This is a YouTube video titled "Why Your Cells Lose Energy As You Age" containing an English interview recorded in March 2021. The conversation features Dave Asprey discussing mitochondrial health and mitophagy with an expert speaker, focusing on the effects of urolithin A on cellular energy and aging. The discussion centers on scientific insights into mitochondrial function and potential health supplements.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. As I understand it from looking at the literature before the interview, it's primarily because of mitophagy. Is that the only or the main effect, or are there other things going on? And can you tell people what mitophagy is?
Yeah, it's an excellent point, Dave. So urolithin A is acting on the mitochondria and improving the mitochondrial function by stimulating a pathway that's called mitophagy. So what happens is, as you're getting older and you're leading perhaps a more sedentary lifestyle, the mitochondria that are inside of your cell, they start to get damaged and they get old as well. Each of our cells that are containing mitochondria, they have an innate process of cleaning up the damaged mitochondria and recycling them. And this process is called mitophagy. And so as you get older, mitophagy declines. And so the number of healthy mitochondria inside of your cell declines. And so your cells are less, let's say bioenergetically optimal, if you will, with that decline. So consequently, the cells aren't functioning well. So the mitochondria are a little bit like batteries inside of our cells, so they get run down. And so what we've seen with urolithin A, and this was the subject of a paper that we published several years back with the professor Johan Ulrichs here at the EPFL in the journal Nature Medicine, was that urolithin A was stimulating, or is stimulating, mitophagy and inducing this recycling process of the damaged mitochondria to keep your cells and your mitochondria very fit and very bioenergetically, let's say, optimal, if you will.
There's plenty of evidence around urolithin A for me to have started taking it. I think it's too early for me to say I felt a huge difference, and maybe I will, maybe I won't. I do a lot of mitochondrial stimulation and mitophagy stimulation, but this is something that I'm permanently adding to based on the evidence to my. My personal stack, and you guys put it in time.
