My 13th book, Best Future You, is out!
Over the next several weeks, I’ll be posting excerpts from the book and blogging frequently about the main concept in the book – which is the idea of harnessing your body’s internal cellular biochemistry to achieve true balance in body, mind, and spirit – and in doing so, help you to become your “Best Future You” in terms of how you look, how you feel, and how you perform on every level.
Chapter 5 – Pillars of Health
In some of my earlier books, I’ve written about different aspects of metabolism and biochemistry that can become unbalanced and lead to ill health, weight gain, and poor performance. In many ways, harnessing the CDR pathway and its role as a “master switch” in directing the body’s response to cellular stress, brings many different aspects of biochemistry together under a concerted and coordinated approach to helping us feel, look, and perform at our best. I refer to each of these four major aspects of biochemical balance as “pillars” of health, including oxidation, inflammation, glycation, and allostation – with imbalances in any of them leading to elevated cellular stress and tissue dysfunction.
For example, scientists and doctors agree that excessive inflammation (due to an imbalance in signaling molecules called cytokines) can lead to accelerated tissue damage and breakdown, so it makes a lot of sense to control inflammation to reduce cellular stress and promote overall health.
But, if you look deeper to find the causes of inflammation, you quickly see other factors that you can control. Because oxidation (caused by free radicals) leads to inflammation at the cellular level, why not also control oxidation as another “trigger” of cellular stress?
Great idea—but why not look even farther up the metabolic chain of events to see if you can control or modulate the causes of oxidation? Doing this shows that glycation (cellular damage caused by overexposure to certain sugars) can lead to oxidation (which can, in turn, lead to inflammation).
Should you stop there? Of course not, because when you look even higher up the metabolic stream, you see that an imbalance in stress hormones such as cortisol and the resulting allostation (inability to adapt to and recover from stress) can lead to glycation, which can lead to oxidation, which in turn leads to inflammation.
Unfortunately, existing scientific or medical research doesn’t go any farther “upstream” with regard to the biochemistry of cellular aging and health promotion. Balancing stress hormones is about as far “upstream” as you can go at this time—but that’s still pretty good. In addition, we know from both laboratory research and clinical experience that such a coordinated approach to restoring biochemical balance can be very effective in reducing cellular stress through CDR activation. In fact, at the recent Cambridge University scientific conference on CDR metabolism, there were research reports linking CDR pathway activation to improvements in each of the four pillars of health.
Obviously, each of these four aspects of your body’s biochemistry is intimately intertwined and interdependent on the others, so saying that any one of these “pillars” is “first” is somewhat arbitrary and situation-dependent. That said, the important take-away message is that having an imbalance in any of the individual aspects (inflammation, for example) can set off a biochemical cascade leading to imbalances in another (such as oxidation) and ultimately increasing cellular stress. They’re all intertwined and interdependent. The different aspects of biochemistry act almost like a set of dominoes—when you touch one, you set off movement and changes in all the others. The good news is that when you restore balance in any one area, you can also get the benefit of restored balance in other areas, with the end result being reductions in cellular stress and optimal levels of health and well-being.
Thanks for reading – be sure to tune in for the next installment about, “Free Radicals, Antioxidants and Health: A Summary”
