In this educational video, Matt Kelly explains why mitochondrial health underlies overall energy and disease risk, and outlines a comprehensive, tiered approach to support and restore mitochondrial function. He begins by describing the central role of mitochondria in cellular energy and how dysfunction contributes to fatigue and organ pathology. He then emphasizes foundational lifestyle factors—adequate rest, quality sleep, stress management, and stable blood‑sugar control—as the first line of mitochondrial support. Kelly discusses endocrine contributors, focusing on thyroid and adrenal health, and how dysregulation of these glands can down‑regulate mitochondrial respiration. Building on lifestyle and hormonal optimization, he reviews a hierarchy of nutritional and pharmacologic interventions: B‑complex vitamins and trace minerals, CoQ10 and alpha‑lipoic acid, iron balance, NAD⁺ precursors (niacinamide, NMN, nicotinamide riboside), and the mitophagy‑enhancing compound urolithin A. He then introduces methylene blue as a potent, but cautioned, mitochondrial energizer that can be photo‑activated by red light, and explains the complementary role of red/near‑infrared light therapy in directly stimulating mitochondrial bioenergetics. Throughout, Kelly stresses the importance of individualized lab testing, gradual implementation, and realistic expectations about timing of benefits. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to like, subscribe, and explore related content.
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You know, some internet videos about mitochondrial support are a little bit like the weather where everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it, as the old joke goes. So I want to break down what some of the core mitochondrial supportive treatments or areas of your health you can look at or maybe work with your healthcare provider on to help mitochondria recover, recharge, and work up to their optimum. So the first thing is the mitochondria are in all of your cells essentially, and they are what the energy that the cell can do its energy-dependent business off of. Some cells have just a few mitochondria. Some cells have thousands of mitochondria. It depends how busy the cell is. But if you take all of your mitochondrial activity in your body and you add it together, that by and large is the energy that you feel in your physical body and in your life and ability to do things. So if your mitochondrial function is low, you are more likely to develop diseases and cell and organ and tissue dysfunction. And also you are more likely to feel a fatiguing component to whatever illness it is that you have. So the mitochondria and recharging them are very important. Now I've seen people, you know, post or reply, well, if your mitochondria weren't working, you'd be dead. And that indeed is true. If your mitochondria stopped working, you'd be dead. But your mitochondria have a lot of checkpoints in them and they have a lot of other things going on in them that allow them to modulate between a lower energy output and a higher energy output. All of that becomes very critically important. So what can we do from a health, wellness, diet and lifestyle medicine point of view to really help out our mitochondria? Well, one of the first things is not a supplement, but it's one of the most important things for your overall health, and that is rest and sleep. So that would include stress management, resting, and your sleep cycles. Now, many people nowadays use these biometric devices, whether it's a ring or a watch or whatever, and you can see, you know, how your sleep is doing, how much you're resting versus not, heart rate variability, all of that. So that can be used as a, as a natural primary biofeedback agent to show you whether you're getting enough sleep at night, whether you're going into the right phases of rest and recovery. Et cetera. When you are doing that, whether it's on the sleep and rest side or on the stress management side, which we think of more as the management of what your sleep is trying to recover at night or whenever you sleep versus the management of when you're not asleep during the day, that's more of the stress response management. All of those things become critically important because if you're constantly stressed and you don't have a way to deal with that, and if you're constantly sleep deprived or you have inappropriate sleep cycles, you're mitochondria don't get the chance that they need to rest and recover as well, because your brain and your body are sending these confusing signals that say, oh, well, we're not in a rest period right now, or we have a lot of this stress hammering us. We need to stay alert and stay on the edge. Well, what's that going to do? That's eventually going to start to burn out your mitochondria and the feedback will make them go to a lower state of operation. You won't be dead, thankfully. They'll just be running more slowly. So rest and stress management is huge. Some of your hormonal function, really all of your hormonal function affects your mitochondria, but 2 big ones right off the top would be the function and the appropriate function of your thyroid gland and your adrenal glands. So the thyroid works at the level of the mitochondria to actually run the mitochondrial respiration rate. It tells your mitochondria how fast to make energy. So if our mitochondria get damaged, often there's a feedback where the thyroid will slow down as well. Sometimes early in a disorder, just fixing the thyroid will make the mitochondria go back to working normally. Sometimes later in a disorder, if you have a chronic illness, you have to be real careful and kind of build both of them up at the same time. But thyroid function or thyroid dysfunction will lead to mitochondrial dysfunction and vice versa. Now, the adrenals do a bunch of different things. There's the adrenal glands. There's 2 of them. They sit on top of your kidneys. They're really 2 glands in one, and they're biologically from 2 different parts of you when you formed as an embryo. The middle part, or the adrenal medulla, is part of your nervous system essentially, and it contains this yellow tissue called chromaffin tissue, which is there to help produce your fight or flight hormones for your body's use. So chromaffin tissue makes epinephrine, norepinephrine, can make dopamine, but mostly epinephrine for your fight or flight use, like adrenaline, right? And then on the outer side is the adrenal cortex, and that's where your corticoids So your corticosteroid type hormones come from, and those are used for more long-term stress response, blood sugar control, stuff like that. So the middle part, epinephrine and stuff, is short-term stress response, short-term blood sugar control. Outer part, adrenal cortex, is there for longer-term blood sugar control, longer-term stress response, et cetera. So when we look at people who are in chronic stress, they often have overtaxed both parts of the adrenals, and now the adrenals are sending signals saying we're in danger, we are in chronic stress, et cetera. These are chemical signals, so there's no words attached, but that's the idea. And what we know now from more modern research is that those messages that go out from the adrenals about being under chronic stress or chronic danger, et cetera, can go to the mitochondria and at the cellular level can downregulate multiple parts of your cell, but actually your mitochondria as well through crosstalk. So adrenal function is as important as thyroid function when it comes to mitochondrial support and recharge and repair. Another one that is often overlooked, although it's sort of part and parcel of the other things we talk about, is the control of blood sugar. Now, control of blood sugar, obviously we think about it medically for people who are diabetic because that's part of their pathology, right? But control of blood sugar for non-diabetics can be very stressful on the body too. So if you have a dysglycemic situation in your life where maybe you, you know, eat and you eat a whole bunch of carbohydrate, spike your blood sugar and spike your insulin, and then you have a reaction where the insulin then drives the sugar down and you crash and you eat again and you crash, that's very stressful because that feeds back to the ones we just talked about, the adrenal, both the adrenal medulla and the adrenal cortex. So that in itself can be an added stress on top of things. Also, blood sugar dysregulation can overall trigger other stress responses in the body, and it can be very pro-inflammatory. So in a way that works with our, both our diet and our lifestyle, because things like exercise and appropriate sleep and everything help us out with the maintenance of our blood sugar. If we're eating in a way that's not bouncing our blood sugar and our insulin all over the place, and we're exercising appropriately, And we're getting enough rest and all of the other things, our blood sugar's not gonna be ping-ponging up and down and up and down. It's gonna be more of a little sine wave going up and down in a smaller bracket, and that's gonna be less stressful as well. And that's going to help the mitochondria recover. Now, people often say, well, if I change my sleep patterns or my stress response or my, my blood sugar control, when will I feel it? Well, some people feel it right away. Other people, if you've been sick a long time, you kind of have to do those things knowing that it's working under underneath your pathology, and they are there to help build a base to help you get better over time. So sometimes you don't feel those right away, but they're very good to do still. Now, the next area that I wanted to talk about was a group of supplements that might be very useful for you. And there are so many supplements as far as nutritional supplements and herbs and things that are helpful for the adrenal glands. So I'm not going to talk about all of them. I'm just going to talk about kind of, we're going to build from the base up. So let's get into that supplement-wise. One of the more common things that are used everywhere in your body, but we don't often realize how much our cells and then the mitochondria use, are going to be the B complex of vitamins and trace minerals. So trace minerals are going to be things like zinc and copper and other things like that. B vitamins, of course, are going to be usually the numbered B vitamins and then like folate and things of that nature. And so if somebody is looking to support their mitochondria. And we're working on the diet and lifestyle things. We've looked at adrenal and thyroid function, and then we're looking at supplementation. Some of the other supplements that you're more maybe familiar with for the adrenals we're going to talk about, they might already be taking that, but they're not taking any extra B vitamins or trace minerals or other stuff. That can be a huge crevasse in the therapeutic order and this— the way that you can build up your actual adrenal reserve and then Mitochondrial reserve, etc. It's sort of a like domino effect. So that while there's lots of B vitamins used to operate and get energy into the cell, and then turn that energy in energy that the mitochondria can use, etc. Big ones around there are vitamin B two and B three. Vitamin B five helps with some of the fat transport, and some of the other ones help with other types of operation. So usually, if somebody's not doing a good high potency B complex, then Then that's a place that we would start. Also, as opposed to giving just one trace mineral, you know, like someone needs zinc or copper or something like that, generally I will have them, like they take a B complex, I have them take a multi-trace element, multi-trace mineral supplement. So they're getting kind of everything together unless they have a specific deficiency. 2 either fat-soluble or semi-fat-soluble nutrients that are used either directly or indirectly by the mitochondria are going to be coenzyme Q10. CoQ10, also known as ubiquinone. That's part of the electron transport system. And then the thiol called alpha-lipoic acid or ALA. ALA is very important in the maintenance and transmission of energy units and substrates inside of the mitochondria. So CoQ10 and ALA, sometimes we just use one, sometimes we'll use them together. Now, not everyone needs this, but if you're very low in it, you do need it for your mitochondria, and that's iron. Iron occupies 2 primary And then some secondary steps in the mitochondrial electron transport chain. And if you don't have enough iron, so let's say you're, you're profoundly iron deficient, like we see in a lot of our chronically ill people, you are not going to be able to make as much energy as somebody who has more iron. Now, iron helps with energy. If you've ever had iron deficiency anemia or known anybody with iron deficiency anemia, you'll know that that's a pretty big deal, pretty big problem. Well, if we're iron deficient, which, as I say, we see in a lot of chronically ill people, it's one of the building blocks we have to put the iron back in. Now, we don't want too much iron, so high iron's not good, but also super low iron's not good either. That's something kind of like thyroid and adrenal you have to check with labs. We've done tons of content on this next one, but it's such a popular supplement, NAD support. This is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, which is the primer that goes in to help trigger the energy that goes through the electron transport chain. And so that comes from the nutrient niacinamide or nicotinamide. And then there's primers for it that are a little more potent, NMN and nicotinamide riboside. Those 2 primers are going to be very helpful again in the acute setting. There is an interesting supplement called urolithin A, and that is essentially going to help not just with energy, but urolithin A also helps with the cleanup and repair phase. They call it mitophagy for the mitochondria. So that can become very, very important as well. Another supplement that's not part of your body. So everything we've mentioned up till now, CoQ10, CoQ10, B vitamins, trace minerals, NAD, iron, those are all part of our body. But something that we use sometimes as a supplement or a drug to get people off of zero, as we call it, get them to start having some mitochondrial activity again, is methylene blue. Now, methylene blue comes with a number of cautions and other stuff. It also is a drug. It's used sometimes as a supplement, but it's a drug. So you want to make sure that you have pharmaceutical grade because it also comes in a non-pharmaceutical grade that can be very toxic. If you want to know more about that, go check out some of our other methylene blue info. But what does methylene blue do? Methylene blue goes in around sort of on the side of the energy activation system and triggers more mitochondrial energy production. So again, kind of like NAD supplementation, it can be very good in the beginning of a case when you're trying to get people to have energy come back. Methylene blue is also photoactivated by red light. So a lot of people use red near-infrared light therapy. Turns out that red near-infrared light combo, which is very common at-home treatment. We got a ton of information on that on the YouTube channel. Red near-infrared, the red part helps to activate, photoactivate the methylene blue. And then the near-infrared part does the next thing I'm going to talk about, which is a non-supplement activation of the mitochondria. So when you put on near-infrared light, so the red light would help on the activating the methylene blue and a couple of enzyme steps. Near-infrared, the step just past red, which again you can get at home units, is also going to be helpful in activating the The energy system of the mitochondria directly. All right, well, that's a lot to talk about all at once, going through mitochondrial disorders and diseases, how to heal them up, et cetera. And this is big picture things based on questions people have asked. Thank you, community, all of you subscribers. Please do consider sharing, liking, and especially subscribing. We'll put some other videos up for you to watch here, and I'll see you on the next video.
