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We’ll start with some “body basics”. The body is a living machine. The skeleton is a rigid frame work of organic rock, and the muscles are living elastic pulleys that move the skeleton in various ways. Every cell of your body, from hair follicles straight down to the osteocyte within bone (cells within bones that maintain the hard bone), uses energy to complete their daily routines. In order for hair to grow, it must have the building blocks for keratin production (the protein that hair is composed of), as well as the energy to drive the mechanisms for said production. For bones to remodel and grow, a process that takes place every day of your life, osteoblasts (cells that produce bone) must have phosphorus and calcium ions required to create the new bone, and osteoclasts (cells that resorb bone), need energy to produce the enzymes to dissolve the existing bone into usable ions.
Energy is required in massive quantities, in order to maintain a healthy living body. This energy, within the body, is known as ATP, or Adenosine Tri-Phosphate. Every single muscle fiber requires multiple molecules of ATP in order to contract. This includes every fiber of your heart, skeletal muscle, all organ linings, as well as the middle layer of every artery. The body needs MILLIONS of ATP every second in order to maintain existence.
Given that the body is 65-70% water that must be maintained within borders, as we are much more complex than a puddle of water. Every cell of the human body is surrounded by fatty acids, to maintain the cells integrity and prevent their watery insides from floating away. Oils repel water, so if you have a ball of fatty oil, surrounding water, that water cannot escape, but the ball can change in shape and size. This is the extremely simplified way to look at each cell of the human body. Nearly every cell is a small “water balloon” surrounded by fat.
There is a structural law of the body, known as Wolf’s law. In order for the body to move, the bones have to be able to resist the force of the muscle pulling on the bone (or else the muscle would break the bone it’s trying to move). This means, bones/joints that aren’t frequently used, will weaken over time, while bones/joints that are frequently used, will become strengthen over time. For example, a boxer’s hand/wrist will become extremely dense, to resist the force repeatedly applied to them, as the athlete trains; while in contrast to the boxer, a patient who is in a coma will slowly lose bone mass, due to the bed-ridden nature of their injury. The human body automatically adjusts to the stresses of life, over its lifespan to best repel and resist the environment around it. If there is no stress to resist, the body will accommodate and lower its “threshold”. As stress increases, the threshold can be raised, if the body adapts properly. This is the process by which some athletes can take seemingly bone crushing hits in a sport, while others can take a simply fall and break a large bone.
Here are some numbers for thought. The body is composed of approximately 23 trillion cells (23,000,000,000,000). That number is substantially higher when synergistic bacteria (the bacteria that live on us/within us and aid with digestion and eat other more harmful bacteria) are taken into account. These bacteria account for nearly 250 trillion cells, both inside and outside the body. The human gut alone has 10s of trillions of bacterial cells, which can account for 1-3% of our total body weight, alone.
The temperature required to heat 1 cubic centimeter of water 1* Celsius, is 1 calorie. Lower case “calorie” is a measure of thermal unit. When converted to nutritional terms, a capital C is used, for Calories. In nutritional texts, Calories, is referred to as kilocalories, or kcal(s), to avoid the capitalization confusion. A kilocalorie is simply 1 Calorie, or 1,000 calories. This is still a representative of heat, as the body produces heat upon digestion of foods and utilization of energy. In this regard, if you eat 1000 Calories of food (approximately 2 candy bars), assuming complete digestion, the body will have produced 1,000,000 calories of heat.
It takes 3600 Calories (3.6 Million heat calories) stored to create 1 pound of body fat, as well as that same amount of energy spent to burn 1 pound of stored body fat.
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Authored by Christopher J. Herrington, DC 2014
Page updated 6/1/2014
Information retrieved from:
Katsilambros, N. (2010). Clinical nutrition in practice. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell.
Rolfes, S. R., & Pinna, K. (2009). Understanding normal and clinical nutrition (8th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.
Wardlaw, G. M., & Smith, A. M. (2007). Contemporary nutrition (6th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.