Energy & Bottom-Up Health
The Bioenergetic Blueprint #04
NB: This article is part of the Bioenergetic Blueprint series. The series is meant to be read in order. You can find its table of contents right here.
Suppose you were in a coma, how many calories do you think you’d burn every day compared to today? Surely, given how you’d be completely immobile—with minimal demands on your brain, immune system, organs, muscles, etc.—you’d have to burn a lot fewer calories, right? Maybe 50% less? Even 80% less? Just enough to keep your lungs breathing and blood pumping?
The answer is a mere 25% less, give or take. In other words: if you were in a coma, you’d still burn around 3/4 of the calories you burn today (maybe 2/3, if you’re currently very active). This number is known as the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): The number of calories you burn at complete rest. In contrast, your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) accounts for other activities like moving and working.
You can easily approximate both your BMR and TDEE using a calculator like this one. The number won’t be precise, but it doesn’t need to be. For reference, here are my results:
You can easily see on the graph how large a slice of total calories BMR is responsible for, and this is accounting for several days of workouts, plus usual activities.
What exactly are all those calories needed for? Why do you need to produce so much energy just to live? And why do you need to eat food every single day in order to synthesize it? Why can’t you just eat food once and be done with it?
Life and Inertia
Over 95% of your body weight is nothing but oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen: elements that can also be found on the Earth’s crust. The structural difference between you and, say, a rock, is not so much the presence of any “special” elements, but the relative abundance of common elements, as well as their interconnections.
Most living organisms are made of carbon because it is a formidably versatile element, and because it is efficient to use a single element for numerous things. Carbon can take up many shapes, and it is precisely its structural diversity that supports its functional diversity.
But as we have already seen, living organisms cannot exist merely by virtue of their atomic structure. They are not machines; they need a reliable flux of energy to help them maintain said structure—and with it its many functions. Therefore, it is not only a structural characteristic that draws the line between living and inert matter: it is also an energetic one.
Living organisms are characterized by a constant exchange of matter and energy with their surroundings, through a series of biochemical reactions which can either be spontaneous or non-spontaneous, catabolic or anabolic. We call the sum of these reactions metabolism, and the rate at which they take place the metabolic rate.
It is precisely the interplay and interdependence between structure, energy and function among living organisms that lies at the core of metabolism, and thus of life itself. The three are inseparable. When sufficient energy flows efficiently through living substance, it imprints hysteretic changes in its structure, promoting and supporting its organization and differentiation, which in turn facilitates energy flow.
This should make sense by now. In a universe in which things tend towards disorder, a highly differentiated living organism (say, unlike yeast) needs to allocate a good part of its energetic intake towards counteracting entropy. All of this happens in a bottom-up fashion: starting with the cell and organelles, and echoing upwards throughout the entire organism.
A living cell requires energy not only for all of its functions, but also for maintenance of its structure. […] Life supports life, function builds structure, and structure produces function. Once the function ceases, the structure collapses: it maintains itself by working. A good working order is thus the most stable state. — Albert Szent-Györgyi
A silly but insightful way to think about this concept is to recall the inflatable figures commonly found outside gas stations. Like a wacky wavy inflatable arm-flailing tube-man, you need a constant flux of air (i.e., energy) not just to be able to do things and move around, but to maintain your very structure. If you stop energy from flowing through, the entire structure will fail, and with it its several functions.
Unlike with tube-men however, hindering the flow of energy in living organisms doesn’t necessarily lead to a simple structural collapse (e.g., apoptosis, or programmed cell death). In fact, a lack of energy availability and/or processability can very well lead to expansion (e.g., hydropic degeneration, or cell swelling) and multiplication (e.g., hyperplasia, or cell proliferation), as the organism resorts to more primitive means of energy metabolism in an effort to keep producing energy whilst coping with its environment.1 When this adaptive mechanism gets out of hand, we call it cancer.
So, whilst tube-men get the point across, living organisms are much more complex. You are an unbelievably sophisticated latticework of cells, systems, functions, nerves, tissues, organs, hormones, synapses, genes (and more), that keeps itself together, ordered and functional, yet inexorably dynamic, through highs and lows alike. Every bit of your body puts even the most advanced computer on Earth to shame. Your physiology operates in a completely different league—and that takes a lot of energy.
All of this raises the question… where do you get all of this energy from?
Eating the Sun
As you might remember from high school biology, living organisms can be classified depending on the source of their energy and carbon. We humans are chemoheterotrophs (AKA chemoorganotrophs), meaning, we are characterized by getting energy and carbon from matter (organic matter, to be precise).
The flow of matter amongst living organisms is cyclical. Autotrophs (e.g., green plants) produce oxygen and organic molecules, which heterotrophs (e.g., you) consume to produce water and carbon dioxide, which gets used by autotrophs again to produce oxygen and organic molecules, and so on, and so forth. This delicate waltz, the cycle of carbon dancing between its inorganic and organic forms, is the lifeblood of Earth's ecosystem.
Contrary to the flow of carbon, the flow of energy in the universe is not cyclical. The Sun’s energy gets captured by green plants and converted into chemical energy (captured by fruits, veggies, etc.) for all sorts of organisms to munch on. Some animals, like cows, have the incredible capacity to “upcycle” food, meaning, to take food with somewhat low caloric and nutritional yield—often inedible to us humans—and transform it into calorie-dense, micronutrient-packed “superfoods.”2
As for us humans, we can enjoy and benefit from a wide variety of organic sources of energy, which allow us to incorporate it and project it back into our environment, be it through our constant physiological adaptations, body heat, actions, relationships, hobbies, adventures, art... Each of these manifestations represents a fold in our energetic imprint on the world—and every single one of them began with the Sun.
This is why we’ll place particular emphasis on nutrition in this series. Though it is far from the only variable affecting energy metabolism, it is arguably the most malleable one, especially relative to its ROI. After all, every time we eat, food gets broken down into usable molecules that travel to some of our 30-50 trillion cells and transformed into adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a major energy currency for living organisms.
Thus, by ensuring health at a cellular level, a bioenergetic approach to nutrition and physiology seeks to cultivate bottom-up health. It is by unburdening the particular (cells) that we can best ameliorate the systemic (health). This is partly because your body is quite literally composed of individual cells, and also because all cells—no matter their level of organization—operate and participate in the one true principle of life: energy metabolism.
Smiling, laughing and other normal physiological activities tell us that a baby is well. This is just a short way of saying that the trillions of cells making up the baby are well. Similarly, when the baby is sick, it is a short way of saying that some or all of the baby’s cells are sick. — Dr. Gilbert Ling
Friend, it really takes a tremendous amount of energy for your body to keep itself orderly and capable; and one of my main points throughout this series is that you can actually influence your BMR, perhaps even significantly so, and that the higher you manage to keep it—without resorting to stress mechanisms—the healthier and more fulfilling your life will be. Doing so will make you, quite literally, more alive.
As a living organism, your relatively high metabolic rate is an extraordinary evolutionary achievement. The fact that your body needs to burn so many calories to keep itself together is, in a way, a decadent luxury, and a display of high potential. Simultaneously, unburdening your physiology and letting Nature express its full complexity through you (i.e., moving away from the yeast state; “optimizing” structure and function, learning new skills, fostering creativity, building muscle and strength, developing intelligence, etc.) is itself a display of surplus power.
Conclusion
This article concludes the more “macro” section on energy and thermodynamics. Up next, we will zoom into the micro to start understanding how and why metabolic processes unfold—starting with a simple review of the humble atom.
Until then, upwards!
Yago
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I like to think of this as the cellular equivalent to how low-income populations are forced or incentivized to have higher birth-rates by their environment, culture, economy, etc.
Milk is likely the highest manifestation of this process, which is why mammals, in their most metabolically intensive years, rely solely on it. It's also—arguably—the only food source many people could live on indefinitely without inducing nutrient deficiencies, to the exception of iron.
This was well explained
Beautiful article Yago! Thoroughly enjoyed reading and learning about metabolism