3.5 Keys to Improving Mitochondrial Health

I've been working in a mitochondrial lab for five years now and I stumbled across this video where in a mitochondrial researcher explained a number of things that we can do to improve our mitochondrial Health if you're not sure why mitochondrial Health matters well that I'd encourage that you check out my video on the topic but in brief mitochondria are implicated in just about every disease state known to mankind and healthy mitochondria are heavily related to well a healthier you I go into the mechanisms and much more detail in the other video so I won't repeat

myself but a healthy version of you hinges on healthy functioning mitochondria so we're going to listen to Dr Picard this mitochondrial researcher speak on what we can do to improve our mitochondrial health and I'm going to take your hand and walk you through your mitochondria to explain things in more detail there are unfortunately plenty of Lifestyle things we can do to ourselves elves to to decrease our mitochondrial function and decrease our mitochondrial health and the big ones that seem to get a lot of attention are of course nutrition and then sort of poor sleep and

toxins and so I mean how do you see the the main um the main detractors from mitochondria Health that unfortunately we do in our society yes so you're pointing to what I just described were uh inherited you know mitochondrial disorders and then they're acquired mitochondrial disorders real quick it's important he makes this distinction between inherited and acquired mitochondrial disorders inherited disorders come from your mother if your mother's mitochondria have some form of defect your mitochondria are likely to have a defect as one example I covered one of these genetic defects in a live session that

I did with the physionic Insiders therein I described the mechanisms of a known condition known as Libra hereditary optic neuropathy or lhon essentially the condition occurs due to mutations in one or multiple of three genes which causes defects in a critical mitochondrial protein heavily involved in cellular energy generation complex one of the electron transport chain ultimately these kinds of conditions are extremely difficult to treat but there are some solution it's like drugs and supplements as we learn more about reducing the dependence on that protein for cellular energy the second distinction that he makes is related

to acquired mitochondrial dysfunction which comes from what we are exposed to for the most part I'll give him the floor so all of the acquired you know results from our exposures and you know kind of internal exposures who were studying how psychological States and exposure to chronic stress or early life adversity and or the uh kind of the disorders that we can create ourselves either psychologically or through you know nutrition and other things and how they can influence mitochondria so this is all part of the acquired you know mitochondrial impairments or dysfunctions so there's a

number of things there that converge on on mitochondria including diet which is a very big one everything we put in our mouth ultimately converts urges either directly on mitochondria or you know around the the metabolic pathways that mitochondria are involved in regulating uh so that's you know a very big one uh there's a lot of good research on uh you know insecticides and pesticides and uh some of those that were used you know back in the days where we use at the laboratory as poisons for mitochondria so he goes on to describe these poisons and

how they're used in the lab but I'll describe that to you with visuals so he also mentions nutrition another area that we'll dive into in more depth in just a bit but the overall idea is that your habits impact your mitochondrial Health in extreme cases poisons like rotnone which was used as a broad insecticide also affects our cells unfortunately Dr Picard goes on to then describe how we use them in the lab as a matter of fact I've actually poisoned using Road known before and I'm looking for a place to stash the body if you

know anywhere a kid of course although I have used road known to poison cells by inhibiting mitochondria this poison works at the exact same site as the mutations mentioned earlier complex one of this chain of proteins that allows the mitochondrion to generate ATP cellular energy so the takeaway here is avoid poisons and otherwise toxic substances granted not exactly revolutionary advice but we're warming up to more I can feel it also I watched the video so I know what's coming up what can we do to promote you know good or to optimize mitochondrial Health energy transformation

or you know proper mitochondrial signaling there's not a lot of uh there's a need for more research on this that's your first thing I want to say um there are three things that we know can optimize and improve you know mitochondrial energy transformation capacity based on kind of scattered research over the last maybe two decades one thing we know for sure is moving uh being Physically Active right so I think many people know you know as exercise is a protective Factor against you know many uh you know mental illnesses um and exercise is a protective

factor for pretty much every disease that we know of and if we flip this if we think about health right as not just the absence of exercise but this ability to thrive and and to um and and to you know live a long healthy life uh exercise is good for this so moving stimulates and pretty much inside every uh organ that people have looked at stimulates the production of more mitochondria so if you move the body feels oh I need more energy how how do I handle this let me make more mitochondria that's called mitochondrial

biogenesis and we know that this this happens you know a lot for example in muscles uh if you go from being completely sedentary uh to training for a marathon you can double the number mitochondria on your muscles all right number one which is a hundred percent true and cannot be emphasized enough I covered this extensively in my master's program in exercise physiology but let's look at some actual studies as well Dr Picard mentions that moving being Physically Active has tremendous benefits to improving mitochondrial Health a number the latter the mitochondrial number can be increased through

a process called mitochondrial biogenesis every time I say that I always think to myself like I'm sitting on top of a massive Canyon with a booming voice saying [Music] it reverberates through the expense anyway my delusions aside how does this work well your muscles are filled with millions of myocytes those are muscle cells these muscle cells when activated under strenuous or continuous load AKA lifting weights running they contract now it's really remarkable how much I'm cutting out here I'll always remark that because I it often feels so unsatisfactory to me but we also have a

lot of information to get to so please excuse anyway contractions of the muscle cells require energy so your muscle cells use Mass amounts of ATP the cell energy that I briefly mentioned earlier as such Downstream product molecules of ATP begin to increase in concentration within the cells like ADP and amp additionally calcium is in great use during the whole process for reasons that we can't really get into right now just know that it's highly involved in muscle contraction so elevated calcium and elevated ADP and ANP lead to the activation of the master mitochondrial biogenesis molecule

called pgc1 alpha pgc1 alpha then enters the nucleus of your cells and activates a variety of proteins called transcription factors these transcription factors sitting on the genes within the nucleus begin recruiting the gene a reading Machinery to begin producing Downstream proteins that are part of mitochondria once these mitochondrial proteins are produced they are integrated into new mitochondria borne from mature mitochondria and that is the highly truncated version of how we produce more mitochondria for reference see this study although there are many others that detail this as well okay so big picture if you use your

muscles the mere action of movement causes a chain reaction and more often within reason you move and are Physically Active the more this occurs generating more mitochondria that is crazy cool this whole process is especially true for cardio exercise even over strength training so being hungry once in a while is healthy we evolved you know to do this and the reason why being hungry is is not eating too much is is healthy is not too clear maybe it's because it puts you into ketosis uh maybe it because it's because it prevents nutritional or metabolic oversupply

or you know overload people have done beautiful studies and in cultured cells where you take cells and then you bombard them with sugar and with fat and so that causes kind of there's too much energy Supply relative to what the cells need and this causes within minutes the fragmentation of mitochondria so you go from having a beautiful network of connected and you know dynamic mitochondria talking to each other to a completely fragmented mitochondrial Network being calorically or nutrient neutral on average this is also excellent input and there's plenty of research that has come out on

being overweight as one example causes tremendous changes to mitochondria one area that I would caution is not to over interpret changes in mitochondrial structures positive or negative Dr Picard mentions that when cells are exposed to significant nutrient load there is mass shrinking of mitochondria it just so happens that I've performed at these experiments myself in the lab and I can 100 confirm these massive changes in mitochondrial morphology however when looking over the literature this is merely an adaptation by mitochondria to increase their burn through or oxidize of nutrients so this fragmentation as seen here in

green allows mitochondria to waste more energy clearly this is a reaction to massive nutrient overload as we'd see with obesity although this is possibly a little bit more extreme still repeat exposure to high nutrient load does eventually cause issues I'll give you a little fun fact about my experiments at the end of the video in relation to this effect stay tuned anyway though making sure not to over consume regularly so we're talking about months and years not the occasional day is critical for healthy mitochondria because excess food consumption over time Burns mitochondria with needing to

burn more energy as inefficiently as possible which can in some cases increase oxidative stress or damaging molecules that are produced by the overburdened mitochondria but let's hear Dr Picard speak to this nutrition aspect just a bit more so the magic question with fasting though is how long and I know it's like impossible to answer with with certainty but you know time restricted eating it can help reduce calories maybe you know it can help reduce insulin and improve insulin sensitivity to some degree you know probably like a minimum of 12 hours maybe has to be 16

maybe has to be 18. do you have any sense when it comes to mitochondria where The Sweet Spot is or it's just clear that some amount of it helps and we still need to learn more about the specifics yeah I think it's it's clear that some amount of it helps I don't know that we have the right evidence to be prescriptive here about how long should you fast and it probably depends if if you're on a ketogenic diet right and and you or you have a you're on a low carb diet maybe you don't need

to fast for as long to to you know derive the benefits that if you're on a a regular you know a high carb diet and maybe you know each person's metabolism is is pretty different and it's clear that some people respond a lot better to uh you know nutritional ketosis than some others I don't have much to add here except for one thing I think that he Nails it with the uncertainty on how to be prescriptive about fasting in regard to mitochondrial Health if anyone on the Internet is telling you that they know exactly how

long they're lying out of their rear end that may change in the future as we gain more data but as it stands here's how to approach fasting for mitochondrial Health one focus on doing it in a sustainable way if that's only 12 hours a day then so be it if it's longer that's great two focus more on the overall ability to reduce or maintain to a healthy weight not the actual fasting length itself the fasting will help you achieve that healthy weight if you find it sustainable for you but there is no evidence yet on

the optimal amount of fasting on this mitochondrial metric hopefully that will also be changing in the near future you know I guess I do have a second thing to say it probably does matter which nutrition style that you choose but again we have no data on mitochondrial metrics so focusing on the big picture of maintaining a healthy weight no matter if that's using high carb or low carb or whatever is ultimately going to Trump some nebulous idea that one diet is more optimal than the other diet there isn't enough data on that topic yet how

you feel and and I'll Focus specifically on positive psychological States might actually drive changes in your mitochondria and um and we did a study a few years ago with Elissa Apple UCSF where they took about 90 women who um who were asked every morning and every evening how they feel and then you know you imagine you wake up in the morning and then you're asked how do you feel now right do you feel you know inspired or do you feel you know confident about your day or do you feel worried and you don't know what's

going to happen today and that's really stressful to you and then in the evening there was kind of a more elaborate questionnaire that asked how much of this did you feel today and then there were kind of items like love closeness and trust and uh you know being inspired and motivated and uplifted and you know connected to others and so on and then some negative things like feeling betrayed and you know rejected and feeling sad and depressed and and I think everyone you know can can imagine some days you feel a lot of positive stuff

right like you had a great day with your partner with your colleagues at work or so you felt a lot of positive things and not so much negative things and some other days you feel a lot of negative things because if things have happened because of your you know psychobiological State you know whatever this whatever drives the emergence of those positive negative experiences so they ask those questions so we have kind of reports on how women feel for seven days in a row for a whole week which is beautiful you know a daily repeated measures

of someone and then we uh we were able to have white blood cells immune cells from these women on measured on the Wednesday so they answered these questions from you know this the the Sunday to the Saturday for these seven days and then on a Wednesday they came to the clinic gave blood then uh Alyssa's team isolated white blood cells and then we asked they might mitochondria and then what we measured in the mitochondria there is we call the mitochondrial Health index which is basically how much energy can each mitochondrion transform right so that's kind

of a proxy for a simplistic proxy for mitochondrial health so we were able to to relate for the first time how people felt right across that week and and their mitochondria in the middle of that week um and so we asked you know a simple question first do people who feel more positive have better mitochondrial Health than people who feel more experience more negative things right uh and and the answer does was you know yes and it seems like people who experience more positive things have slightly better mitochondrial Health uh but then the more interesting

question was well we know how uh these women reported feeling for the three days before we took the mitochondria and then for the three days let's say after we took the mitochondria so we can ask is it how people feel that predicts right or drives the mitochondrial health or is it the mitochondrial Health that drives and predicts how people feel right um and the what the study showed is that how people felt uh in the morning in the evening on the three days before on the Monday the Tuesday the Wednesday actually predicted mitochondrial Health uh

but not the other way around I'll be honest with you I have never heard of this in my life but I'm also not the all-knowing purveyor of all things science I'm learning too fortunately I have a unique set of skills that allows me to poison not those skills I have a set of skills that allows me to interpret molecular data so let's see if we can find this study for you bingo actually I'm not even sure if the term Bingo fits here but let's roll with it I'm not going to get into all the intricacies

of this data because that would involve again and more time than we have but I'll point out one piece that illustrates his point well in this data the researchers Dr Picard being one of them identify the association between morning and night feeling of Wellness so binarily separated as negative and positive the horizontal axis is the effect size or the magnitude of the effect I'll go ahead and tell you that all the effect size is listed up to 0.4 are small but let's play along anyway so they are comparing the mood that a person is in

to the mitochondrial Health index which is a measure that they created they find especially at night that if mood is positive at night there is a relationship with improved of mitochondrial Health that's pretty fascinating stuff but I'll need to dig into this a lot more to get a complete picture plus the study is associative still I think it's pretty neat and kind of makes me reflect on my unending stress levels maybe it does for you too I guess the takeaway is buck up chap or just take care of your mental health it's important oh yeah

and I nearly forgot I mentioned a fun fact in my experiments on mitochondrial fragmenting well while Dr Picard mentions this occurring with combining lipids so that's fats with glucose sugar I've actually done it with only fats so no sugar and the effect is extremely rapid just taking a few minutes so while I wouldn't jump to any conclusions that fats are bad for you based on that information I just want to relay that glucolipotoxicity the process of too much glucose and fat simultaneously causes this reaction it can also happen independent of glucose pretty neat huh anyway

while we've covered a lot here I actually have a lot more mitochondrial content right here and I think that you'll find it Illuminating if you found anything in this video interesting or if you care to switch gears check out this other video which is also filled with data driven conclusions now where did I leave my rope noun foreign