Course No. 6
All cell nutrition must pass through the cell wall.

Your Cells Don't Have a Mouth.

Overview
Everything that exists in the food chain must be reduced to four types of nutrients before they can be used as food for a human cell, protein, vitamins, fat, and glucose. These nutrients fuel the energy that drives cell activity, a process known as metabolism. Problems related to these nutrients and the metabolism they support are where we get the terms metabolic syndrome and metabolic disease.
Even though the human food supply is extraordinarily diverse, with incalculable combinations and permutations of molecule sizes and shapes available, when it comes to feeding our cells, it all comes down to very few molecules that can pass through the cell membrane. This journey from this abundance to this select few is virtually ignored in nutrition discussions. Nutrition discussions primarily focus on the food supply to the mouth when we need to pay attention to the food supply to the cell membrane.
The Nutrition industry focuses on the outside food chain, which selects and transports healthy food from the source to your mouth. However, the inside food chain is significantly more complex, as it involves selecting and transporting healthy food from your mouth to inside your cells.
One group of microbes eats fiber and leaves starches, and the next group eats starch and leaves complex sugars, which feed the next group of microbes to produce simple sugars. One of the final products of this inside food chain is glucose, which is the focus of metabolic syndrome, obesity, and metabolic disease. This hierarchy of food conversion is what creates the inside ecosystem. Microbes eating the most complex fiber molecules are at the top, starch eaters in the middle, and sugar eaters at the end. The focus here is that these microbes are essential to your ability to feed your cells.
Actionable Knowledge
  • If you're like most people, it's a shock to learn that our quality of life depends on microbes in our digestive tract. Once this sinks in, it's reasonable to think we should definitely get to know these microbes better and take good care of them.
  • The human body has an elaborate food processing and distribution system to bring protein, vitamins, fats, and sugar in the form of glucose directly into contact with the walls of the human cells. However, regarding metabolic syndrome, obesity, and metabolic disease, the focus is on glucose. Avoiding and reversing metabolic syndrome, obesity, and metabolic disease requires just the right amount of glucose to pass through the cell wall to provide nutrition to the human cells.
  • When you look at nutrition at a cellular level, what goes in the cells counts, not what goes in the mouth. Nutrimatters favors the hormone/insulin model over the calorie balance model. It is more important to focus on avoiding bad food than eating good food since all food must be reduced to its primary molecules before entering a cell, no matter how "good" it was when it entered the mouth. That's right, broccoli and a brownie are the same in that both must be reduced to molecules of glucose before cells can use them as nutrition.
  • Like most life forms, these non-human microbes have preferred foods, produce diverse byproducts, prioritize reproduction, and thrive in various temperatures and environmental conditions, including a highly complex, cooperative, and competitive ecosystem of other microbes. As food molecules pass in and byproducts out of their cell membranes, think of each of these different species as a different filter that takes a complex molecule and converts it to another slightly less complex molecule, ready to be processed by the next microbe in the inside food chain.
Your Cells Don't Have a Mouth.
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Related Article
Your Cells Don't Have a Mouth.
Article 6

All food must be reduced to select molecules that can pass through cell membranes to nourish the cell.

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Previous Course

Cellularly, You're Only Half Human. About Course
Cellularly, You're Only Half Human.
Course 5
52% of the cells in your body have no human DNA.
The cells of microbes processing food in your digestive system outnumber your human cells. There are thousands of non-human species of microbes in incalculable combinations, each unique to the individual and having a different effect on the body. We know now that non-human microbes drive most of our body chemistry.

Next Course

If It's Not Protein or Fat, It's Sugar. About Course
If It's Not Protein or Fat, It's Sugar.
Course 7
All sugars, starches, & fibers must be reduced to glucose.
When not talking protein or fat, we use terms like sugar, starch, and fiber, but cells can only use glucose. Glucose is the simplest sugar. All sugars, starches, & fibers must become glucose before the cells can use it. From the point of view of cellular nutrition, all foods that are not protein or fat, are a simple sugar named glucose.