At any given moment there are countless chemical reactions occurring in your body. Have you ever wondered how they are controlled?
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At any given moment there are countless chemical reactions occurring in your body. They might be related to the digestion of your food, the contraction of your muscles, the repair or construction of cells, transmitting signals along your nerves, changing energy to a more a useful form, or a thousand other functions.
Because these reactions are a part of life, you might think that they occur quite easily and automatically, like the way mixing baking soda and vinegar creates bubbles of carbon dioxide. But in many cases, just because two molecules in your body happen to bump into each other doesn’t mean they will stick together to make another molecule that you need. That’s actually a good thing, because it gives your body a way to control those reactions.
Here’s how it works: Imagine trying to tie two ropes together by slapping them together. It’s not very likely that that will make a knot. But you can hold them together and manipulate them to make the knot. In your body, there are special chemicals that play a similar role—they hold \ molecules in the right position to stick together, causing a chemical reaction to occur. Those special chemicals are called enzymes.
And the truly marvelous thing about enzymes is that once they’ve brought one pair of molecules together, they are turned loose to do the same thing to another pair, and another pair, etc. In that way, a single enzyme molecule can make possible thousands of the specific chemical reactions that are its purpose in life.
That makes enzymes critically important to your body’s ability to manage its own chemical .
If you’re tracking so far, then you might be wondering: if enzymes control chemical reactions, then what controls enzymes? There are many answers to this question; here are two examples.
When you chew food, the presence of certain substances in the food causes your salivary glands to produce an enzyme that breaks complex carbohydrates called starches simple carbohydrates called sugars. That’s a very important reaction for many reasons, not least because your brain must have a continuous supply of glucose to operate.
But where does the brain get glucose when you’re not eating? Part of the answer to that question is that your body can store glucose in the form of a something called glycogen. If the glucose levels in your blood start to drop, your body reacts by producing a chemical called glucagon. Glucagon, in turn, activates an enzyme that helps break glycogen down into glucose. (Actually, it’s not quite that simple, glucagon activates an enzyme that causes a chemical reaction that activates another enzyme that activates other enzymes that actually break down the glycogen.1 But you get the idea.)
You can see that your body is a rather complex system, with chemical reactions controlling other chemical reactions based on the presence or absence of other chemicals.
And although these reactions occur without you noticing, it’s important to keep one thing in mind: the most important element in the system is you. Because ultimately, it’s the decisions you make as to what to eat, what kind of physical activities to engage in, how much sleep to get and how to get it, and whether, which, and what kind of other substances you expose yourself to, that drives or inhibits all of the reactions that are the life and health of your body. Which kinds of makes you the ultimate enzyme.
