What are Metabolism and Metabolic Health, and How Do They Impact Mental Health?
"Metabolism is the set of life-sustaining chemical reactions in organisms. The three main things that metabolism does is convert the energy in food to energy that is available to power the cell and therefore the organism, the conversion of elements in food into the building blocks to make proteins, lipids, nucleic acids and carbohydrates, and the elimination of metabolic waste. Another definition of metabolism is "all the physical and chemical processes in the body that convert or use energy". Metabolism is how we use our food to create energy. If we consume more calories then we need we need to store the excess energy. We store some as glycogen in the liver, but most is stored in our fat cells. It makes sense that our bodies would have evolved with uncertainty about when we would have food and how much we would have, so we would have needed to store up excess for times when we didn't have enough.
Metabolic dysfunction usually results from too much food intake or eating foods with a poor ratio of nutrients to calories. If we consistently eat more calories/energy than we need, our bodies first store the excess in our fat cells but they eventually get full, and then we store fat in our organs, called visceral fat (such as fatty liver). Visceral fat interferes with the function of the organ in question and leads to disease states such as type 2 diabetes. We need to have low levels of insulin in order to access and use the energy stored in fat. Insulin levels rise when we eat, especially if we eat sugars and simple carbs. When our insulin levels are high this signals our body to store energy because we have plenty for now. The state of having high insulin levels from frequent eating is called hyperinsulinemia. If the state of hyperinsulinemia persists our cells become less responsive to insulin, producing a state called insulin resistance. This means too much sugar stays in the blood and not enough is available for energy use.
