Metabolic Disorder and the Metabolic Syndrome

So without sufficient darkness, we enter a very strange twilight zone that nature never intended us to venture into. In this strange new world, we are drowning in calories, but at the same time phosphor fuel-starved – the phosphor atoms that act as batteries to do everything in the body can't be attached to molecules in sufficient numbers to do everything that needs doing (because the mitochondria are run down and some have died) yet we're suffused with primary energy sources such as fat and glucose. The body gets very confused in this situation because it's not one that we ever faced in nature – our mitochondria didn't typically fail in this way before we encountered artificial light, and in particular, before cheap gas lighting was invented in the very early nineteenth century.

This confusion shows up as an ugly paradox – because the body believes it is starving (various flags are being raised that indicate more energy for chemical reactions is badly needed), our brain starts to demand that we consume and store more energy supplies (fat and sugar), assuming that's the problem - even though we have too much sugar circulating in our bloodstream already – more than our crippled mitochondria can cope with. Our natural appetites change away from “good food” such as fresh vegetables and fruit that are necessary to keep us healthy in the long run towards strong cravings for “emergency” foods that can serve as immediate fuel sources that just allow us to keep going – sugar, and fat. But the irony is, we can't use this extra sugar, etc. Eating more of it only burdens our metabolisms further, because our delusional bodies, believing that we are starving, will now desperately try to store these fuel sources too (no matter how obese we already are.) Such storage isn't free – it takes energy. As long as our mitochondria aren't working well, this overeating doesn't solve the crisis, it actually worsens it.

If this situation has gone on long enough, phosphor-fuel may only be available in large quantities near the intestines. This is because our intestines produce immense amounts of melatonin, aren't quite as easily upset by artificial light (since they have a somewhat independent clock) and in any case always have a very high priority claim on using whatever phosphor-fuel is available (since starving people must be ready to digest food quickly if they encounter it.) If phosphor-fuel is only plentiful near the intestines, then because our bodies, thinking we are starving, are demanding that every excess calorie be stored, and that takes energy, we will start to store fat around our intestines, and keep on doing that. The result is the familiar, dangerous “apple” body-shape that indicates a dangerous metabolic dysfunction is underway, and that dramatically raises the risk of diabetes and heart disease.