How Does The Body Make Energy?

What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Fibromyalgia Fatigue: The Powerful Program That Helps You Boost Your Energy and Reclaim Your Life
by R. Paul St. Amand, M.D., Claudia Craig Marek, M.A.

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It's much easier to understand what's gone awry if you first grasp how your body makes energy. The first thing that's needed is fuel, and our cells grab up bloodborne molecules derived from what we eat in order to make it. Not all foods are treated equally by the body, and their energy values are quite different.

But basically, after digestion, breakdown products surge through the system. Cells take what they need and direct this fuel to all kinds of hard-laboring enzymes. Various internal compartments process each remnant into usable snacks that are resurrected as energy. Huge amounts of high-energy phosphates are also extracted and wedded to certain proteins that should ideally empower anything your body wants to do. All of this happens in thousandths of seconds, staccatolike, until all required tasks are completed. When an obstacle springs up anywhere along this series of biochemical steps, however, you simply cannot produce the energy you need.

We use 10 to 20 percent of our foodstuffs to create the supportive structures of our tissues. These become the fabrics that hold us together and contour our individually unique external appearance. Other frameworks shape the internal organs that we can easily identify at a glance. The millions of cells within those organs must have walls that allow them to lean on their neighbors for maintaining their relative positions. Ever smaller, often submicroscopic membranes define compartments housing the metabolic machinery inside those cells.

There are even filamentlike highways where traffic moves along prescribed routes to deliver basic materials or finished products to and from those minuscule factories. All this fundamental construction work is needed to allow even the tiniest amount of movement. It also creates the dimensions enclosing billions of minuscule metabolic factories that seize the energy stored in the remaining 80 or 90 percent of our foods.

To me pain is such a subjective experience that it's often difficult to know for sure whether I was feeling better or not. For a long time, observing the state of my kitchen was the method I used to tell how I was feeling. My kitchen had been in a constant state of turmoil (not to mention the rest of my house) for two years before I started the protocol. I was too tired to wash up after dinner, load and unload the dishwasher, et cetera. The sink and the counters were always cluttered with dirty dishes, and it seemed like the wastebasket was always full. Not a pretty picture. After a few months on guai I actually had the energy to take care of all those little tasks and clear my sink and counters. From then on, I used the state of my kitchen as a gauge-clean and tidy meant I was feeling pretty good ...dirty and cluttered meant I was cycling hard. Now after three years, my whole house gets cleaned....
-Nancy B., Cleveland, Ohio

Like humans, all living things-plants and other animals- gobble up energy at a furious pace. Luckily for us and thanks to their chlorophyll content, plants can make their own energy directly from sunlight. They extract carbon dioxide floating in the atmosphere, much of which was exhaled by humans and the animals. Chemically trapping this simple gas, plants convert it into various carbohydrates. Thus, plants are the source of the sugars and starches that will, in turn, nourish the animals that consume them. It's a great relationship-at least for us at the top end of the food chain!

Humans generally don't eat only plants, though. We also eat other animals, a trait we share with them and with only a few carnivorous plants. Though it's a rather barbaric system, the benefits are positive for our survival, albeit one-sided.

We're therefore blessed with two food sources, vegetable and animal. The latter provides most of our protein needs and the former, carbohydrates and fiber. Both are sources of fat. All our energy for motor activities, thinking, breathing, and healing comes from our successfully preying upon the other inhabitants sharing our planet. Let's look more closely at how our bodies convert these once living tissues into power. Remnants of the three basic fuels-that is, fat, carbohydrate, and protein-are fated for destruction in energy-generating plants inside each cell, known as mitochondria.

Every cell in the body has multiple generators and, depending on the tissue, may be quite densely populated with them. Here, wonderful concoctions are derived from the energy stores that nature instills into our foodstuffs. Gearlike enzymes working within the mitochondria process and restructure whatever is needed. Waste is produced but is expediently disposed of as two simple residues: water, and the gas carbon dioxide. From these magical activities, the currency of energy, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), is born.

The industrial prowess of a cell is second to nothing else we know, and it certainly meets strenuous demands. There is unrelenting wear and tear, much like what occurs with human-made machinery. As a result, a constant regeneration process goes on day and night. Essential chemicals must be imported for this reconstruction. Chromosomes use a lot of material while repeatedly dividing and creating new daughter cells.

They must also direct all the cell's production lines. Eggs and sperms are generated and stuffed full of coded information in preparation for reproduction. All the while human arms and legs move, support, tug, or lift. Livers sort, store, or produce goods even while overseeing removal of toxins that periodically invade the system. Kidneys identify, purify, and purge the delivered by-products of metabolism, making instant determina-tions of what to save or excrete. Hair and nails grow, eyes blink, and hearts beat. Unlike the intestines, muscles, or bones, which are permitted intermittent, partial rest, the cells of the heart, brain, and blood are never awarded such luxury. Above all, the brain is continuously thinking and choreographing much of this biologic dance.

In every cell in our bodies, signals are coming in and out from every direction. These interconnections and functions are not luxuries. They are the very necessities for staying alive. This physiologic frenzy and perpetual activity requires energy. Most of the time cells rise to the challenge.

About the Author

R. PAUL ST. AMAND, M.D., is a graduate of Tufts University School of Medicine. He has been on the teaching staff at the Los Angeles Harbor/UCLA Hospital, Department of Endocrinology for over forty-three years. He is currently an assistant clinical professor at the UCLA School of Medicine. Dr. St. Amand discovered guaifenesins use as a treatment for fibromyalgia, and his work is cited wherever the substance is mentioned.

CLAUDIA CRAIG MAREK, M.A., is a medical researcher tutored, trained, and taught on the job as Dr. St. Amand's assistant. She has co-written medical papers with Dr. St. Amand and has counseled fibromyalgia patients on the use of guaifenesin for the past seven years. She, too, is a former fibromyalgia patient, and is a leading patient advocate.