Part 1: What is Metabolism?
Some people
think that the metabolism is a kind of organ,
or a body part, that influences digestion.
Actually, the
metabolism isn’t any particular body
part.
It’s the
process by which the body converts food into
energy.
Hence, you’ve
likely heard of the phrase metabolic process used synonymously
with the term metabolism, because they both mean the same
thing.
The
Medical Mumbo Jumbo
This isn’t a
complicated medical text (which should be great news to most of
you!), and so we don’t need to spend an unnecessary amount of
time and space focusing on the layered complexity of the human
body and its extraordinary intelligence.
Yet without
drilling deeply into medical details -- which are not relevant
for our general understanding purposes -- it’s helpful to
briefly look at the biological mechanisms behind
metabolism.
Metabolism,
as mentioned above, is the process of transforming food (e.g.
nutrients) into fuel (e.g. energy). The body uses this
energy to conduct a vast array of essential
functions.
In fact, your
ability to read this page – literally – is driven by your
metabolism.
If you had no
metabolism – that is, if you had no metabolic process that was
converting food into energy – then you wouldn’t be able to
move.
In fact, long
before you realized that you couldn’t move a finger or lift
your foot, your internal processes would have stopped; because
the basic building blocks of life – circulating blood,
transforming oxygen into carbon dioxide, expelling potentially
lethal wastes through the kidneys and so on – all of these
depend on metabolism.
Keep this in
mind the next time you hear someone say that they have a slow
metabolism.
While they may
struggle with unwanted weight gain due to metabolic factors,
they certainly have a functioning metabolism.
If they
didn’t, they wouldn’t even be able to speak (because that, too,
requires energy that comes from, you guessed it:
metabolism!).
It’s also
interesting to note that, while we conveniently refer to the
metabolic process as if it were a single function, it’s really
a catch-all term for countless functions that are taking place
inside the body. Every second of every minute of every
day of your life – even, of course, when you sleep – numerous
chemical conversions are taking place through
metabolism, or metabolic functioning.
In a certain
light, the metabolism has been referred to as
a harmonizing process that manages to achieve two critical
bodily functions that, in a sense, seem to be at odds with each
other.
Anabolism and Catabolism
The first
function is creating tissue and cells. Each moment, our
bodies are creating more cells to replace dead
or dysfunctional cells.
For example,
if you cut your finger, your body (if it’s functioning
properly) will begin – without even wasting a moment or asking
your permission –the process of creating skin cells to clot the
blood and start the healing process. This creation
process is indeed a metabolic response, and is called
anabolism.
On the other
hand, there is the exact opposite activity taking place in
other parts of the body. Instead of building cells and
tissue through metabolism, the body is
breaking down energy so that the body can do what it’s supposed
to do.
For example,
as you aerobically exercise, your body temperature rises as
your heart beat increases and remains with a certain
range.
As this happens, your
body requires more oxygen; and as such, your breathing
increases as you intake more H2O. All of this, as you can
imagine, requires additional energy.
After all, if
your body couldn’t adjust to this enhanced requirement for
oxygen (both taking it in and getting rid of it in the form of
carbon dioxide), you would collapse!
Presuming, of
course, that you aren’t overdoing it, your body will instead
begin converting food (e.g. calories) into energy. And
this process, as you know, is a metabolic process, and is
called catabolism.
So as you can
see, the metabolism is a constant process that takes care of
two seemingly opposite function: anabolism that uses energy to
create cells, and catabolism that breaks down cells to create
energy.
Indeed, it’s
in this way that the metabolism earns its reputation as a
harmonizer. It brings together these apparently conflicting
functions, and does so in an optimal way that enables the body
to create cells as needed, and break them down, again as
needed.
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