The Plateau Principle: A Key to Biological System Dynamics

Abstract

There may have been a time when only the clinical pharmacologist and the experimental nutrition scientist truly needed to understand the dynamics of materials introduced into the human body. All that changed with the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, about which information is available from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (http://www.cfsan.fda.gov). It is now possible to purchase powerful hormones and plant-derived substances over the counter and without prescription from any drugstore in the United States. The freedom is refreshing, but let the buyer beware; our population is now performing the most widespread experiment in drug interactions ever performed in the history of mankind!

I worked out the equations and came up with the surprising and satisfy-ingly simple result that the halftime for a shift in steady state protein concentration depended only on the rate of protein degradation, regardless of the rate of synthesis. It was Avram (Goldstein) who saw the general applicability of this approach….