Is Metabolism the Key to Disease and Aging? By Deepak Chopra MD

Medical research enjoyed a major breakthrough over the past decade when two factors were isolated that link almost every major disorder: inflammation and stress. Neither came as a total surprise. Inflammation was long known as a paradoxical process in the body.

Stress is more clear-cut, since it has always been associated with harmful effects in the body and is linked to many disorders from depression and anxiety to hypertension and lowered immunity. But a breakthrough occurred when it was suddenly realized that the culprits in disease and aging were not acute, dramatic instances of inflammation and stress. Instead, the damage to the body is low-level and steady, a chronic condition that does its damage slowly at the cellular level. It turns out that aging and chronic disease actually begin almost invisibly at the cellular level long before any symptoms appear, over a span of years or most probably decades.

Breakthroughs are conceptual, opening a door into new paradigms.What lies ahead is unknown and open to more breakthroughs. This is where modern physics enters the picture. At the quantum level, far deeper than medical research has explored, there is an exchange of energy, which is broadly classified as metabolism, from the Greek word for “change.” The change is of energy that every cell needs to sustain itself. You might think that this is like stoking a furnace with coal, but such isn’t the case. There are many mysteries about metabolism that require a quantum explanation.

•How do cells know how much energy they need? •How do cells communicate with each other to balance their energy needs and synchronize with one another? •What’s the secret of the complex molecular machinery that regulates the happenings in a cell? •Where is the timer or clock that moves energy through every phase in our bodies from sleep to waking to vigorous activity?

These turn out to be quantum questions for the simple reason that chemistry and biology can’t solve them using the time-honored metaphor of the body as a machine. At the basis of the laws governing energy is entropy, the tendency for heat to move from a hotter place to a colder one.

The greatest mystery about metabolic energy, however, is negative entropy, the state where heat builds up rather than flowing away, and the human body is a miracle at doing this. Metabolism is a process of renewing every cell’s energy supply, not just offsetting the heat our bodies give off, but trapping energy to deploy it, not simply to keep us warm, but to accomplish the amazing processes behind hearing, seeing, and thinking. entropy is, consider something as simple as the speed of energy moving from a warmer to a colder place. It is this that creates the so-called arrow of time. In a static universe, entropy might be so slow that change occurs too gradually to create the passage of time. Our universe is so dynamic that time and entropy are intimately linked, which is also true of our bodies.

In scientific terminology, nanoscale molecular motors drive the efficient energy transfer in all cells. It might be that inflammation and stress are distortions of energy transfer, slower than normal, which causes the warmth and red skin associated with an inflamed wound or infection. Chronic stress response is the fundamental basis for the amplification of all chronic disease states.

At bottom anxiety and depression, which massively drain a person of energy and the vitality of life, are inextricably linked. They inherently drive the chronic stress response. It is this perspective that views chronic diseases as metabolic disorders, whatever the medical diagnosis might be (obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, etc.). Accordingly, the evolutionarily fight-or-flight response, when it stops being shortterm in emergencies and becomes long-term in our metabolism, results in pathological processes of inflammation and stress affecting the cells.

Physics, to turn to a more technical explanation, would say that inflammation is like the “de-coherence of quantum physical systems.” In layman’s terms, the tiny quantum motors that drive metabolism must remain orderly and connected. Quantum processes level the playing field for everything, not just our cells but hundreds of biological clocks, thousands of chemical reactions per second, hormonal cycles, and the life cycles of the micro-organisms known as the microbiome.

The recent Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery of the molecular clocks embedded in all our cells emphasizes the importance of living in harmony with the circadian cycles of the Earth. They synchronize all those tiny cellular time-keepers.

At that point a complex new horizon appears, known as the “fitness landscape.” In evolutionary terms, some species thrive and evolve while others reach a dead end and remain the same or become extinct. Darwin’s theory of evolution broke this down into two factors, getting enough food to survive and finding a mate in order to reproduce and carry on the species. But modern evolutionary biology deals in what is happening at the level of genes, because ultimately, survival is a genetic process. Your own genes are affected by every experience you and your ancestors have ever had. The same is true of every species, so a fitness landscape attempts mathematically to envision every factor that might create changes in genes over time. Imagine a saber-tooth tiger faced with stresses in its environment and if a condition appears that the tiger’s genes cannot adapt to (known as a bifurcation point), disaster awaits. In our bodies a major bifurcation occurs between being healthy and being sick and aging.Enter the field of quantum metabolism. It provides the rules of the road that quantum motors follow. The rules of energy transfer are being violated when metabolic inefficiency appears, leading to disease and aging.

It turns out that the most important metabolic parameters of the human body are: redox (the rise and fall of oxidation rates), free energy, and acidbase balance. These factors are maintained in a narrow physiological range in healthy states. The deterioration from health to disease involves stress pushing these key metabolic parameters out of their narrow ranges.There are many ways that the deterioration might start, in something as basic, chemically speaking, as oxidation rates. Small, localized imbalance can eventually bring down the whole body.

The common thread in this complex train of investigation is this: physiological fitness declines as energy is lost from the system. This results in the degradation of structure and function in cells and the body as a whole.

Quantum processes determine, regulate, and control changes of state, so understanding them can allow us to forestall disease and aging at the deepest level. Aging in terms of symptoms is personal, unique, and unpredictable. Quantum processes aren’t. A much-needed foundation is provided akin to how DNA and gene mapping gave a foundation to evolution and inheritance.

Because it triggers disorder in a cascade through molecules, cells, tissues, organs, and the whole body, stress is critical in the fitness landscape human beings occupy, along with all other living creatures. Stress response, when viewed technically, is a measure that can be quantified of a person’s, or a species’, evolving physiological fitness.

In human physiology, unpredictable changes in thecourseof a diseasemightarise due to an astonishing complexity of molecular interactions. Even modern physics finds itself challenged by thiscomplexity.If we are to reach the cherished goal of a truly precise medicine,massive amounts of data are being accumulated by genomics, metabolomics, proteomics, etc.,allowing usto rely on computers and artificial intelligencetoclarify the essential things we need to know.

The human body is literally being reinvented before our eyes.Insights from modern physics are needed to realize the full potential of this emerging paradigm shift.Yet without a doubt it is proceeding and accelerating every day.