Great question!
Metabolic health isn’t a common topic in medical discussions. A big reason for this is that the American ‘Sick’ Care system is designed to manage the downstream effects which are the chronic diseases we’ve been talking about.
Yet, metabolism is the foundation of our health. It encompasses every process in our body that builds stuff up, or breaks it down—called anabolism and catabolism if you want to get fancy.
For our purposes we’re going to narrow the discussion a bit and focus on metabolism in terms of energy.
Every cell and organ in our body needs fuel to function and metabolism is about how we get fuel, store fuel, move fuel, transform fuel, and burn fuel. It’s also what we do with that energy—build stuff up and break stuff down.
When everything is working great, we feel good. Let’s go through each piece.
- Get It
We get energy from food. Not much more to add here other than the main factors are the quality and quantity of food we consume.
- Store It
This is our shed. We store energy primarily as fat. We also store a small amount of sugar in the form of glycogen.
- Move it
Energy gets shipped from one part of the body to another primarily through our blood stream
- Transform it
We can convert energy from one form to another—for example, convert sugar to fat, or fat to ketones.
- Burn it
Our cells burn fuel in our cells, generating the energy currency ATP—the primary molecule for storing and transferring energy. Okay, we don’t exactly burn it as in a fire, rather it’s more like how a battery works—chemical reactions make electrical energy.
