Modelling and Quantifying Metabolism to Optimise Health and Performance
Dr. Tommy Wood
Dr. Tommy Wood (UK/NOR)
Medical Doctor, DrRagnar.com, Health and Performance Coach, Chief Medical Officer @ Nourish Balance Thrive
Dr. Tommy Wood is a medical doctor with a previous degree in biochemistry. He is currently finishing his PhD in physiology and neuroprotection, and is published in multiple scientific journals. Tommy has coached and competed in rowing, CrossFit, powerlifting, and (ultra) endurance racing. He runs the blog www.drragnar.com, co-hosts the Eat Better podcast, and is a featured coach for Breaking Muscle. He is Chief Scientific Officer of Physicians for Ancestral Health, and the Chief Medical Officer of Nourish Balance Thrive, a company that specialises in optimising the biochemistry and performance of athletes.
Dr. Tommy Wood presents a novel systems analysis approach to understanding metabolic health, moving
The body is just responding to its environment. Supplements are really a stopgap; it is fixing your environment that is really going to get you most of the way.
Summary
- Systems analysis synthesizes complex health data to move beyond oversimplified dietary rules and identify the root causes of metabolic dysfunction.
- Insulin resistance is an output of cellular stress rather than a root cause, with metabolic health fundamentally driven by the redox state and NAD to NADH ratio.
- Mitochondrial function is the central driver of metabolic health, influenced by factors such as chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, and total cellular energy load.
- Urinary organic acid testing offers a comprehensive view of cellular bioenergetics, identifying metabolic blocks and the state of the body’s energy currency.
- Long-term health optimization requires fixing environmental factors like circadian rhythms, sleep, and light exposure rather than relying on individual supplements.
Article
Modelling Metabolism, Measuring Modern Life
At Biohacker Summit 2016 London, Dr. Tommy Wood Argued That Metabolic Disease Was Less About Demonising Carbs Than Repairing The Cellular Environment
On 21 May 2016 at the Biohacker Summit 2016 London, Dr. Tommy Wood took the stage with a message that cut through two of wellness culture’s loudest habits: oversimplification and overload. His presentation, *Modelling and Quantifying Metabolism to Optimise Health and Performance*, was not a plea for one more miracle diet, nor a hymn to laboratory fetishism. It was, instead, an attempt to restore metabolism to its proper scale: not as a moral drama about carbohydrates, but as a systems problem rooted in stress, mitochondria, circadian rhythm and the redox state of the cell.
Wood, a medical doctor with a background in biochemistry and physiology, spoke with the confidence of someone fluent in both clinical language and the rougher dialect of performance culture. He had worked at St Thomas’ Hospital, was nearing the end of a PhD, and had moved increasingly into the world of functional medicine through his role with Nourish Balance Thrive. His argument in London was that health had been flattened by slogans. First fat was the villain, then carbohydrates, then perhaps protein too. In reaction, others drowned the public in dense jargon and endless supplement lists. Between those poles, he suggested, lay a more serious way of thinking.
The Case Against Reductionism
Wood’s central complaint was not merely that popular nutrition got things wrong. It was that it asked the wrong kind of question. The body, he said, was not a line of isolated causes and effects but a responsive system, constantly adapting to environment, light, food, sleep, stress and movement. To understand disease, especially metabolic disease, required synthesis rather than a hunt for a single nutritional culprit.
“We need to find a middle way between dramatic oversimplification and death by information,” he said. “By synthesizing data better, we can filter out root causes and identify the most effective intervention points for health.”
This was the intellectual frame for his use of systems analysis, a method borrowed from engineering. Rather than treating one biomarker as a verdict, systems analysis attempted to map feedback loops, competing influences and hidden drivers. In Wood’s model of insulin resistance, dietary intake still mattered, but it sat among larger forces: chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, autonomic balance, chronic stress and circadian biology.
Insulin Resistance As Signal, Not Cause
Perhaps the most provocative claim of the talk was his challenge to the idea that insulin resistance itself sat at the root of modern disease. The phrase has become almost liturgical in some health circles, invoked to explain obesity, type 2 diabetes, dementia and cancer. Wood did not deny its importance. He demoted it.
“Insulin resistance itself is not the root cause of metabolic diseases,” he said. “It is an output from the system, a biomarker of cellular stress, and a reflection of the redox state of our cells.”
That distinction mattered. If insulin resistance was an output, then suppressing it without addressing its source risked little more than symptom management. Low-carbohydrate diets might improve blood sugar control in some people, he acknowledged, but that did not prove carbohydrates were uniquely toxic. It might simply prove that stressed, dysfunctional cells could not process them properly.
For Wood, the real centre of gravity was mitochondrial function. The mitochondria, he argued, were shaped by inflammation, oxidative stress and total cellular energy load, all of which converged on the balance between NAD and NADH, molecules deeply involved in the transfer of cellular energy. That ratio, in turn, helped define the redox state of the cell, which he presented as the deeper determinant of metabolic health.
The Redox State And The Hidden Economy Of Energy
Much of the talk turned on this biochemical architecture. Wood described NAD and NADH as central to the energy economy of the cell. In many chronic diseases, he said, the ratio shifted in the wrong direction, with too little NAD and too much NADH, suggesting a system under strain and mitochondria unable to process energy efficiently.
This was where his presentation became both technical and unexpectedly practical. He argued that standard health assessments often looked at blood glucose, cholesterol or triglycerides as isolated flags, then offered equally isolated fixes. The result was algorithmic nonsense masquerading as personalised care.
“Biomarkers are just telling us about the state of the body,” he said. “There is very little point in trying to manipulate them individually if there is no synthesis and no understanding of the system in general.”
He was especially critical of software-driven interpretations that paired a high LDL result with a simplistic instruction to consume more vegetable oil, or treated every abnormal value as an invitation to add another supplement. Such methods, he implied, confused data accumulation with understanding.
What Urine Could Reveal That Blood Often Missed
To move beyond that, Wood highlighted urinary organic acid testing, which he said offered a broader picture of cellular bioenergetics. Though relatively expensive, the test could expose metabolic bottlenecks, nutrient deficiencies, neurotransmitter issues and signs of gut dysbiosis. More importantly for his model, it could reveal patterns that reflected redox imbalance.
He walked the audience through examples from glycolysis and the Krebs cycle, pointing to mismatches such as pyruvate-to-lactate imbalance or stalled conversions involving isocitrate, alpha-ketoglutarate, malate and oxaloacetate. These shifts, he argued, could indicate a shortage of available NAD or dysfunctional mitochondrial throughput.
One case involved a man in his fifties working swing shifts, eating a vegan diet and relying heavily on nootropics to get through the day. On paper, many of his values sat within normal ranges. In context, Wood said, they painted a more troubling picture: poor redox balance, rising oxidative stress and a clear drift toward pre-diabetes.
The point was not to fetishise one urine panel. It was to show that pathology often announced itself in relationships between markers rather than in any single out-of-range number.
Circadian Rhythm As Metabolic Infrastructure
If the talk had a moral centre, it was here. Wood returned repeatedly to the proposition that environment, especially light and time, governed metabolic resilience more profoundly than most supplement regimens ever could. Shift work, poor sleep, erratic eating and artificial light exposure all disrupted the rhythms that coordinated glucose handling, autonomic balance and mitochondrial repair.
“When you fix your circadian rhythm, you improve the cellular redox state, reduce oxidative stress, and improve the energy currency of your cells,” he said. “This is really where the crux of metabolic health comes from.”
He described nighttime fasting as particularly important. In the absence of food, cellular energy load dropped, NAD levels rose, and clock-related gene pathways were better able to recycle and regenerate the very molecules needed for healthy function. The implication was stark: many people were attempting to biohack around the damage caused by a disordered daily rhythm rather than repairing the rhythm itself.
This was not merely a sleep hygiene sermon dressed in biochemistry. It was a claim that the body’s clock regulated the chemistry on which metabolism depended.
The Coenzyme Q10 Clue
Wood also turned to ubiquinone, or Coenzyme Q10, calling it a universal electron acceptor in the mitochondria. If the machinery around it became blocked, the consequences could ripple outward through fatigue, poor cognitive performance and broader bioenergetic dysfunction.
In another case study, he described data from Chris Kelly, founder of Nourish Balance Thrive, from before Kelly had restored his own health. There, Wood pointed to an elevated succinate-to-fumarate ratio and to raised hydroxymethylglutarate, a sign that the pathway involved in Q10 synthesis might be compromised.
One possible cause, he suggested, was intestinal yeast overgrowth. Certain yeast-derived metabolites could interfere with the same pathway affected by statins, reducing endogenous Q10 production and mimicking some of the same downstream problems. It was a reminder that gut dysbiosis could produce effects far beyond digestion, disrupting the energy systems on which the whole organism depended.
The Low-Tech Biohack
For all the molecular detail, Wood resisted ending in abstraction. His favourite “biohack”, he told the London audience, was getting a dog. It was an answer that drew laughs, but it was not entirely a joke.
A dog, in his telling, forced the owner outside in the morning light, improved circadian entrainment, encouraged movement, reduced social isolation, enhanced heart rate variability through companionship, and diversified the gut microbiome. It was the kind of intervention modern optimisation culture often overlooked because it was too ordinary to market.
In that sense, the anecdote captured the larger spirit of the talk. The body was not a machine to be tuned solely through pills and panels. It was an organism in relationship with its environment. Light mattered. Sleep mattered. Rhythm mattered. Companionship mattered. Movement mattered. Data could help, but only if interpreted in a way that served life rather than replacing it.
Supplements As Stopgaps, Not Salvation
Wood did not dismiss targeted interventions altogether. He mentioned compounds such as nicotinamide riboside, riboflavin, CoQ10, carnitine and creatine as potentially useful in specific contexts. Exclusion diets, too, could provide short-term clarity. But he was adamant that such strategies remained secondary.
“Systems analysis is a tool to help us synthesize and model large amounts of data to find the root cause of disease,” he said. “In reality, it is the redox state of our cells that determines our metabolic health.”
And that redox state, he argued, could not be meaningfully rescued by isolated supplementation if the person remained trapped in a bad environment, starved of natural light, chronically stressed, sedentary or metabolically disordered by broken sleep.
A More Demanding Vision Of Health
What Dr. Tommy Wood offered at Biohacker Summit 2016 London was not a simple protocol. It was something less comforting and more mature: a demand that health be understood as an emergent property of systems rather than a set of disconnected numbers to be hacked one by one.
His presentation, *Modelling and Quantifying Metabolism to Optimise Health and Performance*, suggested that the future of metabolic medicine might depend on better models, richer testing and more intelligent synthesis. But it also returned, insistently, to fundamentals. The body was speaking all the time through biomarkers, rhythms and energy patterns. The challenge was to hear it clearly.
Supplements might buy time. Data might sharpen the picture. But the deeper work, Wood made plain, was environmental. Fix the rhythm. Fix the light. Fix the conditions under which the cell lives. Only then, he implied, does metabolism begin to tell a different story.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 London