What is Metabolism?

We are all familiar with the metabolism, but not everyone quite understands exactly how the metabolism operates. While obviously, there are the physiological processes, we want to briefly explain the components. The three components that establish our total daily energy expenditure (TDEE; the total of calories expended each day) for the day are resting metabolic rate (RMR), thermic effect of food (TEF), and thermic effect of activity (TEA).

• Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR):
• The energy required for the body to maintain homeostasis and normal daily bodily functions 
• Blood flow
• Breathing
• Heartbeat
• Blinking
• Sleeping
• Bodily movements
• The largest contributor to our TDEE
• Typically makes up roughly 60%-75% of TDEE
• Factors that can influence the percentage of caloric expenditure from RMR:
• Gender
• Age
• Muscle (lean body mass)
• Body composition
• Genes
• Thermic Effect of Food (TEF):
• Energy required for the body to process and store food for energy/nutrients
• The smallest contributor to TDEE
• Makes up about 10% of TDEE
• What can influence TEF?
• Daily caloric intake
• Composition of carbohydrates, fats, and protein from meals
• Diet
• Thermic effect of physical activity (TEA):
• Energy used to use voluntary musculature
• Accounts for about 20% of TDEE
• The percentage of TEA can be increased, with the more physical activity/exercise and individual has that day. Athletes typically have a much higher contribution of TEA than the average person.

Are You Having Trouble Sleeping?

Not being able to sleep can easily be a sign of an underlying health condition. Lack of sleep or insomnia will also lead to disruptions in our circadian rhythm hormones. Many of the hormones that affect your circadian rhythm, also affect your metabolism, blood sugar and all of this is a major risk factor for diabetes and subsequently heart disease. 

A number of sleep issues were associated with type 2 diabetes, including:

• Trouble falling or staying asleep
• Getting less than 6 hours f sleep at night
• Frequent snoring
• Sleep apnea
• Rotating Shift work

In general, people who report having difficulty sleeping are more at risk of developing metabolic conditions. A single night without sleep can have some serious implications.

Just one night without improper sleep starts to impair your physical movements and mental focus. This can be equivalent to have a blood alcohol level of .10 percent which is higher than the legal limit in Texas.

Overall, you become more susceptible to “suggested” memories, and start having trouble discerning the true source of your memories.

Tips to improve your sleep:

1. Optimize light exposure during the day, and decrease it significantly at night. 
2. Address mental states that prevent peaceful slumber.
3. Keep the temperature in your bedroom below 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
4. Take a hot bath 90 to 120 minutes before bedtime.
5. Avoid watching TV or using electronics in the evening, at least an hour before going to bed.
6. Develop a relaxing pre-sleep routine.
7. Avoid caffeine, and other drugs including nicotine.

Sleep is very important and is a very important part of our life, immune system and endocrine system. If you have any questions about how to improve sleep or need help with getting better sleep then feel free to call our office at (210) 468-1891.

In Health, 

Dr. Jacob Torres, DC

Just a Single Meal of This Can Hinder Weight Reduction

Jeff Volek, Ph.D., and registered dietitian and professor in the Human Science Department at Ohio State University, has done enormous work in the field of high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets, investigating how it affects human health and athletic performance.

Volek has published many scientific articles as well as several books, including "The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living," and "The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance."

Both of these books were co-authored with Dr. Stephen Phinney, a physician and true pioneer in this field, who has studied low-carb diets even longer than Volek.

Starting out as a dietician, Volek was taught that low-fat diets were healthy and that saturated fats and cholesterol should be avoided. But in working with diabetics, he kept feeling that something was "off." Why should diabetics eat so many carbs?

"In essence, it drove me to want to understand metabolism and nutrition at a much deeper level," he says. "I was also into self-experimentation ... I was at the time into very low-fat diets, thinking that was how I would optimize my own health. But I decided to experiment with a very low-carb diet."

Low-Carb Diets Can Benefit Athletes and Non-Athletes Alike

His experimentation began in the early '90s and, to his great surprise, his low-carb experiment proved to be anything but harmful. This fueled his passion for understanding how humans respond to diets that are very low in carbohydrates, and led him to continue his education. He has now spent the last 15 years conducting research in this area, and the outcomes from most experiments have been very encouraging.

"The science continues to point in the direction that there are a lot of applications for these diets for a large number of people. We're still sorting out a lot of the details, but clearly we need to change the way we feed Americans and the way we think about nutrition in order to reverse ... obesity and diabetes."

He's also done research on low- and non-fiber carb diets and athletic performance, and here too results have proved quite positive — despite running counter to everything he was taught about diet and performance in school, and in most of the scientific literature as well.

"It's been an interesting journey to say the least ...The things I was reading, the things I was taught were not really based on a lot of science, and were a lot of half-truths and misinformation, which still persist today,"he notes.

Is Your Diet Driving Your Metabolism in the Right Direction?

Most of the food (fuel) people eat these days is moving their metabolism in the wrong direction. The Westernized diet constantly biases you toward using more nonfiber carbs for fuel.

Most Americans are primarily burning glucose as their primary fuel, which actually inhibits their body's ability to access and burn body fat. Healthy fat, meanwhile, is a far preferable sort of fuel, as it burns far more efficiently than carbs. As noted by Volek, humans evolved to primarily burn fat as fuel — not carbs — and yet that's not how we're feeding our bodies.

"As a result, we're running into a lot of metabolic problems, because we're constantly inhibiting our body's ability to burn fuel that we evolved to burn,"he says.

We all have to eat; we need fuel to live. Without generating ATP you cannot survive at all. The question is how to do that efficiently, without generating harmful reactive oxygen species (ROS), which can destroy your mitochondria and contribute to disease?

It's all about keeping your mitochondria healthy, and low-carb, high-fat diets tend to do that far more effectively than high-carb, low-fat diets.

Healthy Fat Is a 'Cleaner' Burning Fuel

An indirect measurement included in one of Volek's books shows that when people burn fat as their primary fuel, their respiratory quotient can go down as low as 0.7 as opposed to 1, which suggests they're generating less carbon dioxide.

Regardless of the fuel your body burns, you're going to generate carbon dioxide and water. But when you burn fat, you generate 30 percent less carbon dioxide, suggesting it's a lot "cleaner" fuel.

"To use the term 'clean,' that's kind of a provocative term, but I think it is an appropriate one because ... there's a lot of 'exhaust' associated with burning carbs for fuel ... free radicals, reactive oxygen species ... That contributes to the metabolic problems we're seeing in this country."

Also, the most efficient way to train your body to use fat for fuel is to remove some of the sugars and starches from your diet. According to Volek, that's true for everyone, whether you're an elite athlete or a sedentary diabetic.

In essence, the reason why low-carb diets work so well is because it helps you escape this non-fiber, carb-based metabolism that depends on insulin levels to drive blood sugar into cells and use carbs for fuel.

Volek also introduces another term: "carb intolerance" — a metabolic impairment that you suffer from if you're insulin resistant or prediabetic. As noted by Volek:

"It really makes no sense if you're carb intolerant to be consuming half your energy from nonfiber carbs, and to be trying to force your body to burn more carbs."

In Health, 

Dr. Niewierowski 

Source: Why Low-Carb Diets May Be Ideal for Most People, Including Athletes

January 31, 2016    Mercola.com

Mitochondria: Your Body’s Power Stations

Mitochondria: you might not know what they are, but they are vital to your health.  Rhonda Patrick, PhD is a biomedical scientist who has studied the interaction between mitochondrial metabolism, aberrant metabolism, and cancer.

She's also done research on aging at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California.

 “I’ve had a variety of experiences doing research on aging, cancer, and metabolism,” she explains. “Now, currently, I’m in Oakland, California, where I’m doing my post-doctoral research, working with Dr. Bruce Ames...

The primary focus of the research is the role of nutrition in preventing age-related diseases like cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and different inflammatory-related diseases like obesity and type 2 diabetes.

I've been doing a lot of research currently on nutrition, specifically what roles micronutrients play in biological processes; how inadequacies and certain micronutrients can lead to insidious types of damage that can accumulate over decades, [and how they] lead to things like cancer and Alzheimer's disease."

Part of her work involves the identification of early biomarkers of disease. For example, DNA damage is an early biomarker for cancer. She then tries to determine which micronutrients might help repair that DNA damage.

The Importance of Optimizing Mitochondrial Metabolism

Mitochondria are tiny organelles, originally thought to be derived from bacteria. Red blood cells and skin cells have very little to none, while germ cells have 100,000, but most cells have one to 2,000 of them. They're the primary source of energy for your body.

In order for your organs to function properly, they require energy, and that energy is produced by the mitochondria.

Since mitochondrial function is at the very heart of everything that occurs in your body, optimizing mitochondrial function - and preventing mitochondrial dysfunction by making sure you get all the right nutrients and precursors your mitochondria need - is extremely important for health and disease prevention.

For example, one of the universal characteristics of cancer cells is they have serious mitochondrial dysfunction with radically decreased numbers of functional mitochondria.

"The mitochondria can still function in cancer cells. But one of the things that occur [in cancer cells] is that they immediately become dependent on glucose and they're not using their mitochondria even though they have mitochondria there. They make this metabolic switch," Patrick says.

How Mitochondria Produce Energy

To produce energy, your mitochondria require oxygen from the air you breathe and fat and glucose from the food you eat.

These two processes — breathing and eating — are coupled together in a process called oxidative phosphorylation. That's what the mitochondria use to generate energy in the form of ATP.

Your mitochondria have a series of electron transport chains in which they pass electrons from the reduced form of the food you eat to combine it with oxygen from the air you breathe and ultimately to form water.

This process drives protons across the mitochondrial membrane, which recharges ATP (adenosine triphosphate) from ADP (adenosine diphosphate). ATP is the carrier of energy throughout your body.

However, that process also produces byproducts such as reactive oxygen species (ROS), which are damaging to your cells, and your mitochondrial DNA, which are then transferred to your nuclear DNA.

So there's a trade-off. In producing energy, your body also ages from the damaging aspects from the ROS that are generated. How quickly your body ages largely depends on how well your mitochondria work, and how much damage can be minimized by diet optimization.

Read more to learn how to help your mitochondria keep you healthy, including decreasing your cancer risk.      

In Health, 

Dr. Brad Niewierowski 

How Your Mitochondria Influence Your Health

January 24, 2016  Mercola.com

Right Now, Your Risk Of Prediabetes Is 50%!

According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than one out of three Americans aged 20 and older has prediabetes, a condition in which your glucose, or blood sugar, levels are higher than normal, but not yet high enough to be diagnosed as full-blown diabetes.

For those with prediabetes (86 million Americans in all), 15 percent to 30 percent will go on to develop type 2 diabetes within five years, if no lifestyle changes are made, again according to CDC data.

These numbers are already dismal, but new data from a large study out of The Netherlands predicts the problem is only going to get worse.

Nearly Half of Adults May Develop Prediabetes

After tracking and analyzing data from about 10,000 adults for a period of 15 years, researchers found that nearly half of 45-year-olds will develop prediabetes, also known as impaired glucose metabolism, at some point during their lifetime.

Further, three-quarters of those with elevated blood sugar levels at age 45 will go on to develop full-blown diabetes, according to the study.

While previous studies have looked into population risks of prediabetes, this study is among the first to consider a person’s lifetime risk of developing this condition – which is remarkably high. If you’re wondering what blood sugar levels are considered healthy:

·         6 millimoles/per liter (108 milligrams per deciliter) or less are considered normal or healthy

·         6mmol/L and below 7mmol/L (108 to 128 mg/dl) are considered elevated or prediabetic

·         7mmol/L or greater are diagnosed as diabetes

The silver lining to this finding is that prediabetes can typically be cured by altering your lifestyle; a diagnosis does not mean you’re destined to develop type 2 diabetes. So if you’ve been diagnosed with prediabetes, consider yourself lucky.

You have received a warning that many people don’t get (and instead progress straight to type 2 diabetes). Now you can take steps to reverse the condition and reclaim your health. In an accompanying editorial, researchers noted:

“The prevalence of type 2 diabetes is increasing worldwide, and the prevalence of the at-risk state for the disease (often termed prediabetes) is even higher.

There is good evidence that intensive lifestyle prevention programs can prevent or delay the onset of type 2 diabetes in those at high risk.”

Processed Food, Sugar May Be Driving Prediabetes and Diabetes Rates Sky-High

Last year, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that more than 29 million Americans were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a statistic researchers predicted in 2001 wouldn’t be reached until 2050.

Why are rates of type 2 diabetes skyrocketing? It’s largely diet-related, and a meta-review published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings confirmed that calories from fructose (think high-fructose corn syrup) and other added sugars are the primary drivers of prediabetes and diabetes.

According to the researchers, the American Diabetes Association does not recommend restricting fructose-containing added sugars to any specific level, despite the fact that:

“Data from animal experiments and human studies implicate added sugars (eg, sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup) in the development of diabetes mellitus and related metabolic derangements that raise cardiovascular (CV) risk.”

Prediabetes is one of the most common conditions we see in our office, but also one of the easiest to correct and reverse with the proper program. If you are in this early warning stage and want to avoid becoming a full-blown diabetic, give our office a call!

In Health, 

Dr. Brad Niewierowski 

Half of All Adults Will Develop Pre-Diabetic High Blood Sugar

December 09, 2015  Mercola.com