Peter Attia

ATP has three phosphates.

They donate one of those phosphates.

And it's that liberation of energy that comes from that chemical bond that creates energy.

The mitochondria can generate ATP from either fatty acids or pyruvate.

Pyruvate is an intermediary breakdown product of glucose via a process called glycolysis.

And both of these processes are constantly occurring.

It's just the question is, what's the balance in which they're occurring?

And of course, are these both equal?

No, they're not.

Each process has a trade-off.

The trade-off would simply be stated this way.

If you are optimizing for efficiency and you don't care as much about the speed with which you can deliver ATP, you want to take that more aerobic pathway, meaning utilizing oxygen and shuttling the breakdown product of fatty acid or glucose

either in the form of pyruvate or acetyl-CoA into the mitochondria to use an oxidative pathway to generate lots of ATP per units of carbon that go in.

The problem with that is as the demand for ATP accelerates, you have to make a trade-off.

You have to make a sacrifice.

The body says, I'm sorry, I can't do this anymore.

I have to go down this quicker path using glycolysis where I turn glucose into pyruvate, ultimately into lactate.

I don't get nearly as many ATP for it, but I can deliver much more ATP to the muscle.

Now, I can't do this indefinitely.

There's a whole problem associated with that, which we'll talk about, but that's effectively at the high level of the trade-off.