Dr. Andy Galpin

It does not like to mess with this.

If you were to look at other markers, like say your blood glucose, you realize that that's highly variable.

It can be as low as 70 milligrams per deciliter, as high as 150 during exercise or something like that.

And so you can see it all a double or maybe even triple the amount.

in the blood.

You would never do that with pH.

It has an extremely tight window that it will not move out of.

That's because all the enzymes that are required for you to go through any metabolic process need to be in a certain pH range.

If it gets out of that, becomes too acidic or too alkalitic, they can't function, you can't create energy, you're going to die very, very quickly.

So pH is insanely important to hold into a tight window.

And so what happens is you don't feel that air hunger or that desire to breathe because oxygen starts getting low.

Remember, especially at rest or even during exercise, you can produce energy anaerobically.

So when you start getting low on oxygen, you'll just switch to anaerobic metabolism.

It's not necessarily a reason for you to panic, to stress, or to change your behavior.

Increases in CO2 though will do that.

And so remember, your muscle, whether it's using fat as a fuel or carbohydrates as a fuel, it's trying to generate a molecule called ATP.

This is the energy currency in all of biology.

And it doesn't matter what you use that ATP for, by the way.

It doesn't matter if we're talking about skeletal muscle, we're talking about cardiac muscle or anything else.

So whether you're using this for exercise, to power your brain, to recover, to digest food, it's irrelevant here, right?