The very first function is producing tissue and cells. Each second, our bodies are producing more cells to substitute dead or unusable cells.
For instance, if you cut your finger, your body (if it’s working correctly) will start– without even squandering a second or asking your approval– the procedure of producing skin cells to clot the blood and begin the recovery process. This development procedure is certainly a metabolic reaction and is called anabolism.
On the other hand, there is the precise opposite activity happening in other parts of the body. Instead of building cells and tissue through the metabolic process, the body is breaking down energy which the body needs.
For instance, as you aerobically work out, your body temperature level increases as your heartbeat rises and stays with a particular range.
As this occurs, your body needs more oxygen; and as such, your breathing increases as you intake more H2O. All of this, as you can picture, needs extra energy.
After all, if your body could not get used to this improved requirement for oxygen (both taking it in and eliminating it in the form of co2), you would collapse!
Presuming, obviously, that you aren’t overdoing it, your body will rather start converting food (e.g., calories) into energy. And this procedure, as you understand, is a metabolic process, and is referred to as catabolism.
So as you can see, the metabolic process is a consistent process that deals with 2 apparently opposite functions: anabolism that utilizes energy to produce cells, and catabolism that breaks down cells to develop energy.
Undoubtedly, it’s in this way that metabolism gains its credibility as a harmonizer. It unites these evidently conflicting functions and does so in an optimal manner in which makes it possible for the body to produce cells as required and break them down, again as required.
