The Telomere Miracle: Scientific Secrets to Fight Disease, Feel Great, and Turn Back the Clock on Aging by Ed Park M.D

Author:Ed Park, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House, Inc.
Published: 2018-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

THE PURPOSE OF EATING

We eat so that we can supply our body with glucose, a simple sugar. Remember when we learned about cellular respiration in Chapter 4? We encountered the coin-operated Laundromat machine analogy and learned that all our energy-requiring reactions are powered by “quarters” of ATP. Well, the only bills the change machine of metabolism accepts are $1 bills of glucose. Protein, carbs, and fat are like $2, $5, and $10 bills that need to be exchanged for singles to make ATP. What I mean to say is that your body doesn’t use protein, carbs, and fat directly as a power source—instead it converts all of them into one-dollar bills of glucose that are used by the cellular change machine to make quarters.

ATP, or adenosine triphosphate, is related to the DNA molecule called adenosine. Throughout our bodies, chemical reactions use ATP to power movement, synthesis, and countless other actions. A single molecule of glucose, via processes called glycolysis, the Krebs Cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation, makes up to 38 ATP. Most of those come from oxidative phosphorylation inside the mitochondria, which are the thousands of symbiotic former bacteria that provide energy from within each one of your cells. I say “former” because it is believed that mitochondria got incorporated into our ancestors’ cells 1.5 billion years ago. Interestingly there are only five grams of ATP in your body but each individual molecule is recycled about 600 times daily, amounting to the consumption and reconstitution of your entire body weight worth of ATP daily. That could be compared to doing your entire neighborhood’s laundry with only a single roll of quarters.

Your body has the ability to convert nearly anything you eat into nearly anything you need, so what you eat is not as important as you might imagine. Our bodies are like airport currency exchange kiosks in that they can “eat” or receive intravenous glucose, and then synthesize glycogen (a short-term storage form of glucose kept in muscles and the liver), proteins, and fats. Conversely, we can just consume fat and by means of gluconeogenesis (the formation of glucose) we can get all the glucose we need even without ingesting it in a process known as lipolysis (or fat breakdown).

Having said all of the above, some foods and diets are safer, more nutritious, and easier on our bodies than others. Hopefully, someday we may all consume food with fewer pesticides, hormones, preservatives, radiation, additives, and DNA fragments called plasmids, prions (like those that cause mad cow disease), bacteria (like salmonella from eggs), and viruses (like hepatitis A in seafood). Perhaps the food of the future will be engineered to be pure, easily digested, delicious, and safe. Just like anything, including water, can be harmful if taken in excess, natural food contains a myriad of molecules that can get into your system and which are chemically processed, or “detoxified” if you will, by the liver in a process described below.

Pure Protein Diet: The Exception to the “It’s All Good” Airport Kiosk Rule

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