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23 years
How can I know if I have low or high metabolism? What does this mean?
May 8, 2014

Dr. Rania Mousa General Medicine
Metabolism, the sum of the chemical reactions that take place within each cell of a living organism and that provides energy for vital processes and for synthesizing new organic material.
There are many disorders of the metabolism, including thousands of congenital deficiencies of the genes that code for essential enzymes. Diseases of the thyroid can radically change the metabolic rate, causing obesity or near-starvation. Sometimes, human metabolism is excessively slow or fast due to disease states and may be treated medically. Some drugs or nutritional substances can be said to boost metabolic rates by changing the rate of pathways involved with carbohydrate or fat digestion. In patients with diabetes mellitus, for example, the hormone insulin's effects on sugar metabolism are compromised, and synthetic insulin must be administered to restore normal metabolic regulation.
In a more simple way, when one has low metabolism, that means that his body is not burning and he/she is thus overweight. High metabolism means fast burning of chemical reactions in cells for the food to produce energy and thus being underweight.
Many medical conditions may interfere in metabolism.
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