Throughout the last month many different topics have been explored in class, mainly we have talked about Ayurveda, metabolism and the microbiome. All of these topic felt as its own module until I started seeing how they just build onto each other. Ayurveda is mostly an holistic idea where we can see balance and connection in the mind and body axis. Further research about it, lead me to found out that Ayurveda is a traditional system of medicine that comes from India, it’s meant to approach health and disease while looking at the body as a whole rather than treating each part separately. The most interesting part is that the main idea is centered around health depending on keeping a balance within the individual, and that the environment and lifestyle can affect it. This leads to the idea that instead of treating everyone the same way, it is expected that we all have our differences and will respond in different ways towards health and diseases. Looking forward to my future after graduation, I am planning to attend medical school and become a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO). It was particularly interesting to find a deep connection between the idea of Ayurveda and the principles of osteopathic medicine. Both emphasize the importance of looking at the person as a whole, and encourage us to think how different parts of the body interact, and how those relationships can influence health. This also brings me back to anatomy, throughout my course I have seen multiple times how hard it is to separate each body system, because they all end up interacting and affecting one another. As an anatomy TA, I always suggest the new students, to not treat each lab separately, but rather let them build on one another, because of how connected everything tends to be. I don’t necessarily believe that every explanation or treatment from Ayurveda is scientifically proven, but I think it’s really valuable to recognize the broader idea of not focusing only where symptoms appear, but rather on what leads there. The idea of interconnection between the different things of the body became more relevant as we started talking about metabolism, and got a first impression on how complex it is. While Ayurveda was able to introduce the importance of looking at health from different and broader prospectives, talking about metabolism gave me a concrete connection from a biological and cellular level. Before discussing this topic, I had always thought about metabolism as how fast or slow someone’s burn calories, but I had never tried or thought about making that deeper research to discover all the reactions and processes involved in it. It has been fascinating to learn about the thousands of reactions that happen in our bodies and inside our cells everyday. Mainly, we looked at two types of metabolic pathways: anabolic and catabolic, and we looked more into each to understand the differences between the two. Essentially anabolic pathways require energy to build larger molecules, while catabolic pathways break things down and release usable energy by the body. If I think about everyday life, I can relate catabolic processes to digestion, where the nutrients we consume get processed and broken down to help provide energy, while others might be stored or used to build other molecules. We also mentioned many pathways like glycolysis, the Krebs cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation. The most interesting thing is how different each pathway is, and the many different roles they perform. Our metabolism is made up of so many pathways reaction, that when something goes wrong in one pathway, it can end up affecting many others. One of the most significant example of how disruptions can affect the entire body is diabetes. In simple words, diabetes occurs when the body is unable to properly control and regulate blood glucose levels. This definition is, of course, a simplification of what diabetes actually is. There are many types of diabetes, each with different causes and effects, and they all affect millions of people every day in several ways. Many organs are actually involved in keeping blood glucose at a normal range, for example, when we are fasting, the liver can release glucose into the bloodstream, while after eating, glucose becomes available through digestion and absorption of food. Other organs and systems involved in glucose regulation include the pancreas, muscles, kidneys, brain, intestines, and immune system, as well as the microbiome. This is the main reason why it is such a complicated disease, because it involves many pathways and loosing regulation on one side can have effects on the all body. This brings me back to the idea of Ayurveda and anatomy, which demonstrates why understanding a disease requires looking at many systems rather than focusing on one in specific. It was interesting to have many people in class share their story about diabetes and its different forms. I wasn’t really aware of gestational diabetes, and how it can just develop during pregnancy and go away after giving birth. I really loved the part where we opened our conversation outside biology, and looked at how these diseases impact society and the economy. These aspects are often overlooked, but things like education, transportation, workplace, healthcare, or just the environment that we live in can influence our physical activity, and our possibilities of an overall healthy lifestyle. One of the major challenges behind diabetes is physical inactivity in most people, and non healthy behaviors, but social and environmental factors can also make the prevention and management more difficult. The economic cost of diabetes was one of the biggest surprises, as someone who comes from a country with mostly free healthcare, it is really hard to imagine that while dealing with any kind of disease, you also have to worry about how you are going to afford the treatments that are going to keep you alive. The paper provided to us, estimated that diagnosed diabetes cost the US $412.9 billion in 2022, while people with diagnosed diabetes had in average about 20 thousand dollars of annual medical expense. It was really hard realizing how economy is such a big part of someone’s health, and I had never considered diabetes, or any other disease, under this prospective. If we look at everything together, diabetes also affects your life and your family, because it can have long term consequences on your daily life activities, financial stability, and overall quality of life. Another topic that increased my understanding about the complexity of our bodies was the microbiome, this added another perspective to how different biological processes interact and influence our health. First of all, I feel like I have always been thinking about bacteria in our body too simply, without realizing how complex and organized these microbial communities are. In the lecture we talked about how the microbiome is this big community of microorganisms living in and on our bodies, and that many are actually beneficial for us. I feel like it’s really easy nowadays to associate bacteria with something negative, because we always think about infections or antibiotics or something bad in general, and we tend to forget how there are many bacteria that are really important for our bodies. These organisms help us digest food, protect us from some other harmful microorganisms in the body, interact with the immune system, and produce molecules that our cells can use. In some ways, it is almost like an additional organ, but it’s alive and it’s frequently changing with our diet, the environment, and our habits. One of the things that surprised me the most was learning how even choosing the way we deliver a baby can end up influencing its microbiome in early development. There are many things that can affect, starting from delivery, our microbiomes. If we go in order, the baby’s first exposure, the way the baby is fed, the mother’s microbiome, the environment, and the baby’s diet can all influence its development. This continues also into adolescence, and adulthood, every decision or change in our life can affect our microbiome. During this conversation in class, we talked about how traveling to other countries can expose us to different microorganisms through water and food, and ultimately affect our microbiomes. Another connection I made was between the microbiome and what I have been learning in biochemistry. Microbiomes actually expand what our bodies can metabolize, because our enzymes can’t digest everything we eat, and some bacterial enzyme can ferment fibers and produce short chain fatty acid that our bodies can use. This relates back to our discussion about anabolic and catabolic pathways, because microorganisms can contribute to the metabolic process happening in our bodies. Throughout the whole discussion diet felt like one of the most relevant factors, as it can directly affect our microbiome. It is really important to have a diet with a lot of variety, that includes plants, fruits, vegetables and fiber rich foods, which can support microbial communities.. It was really surprising to see how many aspects of health are connected to the microbiome, so sleep, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, brain development, and many more things all take part and are linked to our microbiomes. Honestly, this topic made me go back to one of our first discussions about Ayurveda. During that discussion, we talked about the importance of balance and the relationship how between the mind and body axis, and this is probably one of the best examples to explain how different aspects of health can be interconnected. Thinking about factors such as diet, daily routine, stress as one whole thing instead of different systems, is critical when thinking about maintaining a healthy microbiome, and a balanced lifestyle. If we keep imbalance in our life, our microbiome will be affected as well, which can lead to inflammations and diseases, later on, and ultimately it might have an effect on our metabolism, and more in general in our bodies. Looking back at everything that has been discussed, the main take away is how interconnected our health is between many different factors. Ayurveda introduced the more general idea of looking at the person as a whole, metabolism helped me understand how many different reactions and pathways work together inside our bodies, and the microbiome added another layer of complexity, by showing how many different decisions and lifestyle can ultimately influence the microorganisms community in us.
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