How to Double Your Energy – Ari Whitten : 934

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Formerly Bulletproof Radio.

A State of High performance.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics. It's about energy, because there is a hidden epidemic of. Of fatigue, which is a word I actually don't like because, I don't know, fatigue is one of those, like, kind of words, like, I'm feeling fatigued. But really what we're talking about is you are straight up tired. You have nothing left in the tank. And this is how I pretty much lived my life until I was 30 and I really figured out the biohacking things. And chronic fatigue syndrome is where I was, which is the worst end of that. And studies are actually showing now that most people in the US have some level of just feeling tired as hell. The way I like to describe it is you're driving, you have the accelerator all the way to the floor. You can push harder, but it's not going to do anything. And the car is going slower and slower, and there's just nothing you can do. It's not willpower, it's something else. So we're going to talk about that. And I promised you that I was going to tell you what you're going to learn about. So you can decide whether this is the right episode or whether you want to skip back one or forward one or whatever else. Because there's a lot to learn, and I don't want to overwhelm you. I just want every second that you spend listening to this on 1.5x to be worth it for you. So you're going to learn something about what's causing dysfunction in your mitochondria and how you can repair these. And you're going to learn about strategies that absolutely double your energy levels, things that are mitochondrial based. This is my favorite aspect of energy and something that changed my life when I learned about mitochondria in 1997 and started working on my own. And we're going to learn from Ari Whitten, who's been studying and teaching natural health science for about 25 years, who also had chronic fatigue like I did. And he spent the last seven years working on human energy. So we're going to go through what he's learned about mitochondria. We're going to compare it to what I know about mitochondria, and we're gonna have, like a mitochondria, like, flex, and we're gonna, like, see who has the most mitochondrial techniques and which ones are better than the others. So I want to learn things from Ari, and I want you to learn things from him too. But, Ari, I'm gonna ask you all sorts of hard questions. Are you up for it?

I am up for it. Yes.

All right. It's gonna be fun. Okay. You wrote a book on red light therapy. Hmm. I think I would agree with you. That's important. It. And you've talked about low carb diet traps and other books, and even the low carb myth, because turns out you kind of make energy from carbs. But let's. Let's just get right into it. Tell me about human energy, where it comes from.

Yeah, well, I mean, there's really a million different processes in the body that. That relate indirectly or directly to energy levels. I mean, we can talk about hormones. We could talk about thyroid hormone. We could talk about cortisol. We could talk about epinephrine and norepinephrine. We could talk about testosterone. And all of these are impacting on variables related to energy production. We could also talk about neurotransmitters. We could talk about dopamine and serotonin and orexin. We could talk about so many different aspects that are tying into this energy puzzle. And the story could really go on endlessly in terms of that kind of complexity. But at the core of it, I really see mitochondria as the most upstream thing that are that. That is regulating human energy levels. I really see mitochondria as the most upstream thing that are that. That is regulating human energy levels. So not just playing a role in, you know, some particular biochemical process that is indirectly related to energy production, but the. The actual thing that is sort of deciding whether we should be producing lots of energy at the cellular level or not very much energy. That's what our mitochondria do. So that's the short version of that.

The most important thing that I think you said there is core to what I believe, which is that mitochondria aren't just power plants. They're smart power plants and smart manufacturers. They decide, not you. Right. And then they either make energy or they make something else like fat or inflammation or whatever. Right. So according to your book, 5.4 million adults have chronic fatigue syndrome, but you think that the fatigue epidemic is more like a hundred times bigger, which would be a hundred times five more than the US Population. I'm not sure if I believe that, but. Okay, let's go with like, 70. So we hit the US population okay, so pretty much 95% of the population is tired right now, or at least more tired than they want to be. Right.

So the basic, the gist of it is it depends on what we're talking about. Are we talking about meeting the diagnostic criteria? For me, cfs, chronic fatigue syndrome, which is a specific set of diagnostic criteria that includes having certain symptoms, particularly post exertional malaise, which is sort of extreme tiredness and exhaustion, being debilitated after physical exertion for one, two, three days after, and having that kind of symptoms for six months plus. Okay, so there's, there's meeting that diagnostic criteria, but there's also much lesser states of fatigue that are much more common. People who have energy crashes in the afternoon, people who are just operating chronically at much lower energy levels than they did in their youth. Right. And that is, is very common. Me CFS certainly is not super common, but lesser states of fatigue, more mild or moderate states of fatigue are very common. And we have lots of surveys that show that upwards of 50% of the population, or depending on which demographic you look at, if you look at older adults, severe chronic fatigue is present in one out of three over older adults over the age of 65. Lesser states of fatigue. You know, if you ask people, would you like more energy, do you have less energy than you had when you were younger? 50 plus percent typically of adults will say yes to those kinds of questions.

In Headstrong, which is my mitochondrial brain book, I cited research from Shallenberger who said that 48% of people under age 40, 40 had mitochondrial dysfunction and that virtually everyone over age 40 has it. And they just call it aging, like, oh, you're supposed to have weak decision making and weak power plants after that age. I don't accept that. That's not how it works. But that's how we think it works. So those numbers line up pretty well. And a lot of people who have this saying, well, I have enough energy, but I think the natural state for humans is to say I have more than enough energy, like I can handle whatever life brings my way. And if, you know, I'm just chilling out and I feel like I've had a busy day and then a bear comes at me like, I'm going to get up and I'm going to fight off the bear or run away from it, at least faster than someone else, and then it's good to go. And that's just our normal state. But it's not the normal state for most people.

Yes, absolutely. I'll give you Another data point that lines up with what you just said in an interesting way. There are a number of studies that have taken muscle biopsies of adults at different ages and analyzed their mitochondrial capacity. And they can do this in a number of different ways, measuring certain compounds in the mitochondrial level, but mostly just actually physically counting the number of mitochondria per cell and the sort of total mitochondrial mass per cell. And what they find is, in general, between the ages of 20 to 40, most people lose about half of their mitochondrial capacity. Between the ages of 40 to 70, it gets cut in half again. And it can also be quantified roughly by saying most people lose about 10% of their mitochondrial capacity with each decade of life. Now, one conclusion from that might be, wow, that really sucks that aging does that to us. But there's also an interesting finding. When they look at 70 year olds who are lifelong athletes, exercisers, they take muscle biopsies from them and they look at their mitochondrial capacity and they find that they have the same mitochondrial capacity as a young person. So what that means is that this loss of mitochondrial capacity is not just a natural byproduct of the aging process. It is actually the result of loss of hormetic stress in our life. In the same way that if you break an arm or a leg, if you've ever done that, or if you've known someone who has you get that cast cut off six or eight weeks later, and you look down at your arm or your leg and it's half the size of the other one. And that's because in the span of just a couple months, those muscles basically detected that they weren't needed for survival. And the body is pretty ruth. Pretty ruthless in getting rid of any energetically costly tissue that isn't needed for survival. So it basically says, oh, we don't need those muscles anymore, let's get rid of them. And in just a couple months, they're reduced to half the size. So at the cellular level, at the mitochondrial level, that same process is happening. If you are not challenging and stimulating your mitochondria through hormetic stress, the body basically causes them to atrophy, it gets rid of them, and we lose that mitochondrial capacity as we get older. So I think, you know, that this, to me, is one of the most underappreciated aspects and one of the biggest contributors to chronic fatigue is the loss of mitochondria due to mitochondrial atrophy. Not just mitochondrial dysfunction, but the actual decrease of the number and size of the mitochondria in Your cells as a result of the modern sort of non hormetic lifestyle.

Well, in chronic fatigue syndrome, you are dealing with cells that are poisoned. And the number one cause of CFS is toxic mold. And there are other causes like secondary Lyme disease to toxic mold and heavy metals or other types of lipophoric toxins. So let's assume that we're dealing with a population that doesn't have those poisons affecting their mitochondrial function. You still have this. Oh, I didn't exercise, so I didn't do it. I'll just say do whatever it takes to get enough mitochondrial function that then you can do the work. Cause if you're at that level, you're not gonna do something on top of the basic necessities for life. Cause that's what nature wants is what you're saying. Like if, if it goes away, you don't have enough energy, it, it's hard to get it back. And so I, I just want to call that out. It's okay to do a hack which lets you then do more foundational work, because if you're too tired to improve yourself, you're not going to improve yourself. Right?

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you. I'll say a couple things on this. What you just said about being too tired to do the work on yourself is huge. For people with severe chronic fatigue especially people don't have the drive and the energy to go really overhaul their diet or start a workout program or do really do any sort of lifestyle intervention that requires a lot of hard work and discipline. Supplements can be hugely beneficial in that regard. I mean, there are certain supplements that have been shown in people with stress related fatigue and exhaustion to cut their levels of fatigue, to cut their levels of depression and anxiety and brain fog in half in a week or a month.

What's your favorite supplement ingredient that does that?

Rhodiola. Rosea, I would say, is the one that I'm referring to that's been shown to do that in one week. I mean, it's actually pretty mind blowing to the point where I'm skeptical of some of these studies where I'm like, whoa, that's a big effect for just seven days.

I've been on it for 20 years. Rodiola is a powerful one. I look at PQQ as a really powerful one, as well as even coenzyme Q10 for a lot of people is a big deal. So is oxaloacetate, which is a mitochondrial metabolite that actually primes the pump. So there's all these different mitochondrial things you can do. And you're like, oh, I have 20% more energy than I did before. Maybe I'll go for a walk around the block. And it's not that you didn't want to go for a walk. It's not that you weren't willing to. It's that literally, at the end of the day, if I do that, I can't go to work tomorrow and people don't get it. But it's that big of a deal. And it's not because they're lazy. It's because the battery is dead. And if your Tesla has no charge, it doesn't matter. You can get out and push it. That's your only option. And that's what these people are doing, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I'll mention something else. You made me think of a conversation I was having with a friend of mine who's one of the most. I think he's widely regarded as one of the world's top peptide experts. You may know him because I know you've dabbled a lot in that world. His name's Jean Francois Tremblay, and he has a lab up in Canada where they synthesize peptides. And he's kind of been on the leading edge of it for a long time. But I was talking to him about MOT C, a mitochondrial peptide and chronic fatigue. And if he's had any experience of working with clients who have severe chronic fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome, or talking to clinicians who have used it. And he said he had an interesting perspective on it because it was kind of like, yes, absolutely. It's amazing. You can get really unbelievable results with people with chronic fatigue syndrome, but you really have to be careful not to overuse it, to use it too much for too long. Because if you're. You're, in his words, revving up the engine of your mitochondria, and you don't want to be pushing that lever all the time because it can result in negative effects. Now, I don't. I don't know. I. I don't have that clinical experience that he's talking about with that particular peptide. But I thought it was an interesting perspective, kind of that feeds into this discussion of, you know, kind of kind of hacking fatigue in that way.

It. It, I think, really does. I've tried MOT C. I couldn't feel anything from it, but I don't have anything near chronic fatigue anymore. Like, I have abundant energy. That still makes me surprised because this wasn't my natural state. So maybe that's Just because I didn't need it. There are, though, other things that happen. For instance, if you're dealing with toxicities, when I lost the first 50 of the 100 pounds that I lost, well, all of the toxins in that fat get released, and fat stores toxins, toxins down, regulate and poison mitochondria. So I ended up writing a post towards the beginning of my blog, and it's still up. And it's called Rapid fat loss protocol, how to lose weight faster than you should. And the big warning is, look, you might fit in your wedding dress, but you're going to feel like crap. So you have to take all these detox things while you lose weight. One guy did lose a pound a day for 75 days straight, right? And it's just like, that's kind of dangerous. And so if you upregulate your mitochondrial function, when there's a bunch of crap floating around, you can force them to burn dirty fuel, basically. And it's not going to end well. So you still have to then start doing the detoxing and other things to get the system back online. At least that's been my experience. Does that match yours?

Yeah. Well, you said something at the beginning of this podcast that is. Is very central to my paradigm of understanding energy. And I'll briefly explain that and then I'll tie it back into what you just said. In fact, I've done many interviews where I've talked about it, and I've heard this in a number of occasions where people will say, Dave Asprey has talked about this same thing, and that you're, You're. You're. You're the only one that I've ever heard that about. You're the only other one that's kind of talking about this. But. And you alluded to it at the beginning of this podcast, you're the only one that I've ever heard that about. You're the only other one that's kind of talking about this. But. And you alluded to it at the beginning of this podcast, basically. In, in high school and college biology courses, we're often taught about mitochondria as these sort of, kind of mindless energy generators. They just sort of take in carbs and fats, pump out cellular energy in the form of ATP. And in recent years, in the last decade especially, it's really been discovered, largely due to the work of Dr. Robert Navio, who runs a lab for mitochondrial medicine and the University of California, San Diego, that mitochondria have a second role. And the second role is as environmental sensors. They are essential. They are essentially the canaries in the coal mine. So they're not just these mindless energy generators. They are actually our energy regulators. They're deciding whether or not we ourselves should be in energy mode or if they should be in defense mode. And to the extent they are sensing the presence of various threats or dangers or stressors, they are designed to respond to that by turning down energy production and shifting resources towards cellular defense. Okay, so, you know, think of it like if you were living in some crazy inner city, I don't know, let's say in the Ukraine right now, and there was an attack in the street, somebody, you know, the Russians are attacking and they've got poison gas outside your home in the streets. It would be a terrible mistake to go, well, let's, let's just keep all the windows open and let the fresh air in and let, let's go outside and go for a walk as we normally do every day at this time. Right. The right response when you're under attack is to seal the windows, seal the doors, stay inside, lock yourself in. And that's basically what our cells do when they are under attack. They shift out of energy mode and shift towards defense mode. Your energy levels, I argue, are basically a reflection of the degree to which your mitochondria are sensing that they're under attack and are shifting themselves out of energy mode. So to the point that you were just making, what would be the consequences of forcing your mitochondria into energy mode when they are actually under attack? And they're designed evolutionarily to be shutting down energy production and shifting into defense mode to, let's say, protect against that mold toxin or protect against, during rapid weight loss, protect against all the release of all these stored endocrine disrupting, mitochondrial poisoning, you know, DDT and pesticide residues and all this other crap that's, that's lodged into our adipose tissue that's now being released. They want to shut down to, to shield themselves from exposure to that. But now you're forcing them to stay on. Right? There's. So we have to. In my view, I'm, I'm all for hacking when we can do it, I think in an intelligent way that works with the body. But there is, I think, a need to be cautious, to be cautious around making sure we understand physiology accurately and making sure that we're working with the intelligence of our body and not against it.

There's a risk, reward for everything you do. Going for that exercise, you might get hit by a car. Right. So is it worth it? You get on an airplane, it might crash. Is it worth it? Well, yeah, you know, so. And because I'm going to argue that our mitochondria form a distributed intelligence and there's really good research for this from Candace Pert, and some of this is there isn't research, but I can tell you I can put all the pieces together. So I think most of our egoic behaviors are actually driven by mitochondrial decision making. That's not even your brain. It's a separate consciousness in your body that's really fast and really dumb.

So.

And a lot of this comes from 40 years as in the neuroscience company. Like that's weird. The body felt a stress response in the small window before the brain even gets a signal. So if stress hormones got released before your brain got a signal and long before you could do anything with the signal, like make a decision, well, it wasn't you who turned on the stress response, it was them. So. And that's our angle for hacking is, and this is what you write about in your book and what is in the definition of biohacking is change the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control, control of your biology. Number one thing you want is energy because it turns off fatigue. But the other thing I want to ask you about is I believe that somewhere from 50 to 70% of anxiety that people are feeling is not mental anxiety, it's actually biological anxiety from the mitochondria going, we're under attack. So you feel this sense of doom or the sense of irritation and then you blame cnn. Well actually they deserve the blame. Or, or you blame your mother in law or like you, you pick a target and then your brain makes up a story because it knows that the stress is there, there must be a reason. But the brain can't see the mitochondria because they're faster than the brain. So there's all this weird stuff going on. So what's the relationship between fatigue and anxiety in your experience?

Yeah, I, I mean, I don't know if I would go as far as where you just took it. I'm not saying that I think you're wrong. I, I'm sure that there's something to what you're saying, but I, I don't know that I've like seen research to really, I don't know, make me like, make me go to that level. I think what you said is a very interesting hypothesis though. I'm fascinated with this field of research called Mitochondrial psychobiology. There you go.

Right.

And. And there I've interviewed a guy who's sort of one of the primary researchers in that field, named Martin Picard, who works with Doug Wallace, who's sort of this legendary mitochondrial researcher. And they've performed some really interesting experiments. They've shown, you know, they did one study where they had. They had people basically go on stage and have to give a speech, public speaking. And as you probably know, I think they say that people have more fear of public speaking than they do of death. So it's a pretty intense thing for most people. And then they basically had them give this little speech and then they had an audience attack them personally, so just like shout insults at them. And so for most people, it's a pretty extreme stress. And they showed actually the leakage of mitochondrial DNA in the bloodstream within a matter of seconds of this extreme stress. We also know from lots and lots of other studies that there are studies on depression, there are studies on anxiety, there's studies on several other mental health and psychiatric disorders that mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with that. So there does seem to be a very strong bidirectional link. The function of your mitochondria impact upon. On your brain function, your mental health, your mood, your cognitive function, and vice versa. If you know extreme emotional reactions and stress reactions directly impact on your mitochondria within seconds to minutes, you can be.

Tweaked in the head and hurt your biology, or you can be tweaked in your biology and hurt your head. We train that network to determine what is a threat and what isn't, because it has to be able to react to threats before we can. That's the convenient part of you that jumps when a tiger comes out of the tree before you decide to jump. And so there's all this neat psychobiology and stuff we haven't figured out, but the idea that your mental state is one of the many variables that affects mitochondria is really important. But do people get chronic fatigue because they had a bad breakup?

I think that's possible, actually.

It's possible, but rare, right? And usually there's other things that weakened the system to a certain point. They didn't have the resilience to handle that. And resilience just basically means you can handle a stressor and then return to baseline quickly and effectively. And when you handle a stressor and it keeps you stressed for a long period of time and then your system degrades, you didn't have resilience.

Resilience is something that we've often, most people conceptualize as kind of a psychological phenomenon. And there's certainly a psychological aspect to it, a sort of mental toughness aspect to it. And just life experience, what you've dealt with allows you to become more resilient to those kinds of experiences. But there's, there's a. There's a physiological basis of it as well that revolves around mitochondria that I think is not well understood, but is incredibly important. And it relates back to what I was describing before with mitochondrial capacity. The loss of mitochondrial capacity. As you lose mitochondria, you basically become less resilient in the face of these stressors. So the mitochondria have this role as environmental sensors. They're not only sensing the presence of various stressors, but they're actually tasked with, to some extent, directly fighting them off or defending the cell against those stressors or coordinating a response to it. Um, so this is true whether it's a pathogen, it's true whether, meaning like a virus or a bacterial infection, it's true whether it's psychological distress, it's true whether it's environmental toxicants, it's true whether it's sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, all of those things. The mitochondria are being tasked with fighting against that source of stress at the cellular level. And basically it's like, imagine that we were together right now in the same room, and then we look over to our right and oh, there's a building on fire, right? And now we have to go take buckets of water and try to put out that fire. Well, is it easier for just you and I to do that, just just the two of us? Or would it be easier if everybody watching this live right now in the, whatever, hundreds or thousands of people were also taking buckets of water and helping us, right? Or even if we just had, let's say 20 other guys in addition to us, it would be way easier. And so what I'm getting at is the more mitochondria you have in your cells being having youthful levels of mitochondria, lots of big, strong mitochondria filling your cells versus what's common in older age of, you know, losing 50, 75% of your mitochondria, you have lowered your resilience threshold, you have lowered your mitochondria's capacity to deal with that stressor and then return the body to health and homeostasis and high energy levels. In other words, the mitochondria have a certain limit of what level of stressor they're able to tolerate and maintain health and high energy levels. And if you exceed that limit, then you get fatigue and you get other symptoms and ultimately various kinds of diseases. So the more mitochondria you have, the bigger, stronger your mitochondrial networks are. The higher your resilience threshold, the higher your capacity to tolerate various kinds of stressors. And that is the physiological basis of resilience.

I love that definition. And there's an emotional one as well, because if you handle it physiologically and then emotionally you lose your mind. Then your mitochondria also take a hit. I kind of look at it as you want to have a big army with lots of troops. And you want the troops to be very healthy and strong. They should be good fighters. Right. You also want them to be obedient troops. And that when the general, which is you, or the sub generals and the commanders and all, which is actually not your decision making. But these are other higher level systems in the body, like liver regulation for all the mitochondria in the liver, for instance, they also need to listen to those. So you can have command lines that are screwed up, that'll cause poor mitochondrial function because they aren't well organized, or you can just have weak ones, or you can have not enough of them. And those are all hackable things to do. You've listed six major causes of mitochondrial dysfunction in your book. Can you go through all six from memory? Yeah.

So the, I mean these are six nutritional causes specifically. So circadian rhythm disruption, blood sugar dysregulation, poor body composition, poor gut health, and.

Poor brain health and neurotransmitter and hormone imbalances, I think. Is your poor, poor brain health?

Yes.

And did you say microbiome in there?

Yeah, I got health. You did.

Okay. Good gut health. There you go. Right. So that's a good list. And guys, if you want it one more time, Circadian rhythm, too much body fat, gut health, blood sugar, nutritional toxicities or deficiencies, and neurotransmitter hormone imbalance. That's a fantastic list. Problem is if you're listening to the show going, I'm tired. No, I'm already overwhelmed. My mitochondria just got another hit because I'm feeling overwhelmed. And how the hell would you know where to start?

Start with the low hanging fruit.

Right now your body might be wasting energy on stress instead of healing. That's why your gut feels off, your brain feels dull, and your immune system keeps letting you down. What if you could switch your healing state back on without meds, stimulants or guesswork. Vibrant Blue Oil's parasympathetic essential oil blend is a powerful, non invasive way to activate your nervous system and shift your body into healing mode just through scent. A drop behind your ears can help switch off your stress response, calm inflammation and support digestion, detox and immune function. And it can even help clear up your stubborn brain fog. It's natural, easy to use and thick. Thousands of happy customers already love it. And right now, the Human Upgrade podcast listeners can grab a full size Bottle for over 50% off at vibrantblue oils.com Dave that's vibrantblueoils.com Dave don't wait to start feeling like yourself again. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Problem is, if you're listening to the show going, I'm tired now, I'm already overwhelmed. My mitochondria just got another hit because I'm feeling overwhelmed. How the hell would you know where to start?

Start with the low hanging fruit. You know, start with the easy, simple stuff. Yes, that, that. You know, here's the thing. I think that a lot of people who are brought up in, in the west, in the United States, in North America, who are brought up in a sort of conventional medical paradigm, you know, the United States and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that allow direct to consumer advertising for pharmaceutical companies. And you know, I grew up in the States. I was seeing pharmaceutical ads on TV from the time I was a little kid, you know, being bombarded with them. And it's so easy when you have that kind of influence to start thinking from a paradigm of every one specific problem, you know, physiological problem, health problem, requires some very specific targeted biochemical intervention that's unique for that specific disease state. So what's the drug I take for Alzheimer's and what's the drug I take for depression? What's the drug I take for my high cholesterol? And the drug I take for this and the drug I take for that. Right. We all start thinking in that kind of paradigm when we're brought up in the West. But when you study physiology at a deep level for a long time as, as you and I have, you start to realize everything in the body is interconnected. And so hold on, we're going to.

Have to ban this episode. You're, you're now offending the authorities at the drug companies. You just can't say that the American Medical association is angry right now. How can you be a kidney specialist? I mean, come on.

Well, I didn't mention the V word. So I think we're still. Okay.

That was the sex episode. That's a different one.

Oh, yeah, sorry.

Oh, the other V word. Sorry, sorry, I get all confused there now we'll definitely get banned.

Yes, definitely. So, you know, as an example, just to look at circadian rhythm. Okay. Circadian rhythm. And I won't. Your audience is sophisticated. I'm sure you've talked about this a bit, so I won't go into a whole bunch of the physiology, but we start to look at these biological clocks. The central clock in the brain, the peripheral clocks throughout the body. And initially it's thought like, oh, the circadian rhythm. It's really important for our sleep and wake cycles. Well then as you start to dig in deeper, you start to discover, oh, circadian rhythm also impacts on many different neurotransmitters from dopamine to serotonin to GABA to orexin. It's impacting on different biochemical processes at the mitochondrial level. It's impacting on the glymphatic system. This process of cleaning out toxins from our brain every night. It's impacting on many different hormones that impact so many aspects of our mood, our energy, our libido, you know, from. From thyroid hormone to cortisol to testosterone to growth hormone to melatonin. Right. And then you just look at the melatonin story. Many people think of melatonin, oh yeah, that's a sleep supplement, melatonin. And they don't even realize, right. Melatonin is a hormone produced in our body. And the other part of the story, there's, there's many layers to this, but melatonin is, is actually, it turns out, is basically the most important mitochondrial antioxidant and is vital for protecting our mitochondria and our neurons and has profound anti cancer effects as well. Super important for preventing the development of cancer. So you start to realize, and then, you know, this, this, this other. Well, actually, I won't go there yet. You start to realize that this one lever of circadian rhythm is actually impacting everything. It's impacting everything from brain health to mitochondrial health, to gut health, to immune health, to body composition to levels of inflammation, to insulin sensitivity to libido and mood, you know. Right. And so, you know, it's. Again, again, just to loop things back, we need to get out of this mindset of, oh, I have this specific problem, therefore. And, and that problem is caused by this specific biochemical abnormality. And therefore I need this specific drug to affect that pathway. And we need to start understanding how to work with the, the systems of our body to pull different levers to optimize the entire system to have beneficial impacts on our physiological function as a whole.

You said something in there that a lot of people don't know about. It's that melatonin causes insulin resistance. So if you were to take melatonin with an ice cream cone, your blood sugar is going to go higher. If you eat after the sun goes down, you will not handle that food the same way. And this is the biggest reason that I tell people, look, just don't eat after the sun goes down. That midnight snack is truly harmful. And maybe if you had only fat for a midnight snack, or maybe a little bit of protein that doesn't raise your insulin and you needed that in order to sleep. Okay, fine. But the typical way we're eating, we're eating at the time when it kind of causes diabetes like symptoms. And just shifting, that can have systemic effects. And that's just one of the things that melatonin does. Well, let me ask you this. Do you take melatonin?

Such a complex answer. So I, I've discovered something that isn't talked about widely, but certain people seem, and it seems to be genetic because both me and my father have it seem to be hypersensitive to melatonin. If I take a, a 3 milligram, which is a typical supplemental dose of melatonin, it actually causes insomnia for me. I sleep terribly because of it, and I will wake up the next morning really groggy and feeling pretty awful. And I've tried it many times because I've been so impressed with the research on melatonin. What I found is that I can take baby doses of it. I can take very small doses. Actually a physiological dose is about 300.

Micrograms, which is 0.3, right?

0.3 milligrams. Yeah. And there's a company called Erbatonin which makes a plant based melatonin. I don't know why this affects me differently, but even if I take the same dose from another kind of melatonin, I'm much more sensitive to it. But the Erbatonin seems to work well with my body.

I'm not, maybe, maybe because it's plant based, it just doesn't work very well at all. So it doesn't cause bad effects?

It does, it definitely does cause an effect though. But your theory is honestly legitimate? Yeah, no, it's plausible that that's possible. But it does have an effect for sure, but it's a subtle effect and. Yeah, so I don't have a strong answer on that. The research on supplemental melatonin is, I would say, overwhelmingly positive. And it's been used in lots of different disease contexts. Neurodegenerative disease, gut bowel diseases, cancers, with pretty remarkable results, I would say, in most cases. So I would. I almost have an attitude of I would like to supplement melatonin because I'm so impressed with the research, but it just doesn't work with my physiology.

I used to take the biological dose, 0.3 milligrams and I think that's safe for the vast majority of people. And Most supplements have 10 times that dose. But there's also absorption and timing and things. So 3mg works. And then there are a few people out there who are taking like 20, 30, 40 milligrams because of positive effects on repairing the pineal gland and other things, which seems a little bit high. So I tested myself. I took 20mg for six months and it probably improved my sleep. In fact, it quantifiably did to a certain extent. But I backed off to 10 milligrams of time release, which is what I take now when I go to bed. And I get the best night's sleep when I do that. And I think there's anti aging effects from having higher than physiological amounts of melatonin during sleep. Then again, I sleep six and a half hours a night and I wake up by myself after that and I'm oh, that's weird. I got two hours of deep and two hours of rem. I actually think I just recovered well last night and I'm done sleeping. It's not, it's different if you wanted to sleep more but you couldn't. So I didn't used to be like that. No, but I like waking up that way and I think my dose works for me. And guys, I'm six four and I have a history of neurological inflammation for my entire life and autoimmunity and things. So that might be too much for you, but there's a case for trying a higher dose. But don't take it with dessert because it's going to mess you up.

Yeah. I will say one more thing on this. I have heard, I don't know if you've had Dr. Ben lynch on your podcast. He's a buddy. He's a buddy of mine and absolutely I've talked to him about using high dose melatonin and he's. I've seen him warn against it on a number of occasions. He's concerned with actually sort of too much of this antioxidant leading actually to pro oxidant effects. And I've also heard people, people suggest negative effects in women on estrogen metabolism and things like that. So I do have a little bit of caution with recommending super high dosages. But I think 10 milligrams is pretty moderate compared to some of the research I've seen 40, 60, 80 milligrams a day.

And that would be for a short period to repair some system. I don't think people are advocating for taking that every day. And the point about increasing oxidation, even if you do something like vitamin C and you take 50 milligrams a day or 25, like Linus Pauling who had two Nobel prizes and took I believe 25 milligrams or sorry, 25 grams a day, that's 25 large vitamin C pills a day. Lived till he was 90. It does suppress mitochondrial function. Even metformin, the drug that some people in anti aging are big fans of. That's certainly something I've experimented with. It reduces mitochondria function. So mitochondria need to make oxidative molecules and it's a signaling molecule. That's why ozone therapy works. So if you're always taking high dose antioxidants, your exercise doesn't create benefits and your mitochondria actually can't send a signal to other mitochondria that says, hey, let's build more, let's be strong. So there's a case for them and there's a case against them, but too much antioxidants all the time. No. No antioxidants ever.

No.

But how would we know how much to take? What do you do to look at that?

Yeah, it's a great question. I love what you just said. There's a lot I want to say in response to it. I want to comment one more bit about melatonin that's interesting because there's a somewhat new discovery around it. So I mentioned melatonin is this incredibly important antioxidant at the mitochondrial level. Well, it's turning out there's a number of lines of research that are now suggesting that mitochondria actually produce their own melatonin 100% at the cellular level. So we need to get out of this paradigm that all the, all the melatonin is coming from the pineal gland, going into our bloodstream and then ending up in, in our mitochondria it's actually been shown in, in I think in animal studies where they take out the pineal gland, that it doesn't change the concentrations of melatonin at the mitochondrial level.

Right.

So the other aspect of this, this is super cool. Particularly you're, you've been into red light for a long time, as I have and I've written. This is such new information, it didn't even make it into my book a few years ago. I'm going to update that shortly. But there's research now suggesting that red and near infrared light directly impact upon the, this, the production of non pineal melatonin. Pineal melatonin at the mitochondrial level, at the cellular level. So it seems that that light exposure is actually one of the big keys to our mitochondria producing this incredibly important endogenous antioxidant. Melatonin also impacts on other endogenous antioxidants. Glutathione catalase, superoxide dismutase. So what I think is that it's going to turn out that, that much more that, that maintaining proper redox balance and preventing oxidative stress and oxidative damage, which is one of the main drivers of aging and disease, is much more about supporting and optimizing endogenous antioxidant production than it is about using supplemental antioxidants. It's not to say that it's black or white and you should never use supplemental antioxidants. But I think that that story, and particularly I think it's going to turn out five years from now, I think everybody's going to start to recognize how important melatonin is to that story of preventing oxidative damage at the cellular level. So that's one thing I wanted to comment on. And then the other thing you commented on in passing, which is super interesting that I want to expand upon a bit, is that we used to have this paradigm that free radicals are bad, antioxidants are good. We need to squash all the free radicals because they're driving disease. And it used to be thought for many, many years, for decades that these free radicals are causing this oxidative stress and causing aging. We had the free radical theory of aging. And, and so as an extension of that, we would expect that by using like Linus Pauling did so much exogenous antioxidants that it should slow down the aging process. Except we know from lots of research that that's not true. We also know from lots of research that things which actually cause the production of, of Lots of reactive oxygen species, free radicals like exercise, for example, or most other types of hormetic stressors or.

Saunas or ozone or cold therapy or all the things that we do.

Right, right. So paradoxically, they actually extend lifespan. Right. Rather than shorten it. So what's going on there then? What's interesting and kind of one of the big breakthroughs which you alluded to in passing is, you know, a decade or two ago, Maybe. Yeah, maybe 15, 10, 15 years ago, a number of researchers basically said, well, we know exercise is really beneficial. It has all these amazing effects. It's associated with longer lifespans, prevents all kinds of different diseases. But the problem with it is that it produces all these damaging free radicals. So what if we take supplemental vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin A before or after exercise to minimize that? And they did those studies, and what they found in those studies is that it negated, it canceled out most of the benefits of the exercise, even vitamin.

A. I don't think A is particularly antioxidant. That was mostly vitamin E. Right.

They've definitely used vitamin A in some of those studies.

Interesting.

I don't know if they've only used vitamin A, it might have been a cocktail with vitamin E, vitamin C. So I don't know to what extent you can attribute the effect directly, directly to.

Vitamin D, because A is typically not antioxidant. It's more like mineral absorption. It is a circadian vitamin. But if you take it in relation to vitamin D, it seems to not negatively affect mitochondria, probably positively.

Yeah.

That's part of my next book. I have some stuff in there about the fat solubles. There's some really neat stuff you talked about there. But one thing I just want to talk about, you know about red light. I know about red light. And there are so many companies doing like 1980s blue blockers and saying that that's what you do for sleep. I have written the patent for TrueDark, my circadian biology company. And there's four colors of light that affect your timing system. And blue light is just one of the four colors. And blue light affects melatonin levels. So if you block blue, your melatonin will go up, but your timing system will still be broken, which is not a good move. And that's why you see me at night in pictures or the danger coffee pictures, whatever. I'm wearing these unusually colored reddish, but with a variation in IT glasses, because that's actually covering all five aspects of light and how it talks to your central clock. So it's Just a little bit more complex than that, but I'd say for most people, I think it's a pretty good idea. After the sun goes down, don't eat anymore and take a melatonin maybe two hours before bed and just watch your sleep score on whatever sleep tracking you use. I'm a big fan of Sleep Space, which is a free app, but they also have a sensor thing. And man, you just realize I have a very noticeable change in my deep sleep. For me, I doubled my deep sleep, but blue blockers won't do that for me. They don't change my deep sleep number at all, but blocking all four colors does. So just understand from a mitochondrial perspective, red light is magic. To, to look at red light and the mechanism, action for red and infrared on increasing melatonin. I would argue that mitochondria want to make melatonin when there's an absence of other light, but red light makes more electrons available and makes them move more effectively.

Red and near infrared light also have another mechanism of action that's very important, which is retrograde signaling. They are impacting directly on the gene expression from the nucleus. So they're shutting down NF kappa B pro inflammatory pathways and they're stimulating the expression of genes involved in growth and regeneration, basically growth factors. So in muscle tissue, they're stimulating increased IGF1. In the brain, they're stimulating increased nerve growth factor and brain derived neurotrophic factor. In the skin, they're stimulating increased collagen production, fibroblast activity, they're basically stimulating whatever, you know, specific growth factors in whatever tissues. They are in the thyroid gland, hormone producing glands and whatever. So it's possible that, you know, that along with modulating dozens, maybe hundreds of different genes to do those kinds of effects, maybe melatonin is, is paired with that in some way is involved in those healing and regeneration pathways to, to reestablish proper redox status. But, but I don't know. I think your theory is a good one.

Do you put red light on your balls?

Oh man. I don't think I've ever been asked that in an interview before. Yeah, of course. Who doesn't?

Okay, corollary, follow up question. Butthole sunning. Yay or nay.

I. So I am a fan of naked sunning. I have never done the full, what do you call it, maybe plow pose where I've, I've attempted to get it in my butthole, but I'm not really a fan of.

You're missing out. It's just like eating Mexican Food. I mean, just don't get sunburned is all I'm saying. Okay, guys, in reality, I did that once for a picture and it got picked up in the press and it was a humor post because, no, I don't think you need to tan your taint, but there is evidence for sunlight on your testes and red light on your testes. One of the reasons is probably the mitochondrial efficiency we talked about. The other one though, is that red light increases nitric oxide. So if you put like one of the true light energy panels with infrared and red over your groin before you go to sleep, wake up in the morning and look at the quality of your kickstand, because nitric oxide is a real thing that changes blood flow. So I, I see a difference from that for sure.

There's actually a study where they have looked at men who have erectile dysfunction who have difficulty getting erections, and they, they actually found an association, strong association with, geez, I'm forgetting the specific condition, but basically like a deviated septum or something to that effect where they have difficulty breathing through their nose. And they found that as a result of doing surgery to correct that, so that now that they can engage in nasal breathing, the, the erection performance, I guess you would say, increased dramatically as a result of nasal breathing, which we know is one of the big keys to producing nitric oxide in the bloodstream as opposed to mouth breathing. So, yeah, to, to your point, there is a powerful relationship with nitric oxide and red and your infrared light and, and sunlight also, UV light also impact on that.

Mitochondria are exquisitely sensitive to UV light and they need some of it, but not too much. Right. It seems like it's a stimulating molecule, like, oh, maybe I should make some antioxidants to protect myself from radiation, which is another reason that I tell people, you know, get some sun, but maybe not too much.

Yeah, I'm, I'm a huge advocate of sun exposure. The, the challenge with it is that genetics of skin type make a massive difference in what is the appropriate dose for the individual. It can vary between, like, maybe your optimal dose is five to ten minutes per day, or maybe it's like three to five hours per day. I'm, I'm definitely, you know, I have a lot of Mediterranean and North African ancestry in me, and I'm definitely more on the side of the spectrum where I, my body does best with more sun exposure, and my health really suffers if I'm in a place where I can't get much sun exposure.

I'M the same way. In fact, the DNA company looked at my vitamin D receptor genes and they said, we've got bad news for you, Dave. Based on your vitamin D receptor genes and the rate you use vitamin D, you should be living on a tropical island based on the fact that you're but white. Sadly, that's probably not going to work for you either. So I'm sort of damned if you do. Damn if you don't need to get enough sun to be happy, but not enough sun to cook my frail white skin. Right. So I don't know how to solve that problem if you come up with it right now. What I do is I inject a melanotan, which is a hormone that stimulates the formation of melanin, so I can get a tan in very little time. And the tan naturally protects me from the sun.

Yeah. And isn't, if I remember correctly, I've never used it. But if I remember correctly, melanitan also impacts on libido and erections as well.

It has a side molecule that you can buy separately called PT141. And if you want to feel like you're in like 11th grade again, you inject that stuff. And if it doesn't cause nausea for you like it does for some people, you're like, could I not inject that again? Because this is too distracting. Like, it is a very strong, like much stronger than vag or something like that, if that works for you. So, yeah, it does have that side effects. You have to do low doses, unless you just want to be terribly distracted all the time. Yeah, so there's that. There's something else though, and the reason I mention that is not that I'm just single minded. I didn't inject it this morning. It's that melanin is actually electrically active. And this is something very few people talk about in the context of mitochondria. So if you look at mitochondria as power generators, as one of their many functions, what melanin is, is like a Tesla powerwall. So it actually stores a small amount of energy, like a capacitor would if you're an electrical engineer. And it can release it. And this is why if you look at dark, the darker your skin tone, the less your skin ages. It's one of the many reasons, not just UV protection. And it's also why we have melanin, this dark compound in the back of our eyes where you need sudden bursts of electroactivity. And we have junk melanin in the brain, which anytime Scientists say something is junk. What they mean is we haven't studied it. Yes. And we're arrogant.

Yeah.

So the.

The appendix is just a remnant of evolution. You don't need that thing right out, right?

Yeah. It couldn't have a function. Let's just get rid of it. Just. Just like a foreskin. Just cut that thing off. Who needs it, Right? Well, maybe it was there for a reason. Just saying. Right. So I. I actually found a couple scientists who spent many years in Mexico looking at this. Why is there melanin in the brain, in the back of the eye, where there's no sun? And the answer is, it can create electrical signaling when needed. So it's basically there as a backup power plant. So bottom line is a healthy tan actually is healthy as long as you didn't stay in the sun for so long, you got skin cancer from it, if your skin is pale.

And there's advantages to building up that natural, you know, innate sunscreen that we're all born with the capacity to produce. Well, almost all. Unless you're extreme Fitzpatrick Type 1 or you have albinism or something like that.

Exactly. Now, in your book, you go through all six of those things that we talked about, the main causes for mitochondrial dysfunction, and you look at ways that you can go in and you can do something about them. And I want to highlight. If you guys decide to read Ari's book, you don't have to do everything. Like, it's Ari's job. It's my job to show you the universe of what you can do, to explain why it's important and why it's worth your time and attention, and just pick one and do it. And if it works, which it probably will, you'll get some amount of energy back. Maybe it's 5%, maybe it's 50%, but that energy, you can say, I'm done, or you put that energy into doing the next thing, and then now you have 20% more energy. You're like, oh, you know what? I can actually put my glasses on before I go to sleep. I can get blackout curtains. I can eat dinner earlier. I can do whatever. I can take a supplement. This was my path. Of course. It cost me a million bucks and took a long time because there was no roadmap for this stuff. It was my path to getting to where I am now. We're like, wow, I kind of like how I feel.

Right.

And you have a list of supplements in the book. Seven supplements. All of them, I would agree with. Things like methylated B vitamins. And astaxanthin, which is something I take an enormous amount of every day, which.

By the way, also as a side note, also builds up in the skin and acts as an internal sunscreen.

You nailed it. It's one of the reasons I take it is I don't get sunburned very easily because I take a lot of it. It's also eye protective. And when you take enough astaxanthin, it actually can become incorporated into the mitochondrial membrane where it can conduct electrons much better than other things. So if you dope your mitochondria with this, you get supercharged mitochondria. But you have to take probably 20 milligrams a day. And I would say take it with a fatty substance, maybe emulsified in danger, coffee, some like butter, mct, some kind of a crazy idea like that. So astaxanthin a S T A X, a N T H A N is that specific thing. And you've got a great really chapter on supplements, which is really cool. And so I would say this is a great comprehensive look at what do you do for mitochondria. And if you listen this far, it's just worth your time to know this stuff. You're not going to take all the supplements. Except I'm pretty sure I'm looking through the list from my notes. There aren't any of them that I don't either take sometimes or all the time. So it's a good list, right? Like CBD oil. I take it sometimes, don't take it sometimes. I do notice a difference in sleep from some formulas, not others. Like that's on your list.

But overall, if I asked Dave Asprey what's what supplements you take, you'd be like all of them. Take everything, right?

Let me pull up my dump truck that has the ones I'm taking today. And the reason I do that is from what I've learned over the years, I am planning to live at least 180. I'm willing to take something that is likely effective based on four studies that are strong studies. And every study says at the end more research is needed, which is the way researchers say, please fund my next year of eating. It doesn't mean more research is needed because every paper that comes out helps us to tighten the direction. Like, I'm heading north. Okay, If I'm heading north, maybe I wanted to go 3 degrees left, 3 degrees right. But at least now I know I'm headed north. So this is how you use it as a, as a functional human being versus an academic where I need a hundred percent certainty. I promise every academic out there, you're all wrong. A hundred percent. 200 years from now we're all going to be face palming going, can you believe that they didn't know that the universe was holographic and quantum and that we're actually all controlled by video game characters? I have no idea. But there's stuff we don't know. It's just, are we certain enough that if we do this, we're likely to get this? If so, I'm going to do it right. And so my rationale is not that everyone should take 100 plus supplements a day, it's that I'm doing it based on my biology and my goals that are not normal. So yeah. So good job on a great supplement list in the book. Thank you Ari. Thank you for being on the show. Your new book is called Eat for Energy and you'll find it@theenergyblueprint.com and there's, there's just a lot of knowledge here and I think we made a pretty convincing case that if you don't have an army of mitochondria that is both numerous and individually powerful, you're doing it wrong.

Most definitely.

To our live audience from the Upgrade Collective, thank you for your participation and for all of of your help with me crowdsourcing questions. And I. I appreciate your time as well. Guys. If you'd like to be in the live audience and be able to participate like that, go to our upgrade collective.com I will see you all in the next episode. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call us. See your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.