Andrew Huberman· PhD
you and I ate something at some point in the foreseeable past that contained chemical energy so we ate something that was organic so it had um so primarily fats and carbohydrates contain carbon carbon bonds and carbon hydrogen bonds and those bonds contain a ton of energy but how do we liberate energy so we break it all down into these constitutive molecules namely glucose on the carbohydrate front and free fatty acids on the fat front and then our bodies break those things down further into smaller molecules that get shuttled into the mitochondria where the Lion's Share of our energy Liberation comes from and what we do is we take that chemical energy that is stored in a carbon to carbon Bond or a carbon to hydrogen bond and we turn it into elect electrical energy and people have heard this term it's called the electron transport chain so there are these four complexes in the mitochondria and there's an inner membrane in an outer membrane across which these mitochondrial uh uh these large mitochondrial complexes reside and what they're doing is they're building up a huge electron gradient by by breaking them apart and taking the electrons and transferring them between NAD and nadh so that at the end they can do another trick which is transfer those electrons to M ADP and ultimately make ATP the finished product is water and carbon dioxide so we eat and we take that chemical energy and food we utilize oxygen in the mitochondria to make ATP carbon dioxide which we breathe out and water which we breathe and pee out so what NAD and nadh are doing is playing an absolutely essential to life role in facilitating the transfer of chemical energy to electrical energy back to chemical energy ATP is just taking it from one chemical form in food to the electrical form as the intermediary in the mitochondria back to an electrical form of ATP