MCT for Health

In the previous two posts , I wrote about hypoxia and pseudohypoxia, i.e. the state of lack of oxygen or just the signaling of lack of oxygen in the tissues. I predicted that free long-chain fatty acids (abbreviation FFA or NEFA), by strongly modulating the activity of the enzyme glutathione peroxidase (GPx), would likely strongly influence oxygen deficiency signaling through the transcription factor HIF-1 α  whose proper and adequate stabilization requires some, not too little or too much hydrogen peroxide H2O2. Too high a peroxide level will be typical in pseudohypoxia, and too low will cause an insufficient and therefore potentially very dangerously low response to oxygen deficiency. The two conditions can be quite intertwined and can occur simultaneously in different tissues and also the conditions will depend heavily on the specific ones in the tissue. It seems that if, for example, the heart muscle suffers from insulin  resistance and therefore also a mild pseudohypoxia, it can s

We have already come across the concept of hypoxia here, it is a state of lack of oxygen. Every healthy cell can prepare for this condition  just in time, can turn on and off the necessary genes, and can easily survive a short-term or moderate lack of oxygen. But what is pseudohypoxia? We can imagine it so that the cell receives a signal that there is not enough oxygen and starts the necessary mechanisms. But in reality, this signal is false and can thus damage the cell.  The same phenomenon is also referred to as aerobic glycolysis or, according to its discoverer, as the Warburg effect. The authors of one study arrived at these considerations because they noticed a striking similarity in the behavior of aged cells and cells exposed to a lack of oxygen. But let's look at another study first. Graphical abstract, hypoxia (or even lack of reduced glutathione, my note) leads to stabilization of HIF-1 α  and thus suppression of beta oxidation of fats and glucose fermentation. Among oth