In this YouTube video, Dr. A— a naturopathic and integrative medicine practitioner with over 30 years of experience—answers a viewer’s question about how fasting can improve mitochondrial health. He first clarifies the spectrum of fasting practices, from long-term water or dry fasts to more common intermittent fasting (typically 10‑14 hours) and one‑meal‑a‑day (OMAD) protocols, emphasizing the importance of undertaking any fasting regimen under medical supervision. Dr. A then explains the cellular mechanisms by which fasting benefits mitochondria: (1) fasting stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis, prompting the creation of new, functional mitochondria; (2) it enhances mitochondrial efficiency and balances oxidative‑reductive (redox) stress, protecting mitochondria from damage; and (3) fasting activates autophagy, allowing cells to remove damaged mitochondria and other cellular waste. These processes collectively improve cellular energy production (ATP) and overall health, which is especially relevant for people with chronic or acute illnesses where mitochondrial dysfunction is common. He also mentions a continuing‑education webinar for practitioners on this topic and concludes with a call to like, share, and subscribe.
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How does this fasting idea help my mitochondria so that I cannot have sick mitochondria and get better? Hey, I'm Dr. A. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I've been involved in research and teaching in the naturopathic and integrative medical communities for over 30 years now, and I've been practicing a long time. I use this channel to answer questions that we get from patients and Friends, family, and all of you guys on social media. We get lots and lots of feedback nowadays from you guys. So let's get into this fasting and your mitochondria question as we move forward here. So some things to keep in mind about fasting. The first thing is that fasting obviously means not eating, but that might have a lot of different meanings to different people. For example, you might think about fasting and you might think, oh wow, I have to like go without food for days and days and days. And I've never done that. I don't know I could do that, et cetera. So that's one type of fasting, would be long fasting. And there's a little difference there between, you know, water only or what they call dry fasting, et cetera. We have other fasting content that gets into that. The bottom line is if you're going to do any type of fasting, you should really work with a healthcare provider who is aware of the parameters around fasting and how to keep you safe during long fasts. But there's another type of fasting that's become more sort of in the news and in vogue and on social media in the last number of years, and that's called intermittent fasting, meaning you're not going days and days and days without eating, but you're going a particular time during the 24-hour time clock period of your day where you're not eating. You're drinking water, but you're just not eating. You're not taking new calories in during that time. That's called intermittent fasting. And intermittent doesn't say how many hours, but generally that starts at least the amount of time you're asleep, unless you're eating while you're sleeping, which happens when you're on certain drugs, but generally you shouldn't be eating while you're sleeping. But anytime between the amount of time you're sleeping, which could be, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 hours, all the way up to maybe a little extra time before you go to bed and after you wake up, where again, you might drink some water, but that's it. So a lot of intermittent fasts are somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 14 hours. And then there's some people you probably hear on social media doing what they call one meal a day, OMAD. And one meal a day people, you know, they either eat in the morning or midday or later in the day, whatever they do, but they're only eating that one time. So then their, their fasting window might be quite long. It might be, you know, 16, 18, 20 hours, maybe longer. Now I'm not making a comment on how good either one of those are or whatever that spectrum is. There's a lot of good reasons medically to do shorter or longer fasting. There's a lot of good things, but you just want to remember you want to work with somebody who can just guide you at least in the beginning and keep you safe if you're doing fasting type protocols. Now what I will say is that Generally speaking, when intermittent fasting— so not the long-term fasting, but intermittent fasting— is looked at, you're looking at times in research that start around 12 hours and go up to around 16+ hours. And they're generally looking at, you know, outcomes as far as survival or quality of life or other things like that. But the connection, I think, when we talk about fasting to mitochondria is, if you look at it mechanistically, somewhat obvious, but you want to keep in mind that your mitochondria are the basic part of your cell, of which there's usually many mitochondria that help to create energy for your cell and really for your body. And so if my mitochondria are sick and not operating well, my cells are sick and they don't operate well. If I have enough of that going on, I feel sick and don't operate well. You have a chronic illness, this happens. If you have certain types of infections, this happens with the mitochondria. Many pathologies start with mitochondria. Mitochondrial dysfunction and work their way out, etc., etc. So now we're trying to connect how does this fasting idea help my mitochondria so that I cannot have sick mitochondria and get better. Quick interruption from the regular video: If you are a healthcare practitioner and you have an interest in this topic, we're going to put a link in the description below to my CE website and specifically the webinar that is about this topic. We'll see you over there. Thanks. There's just a few things to kind of keep in mind. The first one. is that just like we talked about with, you know, mTOR inhibition and cell growth factors and everything else, our body has a process and it has this balance that's very dynamic between growth and kind of adding on and doing new things, and then maintaining the cell and fixing the cell and maybe getting rid of old cells and all that stuff. So there's always a balance, right? Well, it turns out that one of the big things for mitochondrial health that fasting can do is to stimulate the mitochondria to go into what's called Biogenesis, or let's regenerate, clean up, make new the mitochondria. And so that goes on more when you're in the non-eating period than in the eating period. So one of the things that can happen even with these intermittent fasts is that we can stimulate or activate the pathways that help us to maintain or regrow mitochondria. So mitochondrial biogenesis, which is supported by fasting, even intermittent fasting, is pro-mitochondrial. health and can really help out. Now you might say, well, is that everything? And no, there's certainly lots of other things involved in that. But when you think about this being one of the core ways that your body turns on the repair of your cells and repair of your mitochondria, it's a pretty big deal. And then all the other things can work better. The other thing that whether it's an intermittent or a longer-term fast will do is it will improve your mitochondrial efficiency and actually help to balance the oxidative stress. The redox types of stress that go on that might damage your mitochondria. Now, if you're chronically ill or even acutely ill, your redox, your oxidation reduction, which is balanced by oxidation, pro-oxidants and antioxidants, they balance each other out and we need both of those. But if we have too much of the pro-oxidative side, that can be damaging to the mitochondria in the long term. And when you damage the mitochondria, the mitochondria become less efficient. Now, without getting into all the tons of biomechanics of the mitochondria, mitochondria Yes, it's energy to run that cell that the mitochondria lives in. That's very important. But you have trillions of cells and you have multiple times trillions of mitochondria because there's multiple mitochondria in each cell. And what you want to remember is that if the mitochondria start to become dysfunctional and the oxidation and reduction are out of balance, the mitochondria are going to get less and less and less effective at giving you more energy. And so although it is energy for the individual cell and then all the trillions of cells, that's also the energy that's needed to run the body. You quote feel. So when you feel that your energy is suboptimal, a piece of that is your mitochondria are not kicking in as much energy as they need. So fasting, even an intermittent fast, helps you to balance the redox, balance the oxidative stress side, and improve the efficiency of the mitochondria putting new energy out into your cells and ergo your body. And then as we mentioned earlier, when we have a brief or longer time of not eating called fasting, our cells naturally Naturally maintain themselves. So a big part of that that I talk with my chronically ill patients about is taking the trash out for the cell. So we call part of that autophagy, that sort of, you know, cell replacement, cell repair, all that stuff. But the bottom line is, is that even a periodic fast, if you're going to have an intermittent fast, will turn on the autophagy and other related mechanisms so that we can take the mitochondria that are— we're done with and need to go away. They can leave. We clean the environment around the mitochondria, and then we remove, literally take the trash out of the cell. One of the things that proper functioning mitochondria do is run oxidative phosphorylation, make ATP, make energy. But that process then turns on a whole other process that collects up the garbage, the cell debris, packages it up, and then exports it so it can be taken out of the body. So we have these increasing with fasting, the biogenesis, so the, you know, the making of mitochondria, improving the functional efficiency of the mitochondria, and then supporting mitochondrial repair, and then removing the old mitochondria so that we wind up having a removal of cellular junk, which makes the cell healthier. Well, I hope this answers the question as I got it around fasting and mitochondria and where they come together, because we did content on both of those separately. Hope this gets into it a little bit more. And I really appreciate all of you who have joined the channel. Please do like, share, subscribe, do Notifications, and we really appreciate all of you subscribers from the very beginning and all of you that just joined us today. It's been really wonderful to watch the channel grow, and what we want to do here is answer questions and have really good health content for you. I'm Dr. A. Check out these other links I put up there, and I'll see you all on the next YouTube.
