EPISODE #1012: How Your Mitochondria Control Your Brain Energy – Chris Palmer, M.D.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about energy in your brain based on a new book called Brain Energy. And I'm super excited about this because this is a very well researched and well respected book that talks about something you've learned on the show over time. The amount of energy that your brain makes equals how you show up in the world and how you feel. But there's a big focus in this book on mental illness and how much mental illness is a metabolic dysfunction in the brain. So that's an excuse to talk with a really, really smart author who's drawing those connections. So if you have a lot of anxiety, you have a lot of stress, or at least you think you have a lot of stress or any of the other attention problems, all the stuff that frankly that I went through in my 20s, maybe it's not because you're a bad person and maybe it's not because you're weak. Maybe you just have a hardware problem. Wouldn't that be interesting? And that's what we're going to talk about today. And this is just very personal to me. I've done a lot of work with Daniel Amen, who was an early voice in the field. I'm on his board of directors. I've written a book about mitochondria in the brain. So I care, years of my life care about this. And we're going to go deep with a Harvard psychiatrist and his name is Christopher Palmer. And he's just swinging for the fences saying, here's what's going on with mental ill. So, Chris, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Dave, for having me.

You're well known in keto circles because you said, hey, isn't it weird? We take psychiatric patients, we put them on a keto diet, and a lot of their psychiatric issues just go away. How was that received when you first started talking about this?

You know, it's interesting because I know other people have reported similar findings from the low carb and keto communities, and for the most part, they were written off. And I took a different approach. And I kind of knew from day one I would need to take a different approach because nobody would take this seriously. And so I ended up doing a really deep dive into the science of what we know about the ketogenic diet and how it stops seizures. And I really focused on the neuroscience of that. Changes in neurotransmitters and brain inflammation and calcium channel regulation, all sorts of things. And I used that evidence to support why the ketogenic diet might be having the effects on people that it that I was witnessing and for the most part was extraordinarily well received, better received than I would have ever imagined. And some leading psychiatrists and neuroscientists quickly were jumping on the bandwagon and publishing their own scientific review articles about hey. And some of them even kind of took credit for it all and like, didn't cite any of the research that I or others had done.

Heaven forbid that there'd be people like that in academia, just like in the health influencer world.

I know it's so hard to believe.

But, you know, it's a compliment that the number of people who think they invented biohacking is interesting. I'm like, okay, whatever. Exactly, I'm with you there. But you have guys like friends, Mark Hyman and David Perlmutter, endorsing the book, and they're both very well respected doctors and authors and things, which helps. And I do think you are a major leading voice in it. And plus, you didn't just say like, you know, the keto diet is good for this stuff, you went mechanistically for it. And now in, in your book, Brain Energy, you're just saying, straight up, we know it causes mental illness. So what causes what causes mental illness? That's a baller statement, by the way.

It is. It is ridiculously bold and audacious if people really understand what I'm saying in the book. In a nutshell, I'm arguing that the cause of all mental disorders, and there's a difference between a mental disorder and normal human emotions or reactions, we all get depressed, we all get anxious, and those are hardwired responses in the human brain. But what I'm arguing is that when people have mental disorders, so when they have depression for no good reason, anxiety for no reason, ADHD symptoms, psychotic symptoms, bipolar symptoms, that the cause fundamentally is metabolic in nature. And I'm arguing that mental disorders are metabolic disorders. And in a way it's kind of, it makes sense because metabolism is kind of everything in biology. So on one hand it's kind of like some people have even said to me, like, you're not really saying much because metabolism is everything. So big deal. Chris Palmer and yet in another way, once you see the big picture of metabolism and all of the things that influence metabolism, you actually can see novel ways to intervene. And you can also raise some red flags about some of our current treatments.

Well, it's interesting you could say, well, no, mercury is the cause of certain types of Mental disorders. And of course, mercury poisons mitochondria, which affects the metabolism in a specific way. Right. And you can say, oh, it's allergies. Oh, that's funny. Do allergies affect metabolism via mast cells and regulatory cells?

Yes.

So I think you could, from a truth table perspective, say, all right, yeah, but do we know why metabolism is getting deranged or what to do about it?

I think we do. I mean, at the end of the day, a lot of neuroscientists and psychiatrists know that the broad overarching theme is correct and that research actually goes back a couple of centuries. This is nothing new. I am simply integrating decades and decades of clinical genetic neuroscience, neuroimaging metabolic research, putting it all together, looking comprehensively at what do we know about the mental health field and how can we put it together in a coherent way. So if you talk broadly about metabolism, people think about all of the different metabolic pathways and enzymes and Krebs citric acid cycle and all sorts of things, and it gets overwhelmingly complex. But if you really ask big picture questions like, but what exactly are the primary regulators of metabolism? Where is metabolism controlled in the human body or in a cell or whatever you are, you continuously get led to mitochondria. And once you understand mitochondria and the connections there and mitochondria, it's like a whole new universe. So much that we have to learn so much to understand about them. But once you understand the mitochondrial connection, that, that actually allows us to connect all of the dots of mental illness and the mental health field. And it allows us to say, in fact, mental disorders are definitely metabolic disorders, that means some type of derangement in mitochondrial function. And again, what's so powerful and important about it is that once you understand that, once you understand that they are the center of mental illness, you can start to see why do certain risk factors precipitate or cause mental disorders. But you can also understand novel ways to intervene. Mitochondrial dysfunction is not about inheriting a defective mitochondrion from your mother. Mitochondrial dysfunction is about environment and lifestyle factors adversely affecting them and their function.

It comes down to epigenetics and in fact, biohacking is a clever restatement and expansion on that general idea. The definition, when I first launched it, was the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you, so you have full control of your own biology, including your brain, which means including your thoughts. And if you have the persistent negative thoughts, the, you know, the super bad critic in your head, now you can do all the laying on a couch you want and pay for someone's kids to go through college, but it might feel good, but it probably isn't going to fix the root problem. But if you stopped eating crap that was inhibiting your mitochondria and got off the MSG that's causing electrical disturbances in the mitochondria inside the neurons in your brain, magically, you might just fix the problem and not have to lay on a couch.

Absolutely, 100% agree. And one of the beautiful things about the mitochondrial theory is that it also connects psychological and social factors that we know can play a role in mental disorders and also metabolic disorders. So childhood adversity, trauma, stress, they all impact mitochondrial function. And we know, we've known for many decades that they also play a role in mental disorders, but they also play a role in things like premature cardiovascular disease. And again, the way to connect them is through mitochondria. So, you know, so one, one mitochondrial researcher actually said, you know, you think of a cell as a computer. A lot of people say the mitochondria are the power cord to that computer. Well, they are, they are definitely the power cord, but actually they're also the motherboard of that comp. They are making strategic decisions about allocation of resources, both energy and mass. Because when we eat, it starts to even get into EMC2 stuff. Because when we eat food, it's either getting turned into energy that fuels our body or is getting turned into physical substrate to repair cells or grow new cells or whatever. And so we start looking at all of that kind of stuff. And mitochondria are critical in all of those kind of quote unquote decisions.

A lot of my last five years of work has been deducing what I think the operating system in mitochondria actually do. Like how do they make decisions because there isn't that much DNA in them. They don't have a lot of compute capacity or storage. So they're making simple decisions very, very quickly. Do you have thoughts about how they prioritize?

To be honest with you, it is a mind blowing experience. The deeper the dive you do into mitochondria and the decisions or the algorithms that they're using, you know, because mitochondria don't have brains, but yet they are behaving in certain ways. They are responding to the environment in certain ways. And when you actually do a really deep dive, it starts to mess with almost everything we know about biology.

Yeah.

If you want, I'll give you one really huge example has nothing to do with psychiatry or brain energy. But there are some researchers here in the Boston area who are looking at flatworms. And they took a flatworm, they applied a magnetic field to this flatworm at a specific developmental point in time. And the flatworm ended up developing two heads, a head on both ends. That flatworm then can reproduce and reproduces a two headed flatworm. Those flatworms reproduce and produce two headed flatworms. If you asked, if you asked any biologist, now where is that coded that a flatworm should have one head or two heads? Where is that coded? They would say it has to be in the DNA. It has to be in our genetics. And in fact, that study says that ain't so. Yeah, and, and those researchers, I just happen to have a little bit of knowledge that those researchers are. I mean, right now they don't have an explanation. Where the hell is that being encoded and how is it being transmitted along generations? Like where is that information encoded? And right now the answer is no one knows. But the, the, the trail is quickly leading to mitochondria are somehow encoding that information that a flatworm should have two heads instead of one head or one head instead of two heads. And how the hell that works and how they know because you know, you're, you're, you're, you know, you're only transmitting gametes and it's like mess. So I don't, I don't really know how it would work. I don't think anyone does.

But there's definitely a magnetic thing going on and there's probably information fields involved with it as well. Where the mitochondria is setting up an information field where the tissues follow. And we know the, the disjoint bone experiments are running small amounts of electrical current that will cause tissues to grow, to regrow a fracture in a bone. A lot of this goes back to a book called the Body Electric. The. That really changed my view of all this. When I was a computer hacker, you know, a Cyberpunk in the 90s, I read this book, I'm like, oh my God, we can hack human bodies. I know what governments and big companies are doing to computer systems and how hackers are stopping that. I think we need the same thing in humans because we're imminently hackable with electromagnetic frequencies and not the stuff you see in a lot of movies, but we do respond at a quantum level. Study just came out about last month that showed that every time your heart beats, the proton spin of protons inside your brain actually changes on a Per heartbeat basis, which is de facto proof that we're quantum beings. And, yeah, when you take it from there and you say, well, I'm gonna lay on a couch and smoke a cigar and say, tell me about your mother, I feel like there's a bit of a gap between those two realities. And I'm a little more attracted to the hacking one. I don't know about you.

No, absolutely. I am definitely more attracted to the hacking one, especially. Especially with all of this new information. You know, it's really fascinating because, you know, especially over the last 20 years, the research on mitochondria continues to explode and boom. And I think most. Most of the emerging science continues to just shock people in terms of what is going on. And they really are like a universe unto themselves, Even in a single cell. It's like a whole new world. And so I agree. I think mitochondria, at the end of the day, if you ask, like, what is controlling what single factor is most responsible for the control of the human organism? I think the answer would always come down to the network of mitochondria throughout the human body. Now, some are arguing we need to subcategorize, and maybe there are thousands of different types of mitochondria. And, like, it's too simplistic to just say that they're one thing. And I agree with that. But I think if you. If you consider that they are a network kind of under themselves, they communicate not only with mitochondria within the same cell, but they communicate with mitochondria in other cells. Cells share mitochondria. Like one of the primary functions of stem cells, for instance. Everybody knows stem cells are great. One of the things they do is they transfer healthy mitochondria to struggling cells. And so they, like, come to the rescue and say, you need some healthy mitochondria so that you can live and stay alive and repair yourself. And, you know, macrophages, that's one of their primary functions, is to go to a site of healing and inject new mitochondria into struggling cells that need repair and healing. And so it really is appropriate, I think, to talk about mitochondria not as things contained within one cell, but as a network of mitochondria within an organism. And at the end of the day, yes, they are playing a major role in our fear responses, our behaviors, our eating behaviors, everything, because they. At the end of the day, as you said, we as an organism are hardwired to respond to the environment in certain ways and try to survive.

How Flexible are these networks. You see, people are mentally ill. Like, do they fix their metabolism, their brain gets better, and they get younger and they do all this stuff, or are they still kind of walking wounded?

You know, I think there's a whole range with. With humans, obviously, and. But as a rule of thumb, you know, when I get patients with, you know, who've had schizophrenia for decades, they're usually obese because of all the meds they've been forced to take. The medications that we give them actually directly impair mitochondrial function, and that is the mechanism of action of some of the permanent side effects of some of the meds we prescribe. Certainly it plays a role in all the metabolic side effects, such as weight gain and diabetes and premature cardiovascular disease. A patient with schizophrenia who's been on meds for decades is definitely an unhealthy organism, as a rule of thumb, and in part because of the illness and whatever was causing the illness, and in part because of the treatments that we end up delivering. And as a rule of thumb, when I implement kind of strategies to help improve their mitochondrial function, not only do their mental symptoms get better, but everything else does. Their. Their weight normalizes. For most of them, that means significant weight loss.

And you. You actually gain weight when you take antidepressant drugs, right? For the most part. A lot of people do, yeah.

And with the antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, it's enormous weight gain. I mean, we're talking more than 100 pounds for most people. Yikes. Over. At least over time, I see so many people gain massive amounts of weight. And. And it's just considered the price we have to pay to. You know, it's, well, sucks to be you to have a serious mental disorder. And we're sorry our treatments are so ineffective and come with horrible side effects, but. And some people even compare it to cancer treatment. It's kind of like, well, you have cancer of the brain, just like we deliver chemotherapy and radiation, and we know those are toxic. These medications are toxic. We get it. But what's the alternative? You're going to be dead or in jail or.

I learned eventually I must have seen a couple dozen doctors when I was trying to figure out what happened with the poisoning of my mitochondria by toxic mold, which. Wait a minute, doesn't mold make antibiotics like penicillin that attacks bacteria and has for 2 billion. Oh, funny enough, you live in a house of toxic mold. Who would think you'd get mitochondrial disorders? But to unravel that, because the symptoms I had so Many of them. And they were all over the place. It was, oh, you're a hypochondriac, you're crazy, you're lying, you're eating Snickers bars all the time. Like just all these things. Then I finally got to the point where I'd go to the doctor, say I want to do X. And if the doctor said that was impossible, I would just say, I'm sorry, I wasn't asking your opinion about possibility. I was telling you want to do it. So are you going to be curious with me and are you going to help think outside the box because I'm desperate here. And if they wouldn't do it, it was like, next, let's go see a different one. Do you think people should do that more often? Like, if doctors aren't going to work on solving the unsolvable, even if they say, I don't know how to do it, but I'll work with you, should we fire our doctors?

I really do want healthcare professionals to learn about this, to step up to help people recover using all the strategies you've been talking about for years, using the strategies that I outlined in Brain Energy, but coming together, understanding these relate to metabolism and mitochondria that we need to treat the whole human being and not just symptoms of, you know, with, with, with pills that we know do not promote long term healing. So yeah, I do want people to feel empowered. I want people to demand better because you don't deserve to suffer in the way people don't deserve what they're getting.

No way. I, I feel so bad when I see someone who is clearly struggling with this kind of, they're just morbidly obese and you can tell that they're drinking a diet soda because they were told like I was in my 20s, oh yeah, that's how you lose weight. But you know, there's evidence that it introduces metabolic dysfunction and it gives you intense food cravings. And it, it's not my place to walk up and say, hey man, you have to stop because it's just, that's rude. Right? In chapter eight in your book, you're saying that if the cells that control anxiety are underactive, you're going to have anxiety symptoms. And if your memory cells are underactive, you have mem memory issues. And given those cells, they're underactive because mitochondria, what do you think is telling the mitochondria to make those cells underactive?

So the way I think about it is that something has happened to the mitochondria in those cells. And there can be a few different kind of ways to think about it. So one is that if you suppress a cell over time, say by drinking excess amounts of alcohol or smoking cigarettes, which poisons mitochondria, if you kind of assault mitochondria, the number of mitochondria in that cell will decline. And that cell is receiving signals through, say, gaba, through alcohol or a benzodiazepine or other medication that those substances, environmental substances, are suppressing cell activity. That cell is essentially kind of, you know, going into almost a hibernation state. As a result. When it does that, it, it ends up with less mitochondria because that cell senses. I don't. It does. We don't need mitochondria anymore because we're just like in this semi hibernation state. So we're just chilling out. Well, as soon as you don't use that substance, then that cell comes back online. But it does not have sufficient healthy mitochondria to deal with what it needs to deal with. So it is metabolically compromised now. And then it can malfunction. And that's the easiest way to put it, that cell will malfunction. And if that cell malfunctions, it can result in symptoms of what we call mental illness. I do think there are environmental toxins. You've named a few mold and, you know, mercury and others. If people have exposure to environmental toxins, those can adversely affect mitochondrial function. If people have a really toxic diet, tons of junk food, super high calories, you know, you're spiking your glucose levels all the time, that results in kind of overwhelming mitochondria, results in oxidative stress, which actually damages the mitochondria. And so now you've got lots of defective mitochondria in that cell, but all of those different scenarios. So we've talked about kind of suppressing, we've talked about toxins, we've talked about other ways that this can happen. But if it happens, if that cell is metabolically compromised, meaning it doesn't have sufficient healthy mitochondria to manage normal operations, that cell can malfunction and that results in mental illness. The great news, as you know and as I know, a lot of the strategies to improve this are common sense, obvious advice like follow a healthy diet and we can get into that. Or you people already know that, probably from you. But follow a healthy diet that's going to promote mitochondrial health, that's going to promote metabolic health.

Well, people definitely know, you know, my, my bulletproof Diet, cyclical, keto, clean fats, etce. But you just wrote a book and it's not a diet book at all. But given all of the sum of your experience in clinic and in research and all, give me the bullet points for what your mitochondrial healthy diet is.

You know, for some people it really can be just whole food diet. So avoid all the processed stuff, avoid all the chemicals, avoid all of.

What does that mean? Do you eat the walnut Shel, when you're doing whole food? Or like, how do you.

No, no, no.

What is a whole food? I. I can't even tell anymore. Like people are eating kale, which is not even food. It's. It's garnish.

You are, you are correct. I guess I would say you can't read all of the ingredients and you don't know where they can be identified in nature. Then it might not be an ideal diet.

Chemical to avoid chemicals, artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, all that kind of stuff. All right, I like that. What, what else? But that can't be it because, I mean, orange juice isn't an ideal diet. I don't think. If that's all you have, it's not.

So certainly low glycemic load. No, I mean, definitely no added sugars. You know, the diet that I am kind of known for is extraordinarily similar to bulletproof diet.

Okay, so we're in general agreement there.

We are in. Yeah, no, that. I mean, that's exactly what I'm doing. Ketogenic diet, plus or minus some intermittent fasting.

But it's not always in keto.

Right.

You allow carbs sometimes, but not always. Or are you like go keto all the time?

It really depends on the person, honestly. So if, if I'm treating somebody for severe bipolar disorder or for schizophrenia, you.

Know the shit out of them. Right.

They actually have to stay in ketosis, kind of like an epilepsy patient. It really is controlling their brain function. They don't. It's not a lifelong diet for most of them. There are people with rare genetic disorders like glucose transporter deficiency syndrome that, that may need a ketogenic diet for life. But the majority of people, it ends up being a two to five year prescription to allow your brain mitochondria to heal and. Or all the autophagy that needs to happen to just reset things. Because if you are having seizures, if you're having psychotic symptoms, your brain is really in disrepair at that point. I'll just say it's metabolically compromised in a pretty serious way. And that's not going to heal in two months, unfortunately. So those people, I usually say two to five years. But if we're talking somebody with mild depression or burnout or mild ADHD symptoms, I totally agree with you. Intermittent kind of fasting. Maybe introduce some carbs. Carbs would probably be more in the form of berries and fruits. And some fruits and some other things. No, I'm not, not going for granola bars and cereal and a lot of stuff like that.

But they just say kind right on them. And they're made by glued together sugar with a few nuts. Exactly right.

That's not what I'm talking.

That's why I asked about whole food. A lot of people think that's a whole food. And like, no, it, it's not. It's. It's processed and it's full of sugar and it does feel though. And, and this is something that, that kind of rocked my world when I was getting into mitochondria. In the brain, we have neurons, which are the rock stars in the brain, right? And neurons will prefer ketones even in the presence of glucose. Like they drink ketones because they're, they're just hogs. They need that to make electricity. But the glial cells that appear to be kind of shepherding some of the mitochondria and certainly are the inflammatory and cleanup systems in the body, they prefer glucose in the presence of ketones, even though ketones are higher energy. So, like in nature, like, okay, either you're in ketosis and the neurons are happy because you're starving, that is fasting. Or you just ate a bunch of meat and then sometimes you have carbs and then the glial cells are doing, yay, we have carbs. Let's do our cleanup. And gluconeogenesis, which is when the body, just for listeners, when the body makes sugars out of proteins that you eat or that are in your body because you need them, that. That's not enough level to make the glial cells happy. So I'm kind of like, how do I power up the neurons, but then have some time for the glial cells to do the brain cleanup? And it feels like in people with mental illness, the glial activation and the ability to not over activate the immune system in the brain, but to do the cleanup and repair and even the autophagy functions of glial cells, you're going to need a piece of fruit or you're going to need some honey, or you're going to even need some dark chocolate made with real sugar, but just not that much real sugar. Am I onto something there, based on what you've seen? I mean, it's kind of heresy in the keto community to say, God, parts of your brain might want carbs, but I think that's the case.

I think, you know, the story with glial cells is even a little more complicated because they, you know, there's this lactate shuttle. So glial cells are actually a primary source of energy for neurons. So neurons are just kind of clean engines. Neurons do not store any energy. They don't store. Store glycogen. They don't do it. So they are just sucking in fuel and burning it and, and, or turning it into substrates like neurotransmitters or hormones or whatever else they. They need. But glial cells, this story's getting even more complicated because a study just came out not too long ago that suggests astrocytes play a critical role in glucose regulation throughout the entire body. And, and so who knew. And who knows exactly how that all works and, and how that plays out? Like, what the hell are they doing that other cells aren't doing? But, but yeah, I think that for some people, like I said, I've had. I've had some patients with schizophrenia, so I'll just speak to my clinical experience. Experience. We know that with epilepsy world, like, some people do need strict ketosis. They cannot have true chocolate with any sugar. They can't have a nice piece of kind of higher glycemic index fruit. They can have a few berries or something, but with a lot of whipped cream on it. And when they do, like, I will just speak firsthand about the patients I've worked with. So patients I've worked with, psychotic symptoms are in remission on a ketogenic diet. Their. Their hallucinations are gone, or at least 95% gone. Their delusions are gone. They are functioning at a completely different level. And they go out and eat a chocolate bar because they think they can. And some of them are even labeled keto chocolate bars. Yeah, some of them are, unfortunately, and it makes their blood glucose spike, and they get floridly psychotic within 24 hours. The hallucinations come back with a vengeance or the delusions come back. All right? And so for them, I would say, exactly where in the brain, which cells? Who knows? Like, I really don't know. I don't think anyone knows. But clinically, I would say for those patients, they need continuous ketogenic diet. Most of those patients get to a point, though, like, I said, after a few years of doing it, they get to a point where they're much more adaptable and then they can veer off the diet.

I've noticed there's a window at about two years. And this just comes from millions of people doing bulletproof coffee. So for the first two years, if you're metabolically dysregulated, like I was, you put like 4 tablespoons in your coffee and you're like, oh, my God, butter is my religion. I use butter as my deodorant. I mean, you're like, you need it in your soul. And after about two years, it goes from that to, you know, I like butter. I'm gonna have a couple teaspoons, and you just kind of back off a little bit. And two years is coincidentally, almost exactly the half life of lipids in your cells. So at that point, you've washed out half of the fat in your body. You've increased the percentage of saturated, and you've also gotten rid of lipophoric toxins that the fat dissolved, toxins that inhibit mitochondrial function. And if you go like the really sick patients, you go another two years to four years now, you've replaced 75% of the fat in your body with clean, high quality, undamaged fats, which is going to help to fix your mitochondria. And of course, two years later, you've really, you know, you've gotten 80 something percent of it. And does that seem like that might be a part of why that timeline is there?

I think it definitely might be. You know, so, so the, the, the membranes of mitochondria are extraordinarily important and critical, and they're actually very dynamic and fluid. A lot of people don't know this. Like, mitochondria are constantly changing shape, but the mitochondria that move actually will fuse with each other. And at that point they're like sharing material and membranes and proteins and all sorts of stuff, and then they'll split apart again. And, and so, so yeah, if you've got, if you have damaged, like oxidate, oxidized fats, fatty acids or other molecules kind of making up mitochondrial membranes, it may take time to clean, to, to kind of clean that out, replace those with, you know, all of that fat with healthier ones. I mean, certainly the cell membrane is important as well. And a lot of people are focused on the cell membrane, especially like when they talk about omega 3 fatty acids. But omega 3 fatty acids are actually more located on mitochondrial membranes than they are on the Cell, membrane. Membrane. So really, like, once you understand the critical role of mitochondria, it's kind of like it's. They're everything.

And what do you think about statin drugs and their effect on mitochondria?

We know that they are toxic to mitochondria. You know that?

I do. I. I was hoping to slide one in past you and be like, I thought, you know. Yeah. So everyone listening. If you're on statin drugs, unless there's an extreme circumstance, which is not cholesterol of 220, then you're poisoning the system in your body, responsible for your mental health as well as your longevity. So there, there just isn't a good argument for the vast majority of people taking them, especially on a preventative basis in modern science. I think it's actually criminal. What's happening. Do you see people who go on statins have a higher likelihood of mental illness if statins cause mitochondrial dysfunction and mitochondrial dysfunction causes mental illness.

So there, you know, so most people who go on statins end up, you know, they're usually in their 40s and 50s when they're getting placed on statins. We definitely have many case reports of people on statins having acute kind of mental changes. Some people have become aggressive, some people have had severe personality changes. Those are extreme. The much more common scenario that's really hard to tease apart. So we know people with type 2 diabetes, a metabolic disorder, are two to three times more likely to have clinical depression. Oh, yeah. But when they get clinical depression, it lasts four times longer than it does in people who don't have diabetes. So at any given time, a recent study from the UK actually said about 46% of people with type 2 diabetes, so half have enough symptoms of major depression to qualify for at least a mild case of major depressive disorder.

Wow.

And so it's hard to tease that apart from the diabetes meds that they're on, the statins that they're almost certainly on and all of the other medications. For a long time, it was thought that statins might protect the brain from Alzheimer's disease and or Parkinson's disease. But there were some flaws in the way those studies were analyzed and some recent research at least raises the possibility that statin use may in fact be associated with increased risk for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. And now for some people will say, well, why are you bringing that up? That's not a mental. Those aren't mental illnesses, those are neurological disorders. But in fact, Everybody just about 100% of people who have Alzheimer's or Parkinson's have mental symptoms. They end up getting depression, anxiety, but even psychotic symptoms, hallucinations and delusions as part of those disorders. So, you know, even though they are neurological disorders, they are part of the brain and they commonly result in mental symptoms.

Very well said. Bottom line is, yeah, you go on statins, your risk of getting anxiety or another mental illness goes up. And if you get it, it's likely to last longer, which is support for your hypothesis, which, by the way, is one that I believe matches reality very, very well. And the trick now is to get the rest of the medical profession to look at your work, to look at Dr. Amen's work, and to look at the other cutting edge researchers who are just realizing, why are we focusing on your willful changing of your behavior when this is not a system that's controlled by will, it's the system that controls will. So it's, you know, it's like you're beating your dog for not solving a crossword puzzle. You're like, well, the dog couldn't do that because that's not in its control. And so I feel like there's a lot more compassion that's going to come about in the healing professions, especially around trauma resolution. But that brings up trauma. Okay, you see some real bad stuff. I was just with a Special Forces veteran, an older guy, and we talked. It was actually really cool. We talked a lot about how PTSD had affected him and how he was helping younger guys when they got out of the service just to reconnect with life. But PTSD triggers these mental disorders. Are you saying that mitochondria get ptsd? What's the connection?

Yeah, no, it's a great question. And we know that trauma impacts mitochondrial function and metabolism. So people who have a horrible trauma history, let's just put it at that, whether it's a war veteran, whether it's, you know, a woman in an abusive relationship, whether it's a kid who had a horrible abusive childhood or traumatic birth.

That was my big PTSD source. You know, you get smacked in the face coming out of the womb a few times and, well, you know, you might think the world's not a good place. Who would have thought?

So people who have trauma histories are much more likely to develop mental disorders, but it's a lot more than ptsd. And a lot of people don't realize this. It's actually all mental disorders. They are more likely to develop depression, anxiety, personality disorders, substance use disorders like alcoholism or opioid addiction. And guess what? They're also more likely to develop bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. So it's almost across the board. The neurodevelopmental disorders aren't necessarily included in that because they would have occurred already. And so if, you know, if you've gotten through neurodevelopment, yes, those disorders are not on the list. But most of the other mental disorders are. Alzheimer's is. Parkinson's is. Seizures are all sorts of brain disorders, but also metabolic disorders. People with trauma histories are more likely to have obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease and die early deaths.

It's almost like there's really strong evidence that trauma affects mitochondrial networks and changes their behavior metabolically.

And it does. And we have pretty good evidence for that. And, you know, researchers, this is a fairly new field. So, yes, we could certainly use more research, and I'm all for more research in this area, but we have decent preliminary evidence that people with trauma histories have differences in mitochondrial number and the function of mitochondria in different types of cells. And the. One of the ways that I think about it is it's kind of like what you said, that when an organism is threatened, it has a few responses. So when people are traumatized, their entire system goes on red alert because they know that, hey, this is life and death. Somebody or something may kill me. And this is no time for sleeping. This is no time for repairing my body. This is time to defend my existence. And that means all of these resources are going to the fight or flight system. But it also means that all the repair work is not getting done. You're probably are going to have disrupted systems sleep. That is a protective mechanism. It's not a disorder. It's a protective mechanism. If you're being threatened, you should not be soundly sleeping for somebody to come and bash your head in and kill you. Like that's not a good thing. You. You should wake up at the slightest sound because maybe somebody's coming into your room to kill you. And those are, those are normal, protective things. Okay? They absolutely take a toll. They absolutely take a toll on people's health.

One of my older fantasies from my late 20s was that I was just going to take out some of my mitochondria and use crispr, which hadn't been invented yet. But I was pretty sure something was going to come up and just hack the living out of my mitochondrial DNA so that they just massively produce glutathione and they make ATP four times more than normal humans. And then I could pick up Trucks. How far away are we from hacking our, our individual custom mitochondria to give ourselves a little bit more energy than.

We had before people, you know, so researchers are actually working on mitochondrial transplantation. So that is underway. I think one of the challenges is getting my. The right number of mitochondria into the right types of cells. Cells. Right. Because. Because. So one really important point for your listeners, if they don't understand this, you can have some cells with horribly dysfunctional, inadequate mitochondria that are just barely hanging on for their life, for their lives, cells that are in great disrepair, ready to die. And you can have other cells somewhere else in your body or even very nearby those cells. Brand new, healthy happy mitochondria. And that cell is just doing everything that it needs to do. And that's one of the challenges. But, but again, as I said, stem cell transplantation, like, that's a really big area still. One of the things that those stem cells are doing is donating healthy mitochondria to any struggling cells you put in stem cells, and they are going in to donate and spread around mitochondria. So I think that we're probably years, if not decades away from practical applications of this. Although with heart failure, it's a lot easier because we know the organ, the organ is the heart. And if we could get more mitochondria in those struggling cells, like somebody with heart failure, if we could get more mitochondria in those cells, that person's heart would come back online.

Sure.

And, and so, yeah, I, at the end of the day, I mean, you are the biohacker. But I will say the, the path, if there was ever a path to immortality, it is through mitochondria that is the path to immortality.

Amen, brother. It, it certainly appears that way. We might need to do some other systems as well, but if you don't get that one, the other ones don't matter. It's, it's refreshing to talk to someone, especially with your credentials. You know, you're at a major institution and, you know, you know your craft really well, who's just openly talking about mitochondria on a, on a personal level. It feels kind of validated because I've just believed this so fervently for a long time. But also, I can see how this is a big part of changing your profession. It's disruptive and it's a little bit, it's a little bit risky, to be honest, you know, academically and professionally, to be just standing up like you read a big book, you know, brain Energy right here. Like, here's the evidence. So thanks for taking the risk and having mitochondria that weren't so fear driven that you didn't just, you know, pull up the couch and tell me about your mother kind of things. I think you're doing a really great service to the world, and I feel like I could ask you a bunch of other questions. And there's one more I want to ask you that came from the Upgrade Collective, our live audience, and that is, why do you think when some people get metabolic dysfunction, they get heart disease or cancer and other people get mental illness, what's causing the switch between those two?

So I would argue it is probably because, number one, there are so many different environmental factors that can impact mitochondria in different ways. So sleep, dysregulation, trauma history, epigenetics from your parents, diet. Let's just take those alone. There are others, too, but those all impact mitochondria, but they impact mitochondria in different ways and in different cells. So some cells are going to be more affected than others, and then.