The human body has some resilience when it comes to keeping your body functioning.
It can be life-threatening when homeostasis can’t be maintained.
Homeostasis is essential for your body to be able to
- Control temperature in different environments
- Maintain a healthy PH
- Balance blood sugar levels
- Maintain a safe fluid balance
- Balance hormones
- Control Blood pressure
These are just a few examples of how vital maintaining homeostasis is for sustaining life.
The Influence of Climate and Vegetation on Human Homeostasis
Homeostasis is the process that allows you to still function in a variety of different climates. Not every creature can accomplish this amazing feat.
Climate is a significant factor in homeostasis and not always thought of unless you are cold or feel like you are overheating. Where you live in the world directly affects how your body maintains your core body temperature, weight, and the kinds of foods you consume.
When you look around the world, you’ll notice that different cultures have significantly different diets. That’s because the food they grow (that is indigenous to the region) is different from other parts of the world
If your diet changes, your body makes adjustments as best it can. When you begin to consume different foods that contain different micronutrients and macronutrients, your body must break down these in a different manner. Often this will require the activation of other digestive enzymes.
To help you understand how to maintain homeostasis to ensure healthy living, let’s uncover more about how it all works,
Basic Regulation of Human Homeostasis
The most common and easily understood way that human homeostasis works has to do with temperature. When you walk from a warm environment, such as being inside during colder months, and out into the cold, if you aren’t wearing adequate clothing, then you start to shiver.
While you may have considered shivering to be an annoying side effect of stepping into that cold air, it’s actually the process of your body trying to warm itself. Bouncing up and down on your feet, blowing warm air onto your hands, and other processes are more conscious efforts on your part to help regulate your body temperature. But it’s that shivering that helps to get muscles moving, calling for more oxygen and blood through the system. It’s the blood that carries warmth to your extremities.
On the other hand, when you’re in a warm environment and physically active, you begin to sweat. The sweat is your body’s effort to cool itself. By running water over your skin, it’s helping to cool specific regions of the body. The warmer your body becomes the higher your core temperature. The further from your ideal regulated body temperature you are, the more you’ll either sweat or shiver, depending on the conditions. If your body fails to regulate properly, you face potentially life-threatening situations.
Maintaining a Healthy PH for Homeostasis
The human body works hard to maintain a healthy PH. Different parts of your body require a different PH( acid /alkaline balance).
For example, your stomach’s PH is usually around 1.5 to 3.5, making it highly acidic. This allows you to be able to break down food in the digestive tract and absorb nutrients. The PH of your blood, on the other hand, is around 7.35 to 7.45, making it alkaline. The blood needs to be alkaline to allow metabolic processes to work in the body.
Any variance in the PH of the stomach will affect your ability to absorb, and acid blood can be life-threatening.
Two key organs that control PH in the body are the lungs and the kidneys.
Ph is also influenced by stress, the foods you eat, along other metabolic processes. The health of your lungs and kidneys will also affect your PH levels.
If Symptoms of PH imbalance occur in the body, then there should be an investigation into the causes of the breakdown of this essential homeostatic mechanism.
Healthy Blood Sugar Levels.
Most of you will know the health implications of a blood sugar imbalance. If your body loses control of blood sugar levels, then you will get diabetes. Blood sugar that drops too low can also be very dangerous and life-threatening. This can sometimes happen when diabetes is not well controlled or a precursor to diabetes when blood sugars fluctuate between high and low.
There is a careful interplay between your food, insulin, liver enzymes, and other processes to maintain a healthy blood sugar level. Type 2 Diabetes used to be thought of as an older person’s disease, but this can happen even at a very young age due to the Western diet.
Fluid Balance and Homeostasis
The body is made up of fluids, and where these fluids are, and the amount of fluid is crucial for sustaining life. If fluids build up beyond what is required for homeostasis, it can put the lungs and heart under pressure, with potentially devastating consequences.
Fluid balance is influenced by micronutrients, hormones, toxicity, and also organ health.
Healthy Hormone Balance
The human body has an impressive biofeedback mechanism when controlling homeostasis and hormone balance. An example is the thyroid gland, which can become overactive or underactive if these key biofeedback mechanisms don’t work as they are meant to.
All hormones in the body have a healthy window of function, and homeostatic mechanisms are in place to ensure you don’t produce, for example, too much cortisol, estrogen, or the less favorable type of estrogen. Subtle changes in hormone balance can result in many symptoms and cause a range of health disorders.
Healthy Blood Pressure
The critically important control of healthy blood pressure can make the difference very quickly between life and death. This balance is largely under the control of the kidneys.
Blood pressure can also be affected by stress and micronutrient status.
Maintaining Human Homeostasis
While you don’t need to do much to know how to maintain homeostasis, it’s a good idea to keep certain points in mind so that you allow your body to have the right tools to do the job it needs to naturally. Hormones help regulate the chemicals in the body. Based on caloric intake, you can inadvertently alter the chemical composition of your body, forcing it to make adjustments that it shouldn’t have to.
When this happens, it may be unable to regulate other aspects of your system properly. Consuming the proper number of calories for your body weight, height, and physical activity is important. Consuming too little can leave your body weak. Consuming too many, and you can alter the chemical composition.
As previously mentioned, if you constantly consumed highly processed, high sugar foods, the likelihood of your body maintaining a healthy blood sugar long-term is diminished. Once that homeostatic mechanism has been compromised beyond repair, you are left with diabetes and all the health issues that come with the diagnosis.
The number, type, and quantity of toxins in your body also affect human homeostasis. When you drink cola or other non-natural beverages, such as alcohol or ‘energy’ drinks, you introduce toxins to your body that are not intended to be there. This tends to increase the excretory processes in your body, failing your body to regulate properly.
Alcohol and drugs are common factors in poor homeostasis. A person who consumes large quantities of alcohol, for example, is more susceptible to the cold as their blood cannot carry the proper amount of oxygen through the body.
When you eat right, exercise, and take care of your body, it will be in a better position to take care of you. Obesity puts a significant strain on homeostatic mechanisms predisposing you to most chronic diseases. Even a lack of adequate sleep can be a risk factor.
We often take for granted the natural processes that our bodies go through, but when we get sick, feel run down and tired, or deal with stress, we notice something is wrong. Proper Human homeostasis requires us to be vigilant, and when we are, we simply feel better every day.
