Public sanitation, personal hygiene, and antibiotic therapy have contributed to the decrease in death from infectious diseases since 20th century. The efficacy and potency of modern medicine was demonstrated during the recent once in a century COVID-19 pandemic that hit its peak in 2021. For instance, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 460,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in 2021 and by 2023 that number was down by about 75,000. Modern medicine, operating under the germ theory of disease, has undoubtedly contributed significantly to improvement in human health but it is ill-fitted for the prevention of energy-oriented metabolic…
Author: Mukaila Kareem
Hydrogen gas is the most common element in the universe in terms of total number of atoms and constitutes 75 percent of the universe by mass. This is not obvious to us as hydrogen gas represents a very tiny fraction of atmospheric air. That said, sunlight is produced from fusion of hydrogen to form a noble gas called helium. Therefore, the solar energy we enjoy on this planet is fueled by burning hydrogen ions in a state called plasma. Though hydrogen gas is hardly registered in terms of atmospheric percentage, it exists in water and organic compounds. In fact, water…
Given that life evolved from food scarce environments, obesity would have been very advantageous in challenging environments where the next meal was not certain. However, this would probably not be a sound survival strategy in hunting and gathering societies where physical fitness was the norm. Obviously, obesity would have been an unachievable goal and probably would not even be an envisioned longshot plan in a meager milieu. However, this article is not about survival in terms of physical fitness to hunt down prey or to run for dear life from the predator. To be clear, I am not suggesting that…
As someone who had early life in rural Nigeria, I strongly believe that the diet debates are out of touch elite pastimes borne out of food glut in the western societies. For survival, all living things evolved and adapted to scarcity, and humans have been appropriately described as opportunistic omnivores who would eat whatever is available. How supposedly omnivorous humans turned out to be sharply divided into tribalistic die hard vegan, keto, Mediterranean, paleo and all other kinds of dieters is hard to wrap my brain around. No matter how much label you put on it, food is nothing more…
“Pregnancy is the longest duration, highest energy expenditure thing that humans can do. Mothers probably aren’t surprised by this.” Herman Pontzer How fast you can run depends on why, for how long and more importantly the drive that sets the purpose for why you are running in the first place. As in all emergency situations, trying to avoid being a tiger’s lunch does not take long: You either run as hard as ever to demonstrate clearly to the charging tiger that it’s not worth the effort to burn its limited energy for an uncatchable running “human bullet” that you are,…
Humans would go to the end of the world to find food, but oxygen is freely present in the air to break the stored chemical energy in foods to (re)generate water, set the carbon dioxide free and form ATP which every living cell uses to stay alive. Yes, oxygen gas is a peculiar molecule and has been described as an electron thief that wants to cause combustion to form water but strangely prevented by some “kinetic barrier” from blowing up the atmosphere! Truth be told, oxygen does not like to exist by itself and while there is just about 21%…
As a physical therapist, I am numb to hearing diet and exercise in the same sentence, but I still cringe a little bit. The fact is that diet and exercise are not the same: Diets refer to the external sources of energy that fuel metabolic processes while exercise is a metabolic action of skeletal muscle. In the same way that the liver is an organ, the skeletal muscle is not only the biggest organ in the body, but also the biggest metabolic organ. While it sounds ridiculous to associate diets and the liver with weight loss in the same sentence,…
Man has always lived under the threat of food insecurity and therefore the brain is wired to gorge and hoard in times of plenty. The calorie dense foods in traditional societies were meat, honey and fruits but were not easily available. Glucose and fructose exist freely as natural sugar in fruits but unlike tubers which are available year-round, fruits are seasonal and cannot be stored. That brings me to glucose, the primary nutrient used by all cells but let me digress a bit: About two percent of earth’s water is frozen up in glaciers/ice caps, a whopping 97 percent exists…
The aim of science is not to open a door to endless wisdom, but to put a limit to endless error. —Bertold Brecht, The Life of Galileo Except for man, all living things live with the environment. For instance, no matter which continent they are located, lions have never devised a novel way to obtain food in the jungle other than hunting down their prey and then fast 2-4 days before the next successful kill. To be clear, man is the smartest but not the strongest on the planet and certainly has no prayer, pound for pound, against a…
Here is the little secret about dieting: All diets work until you inevitably fall off the diet bandwagon. Thankfully, against our frustrations but for the sake of our survival, the biology of weight abhors loss, be it in the face of uncertain food environments in the traditional societies or in the unprecedented abundance of the developed world. This explains why the hunter-gatherers maintain the same body weight all their adult life even in the austere environments. Humans have high metabolic rate but are endowed with uncanny ability to store fats to fuel the daily energy expenditure in the absence of…
Since antiquity, diabetes has always been an enigmatic metabolic disease. Its prevalence spans the entire medical era: The ancient Hindus writings referred to the sweetness of diabetic urine as “honey urine” and a disciple of Hippocrates, Aretaeus, coined the word “diabetes” which means, “siphon” to explain the condition of excessive urination associated with the disease. In what appeared to be a helpless observation of the combination of excessive urination and uncontrolled weight loss, Aretaeus went on to describe diabetes as “…a wonderful affection, not very frequent among men, being a melting down of the flesh and limbs into urine”. The direct…
As a physical therapist, the skeletal muscle is my favorite organ. It is not only a locomotor apparatus as we have all come to know but it has endocrine action with ability to secret hundreds of peptide molecules called myokines that act on distant organs for overall health of the body. For more important reasons beyond being a movement specialist type like me, I dare say that the skeletal muscle ought to be your favorite organ as well. Apart from sleeping, infectious state or physical trauma, skeletal muscle is a principal organ for basic human activities such as foraging,…
African staple foods are mostly starchy carbohydrates in the form of grains and tubers. I enjoy writing on nutrition and metabolism because what was taught in physiology and medical biochemistry are in great contrast with the calorie advice that we often hear from health professionals. Now and then I get thank you mails from my readers and they often wonder why they are getting some clarity on nutrition from a physiotherapist. Well, the human body is the ultimate hybrid, with the amazing dynamic ability to switch fuel on the basis of different circumstances, like resting, running, fasting, walking, etc. Therefore,…
