So, Ayahuasca turned me into a health coach by scaring the shit out of me. Still, after that trip, I remained faithful to the field of plant medicine and finished an amazing course in herbalism for women's health.
But during that course, I also started to realise that we were still mainly learning how to fix things that had already gone wrong.
Then the termites got fed up with eating our houses, invaded our library, and started on the books. While cleaning up their mess, I noticed an interesting title: "Food as Medicine." Now we're talking! Diet, of course, is preventative medicine and lifestyle as well. By taking control of these, you take control of your own health and healing. What you eat, your habits, and your habitual ways of thinking and feeling immensely influence how much nutrients your body has, how toxic it is, how well it can detoxify, repair, and protect itself, how much energy it can produce, and how well and happily you can live your daily life.
Now... Professional disclaimer: The diet that is perfect for you is created by working together with a professional. If you experience many uncomfortable symptoms, then this is definitely the road that I would advise you to take.
However, it's still awesome and very useful to understand more about how your body works, why certain diet choices are better than others, and which simple changes you can already make to improve your health.
So join me here on this trip to explore how your body and food can dance together to create a more alive-feeling you! Let's start by finding out how our body actually creates energy...
Energy is life
Even when we are doing 'nothing', our body still uses energy. Energy is needed all the time—for breathing, thinking, feeling our emotions, doing sports, and for fighting off virusses or diease. We cannot do without it. And although our energy might not only come from our food (and in the future, we can check out some ideas on this), food is what we are going to work with in this and the upcoming posts. So squeeze yourself a nice juice, sit comfortably, and be amazed: this is how our body's cells create energy.
Explained, of course, in a simplified way. Our body is as complex as the entire universe, and some level of abstraction makes it easier to understand how things work.
The energy-providing nutrients
Food contains what we call bulk nutrients (fat, carbs, protein, fibre), minerals, vitamins, and many other compounds like medicinal substances and unfortunately also toxins. When they enter our digestive system, the body starts to break these nutrients down into smaller and smaller compounds so they can eventually pass through the walls of the digestive organs and move into the bloodstream. The blood distributes the nutrients throughout the body, feeding our cells.
Fat, protein, and carbohydrates are our building blocks and our energy-generating nutrients. The body can't fully break down fibre, and some of it exits as it entered. Fibre provides volume to your poop, so you can move it out of your body with more ease. Minerals and vitamins play crucial roles as well when it comes to generating energy, and we will look at those in a bit.
Creating the body's energy currency
When carbs are broken down, we get glucose at a certain point, which has great energy potential. If we would take glucose and burn it in the presence of air, it would, in a single step, convert into carbon dioxide and water, and all of its energy would get released at once in the form of heat.
In the body, however, it is safer not to perform such a dramatic reaction. And so, the glucose generated in digestion, which is moved to the bloodstream and then brought to our body's cells, releases its energy in about 34 steps. Step by step, it gets changed into different substances and taken apart, until finally only water and carbon dioxide remain. At some of these steps, energy is released in a form that the body can capture and use it.
The energy that is generated at these steps is then used to make ATP (adenosine triphosphate). ATP is a substance with a lot of potent energy. The body can use it for any process that needs energy, and it is often called the body's energy currency.
Adenosine is a nucleotide built from ribose, which is a sugar. This forms the base of ATP, and then it has 3 phosphate groups attached to it.
When our body needs energy (and it needs it for everything), ATP is broken down into ADP (adenosine diphosphate). In this process, ATP releases one of its 3 phosphate groups. Energy gets released by breaking the high-energy phosphate bond. And it is this energy that the body uses for its activities.
The leftover ADP can then be made into ATP again, and this is done by adding a new supply of what was just released, which, of course, comes from the nutrients in our food.
No energy without enzymes
This breakdown process doesn't just happen on its own, it is performed by enzymes. Each step in the breakdown needs its own enzyme.
Enzymes are made of protein and are made by other enzymes. And many of them cannot work alone. Many enzymes need a friend, also called a cofactor, that helps them change one substance into another. These friends are vitamins and minerals, or substances derived from them. For some reactions, both a mineral and a vitamin (or a derivative) are needed. Sometimes a cofactor is actually part of the enzyme, sometimes they just need to come for a visit to help perform the action.
An enzyme that, for example, splits substance A into substance B and substance C will first bind with substance A. They connect at a place on the enzyme that is electrically charged. This charge puts stress on substance A, so it splits into the separate substances. These disconnect from the enzyme, which is then free to start the party all over again.
The enzyme doesn't get used up by the reaction. Because certain enzymes cannot make this electrical charge, this stress on the substance strong enough to actually make something happen, they need their friends to be stronger together.
Ahaa...
Are you starting to see why it is so important to eat right? We need energy for everything we do and this includes keeping our bodies healthy. Enzymes make enzymes that break down the food we eat to generate energy. Enzymes are proteins, enzymes need minerals and vitamins...
But please don't go wild on protein and vitamin supplements just yet. Protein is heavy to digest for the body, and eating more than we need (and you might need less than you think) can put some unnecessary extra stress on your digestion. Supplements are also best dosed properly, so you get what you need and don't just add what you already have enough of.
But only glucose gets used to create energy?
No, but certain cells, such as neurons and red blood cells, rely heavily on glucose. However, other cells can generate ATP using amino acids, fatty acids, glycerol, and, in some cases, nucleic acids.
The cells need a continuous supply of energy to keep doing their stuff 24-7 and that's why the blood should also have a (more or less) constant level of glucose. It is estimated that a healthy dose is 80 mg of glucose per 100 ml of blood.
One of the possible causes of feeling weak, lethargic, tired, fainting, experiencing tremors, depression, or being irritated is not having enough glucose in your blood. If you feel tired and annoyed and remember that you haven't eaten for a while, then please don't overload your body with carbs and other high glucose foods. A sudden high dose can make your body go into overdrive to spread and use all this glucose quickly, and the result is once again low levels of blood glucose. They call this hypoglycemia. So, skip the quickly made spaghetti and prepare some whole grain rice and veggies instead.
A well-balanced cell produces more energy
Although this explanation was a huge simplification of the magic going on in our cells, it is clear that our cells do awesome things, like generating ATP. This substance is needed to perform any physical, mental, or emotional activity. And to create it, our body needs nutrients, enzymes, minerals, vitamins, and healthy cells.
In the beginning of this post, I briefly highlighted that the sources of our nutrients—foods and drinks—can also contain less yummie substances like toxins. Besides nasty things like pesticides, certain foods also naturally contain substances that aren't 100% beneficial for us or that are good but just need to be kept in a certain balance for our cells to function well.
Also, all this activity going on inside our body, also at the level of the cell, produces some waste. Our cells poop. And of course, ATP is needed to eliminate waste and toxins and to keep substances in balance. If certain minerals get out of control or if too much waste gets accumulated, the cell cannot function properly and will produce less energy. This means less energy to maintain balance and remove waste, which results in even less ability to function properly, again less energy, again less balance and waste removal, and on and on we go.
So, now what?
Despite the fact that it might all look like a miracle that we are even alive, you are not going to die if you still go to that pizza party tonight. Go and enjoy life, eat your veggies, and make sure to read my next posts, in which I will continue to explain more about how to create a comfy environment for your cells in which they can generate lots of energy for you.
Thanks for having read my post. Let me know what you enjoyed or what you are curious about! Eat your veggies; they do you good, and have a great day!
Sources:
Ross and Wilson Anatomy and Physiology in Health and Illness
Diet and Nutrition, A Holistic Approach, Rudolph Ballantine
I love the Khan Academy. They make wonderful videos in which they explain complicated matters in an easy-to-understand way. Check out these ones on ATP:
https://youtu.be/PK6HmIe2EAg?si=lTiuWQh8CfNPia5j
Milton Mills with some interesting info about protein: https://youtu.be/05pe-dzwvNg?si=BZcmREpOwxTEd02Z
And a short TikTok version: https://www.tiktok.com/@alkalineherbsand_recip/video/7143629692455718190