Get your groove back: More energy for life

by Barb Jarmoska

The Freshlife Wellness Services team provides individualized nutritional consultations for scores of clients of all ages and both genders. As a part of the intake process, each client is asked to fill out a seven-page form that includes this question, “In order of importance, what are the top three reasons you are seeking this nutritional consultation?” The number of people who write “lack of energy” on line No.1 is staggering!

Where there’s life, there’s energy. All living things require a continual supply of energy in order to function. It takes energy to operate muscles, extract wastes, make new cells, heal wounds, even to think. Energy drives the myriad of processes that keep you alive – processes that occur both inside and outside your awareness. On a cellular level, the energy it takes to build new bone cells is no different from that required to push a grocery cart or walk a mile. Conscious or unconscious, it’s all the same; energy is the capacity to do work and each of the 100 trillion cells in your body has crucial work to do.

Animals obtain their energy by oxidation of foods; plants do so by trapping sunlight to produce chlorophyll. However, before the energy can be used, it is first transformed into a form that the organism can handle easily. This special carrier of human energy is the molecule known as adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.

When you see the prefix “tri,” you think three. In the case of ATP, a single adenosine molecule is attached to a string of three phosphates. The phosphate groups are held to each other by very high-energy chemical bonds. This trio ofsingle file phosphates is the key to the activity of ATP. When signaled by an enzyme, the end phosphate breaks away and energy is released. Have you ever smacked your hand or maybe even hit yourself in the face while attempting to pull two objects apart at a place where they have bonded? When they finally come apart, the force you have been applying becomes an unexpected source of energy. Although this analogy is not completely parallel, it gives you a sense of what happens, especially if you’re old enough to remember trying to pull those 1950s “pop-it” beads apart!

When you are resting and sleeping, the reverse reaction takes place. At rest, phosphates that have split off reattach to form a new ATP molecule.

Because of its ability to constantly release energy and be restored, ATP is not unlike a rechargeable battery. Put a battery in a flashlight and the flashlight stays on until the battery is depleted. Insert the battery back into the charger and it’s ready to power up again the next day.

It’s not a stretch to say that we humans have been created with our own rechargeable batteries: ATP acts as a chemical battery, storing energy when it is not needed and able to release it instantly when you require it.

Your ability to release and recharge ATP requires fuel and your fuel comes from the foods you eat. Food is absolutely essential to this entire, complex process. The quality of your food is directly linked to the quality and quantity of your energy output.

In his most recent book “In Defense of Food,” (see review) author Michael Pollan offers an insightful summary of what has occurred in America over the course of the last several decades. “Most of what we’re consuming today is not food… but ‘edible food-like substances’ – no longer the products of nature but of food science. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients and common sense by confusion,”Pollan writes. He proposes a new (yet very old) answer to the question of what we should eat. He sums it up in seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. I offer similar advice in my nutritional seminars – in even fewer words. “Eat foods God made.” I agree with Michael. The short answer (to the supposedly very complex and confusing question of what we should eat to be maximally healthy) is the best answer.

When your lunch comes from a can or a box or a plastic container; when your dinner is something removed from a freezer and placed in a microwave; when you open your car window to receive your supper from a teenager sliding open his window to pass the food out to you, you’re in trouble. Your energy level is one of the first places this trouble begins to show up.

If you are seeking more energy and enhanced vitality, start with your fuel. Whole, unprocessed, organically grown, chemical-free foods have an ability to provide the basis for energy production that can never be matched by anything produced in a food science laboratory, much less a fast food restaurant. Eat simply and your cells will simply and wonderfully do what they are made to do – create energy.