Cell Biology
PGC-1α is a protein switch that regulates your mitochondria and can be activated through exercise, diet, and specific nutrients. Two new studies show: active PGC-1α leads to improved energy metabolism, better fat burning, and enhanced performance.
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As an ordinary person, you don't really need to know anything about genetics and cell biology. Much like a lion, actually: it just eats well and moves a lot. So it rarely needs to have read a biochemistry textbook to stay reasonably healthy throughout life.
For us humans, things have become considerably more complicated. Since humans settled down just a few thousand years ago, things have gotten a bit out of hand. This intensified over the past century, when our eating and movement patterns shifted drastically once more.
In science, we talk about a "mismatch" between our modern lifestyles and our genetic makeup, which is still relatively archaic. The result: civilization-related diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and in a broader sense also depression and similar conditions.
If you want to become or stay healthy, you should orient yourself toward the motto "back to the roots"—though of course not by copying, but by emulating.
There's one special gene that all living beings, right down to single-celled organisms, possess in the same or similar form. It's called PGC-1α. Here we can tie back to the opening words of this article: as a layperson, you don't usually need to know anything—but you absolutely should know about PGC-1α!
Because PGC-1α is a protein that acts as a "cellular switch," primarily regulating the number and function of our mitochondria.
Our mitochondria—the "power plants of our cells"—don't just determine how much energy we have in daily life and how easily we climb that hill. They're also essential for fat burning, protecting us from metabolic disease, and involved in a multitude of health processes.
In short: if you want to be healthy and perform well, you need healthy mitochondria.
Here's the catch: you don't usually get this for free. You have to put in a little effort.
Overweight damages mitochondria. And people who avoid exercise demonstrably have significantly fewer and less functional mitochondria—lazy people essentially make their mitochondria lazy too. And if you don't supply your mitochondria with nutrients, you harm them the way an aquarium owner harms their fish by not feeding them.
We can pat ourselves on the back here. Because back in 2014, in our "Handbook to Your Body" (which was an Amazon bestseller at the time), we reported extensively on PGC-1α, long before it was even mentioned in German-language media. And in this very book we also stated:
Health and performance are often one and the same!
We justified this, among other things, with this protein—the fact that PGC-1α is the major interface between health (for example, freedom from diabetes) and performance (for example, fatigue-resistant muscles).
This was recently confirmed once again in two very exciting studies.
In the European Journal of Applied Physiology, Chinese sports scientists explore how combined exercise modes—endurance training plus strength training—engage different signaling pathways that work through PGC-1α to produce even better mitochondrial function than either sport alone (1).
This means if you run around the lake and then do some squats afterward, your mitochondria—and therefore you—benefit doubly!
That PGC-1α is truly a magical protein is demonstrated by another recently published study: people who inherited a particularly active version of PGC-1α lost more than twice as much weight during an eight-week endurance program compared to a control group without the active gene variant (2).
Even if you can't count yourself among the genetically blessed—fortunately we only know this through genetic testing anyway—the results suggest it's very worthwhile to keep PGC-1α generally active.
And so the circle closes:
Bottom line: do it like the lion, and things will work out with your mitochondria. In modern terms, you could also simply call it the edubily program (est. 2014). :-)
