Podcast: Metabolism Part 1

Metabolism

Like many medical terms in the information age, the word metabolism is thrown around a lot in conversation. Ideas of fast and slow abound but few descriptions offer a complete picture of how we convert food and oxygen to the warmth, activity, and physical material of our bodies. Likewise, there is a dearth of medical coaching about what we are doing as a culture to disrupt metabolism on a scale large enough to necessitate a medical term for it, metabolic syndrome.

Metabolic dysfunction is a huge concern for many people. So many modern health problems are related to it; high blood pressure, abdominal fat accumulation, diabetes, and cholesterol issues are due to its dysregulation. Let’s explore metabolism and add  the descriptions of ancient Chinese medical science.

When considering metabolism it is valuable to distinguish between form and function. For example, your liver has a physical form shaped like a fat banana. This is the tissue and structure of the organ. Placed into the living system of a human body this inert tissue becomes an animated mass that performs over 500 functions, each contributing to the total metabolic activity of the body. Liver function can be other than normal without liver organ/tissue disease. This is precisely the issue when contemplating problems of metabolism, what is causing dysfunction when there is no disease of an organ present?

Western science defines metabolism as the sum of the processes by which we convert food and oxygen into the energy to sustain our life and physical function on a minute to minute basis. These processes are described in the logic-based terms of the mechanical and chemical mechanisms of digestion, hormonal and neurological feedback loops, circulation of nutrients in the blood and the combustion of them by every cell in the body, and the elimination of waste products from these processes.

Ancient Chinese medical science described the same concepts 2000 years ago using a global, analogical language. All life forms on our planet exist between heaven and earth. The energy of earth (food) and the energy of heaven (oxygen) are available to us for energy production. Each life form has the built-in ability to extract these energies to fuel its own existence.

In us humans, ancestral energy (DNA) provides a blueprint for our triple burner, a three-tiered power plant for the exceptionally efficient combustion of earth and heaven energies. Food and fluids enter the middle burner which includes the stomach/spleen/pancreas, liver/gallbladder, and small intestine. Here the intake is ripened and rotted with digestive fire, the heat, acids, and enzymes of digestion. In the upper burner energy from middle burner processing converges in the lung with oxygen, blood, and spirit. The primed blood is then launched by the heart into the vessels for circulation to the entire kingdom of the body. In the lower burner, large intestine and kidney/bladder, waste from the combustion and delivery processes is eliminated as feces and urine.

The triple burner processes apply to not just food digestion but also the small-world arena of the body. Every single cell has its own triple burner to burn nutrients and oxygen from the blood and eliminate its waste products.

This concept continues down to the atomic and perhaps subatomic level, and up into the greater realm of earth’s function and then planetary relations. This macrocosm/microcosm thinking is the hallmark of the analogical approach of ancient Chinese medical science. It encourages us to remember that natural phenomena are universal, the same in every setting big and small. It allows acupuncturists to diagnose health problems with a general, global analysis where for example if the color red is present it can only come from fire and heat.

So, what can negatively affect metabolism in humans? Hot and cold can. I will discuss what can go wrong with metabolism in my next installment.

I will leave you with the following ideas to contemplate. This description comes from The Healing Power of Illness, Thorwalt Dethlefsen and Rudiger Dahlke MD. page 68:

It is science’s inability to think analogically that forces it constantly to start again from scratch in each separate sphere into which it conducts research. What science is so keen to do, yet never actually succeeds in doing, is to discover some general law that it can express in an abstract form capable of being applied universally- in an analogical way. Thus, for example, it explores polarity in electricity, at the atomic level, in the acid/alkaline relationship, in the cerebral spheres and in a thousand other areas- but each time from scratch, and in isolation from all other applications. Analogy, by contrast, swings the whole viewpoint through 90° and places all the various forms in an analogical relationship to each other by discovering a single, underlying principle within all of them. In this way the positive electrical pole, the left brain hemisphere, the acids, the sun, the phenomenon of fire and the Chinese yang all suddenly turn out to have something in common, even though no causal connections exist between them. Their analogical kinship derives from an underlying principle which is common to all the forms listed, and which in this particular example could be called the masculine, or active principle.