Mitochondrial Health and Metabolic Flexibility

Now consider this, we talk about insulin resistance, right? Why does a cell get resistant to insulin? Could there be more than one reason though? Yeah. But ultimately what's the cell doing? Like it deems that it's more necessary to leave the substrate in the the bloodstream and take it out. So is it fair to say it's protecting you? Yeah, of course it is. Okay, so if we understand that, now we say okay, now that changes a lot of protocols and things that we might have done years ago Like when I taught biopsy if you saw high fasting blood sugar or high postprandial blood sugar it be like oh well we need to get that glucose in the cell So we need to take glucose disposal agents Yeah. Okay, so we're going to force sugar into the cell, and the cell, what? It doesn't fucking want it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, why? Well, it's obviously stressed for some reason. Okay, so we increase stress. Yeah. Stress, we look at autonomic tone, sympathetic system goes up. Yeah. Okay. that increases the body's desire to make energy. Where's the fastest form of energy that we have? Aaron's over there. He's like, I know. Sorry, dude. So sugar, right? Sugar makes energy really fast. The higher your stress levels go and the longer it's happening, the more your body's desire to throw sugar into the cell to make fast energy. Okay. so now we can only store a finite amount of ATP so if you're stressed out shoveling all this glucose in and the mitochondria is getting overwhelmed okay something has to happen right because if we think about this as you're making energy you're also making something else you're making free radicals yeah and if you can't recycle those so we have oxidation if you can't reduce those oxidants now we've got some metabolic mishap going on so what's the easiest way for your body to stop that. Still body fat? No, that goes later. It wants to stop some of these processes. It wants to shut down energy production. Would it slow things down then? It would. It's going to dampen some things down. You're still stressed, right? And survival is the ultimate thing you need. So you still need energy. So these processes are still going on so you're not going to be able to stop that but you can limit the glucose load so you shut down the mitochondria mitochondria shuts down glucose is still getting into the cell right okay now if pyruvate can't get into the mitochondria it has to be turned into something else so what's it going to be turned into you're almost there it gets kicked out of lactate lactate And then that's recycled back into glucose.