The Onion Of Life. An Evolution Based Framework for Interpreting Molecular Biology (Part 1)

The job of molecular biologists – the ones who discover things like leptin and AMPK and superoxide dismutase – is to figure out the genetics and enzyme pathways behind it all. I’ve worked as a molecular biologist. It’s admittedly been awhile, but I can tell you that they’re very interested in the interactions between enzymes …

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Antioxidants Cause Inflammation

The human body has multiple ways of eliminating the hydrogen peroxide that is generated during metabolism. Glutathione and Thioredoxin rely on a steady stream of NADPH to eliminate the peroxide. This causes the NAD+/NADH pool to become more oxidized due to NADPH being regenerated from NADH by the mitochondrial enzyme NNT. In short, peroxide removal …

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Reductive Stress Causes Oxidative Stress (Take 2)

With every new paper that comes out it becomes clearer that reductive stress is the root cause of oxidative stress. I tried to explain this before, but I’m not sure how well I did. Here’s how it works: Some Initiating Event There is an initiating event which pushes the cell into reductive stress, as defined …

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Sustainable Pork and Metabolic Health in China, featuring Coprophagy: Livestock Agriculture, Part 1

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed that there is controversy surrounding the value of livestock agriculture and its end-products: milk, eggs and meat.   Detractors argue that livestock agriculture is inefficient – livestock eat grain that could be fed to humans.  The condition that the animals live in is inhumane, there is …

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Reductive Stress Gives You The Munchies by Activating D6D

This post comes out a recent conversation I had with Tucker Goodrich and David Gornoski (not live yet, I’ll post it when its out). Tucker was arguing that obesity was caused by endogenous cannabinoids that are made from linoleic acid. I was arguing that obesity is caused by reductive stress. As I pointed out on …

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Reductive stress is the POTENTIAL for oxidative stress

Is it lazy to just post my own tweet and call it an article? You decide. Reducive stress(RS) vs Oxidative stress (OS): they are not opposites, RS is the POTENTIAL for OS. Reduced things (NADH, NADPH, GSH) are electron donors. If they give those electrons to O2 it makes superoxide (O2-). You can't make O2- …

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How Stearic Acid Battles Reductive Stress; The Banana Milkshake Study Redux

Since I published The Croissant Diet there has been much interest in the scientific article I call “The banana milkshake study“​1​. The study showed that ingestion of 24g of stearic acid in a banana shake after a two day low fat diet caused mitochondrial fusion and a drop in circulating acylcarnitines. We are very interested …

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PUFA as an obesogen; How Seed Oils Cause Reductive Stress, Part VI

Obesogens are environmental toxins that make you fat. A commonality among them is that they activate receptors such as hormone receptors, androgen receptors, and perhaps most importantly, receptors in the nuclear receptor superfamily. Of course, if certain chemicals can make you fat, you have to really question the calories-in-calories-out theory of obesity. Certain chemicals can …

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Seed oils make lean people behave like fat people, metabolically speaking; How seed oils cause reductive stress, part V

In this series, I have argued that consuming seed oils causes reductive stress in the mitochondria as defined by high levels of acetyl-CoA and NADH. You could also call this “too much fuel” in the mitochondira, AKA a flooded engine. If I am correct, it should be easy to demonstrate in the short term that …

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