MITOCHONDRIA DAMAGE: Symptoms, Root Causes, and Treatment | Dr. Anderson

Today in this one, I want to get to answering the question, which I didn't get into deeply in the other ones, which is, what are the categories of things that would be the most helpful to me from a therapeutic point of view? Hey, it's Dr. A. Welcome to my channel. I've been involved in the world of teaching in integrative and naturopathic medicine for 30 years now, and I've also been involved as a clinician treating patients in both research and regular clinical settings for decades. So aside from avoiding things, you know, which we should do, what are some things I can consider directly, either with my healthcare provider? And again, keep in mind, this is for information. I'm not your doctor. I'm not giving you medical advice. I'm just telling you, generally speaking, the things that help the mitochondria. Well, the first thing are what we would categorize as hygienic treatments. So the first one is hydration. Well, everything moves through the blood and then the fluid part, which is the plasma, and then the plasma goes out into the extracellular fluid, which is largely water. And then the intracellular fluid where the mitochondria live, which is largely water, and then back out into the extracellular fluid and taken away by the venous blood. So if I'm not hydrated enough, and this is borne out in much research about cell dynamics, I'm not going to be able to feed the mitochondria at the appropriate rate, but I'm also not going to be able to take the garbage out at appropriate rate. Both of those are slowing down my mitochondria. So hydration, huge. Moving your skeletal muscle, even if it's to move your arms around, if that's the part you can move or move your legs up and down or walk or, you know, go up and down the stairs or something. The movement, it sort of tags along with the hydration thing, helps with this pumping effect in your body. Does other stuff too. Sends out signals to help you heal actually by moving your skeletal muscle. But mechanically it helps with the water, that hydration movement to feed and then remove the junk from the area of the mitochondria. Well, it helps to pump the venous side, especially of the vascular system so that you can actually pull away those bad things that you're trying to get rid of. So physical movement. The next one would be to sleep appropriately. By sleeping appropriately, not only do we have better glymphatic drainage in our brain, it helps to sort of drain the metabolic garbage out of the brain and all that stuff. But by sleeping, we help to recharge our immune cells. We help to reset our oxidative reductive levels. And that has a feedforward effect on the health of the mitochondria. The next are medical things. You should be aware of it. This list could go on and on and on forever. We already said there's some medications that are mitochondrial toxins and stuff. What are medical things that I might have going on in my body that I do or don't know about that might affect my mitochondria? The first one is what sets your mitochondrial rate, the speed they run at. That's your thyroid. So if you have low thyroid, a lot of the symptoms of low thyroid are symptoms of low mitochondrial activity. If you have high thyroid, like Graves' disease, hyperthyroidism, you're going to have signs of too much mitochondrial activity. And so they're going too quickly. So the thyroid directly affects that. So if you have a low thyroid condition, you want to make sure that it is treated medically in a way to keep it as neutral as possible. That will help your mitochondria. The next, which is a little fuzzier, are your adrenal glands, and they produce your adrenal cortical hormones. So things like corticoids and stuff like that. Now, generally, unless you have Addison's disease or Cushing's disease, but normally they're just sort of kind of subfunctional. So if your adrenals are just kind of slow, but they're not diseased, they're not abnormal, they're just slow normal. Again, the adrenal hormones along with the thyroid hormones help to regulate the way that the cell works. So again, that might be a functional type of treatment. It might just involve getting more sleep. It might involve getting more exercise, could involve a million things, but your adrenals get involved in the act. Also your reproductive hormones. And here it's more about balance. And men or women, doesn't matter. Estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and all their related things have to be in a balance and they're not all the same. And of course, male phenotype will skew one way, female phenotype will skew another way, et cetera. But the bottom line is if they're in balance, your metabolic rate, ergo your mitochondria are going to work better. And then the last one are your hormones that control your blood sugar. So insulin, glucagon, et cetera. And so the higher your blood sugar and insulin levels are, eventually the harder it is on the mitochondria to help autoregulate And that gets into a whole bunch of other stuff. So controlling your blood sugar, very important. Well, what else? What about just the things that directly operate the mitochondria beyond hydrating them and getting oxygen and stuff like that? Well, the first are your B vitamins. The B vitamins are heavily represented in mitochondrial activity. Vitamin B2 and B3 are 2 of the big ones that are used in mitochondrial activity. And nowadays, because of the internet largely, you hear about people doing NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide therapies, NAD therapies. And they're supposed to be good for you. Largely what they're doing is NAD is used as the primer to start the energy cascade inside your mitochondria. Now, that doesn't mean you have to go take a ton of NAD, but sometimes therapeutically, if people are really, you know, as you get someone after surgery or after chemotherapy, or it's used a lot in drug addiction recovery, NAD is, and other stuff, NAD can be very useful. Now, NAD itself would normally be injected like an intravenous application, but there are oral substances that can convert over The simplest and the cheapest is niacinamide. So you've heard of niacin. Its cousin is niacinamide. And why niacinamide? Because it is the closest step to the formation of NAD+ right before NAD+ is made. So if you want the cheapest but most bioavailable form of nicotinamide, niacinamide. If you want a precursor to NAD+, then nicotinamide riboside or nicotinamide mononucleotide are oral supplements that can be taken to do that as well. So B vitamins. And then Things that help NAD. Minerals. Now, there's a lot of minerals used in the mitochondria. The one that we often don't think of and talk about is iron. And iron is very important because iron is involved in a couple of steps in mitochondrial respiration. That doesn't mean you need extra iron because there's a thing with iron where you want enough but not too much. You don't want it too low. You don't want it too high. It's bad on both ends. But if you are anemic, one of the reasons your energy goes down is because your mitochondria slow down. So if you're profoundly anemic, you need to get that fixed. But there's Minerals too. There's trace minerals that are involved in there, and then there's some of the standard minerals you think of. Largely you can get these from food, but also some people will take a multi-trace mineral or a multi-mineral mix, something like that. There's another nutrient substance which we see as a supplement, but it's really a part of your body, and that's coenzyme Q10. That's involved in the ubiquinone step, the CoQ10 step inside of the mitochondria. So sometimes when people are behind and they're really, you know, fatigued and we're trying to rehab them, not only we might give them some you know, NAD support and all the other stuff, but we might give them some extra CoQ10. Now there's another nutrient that is a sulfur-bearing molecule, a thiol we call it, and that's alpha-lipoic acid. Now this is a helper to the mitochondria. It's not quite like CoQ10 where it's part of the process. You know, CoQ10 and iron are part of the process. It's a sort of an accessory part, but alpha-lipoic acid can be very helpful to kind of get the mitochondria back on track. So you'll sometimes see that in protocols as well. And then we get to what I call sort of outside help. And the The next one is methylene blue, which is very popular on the internet right now. It's not part of your body. It's actually a drug, goes into your body. And the main thing that it does is it gets to your mitochondria and it gets to the cellular energy apparatus and kind of jumps a step and causes the energy apparatus to run. Now, what this also means is we want to have enough B vitamins there for it, and we want to have enough minerals and ALA and CoQ10, all that stuff. But it can be very helpful. That's one use for methylene blue. And then the other is actually light. So light from the The sun helps you, but also a lot of people will do red and near-infrared light therapy, and that actually goes in and it goes in in a similar place to where methylene blue does, and it actually will speed up your mitochondrial activity. So just to recap, we've got our hygienic things: hydration, sleep, and movement. We have our medical hormonal things to consider would be thyroid, adrenal function, reproductive hormone function, and then blood sugar control. Then we have B vitamins, minerals, and specialty things CoQ10 and ALA. And then we have outside helpers, red near-infrared light, methylene blue, and then there's a host of other things. All right, I'm Dr. A. I hope this answered that question for you. Thank you so much, all you new subscribers. Please do share with your friends, like, subscribe, do the notification bell, and I'll see you on the next video.