Welcome to Lesson 5.
Now that we understand our framework for making health-conscious decisions, and now that we understand one powerful sub-system that we can bring to mind as we make these health-conscious decisions, we need to think through one missing piece that will turn these ideas into something practical.
Having a concrete understanding of this important part of the body's health can help you conceptualize what is happening in your body, but it doesn't necessarily enable you to take action to do anything about it.
What you need is one more piece of information that will allow you to easily tie your behavior to the physical state of your own health. That's what this lesson is all about.
Listen to the audio and/or read the lesson down below. Images referenced in the audio appear in the text below.
Back in Lesson 3 we saw how the human body is well-designed to maintain tight control over metabolism. As it is common for the human body in today's world to be programmed with metabolic dysfunction, then there must be some sort of mechanism driving forward the progression of this dysfunction.
Image 1: What is one set of mechanisms that is responsible for driving one's state of metabolic health?
If we could determine the main mechanistic driver of metabolic dysfunction, then we could figure out a missing link - something that could enable us to make health-conscious decisions focusing on one idea.
To figure out what this driver could be, let's take a moment to think back through what we've learned already.
In Lesson 3, we saw how your body is a complex, biological system, which means that it is made up of sub-systems that are tightly regulated by numerous signaling mechanisms.
For example, we saw how insulin and glucagon work together, balancing out drops and elevations in blood sugar.
As these two hormones work in a healthy balance, this one particularly important system (i.e., your vasculature and its connection to tissues and organs) is able to remain in a state of homeostasis as you stay healthy.
However, what happens as the body loses its ability to maintain this balance?
That is, what happens if these hormones become dysregulated?
What would happen? Blood sugar would elevate too high (becoming acutely toxic to other biomolecules, tissues, and organs throughout the body); or, blood sugar would drop too low (leaving all these sub-systems lacking in energy availability).
Both are dangerous situations, which is why it is so important that blood sugar remains in a tight range. To do this, it is important that insulin and glucagon (and other hormones involved in blood sugar homeostasis) are properly regulating blood sugar homeostasis.
Proper regulation of blood sugar and other forms of energy (e.g., lipids) includes, but is not limited to:
- healthy amounts of fat being stored in adipose tissue
- enough fat is stored such that the body always has plenty of accessible energy
- not too much fat stored away - at which point that fat becomes damaging to the adipose tissue and leads downstream to harm throughout the body
- glucose being regularly stored as glycogen (and then broken down back into glucose) as a key fuel source for tissues throughout the body
- overall balance between these two key fuel sources, such that both fuel sources are used when appropriate and no over-reliance on one fuel source (at the expense of the other) occurs
Given all of this, let's pull our model back in:
Image 2: The base model, showing how we can think about taking action that has broad impact across an entire complex system.
Now, let's expand the model to include another piece of useful information:
Energy Dysregulation
As discussed in Lesson 3, one awesome thing about being a biological being is this: that you don't have to have conscious control over your body's energy balance.
Whether we're talking about having the proper amounts of energy in the bloodstream, stored in the skeletal muscle, stored away in adipose tissue, or elsewhere, the human body does a pretty fantastic job of taking on this task.
This means that it doesn't need you to micromanage it as it does its job.
Cool, right?
There is one caveat, though. As we've seen in this modern world of hours, energy balance can become dysregulated as a result of modern behaviors.
As these key systems supporting your health become dysregulated, various sub-systems (your vasculature, your adipose tissue, etc.) are exposed to high levels of sugars and lipids, leading to damage and dysfunction.
As this damage arises, systems become further dysfunctional, leading to even greater dysregulation.
See the vicious cycle?
The old way to gain control over this issue was to try to piece apart every little detail of the damaging cascade of events in order to come up with solutions to address the tiny pieces. For example:
- what is one nutrient that impacts one mechanism involved in developing cardiovascular disease? Now change your dietary patterns to avoid just this one nutrient
- e.g., eat less fat
- what is one nutrient that impacts one mechanism involved in developing diabetes? Now change your dietary patterns to avoid just this one nutrient
- e.g., eat less sugar
- what is one nutrient that impacts one mechanism involved in developing cancer? Now change your dietary patterns to avoid just this one nutrient
- e.g., eat less protein
Instead of this approach that requires us to understand each sub-system (an approach that then leads to obviously conflicting actionable advice), let's now put our systems approach into place and take action to avoid this unhealthy cascade of events, including all of these diseases (and more!).
Image 3: The Reprogrammed Systems Model of Energy Dysregulation and Metabolic Dysfunction, describing how healthy behavior supports the body's ability to regulate energy within and across systems supporting the body. In turn, these systems are able to maintain healthy functioning, and as a result, the body maintains good health over the years.
The Reprogrammed Systems Model of Energy Dysregulation and Metabolic Dysfunction
The following models describe two scenarios, both involving how human behavior impacts the ability of the human body to regulate energy supply and demand across systems. This ability to regulate energy in turn drives system-wide metabolic function.
As the body loses its ability to effectively regulate energy, metabolic dysfunction arises. Over time, the severity of this metabolic dysfunction increases, eventually leading to clinically relevant symptoms in various sub-systems (e.g., a blocked artery (CVD), a burnt-out pancreas (TIID), neural damage and dysfunction (dementia), and much more).
These models are shown below. In the next lesson, we'll at last fill in the "Inputs" section so that you understand how you can choose healthy behaviors that support the overall healthy functioning of your body.
Once again, please note the following use of these models:
The Reprogrammed Systems Models should never be used to diagnose nor treat disease. Instead, they should be used for informational purposes only to understand how poor health and modern disease tend to progress in the human body.
These models do not attempt to explain all cases of poor health and disease. Behavior is not the only factor involved - genetics and environmental factors also exist that are out of an individual's control.