A talk on why modern eating habits jam up your mitochondria. Eating sugars, fats, and proteins all at once creates what the speaker calls mitochondrial gridlock, tanking your energy. Changing when and what you eat fixes it.
So a lot of the key is fixing your gut to get your energy back. Yeah. The second key is we are overfed and underpowered. And what the heck does that mean? We in general, Americans eat nearly 16 hours a day, almost continuously from sun up until well after sundown. And we have what's called mitochondrial rush hour, which Living in LA is easy to understand, but simplistically, our mitochondria can handle sugars, fats, and proteins. We use a slightly different system for making energy from sugar, from fat, and from protein. In the good old days when we ate whole food, like you advocate and I advocate, These different components, sugars would arrive first in the mitochondria. They'd be followed by protein sometimes later, and a long time later they'd be followed by fats. Mitochondria have, if you will, basically a freeway, an energy producing freeway. Now, when these things arrive in a staggered fashion, the freeway moves great. but what happens is with our modern diet with processed foods, with ultra processed foods, we have combined simple sugars, simple proteins, and easily absorbed fats that hit our mitochondria simultaneously. And the mitochondria actually can't handle all these. So we actually have stagnation in the energy producing highways. And we have systems on freeways, okay, we're going to have traffic lights that's going to control the on, onslaught of all this, but we get mitochondrial gridlock. And I use the example. So, okay, let's have breakfast at seven o'clock in the morning. All of a sudden, you're slamming with all three of these components and your mitochondria literally go into gridlock for two or three hours. You begin to get sleepy at 10 o'clock and you say, oh, I need a little pick-me-up. I'll have, you know, I'll have a donut and a cup of coffee. and once again, traffic gets slammed. By that time it's lunch, we slam it again. And so this process of gridlock really never stops until we go to sleep. And even after we go to sleep, there's still two to three hours of backup, if you will, on the mitochondrial freeways. So our mitochondria is really never have a chance. And in researching this book and trying this out on my patients, one of the things that was dramatic was that if I could lessen the period of time that you're asking mitochondria to handle food, the better off you're going to be because they have a chance to recover.
