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If a medication could slash Alzheimer’s risk by 50 percent, it would be front-page news and prescribed to every patient. But this “drug” does exist — it’s walking! Yet less than 16 percent of doctors prescribe movement to their patients, and 85 percent of practitioners report zero training in prescribing exercise.
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and I am convinced that healthy emotional boundaries — such as being clear and vocal about what you will and will not let into your life — are what make relationships functional. Your gut lining is a boundary between you and everything else in the universe that is poised to inundate and overwhelm your biology and generate unrelenting inflammation. Healing and strengthening your gut lining with food — therefore creating and strengthening this critical boundary and reducing intestinal permeability or “leaky gut” — allows you to be selective about what you want to take in from the universe on a material level. You can choose what serves you. I reflect on the fact that many of the problems in society — including violence, mental illness, developmental issues, and pain — start in humans, and humans are made by cells that become dysfunctional largely because of oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and chronic inflammation. How miraculous that food can directly combat those things. We can’t have a healthy society without well-functioning humans. We can’t have well-functioning humans without well-functioning cells. And we can’t have well-functioning cells with mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, and cellular and hormone disruption from toxic chemicals in our food. We combat those things through nutrient-dense, unprocessed foods grown in living, thriving soil.
According to Dr. Mark Hyman, “the triglyceride-to-HDL ratio is the best way to check for insulin resistance other than the insulin response test. According to a paper published in Circulation, the most powerful test to predict your risk of a heart attack is the ratio of your triglycerides to HDL. If the ratio is high, your risk for a heart attack increases sixteen-fold — or 1,600 percent! This is because triglycerides go up and HDL (or ‘good cholesterol’) goes down with diabesity.
I reflect that the mitochondria that process energy from food to animate our tissues are inherited entirely from our mothers, passed down through millennia in an endless progression of nesting dolls along a matrilineal line. The mitochondria from the sperm essentially melt upon fertilization with an egg, while our mother’s mitochondria persist and create all the energy we need to do everything.
too much sugar, too much stress, too much sitting, too much pollution, too many pills, too many pesticides, too many screens, too little sleep, and too little micronutrients. These trends — with trillions of dollars behind them — are causing epidemic levels of mitochondrial dysfunction and underpowered, sick, inflamed bodies.
Doctors have twice the rate of suicide as the general population. Based on my own experience with depression as a young surgeon, I think a contributor to this phenomenon is an insidious spiritual crisis about the efficacy of our work and a sense of being trapped in a system that is not working but seems too big to change or escape.
It might not sound like it, but the theme of this chapter is optimism. We are amid a modern health crisis. The good news is that our system can be fixed, and the crisis can end. Just 120 years ago, starvation, malnutrition, and early death were the norm. Tuberculosis and pneumonia were leading causes of death. Life expectancy in the United States was around age forty-seven. Back then, 30 percent of all U.S. deaths occurred in children under five years of age, compared to just 1.4 percent in 1999. If you transported someone living in those times to the present day, they’d be in utter shock as they tried to process society’s advancements. There is no
Other Childhood Metabolic Conditions Epidemic levels of obesity, liver dysfunction, and brain dysfunction demonstrate a cellular energy epidemic. And our children’s small, not fully developed bodies are being set up to fail at an early age because our culture and daily lives have been co-opted by processed foods and the other factors that damage mitochondria and cellular energy production.
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Impact of Stress on Glucose: One of my highest glucose spikes ever was after an argument with my brother (my coauthor!). We hear examples of this all the time from Levels members: stress alone can raise glucose levels, regardless of your diet. The reason is that a key stress hormone, cortisol, signals our liver to break down stored glucose and release it into the bloodstream to fuel the muscles, anticipating a threat that we’ll need energy to physically move away from. In the modern world, however, the “threats” — like arguments, emails, honking, and the alerts on our phones — that cue our stress pathways rarely require our muscles to be active. As such, that mobilized glucose sits in our bloodstream, causing more harm than good. CGM can be a powerful tool in teaching us how stress impacts our metabolic health and motivates us to address acute stress in healthy ways, like deep breathing.
I implore anyone working to optimize their metabolic health or weight to incorporate resistance training (otherwise known as strength training or weight training). Resistance training simply means intentionally making your muscles work against a weighted force, which could be functional movements such as lifting or pushing heavy things in your home or at work, lifting or pushing weights, or using your body weight as a force to work against (think pull-ups or push-ups).
Muscle Contraction Is Medicine The reason that moving regularly is important is because a body in which muscles are contracting frequently (even at low intensities for short periods) is experiencing totally different physiology than a body where the muscles are worked in only a one- to two-hour exercise block per day (no matter how intense that block). Muscle contraction is miraculous medicine.