Transcript of a Feel Freaking Amazing podcast episode (hosts Wendie Trubow, MD and guest Laura Frontiero) explaining mitochondria's role in health and energy production (ATP), their maternal inheritance and semi-autonomous biology, how environmental toxicants (heavy metals, mold/mycotoxins, industrial chemicals, pesticides, VOCs, personal care products, off-gassing) impair mitochondrial function, and how mitochondrial metabolic instability and loss of metabolic flexibility can cascade into chronic diseases (cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, cancer, autoimmune disorders, fibromyalgia, etc.). The speakers emphasize toxin exposure beginning in utero, the concept of an ATP 'bank account', and the need to address environmental toxin burden to restore cellular energy and prevent/reverse chronic disease.
Chapters
If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great, and feel freaking amazing, you're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo.
And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.
Where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social, and spiritual lives.
Hold on to your hats.
I love mitochondria. You love mitochondria. But for the listeners, can you give sort of a primer? What are they, where are they, and what are they doing around our health?
Yes. And this is really important to this discussion about eliminating or avoiding chronic disease, eliminating or avoiding autoimmune disorders. And it's really important when we're talking about environmental toxicants as well. So I'm really excited to be somebody on this summit who gets to unpack this for everyone. So listen up because this is mission critical for your recovery process and your prevention process. Right, Wendy? Yes.
The quiz is in how you feel every day. So if you don't feel like a million dollars, then you know you're getting a D minus on the quiz. And this is, this is where it makes a difference.
It is. And if you aren't addressing your mitochondria health, you're going to keep getting a D minus. You can do everything right. I mean, I talk to people all the time who say, but I exercise and I sleep and I eat healthy and I still don't feel good. And so we get down to what's happening at the cellular level. So it all comes down to cellular level. So mitochondria are little tiny cellular organisms. They actually live inside of our cells. And without getting over scientific, I'd rather talk about what they do and why it's important. So. So this is a Laura ism, but I like to explain energy as physical energy and invisible energy. So the physical energy is kind of what you feel each day. So when you get up for the day and you're faced with your day and you're looking at your list of things to do, do you have the physical energy to carry that out, or do you feel like you have to take naps throughout the day, or is the brain fogginess setting in and it's making it hard to focus, that's kind of the physical thing that we feel. But then there's this whole invisible energy force that's occurring inside of our body that your mitochondria are also responsible for. And by that, I mean the things you don't notice. So your heart pumps and your lungs breathe and your GI tract digests food and your body makes enzymes and neurotransmitters and hormones. And all of these processes are going on that's kind of invisible to us. We don't think about it, but it's happening. And guess what? What in your body is driving all of that? What in your body is sending the messages to your nervous system, to your GI tract, to your immune system, to your brain, to your lungs, to every part of your body. It's your mitochondria. So the thing that mitochondria do is they produce this unit of energy called ATP. And I want you to think of ATP like currency, like money. And it costs a certain amount of ATP to do every function in your body. So if I were to get up and walk across the room and out the door to my right, right, that would take, let's say, let's just arbitrarily say, 100 units of ATP energy. But me just sitting here talking to you for 60 seconds, maybe that takes 10 units of ATP energy. And, you know, some smart scientists somewhere can tell you those exact numbers. But the point is that you need ATP energy for every function in your body, whether it's just sitting here digesting food and talking, or whether it's physically getting up and doing something. So that certain amount of ATP is required for healing your body from chronic diseases. So you're going to have a bigger spend out of your ATP bank account if you have a chronic disease, if you have a autoimmune disorder, if you have any kind of chronic thing going on. So you're going to need to make more to replenish that bank account. So I'll just pause there.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there, Laura.
Yeah, it's a lot.
The first thing we didn't talk about is you really can blame your mother for this because mitochondria are maternal lineage, actually when those cells get fertilized, when you are created, there is paternal mitochondria. But they get destroyed as the cell develops. And so you and I, all of us, have. It's exclusively maternal. So you will see illnesses that flow through the maternal line of things because they're mitochondrial linked, which I thought was so interesting. And there you also didn't mention that. I just thought was so cool, is they're independent. They were initially independent of us, but back when we were much simpler, evolved to be symbiotic. So they can't live without us and we can't live without them, but they are truly independent of us. They have their own DNA, they produce their own. They do their thing, but they rely on us for the minerals and nutrients that they use and to even expend the energy. So I just thought that was fascinating.
It is. They rely on us, we rely on them. And it is all about the evolution of the human body. And so, yeah, they are their own entity, so to speak.
Talk to me about. About some of the environmental toxicants that people could be exposed to that then lead to mitochondrial dysfunction.
Yeah, this is one of my favorite topics to talk about because you and I both know we cannot get people well unless we actually address the environmental toxin piece. You can sleep, you can eat healthy, you can exercise, you can drink water. But if you don't help assist the toxins that are in our body. And it starts off with what's given to us while we're in utero with our mother. So she not only gives us our mitochondria, she gives us our first load of toxins as well.
So I'm sure mom.
Yep. And if you're the firstborn, then you have an even higher load than your younger siblings. So it starts there. Mom offloads. And there's even a theory that the fetus is used as an offloading space for mom to get rid of some chemicals. It's crazy. I know it's hard to think about that as you set space, but. So it starts there. And I'm sure you have, because the topic of this summit is all about toxic intoxicants. I'm sure many, many people are using the analogy of the toxin bucket that we have in our body. And once that bucket gets overflowing, those toxins have to go somewhere. So the bucket gets full and things start flowing. I also like to think of a bathtub where water's pouring in, but the plug is clogged and it can't get out as fast as it comes in. So then it ends up overflowing onto the floor and getting everywhere. So that's kind of what's happening in your body. Toxins are overflowing, and they're getting into our cells, intracellular spaces. Your body is rapidly trying to pack these away in a safe space, away from your brain, away from your lungs, away from your liver, away from your pancreas, away from your vital organs. So of course it gets packed into fat tissue. But to answer your question, what is coming in? I mean, you name it. Everything from heavy metals to mold and mycotoxins to industrial toxins, waste that is created Due to big industry. It's in our air, it's in our water, it's in the food we eat, the pesticides and herbicides that are used during food production, even the skin products that we use every day. Our makeup, our toothpaste, our deodorant, our cleaning products are off. Gassing of the furniture in our house and our flooring and our paint. I mean, you can't escape it. And I mean, I know I'm preaching to the choir here and I know everybody's talking about this on your summit and you have a whole book about it that's right behind you on the shelf. And you and I have had lots of discussions on this. I mean, you are the toxin expert, Wende. So all of the.
Unfortunately, right, because it was all about.
My podcast, your own health. Right. And so all of these things, guess what, they are flatlining your mitochondria ATP production as well. So it's.
Let's dive into this though, because so for the people listening, what happens is you get exposed to something and your body has to deal with it. But the process of dealing with it stresses the mitochondria because they need to make more energy in order for you to actually clean your house, basically. So now do that at a thousand x because you got a major toxic exposure when you strip the lead paint out of your house or you used voc paint or you ripped something out or whatever. You know, you eat non organic food now you have this ongoing onslaught that just keeps challenging the system.
Yeah. So the first thing that happens is this what we call metabolic instability. So as the mitochondria are functioning, the functioning declines. You get this lowered energy production. That's your ATP bank account that we already talked about. And because they're not functioning well, you get this increase in metabolic waste. So your cells are releasing damaging free radicals and waste that needs to be carried away through your detox pathways. But guess what? Your detox pathways are already overloaded with toxicants. So now you get this increase in what we call oxidative stress. And I'm sure that your audience is pretty savvy and has heard about oxidative stress being damaging to your cells. And then you also get this lowered antioxidant production. So antioxidants are important for our cellular health. This gets lowered and then eventually we're talking about a cascade here. The first thing that happens is metabolic instability. The next thing that happens is metabolic inflexibility. So the dysfunction increases. And what metabolic inflexibility is is the inability to Respond to a metabolic demand and choose the best fuel source. So ketone ketones over glucose and our mitochondria make energy from the food that we eat in the and they use either the ketones or the glucose. We do better when we burn ketones. So fat is ketones. We are more efficient. So think about your car and your engine working well and think about the grades of gasoline that you can put in your car. And some cars, the fancy ones require a super unleaded that's like ketones for your body. It's super unleaded gas. It burns clean and it keeps the engine going. The glucose is more like the regular gas, not as clean. Burning makes more waste. So we get this dysfunctional energy production and it continues to cascade. And so the next thing that happens once you gone through this metabolic inflexibility is guess what? Chronic disease. So we have a name for mitochondrial dysfunction. It's called cardiovascular disease. It's called Alzheimer's, it's called Parkinson's, it's called cancer, it's called insert any autoimmune disorder. It's called Lou Gehrig's disease, It's called muscular dystrophy, it's called epilepsy, it's called fibromyalgia. Do you get where I'm going with this? This is what is the final stage of metabolic, excuse me, of mitochondria decline is chronic disease. So at the root of it is a mitochondrial dysfunction. And so you asked earlier, why am I obsessed with this? This is why I'm obsessed with it. Because you can't reverse any of this if you don't get back your metabolic flexibility and if you don't reverse metabolic instability, which are mitochondria problems, inspire and.
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