here and there of a teenager dying from internal bleeding on the way to a hospital after overdosing on iron supplement. Poor kid, all he wanted was to build up some muscles through “magic” pills. Today we are readily exposing our bodies to the overdose of substances that can hurt faster than heal. We are placing ourselves in the unnatural situation to which we are not adapted, and therefore do not have a defense mechanism.

We wouldn’t be here today if our ancestors made wrong choices. So for the sake of future generations why not to stick to natural foods which we are adapted to and supplement our diet artificially only in case of serous starvation or disease. We have more means than cave paintings today to conduct our research and identify missing nutrients from your diet and their natural sources. Examples:

• To make your hair shiny and stimulate its growth try raspberries. Raspberry ketones were found to grow hair, rejuvenate skin elasticity and reduce body fat.
• To cure eye and skin lesions and improve male sexual performance try pumpkin seeds, they are high in Zn, an essential microelement.
• To prevent osteoporosis try honey: not only it contains calcium, but also is shown to promote calcium uptake by bones.
• To lower your blood pressure try watermelon: it is rich in potassium which keeps salt from raising blood pressure, regulates cardiac cycle and may prevent kidney stones formation.
• To prevent anemia and infections try beets: besides numerous vitamins, they contain iron, potassium and cancer fighting agents like betanin.
• To protect your body from radioactive isotopes of cesium and strontium in the vicinity of nuclear disasters and ecological catastrophes consume large amounts of iodine containing foods like sea weed salads, strawberries, and mozzarella cheese. The iodine will displace other metals from coenzymes and cofactors and prevent their accumulation.
• To prevent arthritis, gout and other inflammatory diseases try cherries: they contain anthocyanins which in some studies were found to be as powerful as aspirin.

This list may be continued indefinitely. Our body can find something useful and extract nutrients from all natural foods our ancestors had ever been exposed to. It is those modern commercially manufactured and concentrated pills and powders we should really be worried about.

Our smiles can signal health, compassion, powers of love, success, security, and a whole bunch of other definitely positive intentions towards the people and the world. These signs of happiness are triggered by the release of certain hormones and neurotransmitters (like dopamine and endorphins) by both hippocampus and stem portions of the brain responsible for mood and are therefore often involuntary and instinctive.

For millions of years of natural selection happiness developed as a reward for the activities and events enhancing the chances of human populations for survival and reproduction. Ability to instantly recognize the signals of happiness and positive intentions and distinguish them from signals of danger and hostility may have been a borderline between life and death, passing or not passing of our ancestors’ genes to the next generation. Still today we instinctively smile and attempt to wave back to a stranger who smiled and waved to us, but do not immediately try “mooning” some one back if they “mooned” us from a passing by car. Makes sense to accept the friendly and resist the cruel or not so friendly intentions.

The “feed back” feature or “contagiousness” of the smile serves a crucial role in keeping us attractive, bonded and cooperating, and our babies loved and nurtured. Our smiles help us and those around to live longer and healthier by alleviating stress, stimulating the work of our immune system, minimizing aggression, normalizing heart rate and blood pressure, relieving physical and emotional pain, stimulating memory and learning. In reference to learning, by the way, it has been demonstrated many times that friendly and rewarding atmosphere provides for a much more efficient learning environment as compared to a hostile and punitive one. I once overheard a college professor bragging of what a “tyrant” and a “monster” he was in class and how he’d always “fail” at least half of his students. What a horrible, unfortunate and harmful educational experience did those students have to endure! It would be similar to hiring a mean baby sitter, or a cruel and aggressive nurse coming to take care of you or your family member.

Aggression causing stress and fight-and-flight hormones release (like epinephrine and nor epinephrine, gluco- and mineralocorticoids) cause heart disease, inflammatory reactions and a whole lot of other problems by suppressing the work of the immune system. So either home, or classroom, or work environment full of rage, conflicts, screaming and door slamming is both unhealthy and not productive. The brain will be pushed to mobilize more power for defense and launching of counterattacks rather than creative thinking.

Now here is the time to reveal a great evolutionary remedy our ancestors have provided for us. When ever you feel down and things do not seem to go your way at work, or home or in personal life, do not despair. Find some body in need or in trouble and do something truly altruistic to help them. Remember Will Smith in “I am Legend”? Don’t necessarily have to go that far, or risk your life in the first manned space shuttle. Just do something good for others and their smiles will lighten you heart. Even if you could help out an innocent animal or did something good for the environment, your brain would release a good portion of rewarding dopamine and endorphins to ease your own pain. And in the worst case just come up to the mirror and force a smile upon your face no matter how fake. Stare at your own smiley reflection for a few minutes and the sensory input path from nerve dendrites in your facial muscles and visual receptors in eye retina will trigger the release of “smiley” hormones by your brain. You will feel better and that positive change in your mood will alleviate your pain. Have you heard anything about laughter therapy? Check it out, it definitely works. Once your depression is gone or relieved your brain could ease up on the stress responses and use its power to show you the way out of your fix. Things will get better.

The next time you go on a date, visit your in-laws, or get introduced to new neighbors or co-workers, why wait for the situation to deteriorate? Start smiling from the first hello. Love your life and it will love you back!

The sun has been shining for billions of years. Without sunlight evolution of life on our planet including humans would simply not have been possible. It is well known that just a few minutes of tanning makes people happier and relieves depression by the skyrocketing production of serotonin and endorphins (neurotransmitters for pleasure and euphory), as well as life sustaining amounts of vitamin D, the latter being produced not only in humans, but in all other vertebrates including fish, amphibians and reptiles. This vitamin allowed vertebrate animals to maintain their calcified skeletons as they emerged to the land from the sea water nearly half a billion years ago. So who in their right and not corrupted mind could have labeled this vital adaptive advantage as “damaging”?

Bellow is a list of some secret powers of vitamin D in the human body:

• Serves as cytokine needed for immune defense when converted to calcitriol;
• Assists the work of monocytes as well as both T and B lymphocytes of the immune system;
• Promotes healthy mineralization of the bones and prevents rickets (brittle and misshapen bones) in children and osteomalacia in adults;
• Regulates uptake of calcium and regeneration of the bones preventing osteoporosis in elderly;
• Being a fat-soluble secosteroid (steroid-like substance), vitamin D passes through the nuclear envelope and regulates cellular division and apoptosis (self destruction) at the DNA level;
• Regulates the gene expression (production) of the transport proteins involved in absorption of calcium by the intestinal walls (what’s the point of ingesting calcium containing foods if your body cannot absorb it?);
• Stimulates the work of adrenal medulla cells involved in production of nitric oxide synthase (the erection promoting enzyme).

Important to mention, however is that man made pills and fortified foods are not the same sources of D vitamin as natural sunlight exposure. We are not yet smart enough (if we ever can be) to trick the evolutionary formatted human physiology and metabolism. An artificial overdose of this important vitamin by ingestion may actually cause serious side effects like hypercalcemia, growth retardation, bone and facial fetal developmental abnormalities, metastatic calcification of kidneys and other irreversible damages. The natural sun light exposure, though needed for at least 20 min a day for light skin and up to triple that time for a darker skin individuals could NEVER cause the over dosage. Once the required amount of vitamin D is made in the skin by the sunlight, the rest is getting safely degraded.

So here is the eye opening conclusion for you, folks: that precious vitamin D producing solar radiation naturally REDUCES the chances of colon, breast, ovarian, pancreatic and many other types of cancer (in some studies by 30 to 50%), cures depression, fights the high blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases, increases the life span and reduces mortality and premature aging in the general population.

Let there always be sunshine!

• Does he stare into your eyes for more than 5 seconds at a time: six, seven, and eight? He loves you.
• If he glances at your face for much less and then lets his eyes wonder all over your body, your curves and outfit; he loves you not. It doesn’t matter if he is just curious or has a draconian desire: you might as well have been a Playboy picture.
• Does he think you are perfect and admires everything about you, your family, your pets, the music, the scenic view, the world? The area of the brain cortex responsible for judgmental and critical thinking is inhibited. He is in a state of happiness. He loves you.
• If he is attentive to details and politely points out to a spot on your shirt, notices controversy in someone’s logic, finds things to criticize; he loves you not.
• Is his heartbeat elevated; hands are warm and slightly shaking as he gives you the flowers? Adrenalin rushes through his body. He loves you.
• If he is calm and looks a bit tired, or even bored and yawning; he is a player. There is another reason for him to be with you. He loves you not.
• You had suddenly disappeared for a few days or so. Did he look hard for you and tried all possible means to find and reach you? His mind is locked on the target: he needs to see you all the time. He loves you.
• If all he did when you were suddenly gone was a few phone calls and text messages before he got tired and decided to wait it out; he loves you not.

Now what kind of love are we discussing here: lust, romance, attachment?  The mentioned above features are coming with the “mad” passionate love, the captivating and intense, providing energy to stay up all night, making you fearless and bold and your soul happy. It has a strong instinctive component that allowed our Pleistocene forerunners to find, target and motivate the best possible genetic match for a reproductive success.

This passionate love state of mind is accompanied by the immense production of the excitatory neurotransmitter dopamine and a drop in serotonin in a way similar to people with obsessive-compulsive disorder.  This love emotion is not under conscious control.  It was shown many times that many psychiatric medications (like Prozac and Zoloft) relieved not only the OCD but also killed the “love” and sexual attraction by altering the amount of available neurotransmitters in the synaptic clefts.

What precisely triggers the mechanism of passionate love and points to the best genetic match is not yet completely understood. Some studies say imprinting, or waist to hip ratio in women, or roughness indicating the high testosterone levels in men, or chemical signals (human pheromones), or facial bone structure similarities, or health and energy levels of the partners, or even the holiday or rollercoaster environment that induces the endorphin release. What we know for sure though is that such condition is finite and does not usually last for more than 7 to 9 month. It wouldn’t just be physically possible to sustain normal live while releasing so much energy and being on the edge of emotions.

Yes, this romantic dopamine driven state is destined to seize. It wasn’t there for nothing though; it serves as important precursor stage for a quieter and longer bonding induced by oxytocin – the attachment hormone. In artificially arranged marriages this bonding may never happen, and the married by force (for economic, religious, traditional and similar reasons) couples may end up deprived of all and any love at all, be left with just a habit. We are risking a lot when trying to fool our evolutionary formatted nature.

For millions of years the proper genetic match selection was such an important issue for the survival of human populations that our instinctive nature is still overpowering our less experienced cortex in control over the love emotions. Just in case, to make sure our analytical brain does not impede the reproductive success of population.

Our love is rooted in the deepest phylogeny of humans. As the brain size of ancient hominids expanded, our ancestors had to make an evolutionary trade-off. Since the bipedal pelvis placed constraints on the size of the newborn head, the human babies were born at a much earlier stage of development as compared to other primates. They needed a considerably longer childhood to allow their complete development, especially of the brain. It was a survival necessity for our forerunners to form the long term pair bonds to rear their young. Our human love had to rise to high and engaging emotional levels hundreds of thousands of years ago. By following out heart we are following the call of our ancestors for life.

Well, let’s take an excursion to our ancestors for the answers, and see what the evolution theory has in stock for us on this subject matter. Before diving into the thousands of years back though let us refresh our modern knowledge of the female ovarian cycle in humans.

Every 28 days or so a next on line primary oocyte (the egg cell) in either the left or the right ovary begins its final journey inside the follicle.  Besides other functions the growing follicle is mostly responsible for the production of estrogen, which starts building up the uterine lining (endometrium), and stimulates a woman to look for the best genetically matching mate. Estrogen brings a woman to the top of her attractiveness, health, smarts and also…promiscuousness. Yes, the time before ovulation originally designed to wisely find and attract the male, may bring around the best outcome on the important exam, complicated assignment or a job interview.

Closer to the middle of the cycle the matured egg is released from the ovary in the process we call ovulation and is likely to be captured by the fimbriae of the oviducts, or the Fallopian tubes. It is here, in the oviduct, the egg is prepared to meet the sperm in the process we call fertilization. Once the egg is released from the ruptured follicle, the follicle turns into corpus luteum (the yellow body in Latin) and it is now mostly concerned with the preparation of the uterine lining and a woman’s body for implantation (embedding of the embryo into the endometrium). Estrogen production drastically drops, progesterone takes over, and the immune system weakens its attacks on antigens to give the future embryo a chance for survival.

The success of internal fertilization in humans is now completely dependant on those left two weeks of the cycle. While corpus luteum is working hard to produce progesterone, the fertilized egg (we call it a zygote) undergoes multiple divisions (cleavage) as it moves down the Fallopian tube towards the uterus.  That tiny ball of cells (first called a morula) forms a small cavity inside and turns into blastocyst. It is at this stage of embryonic development that blastocyst has a chance to implant itself into the uterine lining and hold on for its life.

The chance is small, there are so many things that can go wrong and prevent the possible conception from occurring:

• Corpus luteum disintegrates after a couple of weeks of hard work and now not only estrogen, but the progesterone levels are going drastically down. As both hormones reach their lowest levels, the upcoming shedding of endometrium  (called menstruation) is likely to occur.
• The attached embryo has that small window of opportunity to prevent it’s death with the menstrual flow by releasing into the woman’s blood just enough hHG (human horionic gonadotropin ) to stop the cycle for nine months. If the woman’s blood pressure is low, the hHG has no way to enter the blood stream fast enough.

The embryo will be lost with the menstrual flow and the woman will never know she was actually “almost pregnant”.

• If the blood pressure is low it may not provide enough working capillaries to the endometrium for the blastula attachment and formation of placenta in the first place regardless of the hHG consideration.
• Many viral, bacterial and allergic conditions may destroy chances of the embryo for implantation and early development.
• The vigorous physical exercises and orgasms caused by sexual activity may induce contractions of the uterus which would then expel that struggling to hold on defenseless little blastocyst.

So what possible adaptations could naturally increase the female fertility and prevent all those mishaps from occurring? Back in time thousands of years ago our ancestors could not have relied  on just the numbers of offspring to keep their gene pool alive like, say in fish, amphibians, and many other animals including mammals. Those few offspring that could be born to each particular female needed to be cared for from the very beginning. That included the best possible adaptations for the success of internal fertilization and implantation. Even the choice of the male mate played a crucial role:  it was much harder for our bipedal ancestors to feed and protect themselves and the newborns with only one hand left free from holding a child. There had to be a good selection process for locating the most reliable mate.

So here comes a PMS to the rescue:

• Cravings for salty and sweet foods allowed building up the blood volume (therefore bloating) to make sure the blood pressure is good for implantation, and if pregnancy did not occur, the menstrual flow would return the pressure to normal.
• High calorie and iron rich (like red meat and whole grains) food cravings were definitely good for building up supplies for the possible fetal development, and if not, to restore hemoglobin and nutrients to be lost with the menstrual flow.
• Antisocial and even aggressive behavior patterns aided with occasional headaches prevented women from active mingling with other group members and helped avoid infections since the immune system was at its lowest.
• Mood swings and attitude demonstration towards the males kept them away long enough not to expel a hardly attached blastocyst during the sexual activity.  He had to show patience to be pulled back in the upcoming new cycle: estrogen starts going up the first day of menstruation with the growth of a new follicle.
• Since pregnancy never occurred every monthly cycle, those pushing men around attitudes would also play a role in testing the worthiness of the partner, reliability being one of the most important features. If he sticks around during the premenstrual condition (why even call it a syndrome?) and treats a female with loving care (be it a mammoth trunk or a box of dark chocolates), he deserves to enter a gene pool competition for a possible fatherly reward.

It is important to mention here that everything above relates only to naturally occurring ovarian cycles not disturbed by any drugs and/or hormonal pills. The described process is controlled by the hypothalamus, which is a part of human brain and a master gland of endocrine secretion. Every time there is an artificial interference into the natural hormonal balance, the negative feed back affects both hypothalamus and anterior pituitary glands as parts of the brain. The outcomes may be unpredictable and not always pleasant. For example if the hormonal pill keeps a woman in the luteal (progesterone) phase for too long, the pattern of attraction to the male mate may change from picking out the best genetic match (like women would instinctively do in pre-ovulation phase) to someone less matching but more caring, like your own family member. That could jeopardize the genetic health of possible offspring and even prevent the zygote from forming. Other impacts of hormonal drugs could be detected in virtually all organs and functions of the endocrine system. We will make this a subject of another article though.

Well, let’s take an excursion to our ancestors for the answers, and see what the evolution theory has in stock for us on this subject matter.

First of all, eating by ingestion is one of the most important characteristics of Kingdom Animalia, which we, humans, belong to. Even the simplest tiny sessile cnidarians like Hydra have a mouth. The first prototypes of brain developed as a bunch of neurons (ganglia) above the esophagus of primitive worms just to help find food. It is the food we eat that supplies our organism with glucose as the energy source for cellular respiration and other nutrients as building blocks for our own organic matter. Being intrinsic to survival eating evolved to be one of the strongest animal instincts from suckling of a newborn to the last ability of the oldest Alzheimer patients in a nursing home.

So yes, it is an instinct that turns us towards the biggest and most calorie rich food items available. In fact, the sole possibility to support such a huge energy consuming organ as the human brain, providing a chance for us to evolve into Homo sapience, is often attributed to the time our ancestors learned to crush bones and skulls of their prey and feed on the fatty tissues of the bone marrow. Similar to other animal species, our ancestors had to struggle and work hard to obtain their food, and often had to go without, especially during the ice age. The rare and short periods of when the food was available had to be used to stock up efficiently and convert as much as possible into fat to be stored in adipose tissues.

The problem today in the developed countries is the lack of starvation periods and constant abundance and easy reach of all types of foods our ancestors couldn’t even dream of. The instinct they developed during millions of years of evolution and passed to us with their gene pool is now playing a mean joke on us. We are like small aquarium fish that can easily be overfed to their death by the abundance of feed they never had chance to adapt to. We feed ourselves to death indirectly by fattening us up to cardio-vascular diseases, type two diabetes, gastrinoma, pancreatic cancer and more. The fish keeps eating as long as the food is there, as long as it sees it. Luckily to us, our cerebral cortex has the ability to influence our behavior and control our instincts to a noticeable degree.

One of the possible ways to” trick” your eating instinct is to send carefully selected “staged” signals to your cortex from your visual receptors. Our sense organs send messages to cortex analyzing centers through a thalamus – a gatekeeper of the brain.
In case of contradicting signals, say you are touching a straight metal rod with your fingers, while holding it behind a curved lens, the visual receptors will dominate, as having come first in evolution. You’ll think the rod is curved. Knowing this, you can come up with quite a few natural remedies and solutions to keep your weight under
control. The major idea is to set up your table mostly with healthy foods in a way that would trick your brain into perceiving your dinner as more abundant, rich and satisfying. For example:

• Use smaller plates, platters and bowls (this will make any of your food items look bigger and more in volume, so you reach satiety faster),
• Put out foods of greater diversity of colors (your brain will perceive it as more abundant),
• Only put out the amount and types of food you are consciously planning to consume and hide all the rest really far from the site or the smell (we tend to eat everything we see),
• Keep that fattening food out of site always (so you do not go automatically into that jar of cookies every time you navigate past that coffee table),
• Start from the foods you like the least (by the time you turn towards the last course you may not even be hungry as much),
• Eat slowly (to trick your brain into thinking you had much more),
• Try your best to avoid foods containing refined sugar and white flower (our ancestors consumed whole grains and fruits, so our digestive system is not adapted to a stress hammer impact by overproduced insulin in response to a huge dose of glucose they release suddenly and at once),
• Do not forget about liquids: hot soups and drinks (they will fill and send stretch signals from the stomach for faster satiety)

Why hot, but not cold drinks? Cold temperature closes up blood capillaries supplying your stomach with digestive juices (pepsin, HCL, gastrin, etc), so the food cannot be digested properly, peristalsis is not activated enough, and your food may sit in your digestive pathways long enough to start decomposing, instead of being hydrolyzed. Besides, diluting and/or insufficient production of gastric acids allow parasitic larvae to sneak through and end up in the ”worms heaven” of your intestines. But the subject of parasites will be discussed later in another article.

And here’s another trick you can use if there is something you really like which is extremely unhealthy. Try to develop a pattern of negative associations with that item. This will provide learning by experience behavior, which can turn off you instinctive desire. I do not suggest hiding a fowl spicy or bitter item in that food like they do sometimes during the pet training (what if someone other than you tries it?). But you may one day eat forcingly this food as much as you possibly can till you feel sick to your stomach and/or barf it out. My grandpa used to tell the story of how he loved poppy seeded pastries when he was a kid, and one day he got to eat as much of them as he could. He got so sick and nauseous, that had never ever touched again anything poppy seeded.

I am sure you can come up with more tricks to fool that greedy hungry instinct of ours. But please be careful and only come up with natural ways to do it not to make more harm. For instance you may decide to use those artificial chemically produced sugar substitutes providing no calories since our body is not adapted to metabolize them. They are cheap to make and readily available on the market but detrimental to our health. Try to Google, say, side effects of aspartame, which was prohibited in Europe long time ago. You’d be shocked and hopefully throw away every piece of candy, gum or cookie containing it. Sure we can fool our brain by the sweet taste into thinking we obtained food, but can’t fool our pancreas into producing insulin without the natural glucose. You have probably learned in school that carbon monoxide or cyanide kills by blocking electron transport chain in mitochondria and depriving cells from energy in form of ATP. Aspartame is doing similar damage by not letting the glucose into the cells, depriving them from the very source of ATP. Hypoglycemia may be more dangerous than hyperglycemia. To be safe try to stick to foods, which have been around for a few thousand years or so, can’t go wrong with those!