Why Taking Care of Your Mitochondria is SO Important

anything that's hurting my mitochondria is making me less metabolically healthy there's one word that your listeners need to walk away with and understand its mitochondria we are on a mission to inspire heal and bring the world closer together welcome to commune my name is Jeff krasno today we're discussing mitochondria and their vital role in human health so mitochondria are we small organelles in the cell that produce energy otherwise known as ATP or adenosine triphosphate from the food that you eat and the oxygen that you breathe and they do this through a process known as cellular respiration which has three stages number one glycolysis number two the citric acid cycle aka the Krebs cycle and number three the electron transport chain now these fascinating Jelly Bean shaped structures actually have their own genetic material all of which you inherit from your mother and that's distinct from the DNA in the nucleus of the cell now their origin goes back billions of years when a prokaryote archaea engulfed a purple bacteria and this romantic tryst birth aerobic respiration essentially the production of energy with the use of oxygen and this springboarded complex life it's pretty amazing the mitochondria in our cells animate literally everything that we do from the conscious viewing of this video to the unconscious digestion occurring in your gut now each cell in our body with the exception of mature red blood cells contain mitochondria and a different number of them your brain cells your neurons your cardiac cells Brown fat and muscle cells both the highest concentrations of mitochondria and that makes good sense given the significant energy requirements of those cells so in this episode we'll be hearing from three brilliant doctors Dr Stephen gundry my dear friend Casey means and Robert lustig as we explore how mitochondria function and occasionally dysfunction now our first guest is Dr Stephen gundry he is a physician a former cardiac surgeon and a researcher who investigates the impact of diet on human health now he's going to set the stage for our discussion with his helpful and humorous metaphor that explains mitochondrial function he calls it the Mido Club without further delay here's Dr Steven gundry okay so I think this is a good time to talk a little bit about energy production in the body um and the mitochondria and you use this absolutely hilarious and very fun metaphor in the book uh with the nightclub analogy the Mido Club yeah so um so the electron transport chain which was proposed by Sir Peter Mitchell who also finally won the Nobel Prize the electron transport chain uh simplistically I call a nightclub that has an entrance on one end of the nightclub and an exit on the other end of the nightclub and 20 somethings which will which we'll call Energy substrates like glucose like proteins like free fatty acids uh enter this nightclub you know I call it the Mido club and it's the hippest hottest place in town and they go there for one purpose and one purpose only and that is to couple with oxygen and if they couple with oxygen then they leave the nightclub via a one-way revolving door and this is the process of leaving the electron transport chain coupled uh produces ATP literally very much like water going over a water wheel producing energy and there's only one way out and in this nightclub the the electron transport chain is is really changing energy levels of electrons and protons it's getting them excited and we laugh in longevity that you know the only purpose of life is to move an electron from one level of charge to another but I digress so so things and believe it or not this club is hot it's steamy it's sweaty there's so many hormones going on drinking and all for the purpose of getting this coupling going well that's all well and good but the process of coupling uh has a lot of side effects there are fist bites there is a lot of drunken craziness and we actually have bouncers in the nightclub and people probably know at least one of the bouncers it's glutathione the other bouncer which is a surprise to almost everybody is melatonin and it's a surprise almost everybody that we only have two antioxidants that actually work in our mitochondria glutathione and melatonin but we'll digress for a minute in the process of looking to couple up electrons will also just because everybody's Rowdy will couple with oxygen by if you will mistake and we now know that that coupling process produces free radicals produces reactive oxygen species and while some of those are pretty good they make it pretty interesting place to be a lot of them we now know is one of the major processes that damage the club the mitochondria and pretty soon you know you've got beer all over the place of broken chairs and it's no longer the hip place that you want to be so that's how the electron transport chain works and part of what glutathione melatonin do is to Tamp down this unwanted coupling if you will and try to get oxygen into couple with protons and make some CO2 and head out the door what was fascinating to me when when Peter Mitchell proposed this a lot of very smart chemists chemista no weiner the process of making ATP using this system using mitochondria you should take one molecule of glucose and always get 32 molecules of ATP every time it's a chemical equation and you know and Peter Mitchell said well wait a minute you know you guys are all running these experiments with isolated mitochondria and guess what you know sometimes we're getting 28 molecules right yeah yeah and what's happening to those guys so it wasn't until really when his theory was accepted that almost Simon and we got the Nobel Prize on I think in 1978. almost simultaneously uh three researchers said you know he's right about all of this but what's missing is well where were these why what weren't we getting 32 molecules of ATP so they proposed that there were literally emergency exits along the electron transport chain that were controlled by what were called uncoupling proteins that could literally open the door of an emergency exit and let protons escape from the club instead of going all the way down through the revolving door and they proposed that these Escape hatches and there were five of them would be why in all these experiments you never got to that magic number of 32. and so when I learned about uncoupling proteins uh and I started putting two and two together if I realized that a great amount of the calorie potential to produce energy was automatically being wasted and net out of the electron transport chain and in fact I didn't know this but 30 percent of all the calories that we eat never make it into ATP production they are wasted out piece emergency exits in the Mido Club so now you go well wait a minute if you're designing an animal that's really stupid because now he basically has the 30 more food just to produce the energy to stay alive so what's the deal well one of the deals is in the process of letting these protons Escape From The Globe they produce heat and we happen to be warm-blooded animals and believe it or not even cold blooded animals depend on this to keep their body temperature and so heat production is an important part of this but what became apparent and will go into dnp in a minute is that you could waste a lot of calories by opening up these emergency exits you could literally do a caloric bypass well it just so happens that ketones aren't some phenomenal fuel it turns out the ketones are a phenomenal signaling molecule that actually among other things actually do three things they tell mitochondria to waste fuel to open up these emergency exits which on the surface seems are really stupid to do because ketones original purpose was to be produced during starvation to keep the brain kind of hanging in there until food arrives and it would make no sense if you're starving Adele to waste fuel and then I stumbled upon an obscure paper by Dr Martin brand and the paper was published in 2000 I recommend it to anybody because it's actually a easy read and the paper is simple uncoupled to survive and the name of the paper and he said inextremists at all costs mitochondria has to protect itself from Death because if the mitochondria dies it doesn't matter what happens to the muscles it doesn't happen to anybody else you're screwed so the mitochondria should do everything in its power to protect itself so stepping back for a second producing energy is really costly it's really damaging a mitochondria the club becomes a mess so if we actually waste some of all these people entering the club the place calms down so that's number one number two it's okay to waste energy but you got to have a certain amount of energy production or things fluttered to a stop so it turns out the ketones and other substances actually tell mitochondria not only to waste some of the stuff out the side door but to make more of themselves to share the workload now it really starts to make sense because okay you're protecting each individual mitochondria by having it work less but you're simultaneously adding more mitochondria to take up the workload each at a reduced work uh I'll give you an example let's say we have a dog sled since it's now winter and we have a two dog sled pulling a guy and they're doing a lot of work if we add six more dogs we now have an eight dog sled each of those dogs now has to do about a quarter of the work that the two guys did but you're gonna get you know you're gonna go as fast probably faster so it actually makes sense to have a program to make a lot more mitochondria when times are tough and for instance most people have heard of brown fat Brown fat is brown because it's so packed with mitochondria that it's literally Brown and brown fat turns out is actually one of the keys to lifelong health and brown fat produces heat and we can actually see it so mitochondria protect themselves they build more of themselves called mitogenesis and the third thing that happens from ketones is it literally instructs mitochondria to repair themselves to do the maintenance that's needed to keep them in Tip-Top conditions and so as I talk about the Mido club uh the Mido club owner actually wants less people in his minor Club to a point where it's placed to be but he doesn't want to lose those customers so he builds more mid Oklahoma to take up the slack yeah so like you say I carry the analogy to its final end Hopefully Dr gundry's Mito Club metaphor helped you understand how mitochondria function as the energy producers of your cells and this next segment we'll learn more about glucose and what happens when too much of it shows up at the club now here's a quick primer on glucose metabolism your body generally uses glucose from carbohydrates to generate energy in the form of ATP adenosine triphosphate how glucose is absorbed through your small intestine and into your bloodstream and then ushered to your cells by a peptide hormone called insulin which is secreted from your pancreas now if you have too much serum glucose because you scarf down a milkshake with a bowl of pasta and a pizza and some ice cream well your pancreas will need to produce more insulin to accomplish its job and if this pattern continues over time then eventually your cells will become stingy about letting glucose into the club and you'll become insulin resistant now when high levels of glucose are abandoned in the bloodstream a few things can happen including number one some glucose can get stored in the liver as glycogen essentially stockpiled for a rainy day number two glucose will get converted into triglycerides and stored in adipose tissue or fat number three glucose can combine with hemoglobin the protein in your blood that's famously tasked with shepherding oxygen to your cells to form an inflammatory glycoprotein oh high blood sugar levels are concomitant with diabetes which is correlated with cardiovascular disease and dementia in short this is why sugar can be considered the world's most dangerous assassin a Dr Casey means the expert for our next segment is a Stanford train physician and the chief medical officer and co-founder of metabolic Health company levels now she reveals the downstream impacts of excessive glucose and fructose on your mitochondria and shares protocols that you can Implement to repair that damage and here you have the esteemed Dr Casey means what happens when we have excess glucose in our bloodstream and what are some of the downstream or knock-on impacts of that glucose is blood sugar of course and for that to be taken out of the bloodstream into the cells to be processed or stored it requires in most cell types insulin which is like a lock and key that when when glucose comes into the bloodstream and Rises the pancreas releases this hormone insulin which then binds to the cell receptor and allows for the glucose to to come in the glucose then is going to be transported to the mitochondria and this is the key thing anything that damages the function of the mitochondria is going to essentially create a backup of glucose in the cell that's ultimately going to also signal for this process called insulin resistance to happen and insulin resistance is a sort of protective mechanism of the cell saying we're not able to process all this glucose so stop putting it in the cell so the cell becomes less sensitive to that insulin signal and therefore what's going to happen is less glucose is going to get into the cell you're going to start seeing that rise is in the bloodstream and this block to insulin you know it's sort of like the the salsane like there's no room at the end and so like we're gonna help protect the cell from more coming in because we can't we can't host it so then you've got to think about well what are the things that are going to potentially make the mitochondria not able to process that glucose um and one of the it's interesting like one is just what we were talking about before which is have it just over um being asked to produce to process too much glucose but there's other things and really anything that creates oxidative stress so too much free radical activity in the cell can also really hurt the mitochondria so this is a way that insulin resistance and problems with glucose can arise actually separate from just over glue too much glucose in the body and that are really important to zero in on and I think a framework to think about is like anything that's hurting my mitochondria is make give me less metabolically healthy because then you open it up from it's just sugar that's causing diabetes and obesity to actually there's a whole world of things that can impact the mitochondria and lead to these problems so for instance like um interestingly fructose which is not glucose but it's you know what's found in high fructose corn syrup and what's found in um juice and and you know in high levels in these foods that are refined um fructose products so interestingly as fructose even though it will not raise glucose in the bloodstream it will be processed by the cell in such a way that it generates a metabolic byproduct called uric acid and uric acid is a molecule that actually creates oxidative stress in the mitochondria so even though this is glucose independent it's creating a problem in the mitochondria which is then telling the cell we can't process all this glucose become insulin resistant so oxidative stress can happen and uric acid is one example of course oxidized other oxidized Foods so we hear a lot about oxidized seed oil so these like vegetable oils and Seed oils that are prone to oxidation those can also hurt the mitochondria and stress can can do this as well it can generate damage in the mitochondria so that's just to say there's sort of a holistic world of things that can impact the mitochondria that can lead to problems with how the cell is processing glucose and cause glucose to rise in the body and then you hear about all these um you know sort of things that people are doing now to kind of improve their health the sort of biohackery type things like cold plunging and saunas and intermittent fasting and I think it's interesting to just touch on this really quickly because in many ways these are helping by impacting the mitochondria when we're fasting when we are putting um the body into cold stress when we do you know high intensity interval training or zone two training actually lower intensity longer periods of training what we are doing is building we are stimulating the body to build more mitochondria so insulin produced in the pancreas picks up glucose and ushers it to cells for energy production muscle cells are actually an exception they don't require insulin for glucose uptake however in general the more glucose in the bloodstream the more insulin is required eventually excessive insulin will lead to cells becoming insulin resistant the cells no longer accept glucose and it remains in the bloodstream the sum of the excess glucose as I mentioned earlier can get stockpiled as glycogen in the liver however much of it is stored as triglycerides in fat cells now glucose can also bind with proteins like hemoglobin in the bloodstream to form inflammatory Advanced glycation end products also known as ages and these molecules can damage the vascular system and set the stage for cardiovascular disease excessive glucose in the cells can lead to the overproduction of free radicals these highly reactive molecules that can damage the mitochondria and cause oxidative stress so the term oxidative stress is used to describe the condition of damage resulting when the critical balance between free radical generation and antioxidant defenses is unfavorable oxidative stress is involved with a whole wide host of physiological and neurological disorders including cancer heart disease Parkinson's autism depression and many others in the case of cancer for example free radicals can induce DNA damage or mutation which can lead to the production and proliferation of dysfunctional cells so hopefully this provides you with enough reasons to avoid refined sugars and starches so our next guest Dr Robert lustig is going to reveal some of the common foods that we eat that may be contributing to that oxidative stress and poisoning our mitochondria so by the end of this episode you'll have a solid list of foods to avoid the next time you're at a grocery store couple those with Dr means suggestions on how to repair your mitochondria from the last segment and you'll have a good running start so Dr lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist and professor emeritus at the University of California San Francisco and he takes the information Dr means shared and broadens the scope while keeping it bite-sized in this next segment and with that I give you Dr Robert lustig maybe you could begin by outlining the primary chronic or non-communicable diseases and give us just a sense of scale in terms of the health economic and planetary costs associated with these diseases okay if there's one word that your listeners need to walk away with and understand its mitochondria now if you took 10th grade biology you learned about the mitochondria okay it is an essential component of uh high school biology education problem is you haven't heard of it since and you need to it's the most important part of the cell you hear about the nucleus all the time because that's where the DNA is and everybody's into genetics well if this is actually a bigger problem than genetics mitochondria are the little energy burning factories inside each of our cells glucose is the primary energy source but there are other energy sources as well such as fat ketones amino acids alcohol and of course fructose which we will get to in a minute all right but glucose is the primary energy source and there are two steps to Turning glucose into energy to power the cell the first step is called glycolysis that's what yeasts do fermentation that's the difference between wine and grape juice and the second is what we call aerobic respiration mitochondrial function and that's where the majority of the atps the adenosine triphosphates the chemical energy that food gets turned into that powers the cell gets done when your mitochondria work you make lots of ATP and that's what your cells want to do especially brain cells because they use a lot of ATP because neurotransmission is ATP energy intensive ATP intensive and there's no place to store energy in the brain because I mean you need you need your neurons for work not for storage okay so you need a steady supply of glucose and you need a steady supply of energy and you need a steady supply of mitochondrial function in order to make your brain work right well anything that disrupts mitochondria is going to end up causing disease and it turns out that there are chemicals in our environment that do that cyanide does that but you know cyanide's a poison we know it but there are a lot of things that do it that aren't considered poison but they are because they disrupt mitochondrial function okay trans fats do that and they are poison we know that now but we didn't know it for a hundred years you know the first trans fat was made in 1902 Crisco was patented in 1911 and by 1920 virtually every baked good in America was you know made with trans fats because trans fats didn't go Rancid vis-a-vis the 10 year old Twinkie all right Bill turns out the trans fats actually poisoned your mitochondria well alcohol poisons your mitochondria and branched chain amino acids poisoning around the country and it turns out fructose this sweet molecule in Sugar poisons your mitochondria too and so if you can't get the ATP out of your cell you're going to have cell dysfunction and ultimately cell death when you have cell deaths guess what you have human death too so keeping your mitochondria on its tippy toes and working as efficiently to generate the most energy possible is a prime directive of Health hopefully our experts in this episode inspired you to take care of those tiny organelles that have such a big hand in taking care of you here are some key takeaways from today's episode number one the dysfunctional metabolism of glucose can produce an excessive amount of free radicals in the mitochondria and this can degrade mitochondrial function and negatively impact energy production okay number two nurture your mitochondria by consuming healthy fats high quality protein vegetables and fiber and limit your consumption of sugar and of starches number three Implement lifestyle practices like intermittent fasting or cold hydrotherapy that stimulate the body to produce more mitochondria this is called mitobiogenesis okay I hope you enjoyed this episode and if you did please subscribe and hit the notification Bell so you'll never miss another show leave a comment to let us know your thoughts and don't forget to share our content with others who might benefit from this valuable information and the great experts that we assemble here on commune okay that's all from the commune for today my name is Jeff krasnow and I am here for you foreign

Channel: Commune

Views: 119,277

Keywords: wellness, well-being, commune courses, commune, online learning, health, relationships, yoga, online yoga, workout videos, nutrition coaching, spirituality, podcast, mental health, personal development, holistic practices, wellness tips, wellness industry, health and wellness, jeff krasno, Dr. Steven Gundry, Dr. Casey Means, Dr. Robert Lustig, energy, energy levels, energy tips, mitochondria, mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, mitochondrial health

Id: ip1KV0Aixfk

Length: 30min 56sec (1856 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2023