Greetings and welcome back to Health 101!  Last time I introduced the concept of optimum health and two prerequisites for achieving optimum health.  The first is self love and the second is optimum efficiency of our "organic chemical factory". 

So just what does this body and its "organic chemical factory" need to do?  There are probably 100,000 answers to that question.  On the bottom line, however, the two most important goals "the factory" has is to produce energy and enzymes.  The energy is called adenosine triphosphate or ATP, and the enzymes are the workers that do all of the work in the body. The enzymes are the essence of physiological life.  They are composed of special globular proteins that actually do "work" and catalyze chemical reactions.  Current scientific research estimates between 80,000 to 100,000 different types of metabolic enzymes in human bodies that do all of the "work" in keeping us alive and healthy.  The enzymes use the "building materials", the amino acids, fatty acids, minerals, trace minerals and all of the chemical elements to build and continually rebuild our bodies.  None of that other "stuff" is alive or can do "work", only the enzymes can.  Nothing happens in our bodies without enzymes being involved so we'd better understand what it takes for our bodies to produce these enzymes that do all of this "work".  Here's an extremely important fact that few people are aware of:  protein synthesis consumes more of the energy our bodies produce than any other life process. This protein synthesis is of two types: structural proteins for building materials and functional proteins called enzymes.  When energy production slows down so does every other life process especially protein synthesis of structural and functional proteins.  That means less building materials and less workers to do the work.  Is it starting to sink in? 

As bodies get "older" they make less energy, less muscle and less enzymes.  Again remember that "older" simply means more toxic and less efficient!  Energy, ATP, our power source, is what we've got to make, and lots of it.  We make ATP in our cells in the mitochondria.  The mitochondria are the energy factories and power houses of our cells.  They need many minerals, vitamins, enzymes, co-enzymes, fatty acids, and glucose for making ATP.  ATP powers every movement, thought, feeling, breath, and every beat of our hearts.  Incredibly important stuff!  Most importantly ATP powers the production of enzymes!  Another very interesting fact is that ATP itself is useless without ATPase, the enzyme that activates the release of the energy stored in the ATP molecule.  So, we need ATP to produce enzymes and we need enzymes to produce ATP. The enzymes mentioned thus far are metabolic enzymes.  They do all of the work in our bodies.  Remember the list of items we need in the mitochondria in order to make these metabolic enzymes?  How do we get these minerals, vitamins, enzymes, co-enzymes, fatty acids and glucose ?  We get them by digesting our food!  The better quality food we eat and the better we digest it, the better we produce ATP!

  Food is a complex of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, fiber, minerals, trace minerals, vitamins, and other nutrients.  If it is grown in really good fertile soil, then we get good food.  The sad fact is that the soil in the USA is on average, 85% depleted of minerals.  So it contains, on average, about 15% of the minerals we need to be really healthy.  No wonder that many people eat too much when their bodies crave the nutrients that are supposed to be in the food.  That is why juicing works so well to concentrate the nutrients in less volume of "food".  There are couple more facts that we need to be aware of.  The less (high quality, nutrient dense) food we consume -  the longer and better we live!  The more (low quality, status quo, nutrient deficient) food we eat, - the worse we live and the sooner we die!  These choices are ours.  Anyone motivated! More next time.  Peace and Love,  Darrell.