#002 Dr. George Brooks on Lactate Shuttle Theory, Relevance for Traumatic Brain Injury, and More
FoundMyFitness
Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D.
4.8 • 5.8K Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2014
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. George A Brooks
Dr. George A Brooks, an expert in exercise physiology and lactate metabolism. Lactate, a once demonized molecule thought to form lactic acid and become a dead-end toxic metabolite, has been vindicated by the work of Dr. Brooks, his colleagues, and others.
In this episode, we discuss...
- (00:00) Introduction
- (01:40) Dr. Brooks' experience as an athlete inspired his research on lactate
- (06:50) Lactate and its relationship to muscle fatigue is misunderstood
- (09:10) Adaptations to exercise improve mitochondrial functioning and lactate metabolism
- (14:14) How to use lactate threshold training to improve performance
- (23:49) Lactate improves brain health and cognitive function
- (26:45) Lactate improves outcomes of traumatic brain injury via metabolism
- (30:00) Lactate spares glucose, increasing antioxidants such as glutathione
- (42:50) Early lactate administration following a traumatic brain injury is necessary, but challenging
- (48:20) Lactate from exercise improves Parkinson's disease
- (55:00) Brain metabolism following traumatic brain injury
If you're interested in learning more, you can read the full show notes here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Dr. Monde Patrick here. Today I'm very excited to be sitting here with Dr. George |
| 0:04.8 | Brooks who is a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the |
| 0:09.4 | University of California, Berkeley. He is the director of the Exercise Physiology |
| 0:14.2 | Lab and he's really the pioneer of research that he proposed back in the |
| 0:20.9 | early 80s that has to do with lactate that is generated from muscle during |
| 0:26.8 | exercise and how that lactate is used by a variety of different tissues in the |
| 0:31.8 | body for energy to produce energy. So we'll dive into that in a few minutes but |
| 0:38.0 | before we get started I do want to mention just a couple of things about |
| 0:41.9 | lactate and that is that it is something that is produced during exercise and |
| 0:48.0 | it's used by you know the heart and the brain as a preferred source of energy |
| 0:53.4 | I'll let Dr. Brooks get into that in a little bit and also we're going to talk |
| 0:57.3 | a little bit about lactate in the context of the brain and how the brain also |
| 1:02.6 | prefers to use lactate as a source of energy and how this is relevant for |
| 1:06.7 | situations like traumatic brain injury which is the focus of some of |
| 1:10.7 | Georgia's current research and also for neurodegenerative diseases. So |
| 1:15.2 | George thanks for joining us. Do you mind telling us a little bit about first |
| 1:20.0 | about how you got into this research in terms of exercise physiology and all |
| 1:24.8 | things lactate? Yeah thank you Dr. Patrick Ronda for coming here today so we can |
| 1:30.4 | talk about our lactate shuttle theory and the work we've done and the trail we've |
| 1:36.2 | followed to get to this point. So I was an intercollegiate athlete and very much |
| 1:42.3 | interested in running the four 40 yards and 400 meters and I wasn't quite as |
| 1:47.3 | good as I I wanted to be and I asked my coach what's the problem he said I had |
... |
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