Dr. Anderson identifies the main causes of mitochondrial dysfunction: toxic exposures like heavy metals and mold, chronic infections including long-COVID, poor nutrition, chronic stress, and oxidative damage. Genetic mutations are rare; most cases stem from environmental and lifestyle factors that can be screened and addressed.
And our body has redox systems, oxidation reduction systems, to deal with free radicals. But in modern times, a lot of times we can be overexposed to free radicals and then wind up with a net deficit. Hey, I'm Dr. A. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I've been teaching and researching in the integrative and naturopathic communities for over 30 years, and I use this channel to answer questions. So the first thing to keep in mind is, like all other things in medicine, there are some things that are genetic. And while this is not the most common reason for a mitochondrial dysfunction, there are some very profound and very unfortunate genetic mutations that can either lead to major or moderate types of mitochondrial disease and dysfunction. So whenever we have somebody who has a lot of signs and symptoms of a mitochondrial problem, we generally will look at the types of screening testing for these genetic mutations and the primary mitochondrial disorders, etc. And so we always want to keep keep in mind that that is a possibility. So genetic mutations, genetic dysfunction. The rest of what we're going to talk about though are going to be the other areas that are really much more common when we look at the world of chronic disease. One of the biggest areas is going to be toxic exposure. Now in the literature, this includes certain medications that have mitochondrial toxicity, but if you search for a drug in particular and then you add on Mitochondrial dysfunction or mitochondrial toxicity, you can find out just like you can for chemicals and other things that that drug either doesn't have anything to do with your mitochondria or has a lot to do with being a potential mitochondrial poison. So drugs are one level of toxicity. It's not all drugs, but some drugs. Then you have heavy metals. So things like mercury, cadmium is a huge mitochondrial poison, lead, you know, most heavy metals. Then you have chemical toxins or toxicants. So those would be things like potentially pesticides, herbicides, other stuff like that. And because there's tens and tens of thousands of chemicals in the world, there's actually databases for looking up chemicals that you may have been exposed to and how much of a mitochondrial poison or toxin they are. And then there's things that come from the world around us. We call them biotoxins. Most common that we see with mitochondrial problems currently anyway would be mycotoxins. And those are toxins put off by mold that you may be exposed to, say, in a worksite or your home or some other place. The next one, which you might say, huh, that's weird, is infections, especially chronic infections, be very hard on the mitochondria. But in the modern times, you've probably heard of COVID the worldwide viral pandemic. And now we hear a lot about post-COVID or long COVID. And a big portion of long COVID is mitochondrial dysfunction that is induced by spike protein. Damage, et cetera. So it doesn't have to be COVID, but many, many chronic infections lead to mitochondrial dysfunction. The next would be not feeding the mitochondria appropriately. And where do they get their food? Same place you do. So poor diet, inappropriate diet, inadequate diet is another reason that the mitochondria will actually just slow down because they don't have enough of the good nutrients going in to create mitochondrial activity. The next is often described in the literature as And what that really means is that the margin or the window in which we handle physical and chemical and emotional stress gets more and more narrow. So the resilience is big and wide if we have a big margin, and we have loss of resilience when we lose our margin. Now that could come from a number of things. Poor diet and toxicity can create lack of resilience, but also chronic stress can do that. Chronic illness can do that. Chronic imbalance in your hormones can do that. Hormonal levels can do that, many, many other things. So our body's ability to handle stress actually can feed forward into creating mitochondrial dysfunction. And then the last one I'll put in here, although there are many, many others, is either overabundance of exposure or a decreased ability to deal with free radicals. And so free radicals are basically molecules that bring in electrical charge that is damaging to our cell membranes, potentially mitochondrial membranes, Et cetera. And our body has redox systems, oxidation reduction systems to deal with free radicals. But in modern times, a lot of times we can be overexposed to free radicals and then wind up with a net deficit. So that's another way that we can do it. Thank you for listening. 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