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The metabolic crisis and what we can do about it

  • Dr. Robert Verkerk
    Dr. Robert Verkerk

    Robert Verkerk is a leading scientist in the healthcare field and is the founder of the Alliance for Natural Health.

    Robert is an internationally acclaimed scientist with over 25 years experience in the field of agricultural and healthcare sustainability, having worked in academia, industry and the not-for-profit sector. He has worked extensively in Africa, Asia, Australia, the Americas as well as Europe. After leaving Imperial College London in 2002, he founded the Alliance for Natural Health, which he has headed since.

  • 20:52 reading time (ish)
  • Western Herbal Medicine

Written by Robert Verkerk

Under the skin of the metabolic disease crisis

The metabolic disease crisis afflicts a large part of the global population, particularly those in higher-income and emerging industrialised countries, and represents the single largest preventable, non-communicable disease burden in these countries.[i] The covid-19 pandemic has shone a spotlight on how a single viral pathogen can exploit comorbidities that are the result of metabolic dysfunction, creating havoc in its wake. It is surely also a reminder of the urgent need to address the underlying metabolic crisis, especially among younger members of society who will otherwise become extremely vulnerable both to chronic and infectious diseases.

Obesity, type 2 diabetes and ischaemic heart disease are three of the most pronounced downstream manifestations of the metabolic crisis. However, increasingly, many types of cancer are considered to have a metabolic basis[ii], while the rapid rise in prevalence of Alzheimer’s and dementia in industrialised countries is also thought to be, at least partially, mediated by metabolic disturbance, hence the increasingly common reference to type 3 diabetes.[iii]

There is overwhelming evidence that the causes are both variable, between individuals, yet are also multi-factorial, being a consequence of our poor adaptation to modern lifestyle and dietary patterns.

The Global Burden of Disease Study (2015) [iv] identified four metabolic risk factors that are widely associated with the dysregulated metabolism that is typically associated with diet and lifestyle mediated metabolic diseases, these being:

  1. Raised systolic blood pressure
  2. Overweight and especially obesity
  3. Hyperglycemia (high fasting blood glucose levels), and
  4. Hyperlipidemia (high levels of fat in the blood).

These physiological risk factors are in turn associated with other physiological factors, as well as a broad array of social, environmental and genetic contributory factors. Given huge differences in the response both by individuals and different population groups to these multiple determinants of metabolic disease, there is little scientific consensus over which are the most important combination of factors for particularly diseases or population groups.  

This uncertainty is compounded by the common lack of clarity around the causality of non-communicable and metabolic diseases, that is much harder to ascertain than is the case of infectious (communicable) diseases.


REFERENCES

[i] World Health Organization. Global status report on noncommunicable diseases 2014. WHO, Geneva [http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/148114/9789241564854_eng.pdf;jsessionid=A42614E96691C5441534CE0A0F440F51?sequence=1]

[ii] Seyfried TN, Flores RE, Poff AM, et al. Cancer as a metabolic disease: implications for novel therapeutics, Carcinogenesis 2014; 35(3): 515–527. [Link: https://academic.oup.com/carcin/article/35/3/515/2463440?login=true]

[iii] de la Monte SM, Wands JR. Alzheimer’s Disease is Type 3 Diabetes—Evidence Reviewed. Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology. 2008;2(6):1101-1113. [Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/193229680800200619].

[iv] GBD 2015 Risk Factors Collaborators. Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015. Lancet, 2016; 388(10053): 1659-1724. [Link: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)31679-8/fulltext]

Dr. Robert Verkerk

Robert Verkerk is a leading scientist in the healthcare field and is the founder of the Alliance for Natural Health. Robert is an internationally acclaimed scientist with over 25 years experience in... Read more

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