In this conversational health video, board‑certified Dr. Ashley Frazee (Ashley F) outlines thirteen common, often overlooked factors that damage the mitochondria—the cell’s power plants. She groups them into lifestyle habits (poor sleep, chronic stress, sedentary behavior, over‑training), dietary choices (sugar spikes, high‑omega‑6 seed oils, low protein intake, micronutrient deficiencies), medications (statins, metformin, fluoroquinolone antibiotics, SSRIs), and environmental toxins (pesticides, plastics, heavy metals). For each factor she explains the cellular mechanism—oxidative stress, impaired ATP production, disrupted mitochondrial biogenesis, or direct DNA damage—using lay‑friendly analogies. Dr. Frazee stresses that most of these harms are reversible, hints at detox pathways and lifestyle tweaks, and invites viewers to watch a follow‑up video for detailed remediation. She closes with a disclaimer that she is not the viewer’s personal doctor and a call to like and subscribe.
Chapters
I'm a board-certified medical doctor, and lately I've been obsessed with mitochondria, the powerhouses of your cells. If you have healthy mitochondria, you feel great, and if you don't, you feel like this guy. I don't know, there's like slime in his hair or something. So I've made a list of 13 things that quietly destroy your mitochondria. If you are tired, foggy, inflamed, or feeling like you're aging faster than you should, if I can show you why these things are happening at the cellular level, you might be surprised at how easy it is to get yourself out of it. I'm gonna start with some lifestyle factors here, the easiest things to change. Number 1, bad sleep. See, when you're awake, you run your mitochondria hard and they build up waste products, oxidative junk. But at night when you hit deep sleep, your cells end up flipping the switch. They detox, they repair, they fuse damaged mitochondria into good ones. Kind of like buddy taping a broken toe so you're good to go for tomorrow. That was a bad reference. All right, skip deep sleep and you're literally short-circuiting your mitochondrial repair. Number 2, chronic stress. Who'd have thought? But here's why. When you're stressed, your body pumps out cortisol. This is a known thing. And cortisol's whole job is to tell your mitochondria, we need energy, make more. It is go time. And that's great short-term. It forces your mitochondria into max output mode so you can go faster and get ready for whatever's coming. But if you stay in that mode all the time, you're constantly burning fuel, creating toxic byproducts, And you're never giving yourselves time to clean house or repair. It's kind of like my house when my kids are home all day and there's toys and crumbs everywhere constantly. All right, number 3, sedentary lifestyle, not exercising. Okay, movement isn't just good for your mind and your muscles. It literally sets a signal off that tells your cells, hey, we need more energy and make more mitochondria in order to make that happen. And when you sit all day, that signal never fires. And the pathways that build new mitochondria, it just never happens. It just stays quiet. And over time, your cells basically get lazy. Fewer mitochondria are made, and your energy capacity actually shrinks. It's kind of like shutting down half the generators on an energy grid, you know, because nobody's using the electricity. All right, number 4, overtraining. Let's flip the script a little bit. If you're like me and you think some is good, so more must be better, let's go all in every day, That's a problem too. You see, when you push high-intensity workouts day after day after day, you end up creating more stress and reactive oxygen species, using more mitochondria constantly, and never giving your body a chance to recover. It's like redlining your engine every single day, shredding the wires, and overheating the system. Rest is where repair and mitochondrial growth actually happens. So it should be no surprise that your mitochondria need rhythm: stress, rest, Repair, recover, not constant chaos. All right, so those were some of the lifestyle factors that can damage mitochondria. Let's get into something you might find really interesting, like the foods you eat. Number 5, sugar spikes. Okay, when you eat a donut or something like a donut, your blood sugar spikes and your mitochondria gets slammed with fuel that they can't use. They can't burn it fast enough. It's kind of like overloading a fire with too much wood. You choke out the flame and the room fills with smoke. Now that excess sugar ends up getting converted into reactive oxygen species and inflammation. And over time, what happens is the signaling that insulin is supposed to give your body to have a balance of blood sugar really gets jammed up, and the message doesn't get out right anymore. This is insulin resistance. This causes weight gain and the inability to pull it back off. Combine that high sugar with high polyunsaturated fatty acids, which modern vegetable or seed oils are made out of— if you've ever wondered why we're constantly saying eat less seed oils, This is it. Seed oils are made up of omega-6 fatty acids. These are highly flammable fatty acids, very reactive and unstable. And when you have high blood sugar and you combine it with a lot of unstable omega-6 fatty acids, it's like pouring an accelerant onto the fire. This leads to something called lipid peroxidation, which is kind of like cellular rust. And this compromises the integrity of your cellular and your mitochondrial membranes, the place where all good things happen in mitochondria. All right, number 7. Low protein diets. We've all heard this, eat a high protein diet. It's the best way to keep your muscle and lose fat. But if you're skimping on protein, your mitochondria actually don't work well. Your mitochondria need certain amino acids like glycine, cysteine, and carnitine in order to repair enzymes and shuttle energy across the electron transport chain, which is how your energy is made. Without those amino acids, your body will steal from its own muscle in order to get them to keep things going. So you see now how a low protein diet, it doesn't just cost you muscle, it costs you mitochondria. Number 8, micronutrient deficiencies. Your mitochondria run on micronutrients the way your car runs on spark plugs and wires, unless you drive an electric car. But anyway, B vitamins, magnesium, coenzyme Q10, which is a popular supplement, these are cofactors that keep the electrons moving throughout the electron transport chain. And when you're deficient in these micronutrients, energy production can stall midway and you can leak energy out of the mitochondria as heat instead of ATP. All right, we're going to switch gears here and talk about something you might find even more interesting: how medications can affect mitochondria. Let's start with one of the most popular— statins. Statins lower cholesterol, but they also block a pathway that allows you to make coenzyme Q10. We just talked about this. When you don't have CoQ10, your mitochondria cannot make ATP efficiently. And this is why so many people who take statins can have a side effect of muscle weakness or fatigue. You know, their cells are running on basically half of a charge. All right, number 10, metformin. Metformin is great for lowering blood sugar. I use it all the time in people, but here's the catch. It mildly inhibits something called complex 1, which is basically the start of the ATP assembly line in mitochondria. So taking metformin is kind of like lowering the speed limit at which your mitochondria can operate. Now you might be thinking, metformin is supposedly supposed to be a really cool biohackery medication, and it was maybe 5 And here's why. Sometimes blocking or blunting mitochondrial function can force new mitochondrial biogenesis, which is really cool, but it's not proven and it's really controversial still. And metformin and I, we have a very love-hate relationship. Number 11, antibiotics. Now, not all antibiotics, but specifically fluoroquinolones, levofloxacin or Levaquin and ciprofloxacin or Cipro. There are more, but those are the 2 most popular. Now, these antibiotics are designed to kill bacteria by targeting something called DNA gyrase and topoisomerase 4. But these drugs can actually get into our mitochondria and mess with their DNA, effectively causing them to be inert. So you've killed an infection, but you've damaged your mitochondria. And so sometimes after you take these antibiotics, you can end up really fatigued. I'm not even joking. Nobody ever told me that in medical school. I just knew that these meds had pretty bad side effects, but now I know why. Number 12, SSRIs, or Antidepressant medications. All right, think of mitochondria like electrical generators. They have things called complexes that spin around in order to make the energy. SSRIs can actually get into the cell and stick to some of these complexes, causing them to jam up, and the result is you can't make energy. Now, over time, that can mean higher oxidative stress and less energy for the brain. So sometimes people on SSRIs can end up feeling foggy or flat and This is the reason why. Now listen, some people need SSRIs and depend on them for their lives. Please don't go off your meds just because you're hearing me say this. Never take anything I say on here as medical advice. Please talk to your doctor before changing any medications. I am just a doctor on YouTube. I am not your doctor. Moving on, number 13, environmental toxins. Things like pesticides, plastics, heavy metals. Your mitochondria just don't like modern chemistry. Research highly suggests that compounds such as glyphosate, which is in pesticides, plastics, BPA, and heavy metals like mercury block something called cytochrome oxidase. This is just another one of the key enzymes involved in making ATP. And they also drain your body's glutathione, which is its main antioxidant. And the combo just leaves your mitochondria blunted and your cells wide open to oxidative damage without a defense mechanism. Given our environment, you can't necessarily avoid every toxin, but you can support detox pathways and, you know, stop adding more fuel to the fire. All right, there you have it, 13 things that KO your mitochondria. But the cool thing is that most of them are reversible. In my next video, I'll do a more in-depth look at mitochondria, just the things you might want to know, like how to undo all the damage we talked about today. I'm Dr. Ashley Frazee. I run a direct primary care clinic in Mesa, Arizona. It's where I don't take insurance. My patients just pay me directly. And that allows me the time to talk about things like this. If you like this video, please hit like for me, subscribe to my channel, and I'll keep making videos on things that might interest you. You guys have a great day.
