-: When it comes to our regulation of energy
and our metabolism, we can't overlook inflammation.
Inflammation is going to be a big player
in terms of the systemic energy metabolism,
as well as on the cellular level,
so we're gonna talk a little bit about communication
between those two, because when we look at inflammation,
we usually associate it with a local process.
You know, you bang your toe on something,
you get a boo-boo, you get inflammation,
you get that localized swelling,
you get that influx of white blood cells,
that immune response that's local.
When that becomes chronic, or when
we're getting inflammation from lifestyle,
we can get to a point where we have
an over-responsive inflammatory response,
or an over-responsive immune system,
meaning that we're exaggerating a response
to what would be slight insults to our chemistry.
So, we can have rampant inflammation
running around the body that is to a very low level.
So, a couple terms you may hear me throwing around,
one is metaflammation, which is metabolic inflammation,
which happens when our cells basically are wasting energy,
or they're in a toxic state,
in terms of their ability to produce energy,
it's not very efficient,
and so they're creating a lot of stress within themselves,
and so we kinda get this low grade inflammatory response
to that overworked energy process.
That's meta-flammation.
And that's associated with
kind of like widespread inflammation,
and you'll see it affects things like the liver a lot,
because the liver is very important
in terms of my whole body energy.
But it also has a lot to do with, like,
muscles and things like that
that are consuming a lot of energy.
We'll see a lot of chronic metaflammation in those tissues
that are more metabolically active.
And then there'll be chronic inflammation that is,
we'll say, at a low level,
where it's not like the inflammation
where we have this big swelling.
So, acute inflammation, you injure something,
there's a short inflammatory response,
it comes, it goes, it resolves, and then it dissipates.
When we have chronic inflammation,
it tends not to be to that level.
It's a small amount, maybe even non-symptomatic.
You don't even notice that you have it.
Your energy might just be a little bit low,
something that's almost unconscious to you.
But that is what's really damaging,
that and the meta-inflammation,
in terms of our energy balance,
in terms of our systemic regulation of energy.
And then the acute stuff is gonna affect
more at a cellular level.
So, we have to make sure that
we look at both of the things.
We have to look at, okay, we have the local
process of inflammation that's gonna affect
my ability to communicate with those specific tissues.
But then, if I have bad diet or whatnot,
you'll kinda see, as we go through this,
I could get inflammation that's affecting
the entire body.
So, let's look how that story unfolds.
So, one of the things that inflammation is gonna do,
at a local level, is it's gonna
block the effect of insulin on glucose transport.
So, normally you have a cell.
So, we'll say we got our muscle cell here, our red cell,
and when insulin is present,
it is going to go through the bloodstream,
it's gonna reach the receptors on that cell,
basically saying "Hey, bring your glucose transporters
"to the membrane so you can start
"taking glucose out of the blood."
When that cell is inflamed, inflammation,
or the cytokines that are responding to the information,
essentially block out the signal of insulin.
They say, "Yes, insulin, I know you're there,
"but we're not going to bring any glucose in right now."
Now, that's not a bad thing,
in terms of my cellular function.
That is exactly what's supposed to happen.
'Cause let's think about what inflammation is.
So, inflammation is, essentially, we're cleaning house.
Something is broken in there,
something needs to be broken down,
there's bad tissue, there's a pathogen.
Something needs to be broken down in there,
so it's essentially like trying to bring in
new lumber to a job site where they're still
breaking down the old building.
You would do that yet.
So, while the inflammatory process is running,
we don't want a bunch of glucose running in there.
That's gonna mess it up.
It's gonna increase my likelihood to get glycation,
which is where sugars will basically
stick to inflamed proteins and things like that,
and that can actually cause even more inflammation,
and even greater immune response.
So, ideally, we don't wanna be shoving glucose in there
when there's an inflammatory process going on.
So, from an acute standpoint, that's a good thing.
But, when it becomes chronic,
when it becomes from meta-flammation,
because it's an energy system issue with this
from poor diet, or from bad programming,
or doing the same stimulus too long,
whatever it may be, that's messing up
that cell's energy metabolism,
or it's some sort of chronic inflammation from, like,
continuing to stress tissue damage
without proper recovery.
Whatever it may be.
That's now gonna prevent that cell from recovering,
from replenishing its glycogen,
because it's not gonna be able to get its glucose in there.
So that cell, the muscle cell suffers, lovely.
But that glucose still has to go somewhere.
So, if I've got glucose, and it's coming,
and it gets basically blocked
from entering the muscle cell,
option two is the fat cell.
So, when we look at inflammation,
especially meta-flammation or chronic inflammation,
essentially, it's nutrient partitioning
in the direction that we don't want it to be.
It's blocking us from getting glucose
into the lean tissue where we want it,
and insulin instead is gonna have to drive
more glucose into that fat cell.
So, of the carbohydrates that we eat,
less of them will go into our lean tissue,
more of them will go into our fat tissue.
The other thing with that is because,
simply because there's less tissue
to take up the glucose,
if my muscle tissue is being,
"Hey, no, you can't get the glucose in here,"
we're likely gonna have to raise insulin
to an even higher degree
to get that glucose out of the blood.
So systemically, inflammation,
even at a local level, if, you know,
if I was taking post-workout carbohydrates
because I thought I was gonna be able to
get carbohydrates in this tissue and I can't,
from a systemic perspective, I've now
increased the amount of insulin that I have to make.
And as we talked in the blood glucose section,
if I have to overcompensate insulin,
I'm likely going to follow that
with an overcompensentory cortisol response,
or stress response, and start that insulin-cortisol seesaw,
start, you know, having to balance those things out
becomes more difficult because I've
overexpressed one or the other.
So, the other thing we're gonna get
from a local perspective is we're gonna get
inhibited cellular metabolism.
And the reason that inflammation is gonna kind of
disregulate metabolism, especially
in the terms of meta-flammation,
meta-flammation happens because the cell is creating
too many waste products for metabolism,
so one of the things that's gonna happen
is we're gonna slow the metabolism of that cell down.
It's gonna be making less ATP,
making less energy, which means
it's not gonna be able to recover as fast,
it's not gonna be able to do
whatever its functions are.
If that's a muscle cell, then it
can't recover from training,
it can't perform an exercise.
If it's a liver cell, maybe you can't detoxify,
you can support your blood sugar.
Whatever it may be.
If it's an adrenal cell, you can't make hormones.
So, inflammation is going to
drastically inhibit that cellular function,
so that means this cell overall now
is consuming less energy.
If I have that happening widespread across the body,
that's gonna lower my metabolism.
So, you will always see an inverse relationship
between inflammation and thyroid hormone,
because inflammation is going to say,
"Hey, we need to bring thyroid hormone down,
"we need to limit the amount of things
"that are expending energy and creating metabolic waste,
"so that we can deal with all this damage."
In an acute condition, that's important for our cells
to be able to repair and recover.
When this is happening from poor lifestyle,
poor diet, or poor programming and exercise,
that's a really bad thing,
especially when it gets to become chronic,
or in this case of meta-flammation.
Now we're getting all of these negative imbalances,
and they shouldn't be there.
So, inflammation's not a bad guy.
It's when inflammation is around longer than it should be
because I've made bad choices, or my health is poor,
one or the other.
Looking on the other side, we know it's catabolic,
that's essentially how it functions.
So obviously, if my goal is to build muscle,
inflammation is going to drastically decrease that,
not just from a recovery standpoint,
but also likely because I'm gonna be
breaking down more tissues than I want to, right?
So, I essentially could be at a point
where I'm losing my body mass
because I'm choking off the nutrients from it
and continuing to break it down.
And then you get decreased cell function,
so the cell's functioning less from
a metabolic standpoint, whatever that function is.
You know, can't do as much,
I already gave you an example for that.
The last one on here is gonna be
the resistance to cortisol and catecholamines.
So, the whole purpose of these hormones, right,
is to get nutrients out and to increase
your ability to have fuel available,
burn that fuel, and expend it.
So these are like my stress, my survival hormones.
When I have a tissue now that is inflamed,
I can't respond to that as well.
If it's a fat tissue, it's gonna be harder for me
to get fat out of that cell.
If it's a muscle tissue, it's gonna be
harder for that muscle tissue
to perform its job, to increase its metabolic rate
in the demand for exercise, or in the demand for survival.
For most of you guys, it's probably gonna be exercise.
So, essentially, we're still getting
a negative nutrient partitioning,
but in this case it's the output.
So, we get a negative nutrient partitioning
in that we're gonna store more fat, more carbohydrates
into the fat tissue than the lean tissue,
but on the stress hormone side,
we're gonna have a negative partitioning
in that we're not able to get as much
out of the fat tissue.
So, our inflammation helps me get
fat into the fat tissue, glucose into the fat tissue,
fatten that thing up,
but it makes it harder for me
to get any of the nutrients back out of the fat.
So, in terms of body composition,
in terms of recovery, managing inflammation
at a local and a systemic level is huge.
And at the local level, there's an appropriate
inflammation response that we need to respect.
It's actually very important for recovery,
very important for hypertrophy to occur.
We need it for maintaining the health
of all of our tissues, we need that inflammation to happen.
But we also need that inflammation to go away.
So, it's the meta-flammation, the chronic inflammation
that is actually gonna be
the thing that causes us issues down the road.
So, recapping, that inflammation
is gonna prevent cells from responding
to hormones like insulin, like cortisol, even androgens.
Where we have these systemic issues with that,
okay, if we have more insulin than we need
or that we should be producing,
we're gonna get that insulin-cortisol seesaw.
If I can't properly sense my androgens,
I can't recover, if I can't properly
sense my stress hormones,
I can't get fat out when I need it.
Ultimately, I'm just in a case
where I have less energy at a cellular
and a systemic level here, and I'm partitioning myself
from lean tissue to fat tissue in terms of storage,
and I'm partitioning myself to wasting
lean tissue instead of fat tissue
from an output standpoint.
Even at a neuromuscular level,
so we start to see inflammation in the nerve cells
or at the neuromuscular junction,
we actually see decreased ability to contract.
So, in terms of performance, in terms of the ability
to feel a muscle, the ability to execute,
the ability to produce intensity,
all of those things are gonna suffer quite a bit
in any tissues that are inflamed.
If I have systemic inflammation,
what that means is, during a workout,
even if that local tissue wasn't inflamed,
because my inflammation response is hyperreactive,
I'm going to lose neurological coordination
and intensity in that tissue,
likely much sooner in the workout,
meaning my tolerance to volume and fatigue
will be much lower on both a metabolic
and a neurological perspective,
ultimately really driving my performance down.
So I wanna make sure that, if I have,
really if you have any goal,
that you're reducing inflammation.
Inflammation is like stress in that,
if you can reduce that to the appropriate level,
like cortisol's not a bad guy,
but too much cortisol, not good.
Inflammation, we need it for recovery,
we need it for repair, but if it doesn't go away
or if we express too much of it inappropriately,
it's gonna disrupt all systems,
it's gonna make every training stimulus less trainable.
We need to make sure know how to avoid that.