What metabolism actually is, where energy comes out of a cell, and what is inside the MetaPWR system and Mito2Max β read as chemistry.
~13 min read
Almost everything the word gets used for is one narrow corner of it. Metabolism has become a synonym for how easily a person stays lean β a dial someone is born with set high or low, which the right product might turn up. That is not what the word means, and the distance between that picture and the real one is why this lesson exists.
Metabolism is the whole set of chemical reactions that keep a body alive. Every one of them β the bonds broken in a mouthful of bread, the bonds made when a muscle fibre is repaired overnight, the dismantling of a protein that has finished its work, all at once in thirty trillion cells.
Catabolism β taking apart
Large molecules broken into smaller ones, releasing the energy held in their bonds β digesting a meal, drawing on stored fat, breaking down a worn-out enzyme. It supplies the energy and the components everything else is built from.
Anabolism β putting together
Smaller molecules assembled into larger ones, which costs energy rather than releasing it: new muscle protein, a hormone, glucose stored as glycogen, the membrane of a new cell.
The two run at the same time, in the same cell, without pause. What shifts across a day is only the balance.
Metabolic rate β the energy a body gets through in a day β is a real quantity explained by unglamorous things: how much metabolically active tissue there is, what it is doing, and how much the person moved. The metabolic system page names the organs it runs through: cells and their mitochondria, the liver, the pancreas, the muscles. None is the seat of metabolism. Metabolism is what all of them are doing.
Follow a mouthful of food far enough in and you arrive at a structure a micrometre long, wrapped in two membranes, inside almost every cell you have. How many a cell carries depends on what it does: a red blood cell has none, a liver cell one to two thousand, and in heart muscle they can occupy a third of the volume. Getting the energy out takes three stages.
Four complexes sit in the inner membrane, numbered I to IV. NADH hands its electrons to Complex I, FADHβ to Complex II. From either entry point they pass to coenzyme Q, a fat-soluble molecule that drifts within the membrane, on to Complex III; cytochrome c, on the outer face, takes them to Complex IV, which hands them to oxygen. Oxygen takes two electrons and two protons and becomes water β which is why you breathe.
Electrons falling down that chain release energy at three of the four stops, and the complexes spend it pumping protons out of the matrix. That gradient is stored energy, as water held behind a wall is, and there is one easy way back in.
ATP synthase is a rotary motor, and the word is meant literally. Protons flowing back through it turn a ring of subunits in the membrane; the ring turns a shaft; the shaft rotates inside a head in the matrix whose three catalytic sites it deforms in turn β one binding ADP and phosphate, the next squeezing them into a bond, the third releasing the finished ATP. Three ATP per revolution, hundreds a second. One glucose yields around thirty to thirty-two ATP all told; glycolysis alone gives two, and that factor of fifteen is why the mitochondrion exists.
Diagram to come
Cross-section of the inner mitochondrial membrane running horizontally, matrix below, intermembrane space above. Four complexes straddle it left to right: I, II (smaller, sitting lower, not spanning the full membrane), III, IV. Coenzyme Q drawn as a small circle INSIDE the membrane between I/II and III with a sideways double-headed arrow β it must visibly sit in the oily layer, not above or below it. Cytochrome c drawn ON TOP of the membrane between III and IV, also with a sideways arrow. One continuous electron path traced as a distinct line: NADH into I, FADHβ into II, through Q to III, through cytochrome c to IV, ending at oxygen plus protons becoming water. Separately, in clearly different visual weight, upward proton arrows from I, III and IV only β NOT from II, which is the commonest error in drawings of this. Protons accumulate densely above the membrane. At the right, ATP synthase spans the membrane with a visible rotor ring in the membrane, a shaft, and a three-lobed head in the matrix; protons flow DOWN through it, a curved rotation arrow sits on the head, ADP and phosphate enter, ATP leaves. Two things must be unmistakable: electrons and protons travel different routes, and the gradient is what ATP synthase spends.
The scale first. An adult makes and spends fifty to seventy-five kilograms of ATP across a day from a standing pool of about 250 grams β every molecule built, spent and rebuilt something like a thousand times before the day is out. A river, not a reservoir. Then read the chain again and notice what the proteins are made of, because it is not only protein: almost every step above has a small non-protein helper at its active centre, and almost every one of those is a vitamin or a mineral.
Riboflavin (Bβ)
Complex I carries a flavin mononucleotide at its entry point, Complex II a flavin adenine dinucleotide. FADHβ itself is riboflavin with electrons on it, and so are the flavins in the enzymes that take fatty acids apart.
Niacin (Bβ)
NADβΊ is built from niacin. Every NADH delivering electrons into Complex I is a niacin derivative doing the carrying, from a limited pool that must be handed back and reused continuously.
Thiamin (Bβ) and pantothenic acid (Bβ )
Thiamin, as thiamine pyrophosphate, is the cofactor of pyruvate dehydrogenase β the gate between glycolysis and the citric acid cycle β and of alpha-ketoglutarate dehydrogenase inside the cycle. Pantothenic acid is the backbone of coenzyme A, so every acetyl-CoA entering that cycle carries one.
Iron, copper and magnesium
The complexes are studded with iron-sulfur clusters and haem groups, and Complex IV holds two copper centres besides β electrons are handed, literally, from metal atom to metal atom. And ATP almost never works as bare ATP: it functions as a magnesium complex, ATP synthase included.
Which gives the fact worth carrying out of this section. A shortfall in one of these is not experienced as a shortfall in that nutrient. It is experienced wherever the enzyme that needed it was working β and these enzymes work in every cell that makes energy, which is all of them. That is why tiredness is the least informative thing a body can report: dozens of different shortfalls, and a great many things that are not shortfalls at all, arrive at the same sensation by different routes.
Each has its own page: riboflavin, niacin, thiamin, pantothenic acid, iron and magnesium.
A body runs mainly on two fuels and is almost never running on only one. Carbohydrate is digested to glucose, then burned now, stored as glycogen, or converted into something else. Glycogen is glucose polymerised into a branched tree β quick to take apart, because branches present many loose ends.
The stores are small and not interchangeable. A liver holds around a hundred grams of glycogen, the muscles perhaps four hundred: roughly two thousand kilocalories, a dayβs worth at the outside. Liver glycogen serves the whole body, because the liver alone carries the enzyme that takes off the last phosphate and releases free glucose into the blood. Your quadriceps cannot lend glucose to your brain.
Fat is stored as triglyceride, and the capacity is of a different order: nine kilocalories a gram against four, in quantities measured in kilograms. Reaching it takes more steps β a fatty acid is carried across the inner membrane by the carnitine shuttle, then cut two carbons at a time in beta-oxidation, each pass releasing acetyl-CoA into the citric acid cycle and NADH and FADHβ into the chain. Palmitic acid, sixteen carbons, yields something over a hundred ATP. Glucose yields thirty.
So why not run on fat all the time? Because yield is not the only thing that matters β rate matters too. Fat is the denser fuel and the slower to mobilise. At rest most of the fuel is fat; as effort rises the share from carbohydrate rises with it. The body is not choosing a favourite. It is meeting a rate. Which fuel is in use also tracks what has recently been eaten: after a meal insulin rises and the traffic runs towards storage; between meals it reverses.
Diagram to come
Two columns converging on one point. Left: carbohydrate in a meal, an arrow down to glucose, then three arrows fanning out β burned now, liver glycogen, muscle glycogen. The two glycogen boxes must differ visibly in what leaves them: the liver box has an arrow OUT to a blood vessel and onward to a brain icon; the muscle box has a short arrow curling back into the same muscle, with a blocked symbol on any arrow leaving it. That asymmetry is the teaching point of the column. Right: fat, from the meal or from adipose tissue, an arrow to fatty acid, then a narrow gate drawn across the mitochondrial membrane labelled as the carnitine gate β it must read as a restriction, narrower than the arrows either side. Past it, beta-oxidation drawn as a chain being clipped repeatedly two carbons at a time, with acetyl-CoA units dropping out. Both columns converge on a single acetyl-CoA box, which feeds the citric acid cycle, which feeds an arrow off-frame to the electron transport chain. Two size-comparison bars along the bottom, drawn honestly to scale against each other: glycogen about one day, fat stores weeks.
The phrase is used loosely enough to be worth pinning down. In the research literature it describes how readily a body switches between fuels according to what is available and what is being asked of it β running mostly on fat when fasted and at rest, then shifting cleanly to carbohydrate when a meal arrives or effort rises.
It has a real measurement behind it, which is what makes it an idea rather than a slogan. In a laboratory a person breathes into an analyser and the ratio of carbon dioxide produced to oxygen consumed is calculated. That ratio sits near 0.7 when the fuel is almost entirely fat and near 1.0 when it is almost entirely carbohydrate, because the two kinds of molecule carry different amounts of oxygen to begin with. Flexibility shows up as a large, prompt swing between the fasted state and the fed one.
Two limits follow. The measurement is a laboratory procedure and not a sensation β there is nothing a person can feel that corresponds to it. And the term names a characteristic of a whole person over time, shaped mostly by how much they move, how much muscle they carry, and what and when they eat. It is a description of a state, not a lever you can pull. Used loosely it becomes a word for selling things.
Before any of the products: what doTERRA sells differs across its sixty-five markets, and formulations differ too. The label on your own bottle is the authority for what is in it β reading a supplement label is the lesson on doing that properly.
Mito2Max is named for the structure above, and two of its ingredients sit at named points in that machinery β CoQ10 and L-carnitine, both compounds a body makes for itself.
CoQ10 β the mobile carrier
A quinone head that accepts and donates electrons, on a tail of ten isoprene units β the 10 β anchoring it in the oily middle of the membrane so it drifts sideways but never away. The ferry between Complexes I and II and Complex III. Fat-soluble, so taken with a meal.
L-carnitine β the gate
Made from lysine and methionine, in a synthesis needing vitamin C, iron, vitamin Bβ and niacin β so carnitine sits downstream of four other nutrients before it exists. Long-chain fatty acids cannot cross the inner membrane attached to CoA, so carnitine is swapped in outside and out again inside. Red meat is the densest dietary source, so intakes run lower on a plant-based diet β a statement about intake, not about a problem.
What a nutrient like this can honestly be said to do is take part in normal metabolic function. Covering a shortfall is different from adding a capacity, and nothing here claims the second.
What a supplement is not
No supplement on this page replaces food, replaces movement, or replaces professional medical care. Those three are the base; the products sit on top of them, and the order does not reverse. If you are pregnant, nursing, under medical care or taking medication, the first conversation is with your healthcare practitioner, not with a label.
MetaPWR Assist is a capsule, and the nutrient library lists two things in it: green tea extract and L-carnitine again β the same molecule at the same gate.
The leaves of *Camellia sinensis* are rich in catechins β flavan-3-ols, among the functional group families β of which the most abundant is epigallocatechin gallate. An extract is leaves heated soon after picking, so the plantβs own enzymes never oxidise those catechins into the darker molecules of black tea.
Most of what has been described about how it interacts with enzymes and receptors comes from laboratory work on cells in a dish, at concentrations well above anything reached in human blood β which is not the same as what happens in a person. In a person, catechins are absorbed poorly, the gut wall and liver attach sulfate and methyl groups within minutes, and gut bacteria transform much of the rest. What circulates is mostly not the molecule on the label.
This lesson is not going to tell you what taking that capsule will do for you: the honest description stops at the ingredient and its role in normal physiology. What can be said is practical β a concentrated extract is not a cup of tea, it is taken with food, and it carries caffeine unless the label states otherwise. Anyone under medical care or taking medication should raise it with their practitioner first, because botanical extracts are where interactions are easiest to miss.
MetaPWR Advantage behaves least like a supplement and most like a food: collagen peptides and branched-chain amino acids β protein rather than micronutrient, arriving in grams rather than milligrams.
The branched-chain amino acids are leucine, isoleucine and valine: three of the nine a body cannot make, named for the forked side chain they share. The liver carries very little of the enzyme that begins their breakdown, so these three largely pass straight through it and are handled in muscle instead.
Leucine does something the other two do not. Besides being a building block it is a signal: cells read its concentration as part of the decision about whether to start assembling protein. The sensing machinery converges on a regulator called mTORC1, and the signal is generally described as saturating around two to three grams of leucine in a single meal β about what twenty to thirty grams of a good-quality protein supplies. A brick and a message in the same molecule.
Collagen peptides are hydrolysed β cut enzymatically into fragments of a few thousand daltons β so they dissolve into a cold drink instead of setting into a gel. The sources are bovine hide, or fish skin.
Collagen is the most abundant protein in a mammal β near a third of all the protein in you β and its structure is unusually strict. Three polypeptide chains wind around one another into a triple helix, each chain repeating a three-residue pattern: glycine, then usually proline, then often hydroxyproline. Glycine sits at every third position for a mechanical reason. The centre of the helix is extremely crowded, and glycine β whose entire side chain is a single hydrogen atom β is the only amino acid small enough to fit there. Put anything larger at one of those positions and the helix cannot close.
Hydroxyproline is not eaten as hydroxyproline. It is made after the chain is assembled, by an enzyme that hydroxylates proline residues already in place, and that enzyme requires vitamin C and iron to work at all β which is where the structural importance of vitamin C to connective tissue comes from. Different tissues then use different types: type I in skin, bone and tendon, type II in cartilage, type III in vessel walls and organs.
Which brings the question everybody actually wants answered. If you swallow collagen, do you get collagen? The digestive tract does not care what a protein used to be. Proteases cut it into amino acids and short peptides, those cross the gut wall, and the body builds from the resulting pool whatever it is currently building. There is no addressing system returning a fragment to the tissue it came from. Eaten collagen is, in the first instance, simply protein.
What keeps the question genuinely open is narrower than the marketing suggests. A few very short peptides containing hydroxyproline β prolyl-hydroxyproline and hydroxyprolyl-glycine, two and three residues long β resist being cut all the way down and have been detected intact in human blood after collagen is eaten, and laboratory work suggests peptides of this kind can act as signals to fibroblasts, the cells that build connective tissue. A real finding, worth knowing. It is also unsettled: detecting a peptide in blood is not the same as showing it does something in a tissue, much of the signalling work is on cells in a dish rather than in a person, and the human trials are small, varied in design, and frequently funded by the people selling the powder.
What is not in doubt is less exciting and more useful. Collagen is an incomplete protein: no tryptophan at all, and low in several other essential amino acids, which makes it a poorer protein gram for gram than whey, egg or a well-built plant blend. If total protein intake is short, collagen is a poor way to fix it; if total intake is adequate, that adequacy is doing most of the work regardless of source. Having enough protein matters more than which protein β which is also why the formulation carries branched-chain amino acids alongside the collagen rather than collagen alone. Protein and greens covers what adequate looks like.
Diagram to come
Left third: a collagen triple helix drawn as three strands wound together, with a magnified callout of one turn showing the repeating three-residue pattern β glycine drawn conspicuously smaller than the other two residues and sitting at the crowded centre. The size difference must read at a glance; it is the reason glycine is there. Middle third: an arrow for swallowing, then enzyme or scissor symbols cutting the helix apart into a scatter of individual amino acids and short peptides falling into one large shared pool, drawn as a common reservoir feeding several unrelated outputs β a muscle, an enzyme, a hormone β so that nothing routes back to where it came from. Right third, visually separated and clearly marked as the open question: two named short peptides surviving intact, entering a blood vessel, reaching a fibroblast β with the final arrow drawn as a DASHED line ending in a question mark. The dashed line is the point of the panel and must not be drawn solid.
The oil the system is named after is a blend of five, and reading it as five oils rather than a name is the habit this curriculum is built on. MetaPWR holds grapefruit, lemon, peppermint, ginger and cinnamon bark.
Grapefruit β *Citrus paradisi*, peel
Cold pressed. Ninety to ninety-seven per cent limonene β a monoterpene, ten carbons in one ring, light and volatile. Why the blend opens sharp.
Lemon β *Citrus limon*, peel
Cold pressed. Sixty to seventy-five per cent limonene; the rest is what makes lemon smell like lemon rather than grapefruit.
Peppermint β *Mentha piperita*, leaf
Steam distilled. Thirty to fifty per cent menthol, fifteen to thirty per cent menthone. Menthol binds TRPM8, the nerve receptor that reports cold: the sensation is real, the cold is not. Peppermint has the account.
Ginger β *Zingiber officinale*, root
Steam distilled. Zingiberene, ar-curcumene and bisabolene β sesquiterpenes at fifteen carbons, heavier and slower to leave. The warm floor under the citrus.
Cinnamon Bark β *Cinnamomum zeylanicum*, bark
Steam distilled. Forty-five to eighty per cent cinnamaldehyde, three to thirteen per cent eugenol. Cinnamaldehyde is a phenylpropanoid whose reactive aldehyde is why the aroma is so assertive at tiny quantities β and why cinnamon bark is a hot oil.
Three chemical families in one bottle: monoterpenes at the top, a monoterpenol and a ketone through the middle, a phenylpropanoid and sesquiterpenes at the base β terpenes explains why size maps onto how fast you smell something. No essential oil raises metabolic rate, and nothing here says one does.
Aromatically, four drops in a diffuser, or a drop rubbed between the palms and inhaled. Topically, one to two drops diluted in a carrier oil β and dilute generously rather than minimally, because cinnamon bark makes this a blend that earns a heavier dilution than most. Keep it away from eyes, inner ears and broken skin. Grapefruit and lemon are both expressed citrus oils, so avoid direct sunlight and UV exposure for up to twelve hours after applying it to skin. Internal use is only ever a use if the label on your own bottle says it is for internal use; that labelling differs by market, and the bottle in your hand is the authority. Safety covers the general rules.
Keep oils away from eyes and inner ears, and out of reach of children. If you are pregnant, nursing, under medical care or taking medication, speak to your healthcare practitioner before use. Nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
* These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
Everything above is real chemistry, and none of it is the main thing. If you want the machinery in the second section to work well, four unglamorous inputs do more than any product on this page.
Sleep
Seven to nine hours for most adults. Deep, slow-wave sleep is when the largest pulses of growth hormone are released and when much tissue repair is scheduled β the anabolic side of the first section, running while the body is not in use. Nothing below works properly stacked on too little of it.
Resistance training
The only item that changes the machinery itself. Muscle regularly made to work builds more mitochondria, through a regulator called PGC-1Ξ±. You cannot buy a mitochondrion. You can build one. Two or three sessions a week, and none of it requires a gym.
Walking, and everything like it
Ordinary daily movement β walking, stairs, standing, carrying things β is the most variable component of what a body gets through in a day, and differs between two people far more than their resting rates do. Walking costs four to five times what sitting costs.
Protein, spread out
Adults doing regular resistance work are commonly advised around 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body mass a day, spread across meals rather than concentrated into one, because the signal to start building responds to a meal rather than a daily total. Protein and greens has the detail.
And then the one that outranks all four: consistency. A moderate routine kept for a year does more than an exacting one kept for six weeks. What is marketed is intensity. What works is duration.
The line to hold
Sleep, resistance work, daily movement and enough protein, kept up over time, outrank every product named in this lesson. They are not close competitors. A supplement can cover a nutritional shortfall; it cannot substitute for any of the four. Anything sold as a shortcut past them is being sold rather than explained β ask whether you were handed a mechanism or a promise.
Photograph to come
An ordinary hallway at the start of a day. Walking shoes by the door, already worn rather than new. A water bottle. On a shelf slightly behind and out of focus, a supplement bottle β present, clearly secondary, not centred and not lit as a product. The composition must put the shoes in the foreground and the bottle behind them, because that is the argument of the section. No gym equipment, no styling, no bright surfaces. It should look like a real entrance in a real home on a weekday morning.
If you do add something, judge it over months rather than days, against a written note of where you started. Reading your own body matters most here: this is the category where people most want to believe something worked.
The machinery, the fuels that feed it, and what is actually in the four bottles.
Where to go from here
Lesson 7 of 12 Β· Nutrition