Your Metabolic Engine

Chapter 44, Your Metabolic Engine [June 2003]

John loves cars, so I explained it to him this way.

Suppose the engine of your car is just a little bit off. It sputters and pops once in a while, but it mostly works. There are three things to keep in mind.

The car isn't getting all the energy out of its gasoline. some of the fuel is being wasted, because the engine isn't very efficient. So you have to fill up the tank a little more often.
The fuel that is partially burned goes out the tailpipe as exhaust. It looks like smoke coming out the back. You'd never pass the EPA emissions test.
When the car runs fast, the engine produces lots of smoke, and doesn't run well at all. This is not a good situation. The car will get you where you need to go, but it's not built for drag-racing.

John's metabolism is the car engine, and food is his fuel. A malformed enzyme causes his engine to misfire. Translation of the above points:

You're hungry a lot, and you eat more than most kids.
The smoke, in this case ketones, spill into your brain and make you crazy.
The more you eat, the crazier you get.

Now, let's look again, for the bio-chemists in the audience.

I believe the flaw occurs in the Krebb's cycle, where acetyl-coa joins oxaloacetic acid to produce citric acid. If this step runs poorly, the excess acetyl-coa is turned into ketones, and excreted.

There are many reasons why this step might fail. Most of the documented enzyme deficiencies lead to death by age 1, but you know, a gene has thousands of amino acids, thousands of opportunities for point mutations, deletions, or repetitions. Pyruvate carboxylase (for example) could always underperform in a new, undocumented way. I can think of at least 6 reasons why the Krebb's cycle might skip a beat at this step. I'll be looking into the possible causes and treatments (if any) over the coming months. We've come a long way, but there's still a lot of work ahead.

Concentrated Foods

I spent a summer in Africa, and I paid close attention to their diet. They ate lean meat (goat and chicken), boiled grains (corn and sorghum), a few vegetables (in season), and some fruit imported from South Africa as a treat. They drank water, tea, and not much else. (The adults drank a homemade beer made from fermented grains.) You'll notice there aren't any artificials, and I use to think this was key. Well I don't think so any more. You could add red#40 and BHT to their diet, and I'm sure a few kids would react, but not many. The real difference between the African diet and the western diet is the concentration of the fuel. We pack more energy into a Hostess cupcake than an entire African lunch. And we don't eat our fruits any more, we drink them, in the form of juice. It's easy to gulp down the equivalent of three or four apples in one glass of cider, and we feed it to our infants within the first year of life. Then we get older and we drink pop, more concentrated sugar. Have you ever eaten raw sugar cane? I have, when I was in Hawaii. Yuck!! It's a long way from this fiberous stalk to the sugar bowl.

The 5,000 year old "Ice Man", discovered at the Italy-Austria border, ate some wild grains, but this is a far cry from flour. Wheat, rice, corn - it doesn't matter the grain - they're all concentrated starches.

Fats are also concentrated. Everything is fried in oils, but where in nature do you find a bottle of oil - even a "healthy" unsaturated oil? You don't!

All our foods are concentrated, an we are not equipped to handle this. There may be thousands of kids in Africa with John's disorder, and they have no idea anything is amiss. These genetic variations were not particularly detrimental, until we started concentrating our foods. Is this why 7 million Americans are now on ritalin? I wonder.

Most of us don't have misfiring metabolic engines, yet we all suffer the effects of macro-nutrient magnification. Sugars → diabetes/obesity, oils → cardio-vascular, wheat/dairy/corn/soy → various sensitivities and allergies, and even salt → hypertension. We'd better start eating real foods, in their original forms!