Transcript
A (0:01)
Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. We often hear people talk about metabolism, whether it's fast, slow, strong, or sluggish. It's one of those health buzzwords that's often said but rarely understood. Yet understanding metabolism is essential. It influences how we process food, how much energy we have, and our risk of developing health conditions like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. In this episode, Shaun Stephenson and Tim Spector cut through the confusion. Together, they'll explain what metabolism actually is and empower you to take control of yours.
B (0:45)
I'd love to start right at the very beginning, Shaun. What is metabolism and why does it matter?
C (0:52)
From a rudimentary perspective, it's converting food into energy, but that's looking at energy through this very isolated vanilla way. You know, there's this entire microcosm of events, and metabolism is really about the sum of all the different pieces that can create and generate energy and that feed into each other. And for me, it's really based on that principle of energy cannot be created nor destroyed. It can only be be converted from one form into another. And so this energy exchange, even if we're looking at that very vanilla version of it, of food, is creating energy. Where does the food come from? What are the pieces and parts of the food that create the energy? And there are other things besides food that are getting converted into energy for us as well. And whether that's body fat, whether that is oxygen, and how it relates to all these different pieces, there are literally millions of parts and inputs that determine metabolism. It isn't just food. And even from the perspective of food being used as energy. Right. The endpoint being the mitochondria, which we'll get to, I'm sure, and talk a lot about, when we eat a food, it doesn't just become energy. It gets converted into a currency that our body can actually use. Our body runs on a certain currency. And so there's so much work involved in converting that food into the currency that our body can use. And sometimes that conversion doesn't happen. Right. Our body isn't converting everything that we eat into that currency that we're using.
A (2:28)
And, Sean, could you talk me through that?
B (2:30)
Maybe in a very simple way, like, let's imagine I eat a piece of bread.
C (2:34)
Let's use actually a good example, since you mentioned bread. All right. There was this fascinating study published recently in the journal Food and Nutrition Research, and they had test subjects to. And this is a crossover study. So Everybody's doing both things to consume a sandwich of either whole multigrain bread and cheddar cheese, or a sandwich of what they deem to be ultra processed food, which was white bread and cheese product. And here in the United States, like Kraft is a big cheese company. That's what I grew up eating. But it's called Kraft Singles because they can't legally call it cheese. There's not a cheese in the cheese. And so it's this kind of cheese product. Right. And so they had test subjects to consume both sandwiches at different parts of the study. Now, keep in mind, these sandwiches have the same amount of protein, fats, carbohydrates, and the same amount of calories. But when they ate the two different versions of these sandwiches, very different things happened with their metabolism, in particular the expenditure of the calories they consumed. So when people ate the processed food sandwich versus the whole food sandwich, they had about a 50% reduction in calorie expenditure or calorie burn. After eating that processed food sandwich, something happened. And to create a very simple understanding, it basically created metabolic clogs. It blocked the body's ability to use that energy efficiently and to get rid of it. And so what does our body do? It's going to do what it can to protect us. And if even that means holding on to some of these calories to try to figure out, you know, what to do with this later at some point, and not to mention all the other pieces that come along with that, it's not just the calories from the food. And as Tim knows this as well, there's a lot of other compounds that come along with ultra processed foods. Whether this is, you know, phthalates, whether this is, you know, pesticides and all these other things that can disrupt our metabolism. And so when it boils down to it, if we can just kind of consolidate this whole idea when we're choosing to eat a certain food, it's not just this calorie conversation. And Tim and I talked a lot about this when I, when I had him on my show. It's so much bigger. There are all these, and this is the term I want to share with everybody, epicaloric controllers. There are these epic caloric controllers that are determining how our body is processing the food that we're eating. And so today we're going to expand from the conversation of just calories and understand that our metabolism, when it boils down to it, it is the conversion of food into energy. Yes. But there are all these other really wonderful factors for us to pay attention to. And today I want to help everybody to just refine it to some very simple ideas because it can be complex, obviously there's so many pieces to cover. But today I want to share some of the like top things that are the Epicalura controllers that we can apply in our lives to make better choices and to have a more efficient metabolism overall.