Metabolic health is intricately connected to everything. For this section, I want to give credit to Dr. Peter Attia. I learned more from his podcast The Drive than from my biochemistry classes.
What is metabolic health?
It is hard to define what metabolic health is. It is easier to define it by what it is not. Metabolic health is the opposite of metabolic syndrome, which is essentially a disruption in proper energy metabolism. In practice, metabolic health is somewhat synonymous with “being highly insulin sensitive”, which has to do with a myriad of different factors ranging from muscle mass, exercise status, inflammation, and a plethora of genetic and hormonal factors, some of which are discussed in more detail shortly.
Metabolic health is a continuum. At one end, there are highly metabolically healthy individuals with great insulin sensitivity, metabolic flexibility, and nutrient partitioning. On the other end, there is full-blown type 2 diabetes.
In the industrialized world, currently, around 10% of the adult population is suffering from type 2 diabetes (but only about half are aware of it). Due to an aging population, more sedentary lifestyles, and increasing adiposity, the prevalence of this disease is expected to double within the next twenty years or so. Many more people are currently prediabetic and/or have “metabolic syndrome”.
Someone is “diagnosed” with metabolic syndrome if they have at least three of the following:
- hyper-glycemia
- hyper-tension
- hyper-lipidemia
- hyper-weight
Down the line, most people with metabolic syndrome will end up with serious conditions such as heart disease (including heart attack and stroke), type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, cancer, or a neurodegenerative disorder.
Together, these constitute the most common causes of death worldwide. Metabolic syndrome was also one of the most important underlying factors that caused people to succumb to COVID-19, which illustrates again the importance of metabolic health for health and longevity.
Metabolic health depends on a number of things. These include genetics, exercise status, a variety of different hormones, muscle mass, and body fat levels (particularly the amount of visceral adiposity). These factors can tilt metabolism towards a more healthy or a less healthy state.
Because metabolic health is a huge (and hugely important) topic but this article is already awfully long, I wrote three articles on the subject that will go in much more depth:
For more info on muscle mass & longevity, I highly recommend Outlive by Peter Attia.
Tactics I follow to promote metabolic health
- Muscle mass
- Endurance exercise
- A note on VO2 max
- Hormone optimization
- Metabolic drugs
- My experience with fasting
- (Mostly) avoiding sugar
- Thoughts on carbohydrate intake
- (Mostly) avoiding dairy
- Occasionally wearing a CGM
- Sleep optimization
- Thoughts on omega-3 & omega-6 fatty acids
- Keeping body fat levels low
- Leptin
- Supplements
- Are drugs necessary?
The above is only a fraction of the article. This article is currently undergoing final revisions and is expected to be published within the next few weeks to months. To receive a notification upon its release, sign up for my newsletter.
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