© Stephen McNally,UC Berkeley
George Brooks, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
George Brooks has been trying to reshape thinking about lactate-in the lab, the clinic and on the training field-for more than 40 years, and finally, it seems, people are listening.
Lactate, it's becoming clear, is not a poison, it's the antidote.
In a recent article in the journal
Cell Metabolism, Brooks, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, reviews the history of the misunderstanding of
lactate-often called lactic acid-a small molecule that plays a big role in metabolism. Typically labeled a "waste" product produced by muscles because lactate rises to high levels in the blood during extreme exercise, athletic trainers and competitive athletes
think of lactate as the cause of muscle fatigue, reduced performance and pain.
Starting in the 1970s, however, Brooks, his students, postdoctoral fellows and staff were the first to show that lactate wasn't waste.
It was a fuel produced by muscle cells all the time and often the preferred source of energy in the body: The brain and heart both run more efficiently and more strongly when fueled by lactate than by glucose, another fuel that circulates through the blood.
Comment: These scientists are working on the assumption of a solely uniformitarian past and Antarctica being covered with ice for hundreds of thousands of years, but, as Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes in The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction: See also:
- Witches, Comets and Planetary Cataclysms
- Tunguska, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction
- Interview with astronomer Bill Napier: Cyclical catastrophes and cometary bombardments
- Supernova theory explains global warming, extinction events, ice ages says engineer
- Yale's Two Climate Bombs Point to Impending Ice Age
Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?