Regulating Energy Levels through Mitochondrial Repair

Hi, I'm Dr. Tabitha, the gutsy gynecologist. I'm a triple board certified OB GYN and Functional Medicine physician. I've embraced the world of functional medicine and wellness through my own personal health journey. And I'm super excited to share my wisdom and unique perspective as it pertains to women's health. After caring for thousands of women, I've come to realize that your gut health determines your gyne health and your overall health. And it's a super gutsy thing for me to go against conventional gynecology practice to bring you the truth. No more band aid medicine, ladies. We're talking root cause resolution on this show. So if you're struggling with hormone imbalance, weight gain period issues, anxiety, insomnia, you name it, then you've come to the right place. And I want to be your gutsy gynecologist. So welcome. Hi, ladies. I'm super excited about this week because we're talking about how to have more energy. This was like my biggest struggle when I was an ob gyn. You know, being on call, delivering babies all night, doing surgeries all day, seeing patients. I was so sleep deprived and that was one of my biggest reasons. I was tired. But once I started sleeping, I still had issues, especially in the afternoons. I still wanted to sleep after lunch. It was like eating made me tired. And what was really going on was I had major mitochondrial dysfunction. And so my guest today, this is like his jam. He is the foremost expert on mitochondrial health energy production. He wrote the book the energy blueprint. He has programs doing all these amazing things and now he's coming out with a new book, Eat for energy. Let's see how to beat fatigue. Supercharge your mitochondria and unlock all day energy. So everybody needs this, right? Everybody should listen to this episode. You should share this with every woman you know and probably even the guys in your life because this is not a female issue. This is a human being issue and it's affecting all of us. As my guest is going to explain today. So couple things. I love all of the reviews and oh my gosh, like you guys are listening to me all over the world. This is so amazing. When I look on my buzzsprout host, I can see that there's people in like six continents listening and watching the gutsy gynecologist show. And that just makes my heart feel so full and so huge. I just love that I'm reaching you guys and that you're finding value in this. So thank you so much. I wanted to Read a review from someone in Australia. J.C. lee. Wow. What amazing nuggets of information on gut and gyne health. Love this from such a courageous doctor. Focused on helping women reclaim their health and find their purpose. Love, love, love. Thank you Dr. Tabitha.

Wow.

This is why I do this. I don't get paid, you know, this takes a lot of my time. But I do this for reviews like that because I making an impact on you guys and it's affecting your lives for the better. That's what my purpose is on this earth. I'm here to help you live your best life. And so it just warms my heart. Please send me in a review because I want to hear what you're thinking, how you're feeling and don't hesitate to let me know what else you want to hear about or what you're struggling with. You know, I'm doing this for you. Okay, so let me just sing my guests praises today. Ari Whitten. He is the founder of the Energy Blueprint. He's an energy and fatigue specialist who focuses on taking an evidence based approach to energy enhancement, nutrition, exercise, natural health and he's a number one best selling author. He's been studying nutrition and holistic health for more than two decades. He has a Bachelor of Science from San Diego State in Kinesiology. He also has a background in exercise physiology and fitness. He holds two advanced certifications from the National Academy of Sports Medicine as a corrective exercise specialist and performance enhancement specialist. In addition, he recently completed the three years of coursework for his PhD in clinical psychology and education that rounds out all aspects nutrition, fitness and psychology. This is how he approaches optimal health. Ari is a tireless researcher, as you will see, who's obsessively devoted his last 20 years of life to the pursuit of being on the cutting edge of science of health and energy enhancement. So you're gonna love him. He is super knowledgeable, but he tries to explain things in ways that are understandable, which I really appreciate and he's just a joy to talk to. So. So let's figure out how and why you're struggling with energy and what we can do about it. Here we go. Well, welcome Ari to the Gutsy Gynecologist show.

Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Oh my gosh, I'm super excited to talk to you because all of the work you're doing impacts everybody. I have yet to meet a person who tells me they feel amazing and have boundless energy. Right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's just like with the rise of the obesity epidemic and cancer epidemics and diabetes and neurological disease. Chronic fatigue is the same. And it's not just something that's unique to chronic fatigue syndrome specifically, only to people who are debilitated with chronic fatigue and bedridden and can't function anymore. There's many shades of gray of people who are, you know, who crash in the afternoons or just have half the energy levels that they did when they were younger and are looking to get that energy back. So that's. That's what I do. That's what I'm obsessed with and what I love doing.

Oh, my gosh. And it's so needed. Like you said, like, everybody's feeling it. I hear all the time. I just. I need a nap after lunch, or I'm dragging in the afternoon, or I get my second wind in the evening, and, you know, I can barely make it to get to that point. And it's like, that's all energy stuff. So I'm excited because my son's in seventh grade, and of course, he's learning all this biology, and, you know, I'm helping him study, and he's like, mitochondria, powerhouse of the cell. And, like, that's what you learn. That's all you learn. And medical school, it's probably a little bit more than that, right? You learn the biochemistry stuff, the Krebs, like, all these crazy things, but then you forget about it. I know as a physician, like, we didn't worry about mitochondrial health when people had chronic fatigue. We didn't think about their biochemistry, about their physiology. So I would love for you to just explain to my listeners, what the heck is mitochondria and why is it so important?

Yeah, absolutely. So we all heard about mitochondria in high school and college biology courses, and we learned exactly what you just described, which is we learned the powerhouse of the cell. That's where the cell produces its energy for the most part. And this is true. Virtually all of the trillions of cells of our body have between hundreds and thousands of mitochondria in them that are responsible for producing virtually all of the energy that powers those cells, from your muscle cells to your skin cells, to your brain cells, to your heart cells, to your liver cells, to your intestinal cells. Basically, everything relies on mitochondria to produce energy. And, of course, there's a very straightforward element to that. If those cells in your body don't have adequate energy because those mitochondria are not producing enough energy, then the function of those cells suffers and since you are basically a collection of cells and tissues and organs and organ systems, that's what we are made of, what humans are made of. If the energy producing units of those cells and tissues and organs and organ systems are not producing enough energy, the whole organism suffers and we feel the symptom of fatigue. But there's another really critical aspect to this that's only been discovered in recent years that none of us learned in high school and college biology courses or even in medical school. That is largely thanks to the work of brilliant researcher who runs a lab for mitochondrial medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He's an MD, PhD named Robert Navio. He's done absolutely groundbreaking research in a number of fields, including autism and chronic fatigue syndrome, metabolomics research, and many other areas heavily focused on mitochondria. And he's discovered something really fascinating about mitochondria, which is that they're not these just sort of mindless energy generators that we are all kind of taught to think of them as. When we learn about them as the powerhouses of the cell in our biology courses, it turns out that they have another role entirely that is just as important as their role in energy production, and that is in cellular defense. So it turns out that mitochondria are not just these mindless energy generators taking in carbs and fats and pumping out energy in the form of ATP. It's called adenosine triphosphate. That's the energy your cells use. But they have this role as environmental sensors. And they're constantly taking samples of the environment around them. What's going on in the cell, what's going on in. And they're basically asking the question, are we in danger? Are we under attack? And to the extent that they perceive themselves to be under attack, they do something really critical to understand for anybody who's interested in increasing their energy levels to the extent that they perceive themselves to be under attack or under stress, they turn down the dial on energy production and shift resources towards cellular defense. So what I'm saying is mitochondria have two roles. One is in energy production and one is in cellular defense. And those two roles are mutually exclusive. So they're doing to the extent they're doing one, they're not doing the other. And in response to environmental and lifestyle stressors, and this could be everything from poor nutrition to sleep deprivation to circadian rhythm disruption, to poor gut health to environmental toxicants to psychological stress, to light deficiencies and toxicities, to any other stressor you can imagine those Mitochondria can detect that stress and we can talk about the mechanisms why, if you're interested in that. And to the extent they are picking up on stressors, whether it's psychological stress or toxicants or anything else, they are going up, we're under attack. Let's turn down energy production, let's shift resources towards cellular defense. And ultimately you again, as a collection of cells and tissues and organs that are powered by mitochondria, to the extent those mitochondria in all of those trillions of cells are sensing the presence of those threats or dangers, they are making you feel the symptom of low energy levels. And that's ultimately the main thing that is regulating human energy levels.

Oh my gosh, I love how you explain that because it makes so much sense. If you are working on like handling everything going on in your environment, handling all your stressors, you can't be producing energy. You know, it's kind of like I explained, explained to women, you can't metabolize your estrogen if you're metabolizing your alcohol every night. You know what I mean? So that makes total sense. And you really hit on a lot of amazing points. And those reasons are why it's so rampant in this day and age. Right? Like mitochondrial dysfunction wasn't really a thing in the past, just like estrogen dominance and all this cancer. Like this is all stuff that we've created as a society. Right?

Exactly, yeah. And it's really for all the same collection of factors going on in the environmental and lifestyle level that are responsible for the obesity epidemic, the diabetes epidemic, the neurological disease epidemic, the heart disease epidemic, the cancer epidemic. All of these are really being driven by the same factors going on at the lifestyle and environmental level that have really come into prominence in just the last century, in the last 50 or 60 years in particular of human history. And that's why we're seeing. What I just said is not controversial. If you look at the data on the prevalence of those different diseases, they've skyrocketed in the last 50 or 60 years. The rates of childhood diabetes, for example, and obesity. When I was a kid, almost nobody was obese and childhood diabetes was unheard of. I mean, we used to call type 2 diabetes adult onset diabetes, and now we had to change the name because so many kids are getting it now. Why? It's because of what's going on at the lifestyle and environmental level. And fatigue and chronic fatigue is really, I would like people to think of it as, as really a precursor, a symptom a warning before you get some, some of these more serious diseases. This is basically a warning that your cells and your mitochondria are not working well. And we know we have lots and lots of research linking mitochondrial health not only to energy levels, but to almost every chronic disease that you can think of, that you can think up from, from cancer to neurological disease to diabetes to everything. So this is not something that is purely a concern, just of, hey, am I operating at 60% of my energy capacity or 100%? Mitochondrial health is vital for living a long life and for disease prevention more broadly. And if I can forgive the long answer, but maybe I'll present a little framework that will be helpful. I like to think of energy levels or fatigue as having two fundamental causes. One is what's going on at the environment and lifestyle level. So nutrition factors, environmental toxicants, exposure, psychological stress, light deficiencies and toxicities, hormetic, so every other lifestyle factor that you can imagine, so circadian rhythm and sleep and so on. The other aspect of what's going on is all of those different factors at the environment and lifestyle level are then interacting with you, with your cells, with your body, with your mitochondria. And, and if you either have. Depending on whether you have big, strong mitochondria and lots of them, like we all do when we're young, or if you have very few mitochondria that are weak and shriveled and broken down and not robust and functioning well, that influences what I call your resilience threshold, which is your capacity to tolerate stressors and maintain health and homeostasis. Okay, so if you have a combination of too much stress at the environment and lifestyle level combined with a body that has lost its resilience at the cellular level due to mitochondria becoming weak and shriveled and atrophied and broken down and losing those mitochondria, and we could talk more in depth about why that is. The combination of those two things results in overwhelming your body's capacity to maintain health and homeostasis. And then you start to get the symptom of fatigue. Those mitochondria switch out of energy mode and switch into defense mode, and you feel the symptom of low energy levels as a result of that.

I am so glad you're talking about this, because I am really tired of women complaining that doctors are telling them they're just getting old, like, I can't. I can't even stand it anymore. Like that is the answer. Every time a woman complains she's tired. Oh, you're just getting old. No, you're not. Your mitochondria are dying and they're getting old. Right? So I would love for you to talk a little bit about this kind of like if you don't use it, you lose it mentality. Because that's what I think about, like if I'm not exercising, my mitochondria aren't splitting and multiplying and all of that. So I would love women to have some kind of other reason to get up, get moving their body, talk about how to make more mitochondria so that you have that resilience.

Oh, you just, you teed that up for me beautifully. So first of all, there's research showing that if you look at the mitochondrial capacity of a 20 year old versus a 40 year old versus a 70 year old, and they do this by actually digging a huge hollow needle into muscle, like digging it into your quadricep and your leg and pulling out a chunk of muscle tissue and then looking at it under the microscope and literally counting the amount of mitochondria in your cells. There's a few other ways to measure it, but that's, that's sort of a mostly accurate but slightly over simplistic version of how they do this. What they've shown is that mitochondrial capacity on average declines about 10% per decade of life. So between the ages of being a young adult at 20 and, and age 70, most people lose 75% of their mitochondrial capacity.

Wow.

Okay. Now someone might hear that and think, oh geez, aging really sucks that it does that to us. Except we also know that if you look at a 70 year old who is a lifelong exerciser, an athlete, they have the same mitochondrial capacity as a young adult. Okay, so what that means is that the loss of mitochondria is actually not just a normal product of aging, it's a product of lack of hormetic stress. Okay, and I'll explain what that means in a second. But the right way to understand this is exactly what you were saying a minute ago, which is use it or lose it. Okay, so let me give a simple example of this. If you've ever broken a bone, if you've ever broken an arm or a leg and, or your son or daughter has, or someone, you know, you wear cast for six or eight weeks. I know this well, I broke a lot of bones when I was young. And after you get that cast off a couple months later, you notice a couple of things. As soon as that doctor saws off the cast you look down at your arm or your leg and one is, it's really pale and really hairy for some reason. The pale is obvious. It wasn't getting sunlight. I have no idea why it gets really hairy. But the bigger thing that you notice is it's half the size as the other one.

Right, right.

So what happens there is literally in the span of just six or eight weeks, those muscles shrank to half the size as your other arm or leg. And that's because they weren't being used, they weren't being stimulated, they weren't being challenged. And because our bodies are ruthless, they're absolutely merciless in basically identifying anything in the body, any tissue that isn't needed. And if it's using up energy and there's no purpose for it, well, it goes, well, let's get rid of that thing. You know, we don't need that because we are concerned with survival, not, you know, maintaining a bunch of energetically costly muscle tissue unless it's needed. So if you think about that, if you think about just the fact that in just two months, from lack of using those tissues and challenging them, they shrank, they atrophied to half the size. Now consider that same exact process is happening internally inside of your cells at the mitochondrial level. Mitochondria are there in large part not only to produce energy, but to meet the energetic demands of life, of the stress you impose on them. And if they're not being stimulated and challenged adequately, just like your muscle tissue, they shrink, they shrivel and they atrophy and they literally die off. Except, and I should add, the modern lifestyle does not challenge them adequately. Because what these mitochondria need to be challenged is hormetic stress. They need to be challenged through transient metabolic stressors that cause them to work harder. Things like exercise, all the different subtypes of exercise, things like breath holding practices, like heat exposure, like cold exposure, like different kinds of phytochemicals, like fasting, like intermittent nutrient depletion. Sometimes they, they have to function in a low carb state or without too many fats or in a totally fasted state. All of these things challenge the mitochondria and stimulate them to keep them strong and robust and stimulate them to grow stronger or even create more of them, something called mitochondrial biogenesis. But they're in a constantly, they're. This, this whole process is dynamic. They're in constant communication with your lifestyle. So if, like most people in the modern world, you live in a non hormetic lifestyle where you're largely Sedentary, you're over consuming food, you're not eating adequate phytonutrients, you're not engaging in periods of fasting or you know, transient nutrient, intermittent nutrient depletion, where sometimes maybe you deplete your body's stored carbohydrates or glycogen, where you're not being exposed to the elements like heat and cold, because you're in mostly indoor, climate controlled environments. If you're, if you're living that lifestyle, you're living a non hormetic lifestyle, which most people are in the modern world. And that is essentially the equivalent of putting a cast on your mitochondria. It's basically not stimulating them, not challenging them. And as a result of that, that's fundamentally what causes most people to lose 10% of their mitochondrial capacity with each decade of life. So the way, but the good news is we can reverse that. We can actually cause our mitochondria to grow stronger and even grow more of them through mitochondrial biogenesis if we reincorporate those different kinds of hormetic stressors into our life.

Yeah, and I hope women understand the difference between environmental stress and innate hormetic stress. Right. Like our body innately has this intelligence where it wants to be stressed in the good ways that you're explaining with intermittent fasting and exercise. It doesn't want to be stressed by chemicals it's never seen in 2000 years that are just now being created. That's the kind of stress that our body doesn't want to see. So, you know, I think about every day I'm telling women, you know, you got to start moving your body, you got to start exercising and inevitably it's hard for the first couple weeks, but then it gets better. Would you agree that that is just. You don't have the mitochondria to support your first few weeks and then they start to multiply and re engage. And that can push you through and actually make you feel better.

Yeah, absolutely. It's amazing how fast this process happens. You know, again, think back to the analogy of the cast on the broken arm or leg. That's how fast the muscle goes away. Your body says if you're not using that, we're going to get rid of all that tissue. Happens in weeks. So, you know, if you have a period, let's say you go on vacation for a month and you are not doing your normal workout routine in a month, you can lose, or let's say you get sick or something like that, and it's a severe Sickness takes you out of commission, you're not working out for a month. You can go from a very high level of fitness to losing a huge chunk of that fitness you've built up in literally just a few weeks of not stimulating it. That's how fast your body's going. Let's get rid of all those mitochondria that we've built up because clearly we're not using them. I mean, literally within the span of just weeks, that starts to happen in a profound way. So, and that's talking about the context of someone who is exercising and just stops for a few weeks. Now, if you're talking about someone who hasn't been exercising at all in maybe years or, or decades with any sort of vigorous or high intensity exercise, yeah, absolutely. Their mitochondria are in a very weakened state and they have to ease very slowly into building their mitochondrial capacity up to tolerate a significant amount of exercise. You can't take somebody off the couch who's been sedentary and never lifted a weight and say, okay, go bench press £300. And you can't take somebody who's sedentary and say, go run a marathon. Right? Those are, those are capacities that have to be built up over months or years of hard, consistent work. What you can do is take somebody who is in that state and say, hey, let's work on going for a 5 minute walk or a 30 minute walk or a very light jog for, you know, three minutes a day and you start there and then you slowly build the capacity up systematically. Because overdoing it is just as harmful as not doing any of it. You know, if you take a sedentary person, you say, go run a half marathon or a marathon, you're going to cause way more harm than good by doing that. It's the same as taking someone who hasn't, who's been indoors for months and hasn't gotten any sun on their skin and say, hey, go, you know, go where I live in Costa Rica and go out into the midday, you know, tropical sun and go sunbathe for two hours. The sun is really healthy and beneficial for you. But in that kind of context, that dosage applied to that individual, it's way more harmful than beneficial.

Yeah, definitely. So you talked, you mentioned briefly a lot of different things that we can do to stimulate this mitochondrial production. But I'm guessing that nutrition is like a big key of it. Right, because your new book Eat for Energy. So let's talk about how food, you know, how is that related to Mitochondrial health. I know, but my listeners need to understand all that.

Yeah. So if you think back to that, that sort of framework, conceptual framework I presented before of these two roles of mitochondria, energy and cell defense. Well, anything that's going on at the nutritional level, that is any sort of danger signal, is going to trigger the mitochondria to shut down energy production or turn down the dial on energy production and shift more into cell defense mode. Okay. So that can come in the form of many different things. Anything that is inflammatory or that causes oxidative stress or a combination of the two, will lead to the mitochondria sensing that and turning down the dial on energy production. Anything that damages gut health and the microbiome and causes gut permeability will translate into increased inflammation, immune activation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial damage, and the mitochondria will sense that and turn down the dial on energy production. Anything that causes huge blood sugar swings, periods of hypo or hyperglycemia, will trigger that. In the longer term, anything that is disrupting circadian rhythm and all these clocks, biological clocks we have in our body, which we can talk in depth about how all that works, will cause mitochondrial mitochondria to turn down the dial on energy production. Also in the longer term, anything that, you know, chronic nutrient excess will lead to the accumulation of body fat and having lots large amounts of excess body fat, which the vast majority of people do in the United States and most of the Western world, causes chronic low grade inflammation. The very presence of those inflammatory cytokines, this inflammation in your blood is itself a signal to the mitochondria that the body's under attack and it needs to turn down the dial on energy production and shift towards defense mode. So there's many different mechanisms of how this can be caused. I'll mention one more, which is, of course, toxicants in the food. If you're eating food that contains large amounts of pesticide and herbicide residues and other kinds of chemicals, chemicals from plastics. I just saw a study talking about all the different endocrine disrupting chemicals in bottled water, which blew my mind. It's way worse than I even imagined. And all of those things are being picked up by your mitochondria as danger signals that are signaling to them, that are basically communicating to the mitochondria and the cells of your body turn down energy production and shift towards defense mode. So what we want to do is optimize as many of these different variables as possible to switch the mitochondria back into energy Mode.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. I think that a lot of us don't even realize how many toxicants we're getting in our daily food because people assume, oh, it's regulated. The FDA wouldn't, you know, allow things that would be harmful, things like that. I mean, that's a whole other episode talking about, about that. But you really do need to take a hard look at what you're putting in your body because not only are you saying it's not helping you make energy, but it's switching your mitochondria into defense mode and preventing energy production in that way. Right?

Yeah, exactly. Right.

Wow. So what are the big key takeaways for food? Just like organic, non gmo, like tell me all the big key takeaways.

Well, I certainly think those are important variables, but let's start with when you eat.

Okay.

Not even addressing what you eat. Okay. And there's lots of research talking about this and just strategies around not even modifying what you're eating or how much you're eating, but just when you're eating can have a huge effect on your physiology. So here's the sort of context that's important to understand here. We have a biological clock built into our body. It's a 24 hour biological clock and it regulates and influences many, many different neurotransmitters and hormones throughout our body and the function of our mitochondria through many different mechanisms. Okay, so for example, we have a central clock in the brain. It's located in a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. And this central clock heavily influences many different neurotransmitters. Things like gaba, which influences our sleep, things like dopamine and serotonin, which influence mood and motivation and energy levels and the capacity to feel joy. The circadian rhythm influences many different hormones, including testosterone, growth hormone, thyroid hormone, cortisol, and melatonin, all of which either directly or indirectly impact on energy levels and mood and many other aspects of how we feel and how we function. And if your circadian rhythm is not optimal, then all of those things I just mentioned, all of those different neurotransmitters and hormones are paying a price. This is important because many people have a tendency to kind of see hormones as their own distinct thing, right? Like there's, there's hormones in our body and I have low testosterone and I have high estrogen and, or low progesterone, or I have low cortisol levels or high cortisol levels. And you know, that's, that's the thing. But many people, including many practitioners, I found, often don't really connect the dots to what's going on at the lifestyle level. And circadian rhythm has a huge influence on this. So we have this central clock in the brain. This clock is primarily responsive to light signals, also some other signals to some extent, food signals and movement and temperature, actually. And then it's been discovered in more recent years, just really some, mostly in the last 20 years and 10 years especially, that we have these peripheral clocks in basically every tissue of our body. We've got clocks in our skin cells and in our eyes and in our liver and our intestines and our muscles and bones and glands and every tissue of our body. And those clocks are primarily responsive to the signal of food, food inputs. Okay. And the goal here is, if you want your whole biological clock circadian rhythm system to be functioning well, you want to synchronize your central clock in your brain with all the peripheral clocks in your body. Okay? So the central clock primarily responsive to light. What we really want to do there is get as much light during the day as possible. Outdoor bright light sunlight, which is 100 to a thousand fold greater light intensity than indoor light. And we especially want to get it within the first half an hour of the day. We also want to ideally modify the lighting in our homes to shift more towards incandescent or halogen or candlelight, as opposed to fluorescence and LEDs. We want to use software on our computers and phones to get, to get rid of a lot of that blue light. It's specifically the blue light photons that are acting as this daytime signal in the clock in the brain, basically communicating to your brain. It's daytime, the time to be awake, alert, active and energetic. And we want to ideally also wear blue blocking glasses, or ideally blue and green blocking glasses in the evening, an hour or two before bed to minimize or eliminate the amount of blue light going into our eyes, into that central clock in the brain. Okay. That's a very succinct treatment of the central clock so we can get to nutrition. If we want to optimize all these peripheral clocks in all of our tissues of our body, there's a few key things we need to do. Okay. One is engage time restricted eating. Okay. There's research done by a circadian rhythm researcher named Sachin Panda where he's found that over 85% of Americans have a feeding window that's a time between their first bite of food and their last bite of food each day of between 13 and 16 hours per day. What's optimal based on the research, is 6 to 10 hours per day. So less than 10. Actually far less than 10% of people are engaging in that window. But even less, it's only 10% of people that even have less than a 12 hour window. Again, 85% is between 13 to 16 hours. So we know that just by doing nothing else, not even changing what you're eating or how much you're eating, but just when you're eating into a time restricted eating window between six to 10 hours, dramatically decreases oxidative stress in the body, dramatically increases insulin sensitivity, improves other markers of metabolic health, lowers inflammatory markers, improves sleep quality, and improves energy levels just by doing that one thing. Okay, so that's, that's one layer of the story. We also want this window of time. So let's say it's eight hours or 10 hours, for example. We want those hours, that window of time that we're eating, to be ideally as close to synchronized with the hours of daylight as possible with the hours of the light inputs into that central circadian clock. So we want to synchronize the two, the light with the food, ideally. But most people are consuming a huge chunk of their daily food. Over 50% of their daily calories come after the sun goes down. So this, this is not ideal from a circadian rhythm perspective. We know that in animal studies, if you give animals equivalent amounts of food, but in one group, you give them the food during the hours that they're supposed to be awake and alert, versus the other group, you give them food only during the time they're supposed to be asleep. Even if they eat the exact same amount of food and the same type of food and everything's the same, just, just those, those hours when they're eating are switched, you will see profound metabolic dysfunction, increased inflammation, insulin resistance, and these mice will, will get obese in the process just from, from eating most of their food at the wrong time of day. And the other thing that's worth mentioning here is related to what I just said is there's also research where they've compared shifting most of your calories towards the early part of the day or the later part of the day. So in other words, having, let's say 50% of your calories with breakfast and then having a smaller lunch and a small dinner versus having a much larger dinner, 50% plus of your calories at dinner, and then a very small breakfast and lunch. And even if people are eating the exact same amount of total calories, we See in most of these studies that the group that's consuming more of their calories earlier in the day ends up losing way more body fat. And that is in large part due to beneficial how consuming more of the food optimizes your physiology in many ways. For example, improves your blood sugar responses and insulin responses to that meal, increases your energy levels and causes you to burn more energy during the daytime when you have more food earlier in the day and so on. And ultimately leads to the whole circadian rhythm system, which again is modulating so many different neurotransmitters and hormones and mitochondrial function functioning far, far better. And it pays dividends in terms of again decreasing oxidative stress, improving overall metabolic health, decreasing blood sugar levels, and improving insulin sensitivity and improving your mitochondria's ability to produce energy and ultimately translating into you feeling much more energetic.

Oh my gosh. I was just thinking back to so many patients when I was, you know, a regular OB gyn and I would see women with chronic endometriosis or some debilitating painful condition and they were obese and inevitably they worked third shift or they ate all their meals in the evening, they were nighttime snackers. You know, it would always, the scenario would always be, well, I hardly eat anything, I don't eat anything until probably like seven o' clock. And, and then they eat a whole bunch of stuff after the sun has set right before they go to bed. Or they're totally flip flopped and they're eating and working third shift. So that all makes complete sense to me.

Yep, absolutely. And that's, that's exactly the wrong eating pattern. And it's interesting to note that that shift work and I'm sensitive to the fact that some people are really stuck in this position and have no choice. So I have compassion for that. I would say do whatever you can in the future, hopefully to get out of shift work if at all possible. But it's the only job that's classified as a carcinogen in and of itself. The job itself is not exposures to chemicals or something while you're on the job, but the job itself is carcinogenic.

Exactly. I can't tell you how many OB nurses you know would be on third shift helping deliver babies all night long. They're like the ones suffering the most with breast cancer and obesity and diabetes. And you know, if, if you are stuck in that situation, I would be with Ari. Like, see what you can do to get out of it. Because it's impacting your health so much much. It really Is so okay. I love that we're going to just switch up the time that we eat. We're going to shrink it down to a time restricted window. I love the eight or 10 hours. You know, I just had a patient this morning who was like, you don't want me to eat until 10am? I get up at 5. I was like, well, what time did you stop eating? And it was about 8 o'.

Clock.

I said, that's not that long. Like we have to learn how to be up and doing things without eating again. It's just we've gotten to this bad habit of like, we need to eat every couple hours, we need to maintain our blood sugar. All that's bs, right? Like it's gotta go.

Yeah. I mean, think of it this way. I said 85% of Americans consume food in a 13 to 16 hour eating window each day. Well, how many hours, exactly? How many hours are in a day? 24. How many hours are you in bed? I don't know, eight. And so if, you know, if you're consuming a 16 hour feeding window, that's literally consuming food almost from the moment you get out of bed to the moment you go to bed, you're consuming food in a 13 hour feeding window. You've got a little bit of buffer on either side of that, but, you know, that's pretty, still pretty close to consuming food almost from, you know, the first hour you get up to the last hour before bed. This is absolutely not ideal from a physiological perspective. This is extremely harmful to our physiology and it profoundly disturbs our sleep quality and our circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm is the link between sleep and energy. And there are two sides of the same coin linked by your circadian rhythm. And to the extent that you're not honoring your circadian rhythm and optimizing it, both your sleep and your energy levels suffer. And that's just in terms of quality of life. But if your sleep suffers and your mitochondrial energy production suffers, you're also predisposing yourself to so many different diseases. One thing I'll mention here is melatonin. You know, everybody listening has heard of melatonin and maybe people know it as, you know, the substance that's involved in sleep. People know it as a supplement, you know, but. But the truth is melatonin is a hormone. Melatonin is a hormone produced by your body. And guess what? It's not only involved in sleep, but it turns out it's probably the single most important mitochondrial antioxidant ever discovered. And this is something that's starting to become a bit more known in the natural health and functional medicine communities, but still is largely neglected. And we need to secrete to produce lots of melatonin each night. Well, it turns out that just being in the presence of standard indoor home lighting, in anybody's home, without wearing blue blockers, just being in your house in the evening, suppresses melatonin levels by 50 to 70%. Well, melatonin is this. This again, this vital hormone that needs to soak into your mitochondria every night and help recharge them and protect them from accumulating damage. Also related to that, there's a huge amount of research showing that if the mitochondria are not being saturated with melatonin each night, it makes you massively prone to developing cancer. We know that melatonin levels are hugely linked with the increase in cancer. And basically, so what happens if you're now living a lifestyle where you are suppressing melatonin levels by 50 or 70% every single night for month after month, for year after year, for decades? Right. While you're accumulating a lot of mitochondrial damage, which is going to result in fatigue, and you're increasing your risk of developing lots of things that are associated with that, like neurological disease and like cancer.

Oh, my goodness. Such an important point. So the big question is, do you supplement with melatonin? Because I've heard both arguments. How do you weigh in on this?

It's a complex thing. So I've discovered that there's a lot of individual variability and response to exogenous melatonin. And I have discovered this largely because I'm one of these people of, I estimate maybe between 15 or 20% of people that's hypersensitive to supplemental melatonin. I find even small doses, even kids doses, actually cause insomnia for me and make me feel horribly groggy the following morning. But so I can't sleep. And I, you know, they just don't work for me when I take anything more than a very, very tiny microdose, where it's also the case that other people can take 5mg, 10mg, 20mg. There's research on different treating different conditions, brain conditions, gut conditions, cancers, where they've used doses that are 40, 50, 60, 80 milligrams a day, which is more than a hundredfold more than I can tolerate. And I think there's a genetic component, because my father is exactly the same as me. He also is extremely hypersensitive to melatonin, even though he's in his 70s and probably has much lower natural melatonin than I do. And so I think there's a huge individual response to that. Now I'll tell you something. Something. So having said that, the research on supplemental melatonin is mostly positive, mostly very positive for many different conditions. So I'm not necessarily warning against it. And if it works for you, go for it. And I have absolutely no problem with it. Now I'll tell you something else that's interesting. That's really only a new discovery. Almost nobody knows this yet. I've written a book on red and near infrared light therapy. It's called the Ultimate Guide to Red and Near Infrared Light Therapy. It's pretty much the book on that topic. And it's been recently discovered that melatonin isn't only produced by the brain in response to light inputs, in response to circadian rhythm inputs through the eyes. It turns out that melatonin is so important to mitochondria that mitochondria have actually evolved the ability to produce their own melatonin inside basically all of the cells of your body. So we have this narrative that it's mostly circadian rhythm mediated. It's mostly produced by our brain, by our pineal gland. But what people don't realize is it's also being produced in almost all of the trillions of cells of your body by your mitochondria, for your mitochondria. And here's the most mind blowing part. The research has discovered that the primary thing that influences that melatonin that is so vital for protecting your mitochondria from damage and helping them work properly is actually light, is actually red and near infrared light exposing your body to it. So sunlight provides red and near infrared light. So we get, basically what I'm saying is we get much more from sunlight than just vitamin D, as is the common narrative. And you cannot replace sunlight exposure with vitamin D pills because we're getting many, many more benefits from that sunlight than just vitamin D. And this is one of them that I think, I think probably within five years, maybe it'll take 10 years, I think we will recognize that melatonin is way more important than we ever imagined it to be. And that this, this finding that melatonin is produced by our mitochondria for our mitochondria in our cells. And, and I think it will be recognized that that's probably one of the absolute most important things in maintaining cellular and mitochondrial health and disease prevention by maintaining redox status by being able to mitigate oxidants and free radicals and helping the cell prevent damage. So I think that story of mitochondria and melatonin and light, I think is absolutely a huge thing that again, within a few years is going to be recognized as one of the most important aspects of health.

Oh, my gosh, that is awesome. And the key takeaway, go outside, right? Like, everyone is stuck inside. I remember just like two weeks ago, stepping out of my car and thinking, oh, my God, I haven't been outside in days. Like, this is not okay. But you just get caught up in your life, you know? And so we have to get purposeful again, right? We have to, like, make it a priority, actually. Go outside, have the sun hit our retinas, have it hit our skin, because it's so much more important than we realize. And I love that science is finally discovering all of this. But, yeah, I think we know about this much, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. So I love that you're bringing all of this to us. So tell us about your new book. What else are they going to learn in there? Because I feel like we've learned so much already today.

Yeah. So basically, it's not a specific diet, right? It's not saying, hey, everybody's got it wrong. And really the answer isn't, it's not vegan and it's not low fat and it's not low carb and it's not keto and it's not Paleo and it's not carnivore and it's not the low lectin diet. Really, everybody's got it wrong. And I found the one true best diet, right? But of course, it's very appealing to write such a book. And there's huge financial incentives to write those kinds of diet books. And many people do that. And they, I would say, cherry pick and misrepresent the scientific literature in order to position themselves with that kind of diet book. And that's not what I'm doing. I'm compiling the science on. On nutrition as it relates to human energy and mitochondrial optimization and basically saying, hey, here's a bunch of practical strategies for optimizing your circadian rhythm and. Which affects sleep and energy and hormones in a profound way. Here's a bunch of strategies to optimize your body composition to gain muscle and lose fat, which plays a huge import, hugely important role in our energy levels and disease prevention. Here's a bunch of nutritional strategies to optimize your blood sugar so that you're not Having wild swings into hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia, which is critical for disease prevention, for brain health, for brain function, and for energy levels and mood. Here's a bunch of strategies to optimize your gut health. And we know that gut health is profoundly important for energy levels and for disease prevention. Here's a bunch of strategies to optimize your brain health. And then beyond those five different chapters, there's a whole other section. There's two more chapters. One on superfoods for energy production and mitochondrial health, and a whole huge, Basically an encyclopedia on all of the top supplements and herbs for optimizing energy levels. And just that one chapter alone is absolutely worth the price of admission. You will not find that, that information compiled like that anywhere else.

Oh, wow. Well, I'm really excited to read it because this impacts, like, all of my women, all of my patients, all of my listeners, everybody in my group, programs like, literally when your hormones are imbalanced and you're not getting sleep, you can't lose weight, you can't. You don't have energy. And this is all impacted. I say all the time, like, your hormone imbalance is a result of something, it's not the cause of it. Like you were mentioning earlier, like, it's much deeper than that and it is at the cellular level. So we do need to focus on, like, healing our mitochondria, supporting them. And I love all these great solutions that you have. So I'm excited to get this book and start incorporating it. Hopefully I'm doing these things, but it sounds like you just keep finding more new science. This is awesome. So thank you.

Yeah, my pleasure. And, you know, one other thing I'll mention. So if you go get the book on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever you want to buy it, and you email us the receipt@ariethenergyblueprint.com we'll gift you $400 worth of free courses. So we'll give you a course on sleep and circadian rhythm optimization and a course on brain health and neurotransmitter optimization, and we'll just throw that in. These are, again, courses that normally cost $200 each on our website, but we're just throwing them in as a thank you to incentivize people to go get the book. Not that the book is not valuable in and of itself. I think you're going to be blown away by the value, but this is just to sort of push people over the top and hopefully make everybody listening to this, this podcast go out and go to Amazon right now and buy the book and you can get it at Amazon. It's called Eat for Energy, how to supercharge your mitochondria for all day Energy.

I love it. Yeah, all those links are in the show notes. And some people are visual learners, some people want the video. So I love that you're giving that away as a gift. That's awesome. So check out Ari's work and your energy blueprint podcast. Right?

Yes, absolutely.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This has been awesome.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Oh, my gosh, that was an awesome episode. I know that you got value out of that because energy issues are impacting every woman that I see that I talk to. So if you're not having energy issues, I want to know your secret, please. You know, make message me and let me know your secrets. Because Ari has this dialed in. Like, this is his thing he focuses on, he studies, he researches, you know, endlessly. And the stuff that he comes up with is absolutely incredible. And it works. So if you're struggling, that is where you need to put your focus on. You need to do time restricted feeding, you need to change up what you're eating, you need to move your body for all of that mitochondrial health. You need to decrease your environmental toxins. You know, the fact that we all live in this toxic world and we're all exposed to these toxicants on the daily basis, we think it's normal and we don't think anything of it. We're using nonstick pans that are putting horrible chemicals into our air and into our food. You know, all of our food is packaged in these plastics, all these chemicals that we're using to wash ourselves and lotions and cosmetics, tampons, pads, like, they're all full of these chemicals that are really damaging our mitochondria and having a profound impact on how we feel. So it's super important to clean up your life, you know, so it's one thing to clean up your life in the fact that you shouldn't smoke, you shouldn't drink alcohol on a daily basis, that kind of stuff. But now we have to worry about cleaning up just what we're exposed to every day. So I would love for you to start thinking about that a little bit more. There's a link in the show notes for a PDF to decrease your toxic burden. I would encourage you to download, unload that and really start to focus on how can I clean up my environment? Because I think that's really impacting your energy. And I love how Ari talks about focusing on your circadian rhythms and, like, getting outside when the sun comes up in the morning and, you know, eating during the daylight only and protecting ourselves from the blue lights of our cell phones, our computers, our iPads, all of that stuff, because it messes with our circadian rhythms. So check out his book, Eat for Energy. It's awesome. The links are in the show notes. I love that he's gifting these courses to you as a gift. This is awesome. So please let me know what else you want to hear about if you found value in this or shoot me your questions. You know, I am here for you. I do this for you, and hopefully you're getting some value out of it. But stay with me and go have a kickass week. Bye, ladies.