Leptin Supplements - Do They Really Work?

Before spending your money on leptin supplements maybe you should know if they really work.

When leptin was discovered back in 1994, it was a huge hype, and everybody thought that finally we found the holy grail for the obesity crisis. However, the reality turned out to be very different.

Although leptin is a fairly recent discovery, scientists long believed that there has to be a hormone which regulates bodyweight, something like a thermostat that would tell your body how much energy it has available.

For decades, researchers studied some sort of obese mice that metabolically were very similar with humans (low metabolic rate, screwed up hormones, high appetite, lack of activity), and eventually realized that their genes don't produce leptin.

This means that no matter how much they ate, their little mouse brains thought that they were always starving.

The solution to this problem was simple. When leptin was injected in their brains, all the metabolic adaptations were reversed. Appetite dropped, metabolic rate and fat burn increased drastically, hormones normalized, and the result was a lean jolly mouse.

When this was discovered, researchers were quite sure that our obesity was caused by the same leptin deficiency, and applying the same treatment on humans would give the same outcome.

It was like a revolution and suddenly everybody jumped in the same bandwagon. Pharmaceutical companies rushed to buy the rights for leptin, estimating billions in returns. Overweight folks were considering buying new clothes.

So the researchers took the next step, and tested their hypothesis on humans.

To their surprise, they realized that obese folks had actually lots of leptin floating around, so this model didn't have any practical value. In fact, leptin deficiency in humans occurs very rarely, and up to date only a few cases were found.

The bitter conclusion was that leptin couldn't be manipulated to control obesity for a simple reason: its role is not to stop you from eating more, but to stop you from starving.

For this reason, leptin can barely be detected in lean people, and this is probably the main cause for the “starvation mode” that everybody is talking about.

So logically, leptin supplements would definitely be useful for keeping leptin from falling during prolonged dieting. However, there is one major inconvenient: leptin can't be taken in a supplement form because is a digestible protein which doesn't enter the bloodstream.

In other words it has to be injected. It cannot be absorbed from a pill because your body would break it like any other protein.

And while hardcore bodybuilders don't give a shit about such an inconvenient, most folks don't consider injections as a practical solution for losing weight. Not to mention that a daily effective dose would cost a few hundred bucks.

Furthermore, hardcore bodybuilders are not a priority for any drug company because they represent only a tiny market segment, so developing a leptin drug for them wouldn't be profitable.

Truth be told, those leptin supplements that can be found so easily on the internet, don't contain any real leptin even if their names may suggest so.

They contain instead ingredients that are intended to improve leptin functioning, or give a feeling of fullness. However, to my knowledge none of them was tested, so their usefulness is very questionable.

Return from Leptin Supplements to Home