Kevin Rose's latest podcast, a discussion with Dr Casey Means, has all sorts of valuable information about how human bodies transform food into cellular energy. It's an important fundamental process of the body that I think is important to understand. I've extracted some of the most important details in this post. It's likely I didn't totally grock everything, but I think nevertheless it's important information to at least be aware of, to have a general idea of what's happening at the cellular level.
First tier Bio markers important for metabolism, lifestyle based:
- Fasting glucose < 100 mg / decilitre
- Triglycerides < 150 mg / decilitre
- HDL Cholesterol > 40 (for men), 50 (for women)
- Waist circumference < 35 inches (for women), 40 inches (for men)
- Blood pressure < 120/80
- Haemoglobin A1C < 5.7%
Generally speaking you want to stay within these ranges.
Some more detailed information about each of these:
Fasting glucose
- Cell mitochondria are key in the process, which at a high level is food in, i.e. glucose and fatty acids, and ATP out
- Environment can essentially hurt that process, resulting in that flow through the mitochondria getting blocked
- If mitochondria are broken, it will literally put a block to the cell taking in more glucose because it can’t process it, it doesn’t have capacity for this because it’s broken, it's saying 'stay out of the cell'
- Glucose levels rise in the blood stream because the glucose isn’t going into the cell
- So fasting glucose is a good bio marker
Triglycerides
- Elevated triglycerides can tell you something about foundational problems
- Excess glucose in blood stream will stick to things, causing glication which causes blood vessel blockages
- So the body is always trying to get the glucose out of the blood stream, either by the usual metabolism process or by storing it in cells
- Storing the glocose in cells involves first transforming it to triglycerides, which can then be stored in fat cells or inside regular cells
Haemoglobin A1C
- It’s a measure of the % of haemoglobin molecules on rye blood cells that have sugar stuck to them
- If cell is blocking glucose because the mitochondria is damaged, and glucose levels in blood are rising, then the glucose will stick to haemoglobin on the red blood cells
- Blood cells last for a few months
- The measure will give you a 3 month average of your glucose / blood sugar levels
Waist circumference
- The extra blood glucose that is being turned into fat
- That will turn into visceral fat, a layer ontop of your organs
- Laid down as a layer on your organs, that shows up in your waist line
Blood pressure
- In the cell, mitochondria is damaged from the environment, can’t process glucose to ATP
- Cell says can’t take glucose in, and it does this via insulin resistance
- Insulin is the hormone that allows glucose to come into the cell
- Cell blocks the insulin signal transmission
- The body which is still trying to get glucose out of the blood stream, it’s doing the triglycerides thing, but also then secretes more insulin to try to force glucose into the cell, but cell can’t process it
- The high levels of insulin then blocks production of nitric oxide which is a chemical that dilates our blood vessels
- Thus high blood pressure
They go into a rather detailed discussion about second tier bio-markers, which was kind of interesting in places, but a bit too hardcore for me. All the language and primitives around health and body, like proteins, hormones, etc is still very non obvious to me. I got pretty lost in the second tier weeds. But I still think it's worth having a general understanding, especially of the fundamental first tier stuff.
One of the biggest take aways from second tier is that you have to understand what the markers are telling you. It's much like debugging complex code. If you don't have the right understanding of the fundanental processes, you might very well be fooling yourself. For example fasting insulin is an important second tier bio-marker because it indicates that there might be a problem with the fundamental operation of the mitochondria, since the body produces insolin in order to force the glucose into the cell. This might work for a while but eventually leads to issues.
So you can see these issues ahead of time if you are tracking the right bio-markers.
As a javascript programming analogy, it's like understanding the NodeJS event loop in detail. You don't often have to worry about it, but in certain circumstances it is vital.
These are slighlty edited version of the notes I took while listening. I feel like there's still quite a lot of refactoring that could be done here on this to make it clearer, but I really like the approach.
Hopefully this post will add to the process of a more wide spread understanding how our bodies function. #