Recap: We need to talk about metabolism | Shawn Stevenson & Tim Spector

Hello, and welcome to Zoe recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. We often hear people talk about metabolism, whether it's fast, slow, strong, or sluggish. It's one of those health buzzwords that's often said, but rarely understood. Yet understanding metabolism is essential. It influences how we process food, how much energy we have, and our risk of developing health conditions like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. In this episode, Sean Stephenson and Tim Spector cut through the confusion. Together, they'll explain what metabolism actually is and empower you to take control of yours. I'd love to start right at the very beginning. Sean, what is metabolism, and why does it matter? From a rudimentary perspective, it's converting food into energy. But that's looking at energy through this very isolated vanilla way. You know, there's this entire microcosm of events, and metabolism is really about the sum of all the different pieces that can create and generate energy, and that feed into each other. And for me, it's really based on that principle of energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be converted from one form into another. And so this energy exchange, even if we're looking at that very vanilla version of it, of food is creating energy, where does the food come from? What are the pieces and parts of the food that create the energy? And there are other things besides food that are getting converted into energy for us as well. And whether that's body fat, whether that is, you know, oxygen and how it relates to all these different pieces, there are literally millions of parts and inputs that determine metabolism. It isn't just food. And even from the perspective of food being used as energy, right, the endpoint being the mitochondria, which we'll get to, I'm sure, and talk a lot about, when we eat a food, it doesn't just become energy. It gets converted into a currency that our body can actually use. Our body runs on a certain currency, and so there's so much work involved in converting that food into the currency that our body can use. And sometimes that conversion doesn't happen. Right? Our body isn't converting everything that we eat into that currency that we're using. And, Sean, could you talk me through that maybe in a very simple way? Like, let's imagine I eat a piece of bread. Let's use actually a good example since you mentioned bread. Alright. There was this fascinating study published recently in the journal Food and Nutrition Research, and they had test subjects to and this is a crossover study, so everybody's doing both things. To consume a sandwich of either whole multigrain bread and cheddar cheese or a sandwich of what they deemed to be ultra processed food, which was white bread and cheese product. And here in The United States, like, Kraft is a big …