Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains that metabolic health depends on whether your body converts food into energy or stores it as inflammatory fat. You can be lean and still metabolically unhealthy. Humans evolved over 200,000 years in a low-chemical environment, but the past 150 years flooded us with processed oils, sugars, and chemicals our genes weren't built for.
when I say metabolic health, I'm mostly talking about what happens to food after we put it in our mouth. Is it used as fuel, and can we turn it into ATP, or are we going to store it as this inflammatory fat organ that's going to send out inflammatory cytokines and cause all kinds of issues down the road? And we've normalized in America being metabolically unhealthy, and one can be lean and still be metabolically unhealthy. Because I often think about this in an evolutionary perspective, I've come to think about it this way, that we've been on Earth as humans for something like 200,000 years, and it's only the last 150 that we've been exposed to this chemical landscape, to these non-food products that we're putting into our bodies. We have genes that adapted over, over this extremely long period of time that are trying to help us survive by seeking out oils and sugars and all these things. And now that they're so abundant, metabolic health is rare.
