photo: Ed Schipul/Creative Commons via flickr.
DCL
As practitioners of laughter yoga will tell you, having a good laugh does wonders for the mood and for your overall health. As a new piece over at WebMD shows though, there are some interesting connections between laughter and your traditional heart-pumping workout as well.
Appetite Regulating Hormones Affected
Doctors from Loma Linda University have discovered that there is an "uncanny" parallel between laughter and moderate exercise when it comes to regulating appetite. In both cases the body responds similarly: Two hormones that increase appetite, leptin and ghrelin, get affected, with leptin goes down and gherlin goes up.
To determine this the doctors showed test participants both humorous and stressful movies and measured their hormone levels. After watching the humorous videos, they found that leptin decreased on average 15%, while gherlin increased about 9%. The stressful movies had no effect on either.
The doctors say the prime application of the research is helping increasing appetite in people who have lost it because of depression, illness, lack of physical activity due to age or physical handicap, etc. However, the article does suggest,
Laugh while you work out...and you may just be tuning up your appetite hormones, keeping them in balance, as well as improving your cardiovascular fitness.
Hat tip to MindBodyGreen...
