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Comment by bazzargh | Hacker News Reader

Endorphins? Where's the link to the science?

http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-243-297--1102-...

quote:

  "I believe this endorphin in runners is a total fantasy 
  in the pop culture," said psychobiologist Huda Akil, Ph.D.,
  from the University of Michigan.

  The endorphin theory had several problems, the most serious
  being that endorphins are too large to pass through the
  blood-brain barrier that border-patrols your gray matter.

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As with most of the neuroscience research, there exists a counter evidence to this -

Boecker, H., Sprenger, T., Spilker, M.E., Henriksen, G., Koppenhoefer, M., Wagner, K.J., Valet, M., Berthele, A., Tolle, T.R. (2008). The Runner's High: Opioidergic Mechanisms in the Human Brain. Cerebral Cortex DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhn013[http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/11/2523.full]

Other study shows that the effect is mediated through endocannabinoids not endorphins (But the effect is very real): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14625449

It's one of those "life hacks" articles, I wouldn't expect too much science behind it.

Interesting. Huda Akil is no obscure quack.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Huda+Akil&...

Could be more than one person with that name.

See I never questioned this, yet this makes total sense now. Thanks for posting this, I am surprised I didn't know about this before. Kind of, opens my eyes.

A sentense that begins with "I believe..." may not be the best example of science,

a better way to express himself could have been "[X] study has demonstrated...".

There's a lot of personal (anecdotal) accounts that it's real. I don't care if it's placebo or something more sciencey. It works for many people, and it works for me.

OP never said it's not real, just that endorphins are not conclusively the cause.

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