Speaker 1: It is the mitochondria that sets up the innate response
Speaker 1: for your immune system. And that is why the people
Speaker 1: who struggled with COVID were the diabetics and the metabolic syndromes,
Speaker 1: and the obyse and the hypertensives, and they already have
Speaker 1: mitochondria that I like limpin alone.
Speaker 2: Doctor Crista Bell, Yo, welcome to the podcast. Now you're
Speaker 2: on this podcast because I was speaking at the ACNUM conference,
Speaker 2: the Australian College of Nutritional Environmental Medicine, and you were
Speaker 2: speaking a little bit before me, and I was absolutely captivated.
Speaker 2: You talked about my two favorite subjects in one you
Speaker 2: talked about hormesis and you talked about the mitochondria. And
Speaker 2: I think I was a bit through my talk and
Speaker 2: I said were chrys de Bell and like, where have
Speaker 2: you been all my life? Yeah?
Speaker 3: That was that was funny. I was very toughed. Thank you.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, that because it was such a
Speaker 2: good that's probably the best talk that I In fact
Speaker 2: that it's the best talk I've seen in years at
Speaker 2: any conference. And I thought you must be some geeky
Speaker 2: researcher who spent their whole career diving into the mitochondria
Speaker 2: and home. It's just but you're not. You're actually a GP.
Speaker 2: So tell our listeners about just you, your journey and
Speaker 2: why you got interested in this and why you became
Speaker 2: an integrative GP as well, and maybe define that because
Speaker 2: some people may not be a word of the difference.
Speaker 1: Okay, well I'll also define actually some people maybe don't
Speaker 1: know that the difference between being a physician and a GP.
Speaker 3: I'm actually a physician.
Speaker 1: I was trained in the UK, and I was on
Speaker 1: my way to being a gastro and trologist, and I
Speaker 1: was all into nutrition and things like that, and then
Speaker 1: I realized in my guestro clinics that I couldn't do
Speaker 1: very much in ten minutes in the NHS, in the
Speaker 1: wonderful White Chapel Hospital in East London, and I decided, well,
Speaker 1: I don't think I can work in this kind of
Speaker 1: environment where ten minutes to talk to patients and to
Speaker 1: treat very chronic symptoms. And as much as I loved
Speaker 1: hospital medicine and acute medicine, I decided I would just
Speaker 1: specialize in nutrition and go into private practice.
Speaker 3: As a physician.
Speaker 1: And so that's what I did eighteen years ago. I mean,
Speaker 1: a doctor for more twenty five years.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, yeah, like you like the female version of
Speaker 2: Peter Pant.
Speaker 1: Well, perhaps it's the Asian genes and you know, well,
Speaker 1: to be honest, everything I've taught my patients I do myself.
Speaker 1: And I really started off in an environmental medicine and
Speaker 1: nutrition and environmental medicine.
Speaker 3: I know about all what's toxic. I know all about
Speaker 3: what not to do.
Speaker 1: Don't invite me to your parties because I'm a real
Speaker 1: party pooper.
Speaker 3: I'm like, don't eat that, don't drink that.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so that was my journey into being in Australia,
Speaker 1: they call them integrative doctors. Yeah, but yeah, my background
Speaker 1: is an environmental and nutritional medicine.
Speaker 2: And when you do your basic doctor training, did you
Speaker 2: do it in the UK? How much nutritional education did
Speaker 2: you get in the basic training?
Speaker 3: I don't remember any.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I think some places it's two weeks. Some
Speaker 2: medical schools it's not.
Speaker 3: No, it's not never two weeks.
Speaker 1: It's usually one lecture or half a day here, half
Speaker 1: a day there. I don't actually remember any, but maybe
Speaker 1: because I didn't tell them, But I actually then I
Speaker 1: did a master's degree in human nutrition at King's College
Speaker 1: in London. But when I decided, I was a gastron
Speaker 1: Trilogy registrar and I decided, I can't really practice like this.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go back to school and study nutrition.
Speaker 1: So I went and got a postcrad Masters in nutrition,
Speaker 1: and then I went back into medicine.
Speaker 2: So that's how I interesting. That's so, so you had
Speaker 2: done had you finished your residency and things like that, Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: and then you went back into the masters. Wow, that's
Speaker 2: that's pretty full on and taking a year right after
Speaker 2: doing all that training and just getting to the point
Speaker 2: where hey, I can I earn some money, and then
Speaker 2: you went back to university and did the masters.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so because of doing that and then being in
Speaker 1: private practice and really thinking outside of just regular acute medicine,
Speaker 1: which I love, but really every day doctors everyday work
Speaker 1: is very much chronic disease.
Speaker 3: You really have to think about, well, what are all
Speaker 3: the drivers.
Speaker 1: The contributors, the lifestyle factors, the toxic cities of the environment.
Speaker 1: So I was doing that really, and the sorts of
Speaker 1: patients that I was seeing, chronic fatigue syndromes and all
Speaker 1: sorts of syndromes that medicine, couldn't label, couldn't understand, and
Speaker 1: indeed were more complex. So they would come to doctors
Speaker 1: like us because they've seen the neurologists, they've seen the romatologist,
Speaker 1: they've seen the gasterentrologists. Maybe they have a label, maybe
Speaker 1: they don't a lot of the times, first that would
Speaker 1: get the people who didn't have the labels but know
Speaker 1: that there's something wrong and it's not just in their head,
Speaker 1: and then they would come to environmental medicine doctors like myself.
Speaker 1: So from doing that, I've had experience of very complex,
Speaker 1: very strange, very complicated conditions.
Speaker 3: But really, when you just go back to.
Speaker 1: Physiology, biochemistry, understanding the body globally as a huge you know,
Speaker 1: systems biology thing that you have to know a bit
Speaker 1: of everything, so is like being a GP and not
Speaker 1: being a specialist.
Speaker 3: And then we go right down to the cellular levels.
Speaker 2: And it gets ridiculously complex when you get down to
Speaker 2: the cellular level, doesn't it, And the whole physiology and
Speaker 2: how nutrition interacts with our cells and all of the
Speaker 2: cell processes. I want to zero in on metabolic health
Speaker 2: in general, but then do a dive into the mitochondria
Speaker 2: because that's really the thing that captivated me about your talk. So,
Speaker 2: metabolic syndrome is a collection of things, and there's different
Speaker 2: as you and iBooks know, there are different criteria depending
Speaker 2: on who you listen to, but typically three from five
Speaker 2: of central obesity, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, lowing it's DL,
Speaker 2: and high fasting glucose. Why that cluster, why is that
Speaker 2: cluster so important? And the interaction between those things.
Speaker 1: Why it's important, I think just plays out in that
Speaker 1: that's where the rubber hits the road in terms of
Speaker 1: the interactions of where we see chronic disease happen, which
Speaker 1: is cardiovascular health, heart attacks, strokes, dementia, and then you
Speaker 1: know the various range of.
Speaker 3: Blood clotting type of issues.
Speaker 1: Because that's rubber hits the roads like the endothelial system,
Speaker 1: and that endothelial system, the mitochondria play a huge role
Speaker 1: in looking after that. Maybe we can come to that later,
Speaker 1: but then okay, well, the mitochondric also play a huge
Speaker 1: role in you know, keeping a blood sugar level and
Speaker 1: things like that. But I think from a medical definition
Speaker 1: of the high fasting insulin, the high blood sugar, the
Speaker 1: high trigly strides, that's because together, that's just the.
Speaker 3: Train wreck in the enothelial vasculature.
Speaker 2: And it's basically your kind of you know, from a
Speaker 2: layman's perspective, metabolically, you're starting to fall apart when you
Speaker 2: have that cluster. I remember when I was doing my
Speaker 2: first attempt at a pH d, which I then moved
Speaker 2: on to something else. But one of my supervisors, she
Speaker 2: was a doctor and a research change. She said to me,
Speaker 2: because I was doing a study, We're measuring metabolic syndrome
Speaker 2: in people and often, you know, they take the central
Speaker 2: obesity high blood pressure of the traguler said to the HDL,
Speaker 2: but often their glucose wasn't too bad. And she said
Speaker 2: to me, glucose is typically the last thing to go,
Speaker 2: and that gives people a false sense of security because
Speaker 2: they tend to really look at their glucose and type
Speaker 2: two diabetes and they think I'm okay. But is that
Speaker 2: your observation as well, that it tends to be the
Speaker 2: last to go.
Speaker 3: Oh. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: It's funny that having this discussion be because that was
Speaker 1: my conclusion to years ago, like, you know, I don't
Speaker 1: care what your blood glucos is, but I will do
Speaker 1: an insulin and more interested. I would want I get
Speaker 1: all my patients to do a continuous glucose monitor. So yes,
Speaker 1: I do care what the glucosi is, but not just
Speaker 1: on that Tuesday morning am fasting test. You know, I
Speaker 1: was like, Okay, it's five point four and that's not
Speaker 1: very good. I'd like to see it around four point five.
Speaker 1: But it's inside the normal range. And everyone thinks they've
Speaker 1: got away with it and they're fine. But if you
Speaker 1: do a continuous glucose monitor and you can see the
Speaker 1: pattern through the day, the days and the weeks, then
Speaker 1: you start to see all the zig zag peaks and
Speaker 1: troughs that people go through, and that is the big
Speaker 1: driver for insulent resistance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and now I'm a massifier the continuous monitor. I
Speaker 2: think everybody should should try it at least once, because
Speaker 2: it gives you some really interesting insights, doesn't it. Because
Speaker 2: one food you might spike your blood glucose ridiculously, and
Speaker 2: then for me it'll be fine, and then another food
Speaker 2: it will be vice versa. Right, and this one size
Speaker 2: fits all approach is complete and other nonsense when it
Speaker 2: comes to nutrition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, And it's not just the food, but
Speaker 1: how you put the food together on the plate, and
Speaker 1: then what you do after eating it or what have
Speaker 1: you done before eating it? And then sometimes even when
Speaker 1: you haven't even eaten, what's your codisol levels, like adrenaline levels,
Speaker 1: like you learn all sorts of great things around your
Speaker 1: whole you know, psychology and everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that what you do after you eat as well,
Speaker 2: and the mix of stuff, right, having protein, having fat
Speaker 2: with it really reduces the big spike. Having some citrus,
Speaker 2: but even just going for a walk after dinner as
Speaker 2: a profound effect on people's bloodluoks. I mean, if I
Speaker 2: was bizarre at the universe, I would make everybody go
Speaker 2: for a walk after dinner.
Speaker 1: If you was the universe call, we would all be
Speaker 1: unbreakable and the world would be completely different.
Speaker 3: And I want to have a.
Speaker 1: Job, No, well I would I wouldn't have a job,
Speaker 1: and I'd be delighted.
Speaker 2: So we know if you have metabolic syndrome, your risk
Speaker 2: of cardiovascar disease, tattoo diabetes, non alcoholic fat delivered disease,
Speaker 2: chronic kidney disease, PCOS, sleepop near cancerus, dementia, that it
Speaker 2: all goes through the roof. And and that's really the
Speaker 2: crux of the issue, isn't it. It's metabolism gone role
Speaker 2: for people.
Speaker 1: Yes, And what's underlying the metabolism gone wrong is the
Speaker 1: metabolic pathways, of course, and what determines the metabolic pathways
Speaker 1: is the mitochondria.
Speaker 3: And that's why I asked.
Speaker 1: The almost twenty years of nutritional integrated medicine, I've landed
Speaker 1: squarely on the mitochondria. I mean, I've been following the
Speaker 1: whole mitochondry story for about over ten years and.
Speaker 3: Really is seeking more and more answers for the sick.
Speaker 1: There's very complex, very unnamable chronic neurological, weird illnesses, and
Speaker 1: you have to come down to really, in the end
Speaker 1: what works in the patients.
Speaker 3: And I find that that's where one has to go to.
Speaker 2: So why your interests, I mean, you've been interested in
Speaker 2: the mitochondry much longer than me. I've come to probably
Speaker 2: in the last five years and then just realized by
Speaker 2: critical it is. So can we talk about just for
Speaker 2: the lay people who might even not know what mitochondria is,
Speaker 2: give us a bit of a definition, and then just
Speaker 2: give us a sense of what mitochondria do in the body,
Speaker 2: how wide bread they are, you know, how they're involved
Speaker 2: in your overall health spoostigical or mental.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I mean starting at the beginning, just from
Speaker 1: a cell biology perspective, Mitochondria are little mini structures, so organelles,
Speaker 1: mini organelles inside the cell, like one hundred to a
Speaker 1: thousand of them, depending on what kind of cell you are,
Speaker 1: a nerve cell, a brain cell, a muscle cell, or
Speaker 1: bone cell, whatever. So the number of mitochondria depends on
Speaker 1: what the function is of that cell, and the more
Speaker 1: energy that cell needs, a more mi chondria there are,
Speaker 1: so that would be all the neurons, all the muscles.
Speaker 1: That's where we have got most mitochondria because they can
Speaker 1: never stop, like your heart never stops, your brain never stops,
Speaker 1: you know, when you sleep, it's all still pumping around,
Speaker 1: working away. So the mitochondria typic we've all learned it
Speaker 1: as they are the organelles that make energy for the cell.
Speaker 1: And the terminology that being used for a long time
Speaker 1: is mitochondria are powerhouses of the cell and they power
Speaker 1: up everything.
Speaker 3: And that really is true.
Speaker 1: But in my talk I was just trying to bring
Speaker 1: a bit of a nuance in that it's not just
Speaker 1: they're not just pumping out energy because we need more energy,
Speaker 1: we want more energy. The nuances that we actually also
Speaker 1: have to do things to feed the energy, like create
Speaker 1: create the whole environment, the whole landscape. That the mitochondria
Speaker 1: make energy very fluidly and just very naturally rather than
Speaker 1: like we're trying to squeeze out this energy. So that
Speaker 1: my TOD wanted to bring more nuance because it was
Speaker 1: a group of doctors and integrative practitioners and we all
Speaker 1: know that you know, we've given supplements for mitochondrial energy
Speaker 1: blah blah. But so we'll come to the more nuanced later.
Speaker 1: But back to the basics of mitochondria. So they are
Speaker 1: in fact processing energy, and they're like a battery of
Speaker 1: the cell, and like batteries as positive negative charge, they
Speaker 1: hold the charge and it's like a capacitor that you
Speaker 1: know that gives you energy. And mitochondria have their own genes,
Speaker 1: So that's also a newer level of discussion around mitochondria,
Speaker 1: not just that they make energy, but they've got their
Speaker 1: own genes.
Speaker 3: They've got thirty seven genes. Our our the rest of
Speaker 3: our cell.
Speaker 1: In the nucleus. Everybody knows we've got all our DNA.
Speaker 1: That's twenty zero genes in there, but the mitochondria have
Speaker 1: thirty seven genes and those g half of those genes
Speaker 1: make the most important energy producing like machinery proteins pathways
Speaker 1: for making energy. So if that doesn't work, the genes
Speaker 1: there aren't happy, which is the discussions on epigenetics.
Speaker 3: Like what are you what are you doing.
Speaker 1: That alters your genetic function. So if you're doing things
Speaker 1: that your mitochondria genes and the epigenetics it's not too
Speaker 1: happy about what you're doing, then it's going to alter
Speaker 1: how much energy you are transducing through that mitochondria.
Speaker 3: So that would be the basics that mitochondria.
Speaker 1: Are there to power up our biology, and why they
Speaker 1: do it is like amazingly complex with its evolutionary pathways.
Speaker 1: They're highly conserved. You know, you can't just they didn't
Speaker 1: just change.
Speaker 3: Over a few generations. They've been there like forever.
Speaker 1: And then how it came about with prokaryotic cells and
Speaker 1: eukaryotic cells, so all that, like early life are genetics
Speaker 1: that comes from the work of Nick Laine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these these cells that you just mentioned, there's some
Speaker 2: of the earliest life on Earth, right, So, yeah, the
Speaker 2: mitochondria have been around since there was life on Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's that's pretty frigging important, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: So they've been around since there's been life on Earth
Speaker 1: because they just knew how to use oxygen. And life
Speaker 1: on Earth was about like sulfur and all those hot
Speaker 1: gases from the vents deep in the sea and then
Speaker 1: oxygen bubbling up and then how's life going to be formed?
Speaker 1: And somehow by magic, you know, these early life forms
Speaker 1: knew or found ways to use oxygen. So mitochondria need
Speaker 1: to use oxygen, that's its obligate function. But it doesn't
Speaker 1: use oxygen. It's just half asked, basically, like it's just
Speaker 1: creeping along and you end up in anaerobic metabolism, which
Speaker 1: when the cell just has basic energy through sugars and glycolysis,
Speaker 1: but not to really burning fat, not to really burning
Speaker 1: through oxygen, not making heaps more atp that energy currency
Speaker 1: in the cell.
Speaker 2: Are there certain beheaviors lifestyle beheaviors that then ramp down
Speaker 2: the effectiveness of the mitochondria and switch us into that
Speaker 2: more anaerobic metabolism, And then what are the issues with that? Obviously,
Speaker 2: when we're exercising. If you're exercising intensely, right, then you're
Speaker 2: an anaerobic metabolism. But I'm talking just generally, what are
Speaker 2: some of the issues of the mitochondria not working well.
Speaker 1: It would be feeding it a lot of sugar, or
Speaker 1: just feeding the system sugar. If you just have simple
Speaker 1: glucose and you can just rely on glycolysis, and let's
Speaker 1: say that's not enough oxygen around. So let's say, well,
Speaker 1: broadly speaking, I suppose it would be breathing. Moving size
Speaker 1: definitely does play unto it quite split it apart. Yes,
Speaker 1: if you're exercising intensively, then you're going on anaerobic. But
Speaker 1: just the fact of blood moving, pumping, there's going to
Speaker 1: be oxygen flow, you're breathing, it's that whole movement of things.
Speaker 1: But if there isn't that and that's not moving up
Speaker 1: very well, and then there's just a lot of sugar
Speaker 1: and glucose, then you don't need to kick called a
Speaker 1: fatty acid, it's called beet oxidation pathways into gear. You
Speaker 1: could just be very lazy and rely on glucose and
Speaker 1: so it's a whole lifetime or years of doing that
Speaker 1: that you can just downtrain your metabolic pathways to not
Speaker 1: learn how to burn fat very well.
Speaker 2: I interviewed Professor Richard Johnson on the podcast. He produced
Speaker 2: a really interesting research paper around f choks and how
Speaker 2: frigtoks creates a metabolic crisis in the ma to chondria.
Speaker 2: And his research is really interesting because he was an
Speaker 2: anthropologist originally and he studied the Great Apes and he
Speaker 2: showed that the Great Apes millions of years ago had
Speaker 2: a genetical mutitian some of them were when they at fructose,
Speaker 2: they got fat and that was naturally selected for. And
Speaker 2: he's shown that basically it's to do with the urycase
Speaker 2: gene that every Homo sapient on the planet has the
Speaker 2: same version of the urycase gene, where we overconsole fructose
Speaker 2: and we create a metabolic crisis and we shut down
Speaker 2: energy production in the mitochondria. That then ramps up our
Speaker 2: hunger mechanisms and just basically shuts down your energy. Are
Speaker 2: you familiar with that stuff?
Speaker 1: I can't remember about all those pathways.
Speaker 3: I've heard them before, but.
Speaker 2: I have Poi Poiol pathway. I think it was the
Speaker 2: Poio pathway from.
Speaker 1: Memory and when we eat fructose, you actually need to
Speaker 1: use more ATP to convert it to glucose before you
Speaker 1: can use it as energy. And so it was a
Speaker 1: bit of a misunderstanding to think that you could just
Speaker 1: eat heaps of fruit to get more energy. You are
Speaker 1: filling the liver up with more fatty liver, basically more glycogen,
Speaker 1: and then it takes more energy to get ATP from
Speaker 1: fructose than from glucose.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so that's where the metabolic crisis comes. So,
Speaker 2: Chris Palmer, so I read his book recently about brain energy,
Speaker 2: which I'm presuming that you have read as well. I mean,
Speaker 2: that was pretty fascinating doing and it kind of makes
Speaker 2: sense right when I read it, I'm like, oh, duh,
Speaker 2: Holy of course, right, because as you said, and I
Speaker 2: never thought about this way, we know that is very
Speaker 2: very hungry energetically, right. It's like three to three percent
Speaker 2: of the year of body we have but uses twenty
Speaker 2: five to thirty percent of the energy. And it's the
Speaker 2: mitochondria that are pretty central to this. And he basically
Speaker 2: shown that very much every mental health conditional or more
Speaker 2: than mental health actually and brillant health issues are at
Speaker 2: least partly because of mitochondrial dysfunction. So talk us through
Speaker 2: that a little bit, like, how does that happen?
Speaker 1: I think when you say it's partly mitochondrial dysfunction, I
Speaker 1: would say partly because the picture is different than everyone.
Speaker 1: Why is someone parkinson, someone ms, someone als And so
Speaker 1: you might think, well, the mitochondria is partly at play
Speaker 1: because everyone is presenting differently. But I would say that
Speaker 1: the mitochondria is wholly fundamentally under aligning the neurophysiological inflammatory
Speaker 1: processes that haven't been able to be pulled back like
Speaker 1: they're full in force, because the mitochondria haven't got enough
Speaker 1: bio energetics behind it to pull back and to regulate.
Speaker 1: So I'd say that mitochondrial dysfunction is inside every neurological condition, neurinflammatory, autism, depression, schizophrenia,
Speaker 1: mental health, brain health. I mean I don't like saying
Speaker 1: mental health. I say brain health because it is. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so why does that happen? It's really the balance
Speaker 1: of mitochondrial mismatch. And that's the work put together by
Speaker 1: Robert Navio. So in about twenty eleven or twelve, he
Speaker 1: published his first set of papers on something called the
Speaker 1: cell danger response.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 1: Before that he was a see already a mitochondria researcher.
Speaker 1: He's a pediatric geneticist MD from the US. I think UCSD.
Speaker 1: And so the cell danger response is when the metabolic
Speaker 1: slash mitochondria pathways just cannot anymore handle all the information overload.
Speaker 1: So the information overload comes from those highly conserved metabolic
Speaker 1: mitochondrial pathways that have to deal with what evolved with us,
Speaker 1: which is what are the signals coming from attackers. So
Speaker 1: the attackers would usually be viruses, but can be bacteria
Speaker 1: as well. So in the Precambrian, you know, prokaryotic sea
Speaker 1: of life, it was just like viruses and mitochondria knew
Speaker 1: how to live with that, and they just had their
Speaker 1: ways of managing their their ions, their metal ions and ions.
Speaker 1: Catire is to save resources for themselves or they're being
Speaker 1: stolen by a virus or that they're fighting to keep
Speaker 1: that back. So the cell danger response is the mitochondria
Speaker 1: dealing with attack or the attack is not too bad.
Speaker 1: So he calls it peace time and wartime metabolism. So
Speaker 1: when we have wartime metabolism, we have viruses, we have
Speaker 1: bacteria and infections that are overwhelming the innate immune pathways.
Speaker 1: Which are set up by the mitochondria. Because some people
Speaker 1: would know, Okay, yeah, innate pathways when you have a virus,
Speaker 1: and then you get your first immune system response and
Speaker 1: then adaptive pathways and memory for later. Yes, yes, but
Speaker 1: at that very tiny cellular mitochondria level, it is the
Speaker 1: mitochondria that sets up the innate response for your immune system.
Speaker 1: And that is why, well, guess why the people who
Speaker 1: struggle with COVID where the diabetics and the metabolic syndromes
Speaker 1: and the OBEs and the hypertensives, and they already have
Speaker 1: mitochondria that are like limping along.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, interesting, So they've already got damaged mitochondria and
Speaker 2: then you have COVID and the cyberkine storm that goes
Speaker 2: with that. And it's because they've got weak, defenseless mitochondria
Speaker 2: that they get overwhelmed basically their immune systems.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the innate immunity is before the cytokine storm,
Speaker 1: So the cytokine storm will only unfold and not get
Speaker 1: balanced or pulled back if there isn't enough mitochondria resource
Speaker 1: and the cell danger response is too overwhelming.
Speaker 3: So the cell danger.
Speaker 1: Response would be fighting the external world of bad guys.
Speaker 1: But if nowadays the external.
Speaker 3: World of bad guys is sure the glucose.
Speaker 1: For metabolic pop's from not enough muscle mass, too much
Speaker 1: other post tissue not exercising, blah blah, and then excess
Speaker 1: glucoses also taking away resources from the mitochondria. And then
Speaker 1: the last bit would be toxins. So in the Precambrian times,
Speaker 1: they probably didn't have toxins, but they had maybe natural
Speaker 1: toxins of you know, mercarine, too much sulfur or too
Speaker 1: much nitrogen, things like that. But today's world of toxins
Speaker 1: is a whole different story, right, Like we're totally overloaded
Speaker 1: with heavy metals, with ntocrine disrupting chemicals, with pfasts, like
Speaker 1: all those things are basically tying your mitochondria's hands behind
Speaker 1: their back and using up their resources. So then you
Speaker 1: end up having a system that just doesn't have enough
Speaker 1: power inside of itself to deal with what would be
Speaker 1: natural and normal to meet viruses that that's natural and normal,
Speaker 1: But then it's become unnatural and abnormal to have such a.
Speaker 3: Heavy toxic load and to eat the way we do.
Speaker 2: And then you throw in a lack of physical activity
Speaker 2: and poor diet as well. And then what's happening and
Speaker 2: from a very simplistic perspective, if I just kind of
Speaker 2: pull back, is number one, your mitochondria getting overloaded from
Speaker 2: all of these toxic insults. But because of the lifestyle,
Speaker 2: your mitochondria really aren't well trained. Right. It's like having
Speaker 2: Dad's army who have just done no training whatsoever, and
Speaker 2: they're pretty weak and pathetic, and then you put them
Speaker 2: up against an army of different invaders, all coming from
Speaker 2: different directions. It's not hard to see now how everything
Speaker 2: gets overwhelmed. So when you add all of those different
Speaker 2: toxins and insults from the environment, the oxidat of stress,
Speaker 2: and then you know, we haven't be talked about out
Speaker 2: a post tissue and what happens without a post tissue
Speaker 2: from a metabolic perspective, because and particularly visceral fat, right,
Speaker 2: which is different completely, and then you're not exercising and
Speaker 2: you're having shared our slin yeah disaster.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you as a sports scientist, you know you want
Speaker 1: to talk about like myokinds and adipo kines, right, so
Speaker 1: that all the inflammatory kinds or signaling that comes from
Speaker 1: muscles and fat and so mitochondria have the same they
Speaker 1: have mitokinds. So mitokinds are the signaling of that cell
Speaker 1: danger response to say, okay, are we in wartime metabolism?
Speaker 3: Do we have to put barriers up.
Speaker 1: Around our boundaries other invaders coming in from the different countries,
Speaker 1: and they literally put barriers up around the boundaries, and
Speaker 1: that's what cell membranes do. So the mitochondria inside the
Speaker 1: cells will know that there's a fight coming. And then
Speaker 1: they're going to change the structure of the phospholipids of
Speaker 1: the cell membranes and they're going to change your signaling.
Speaker 1: And what they do is they release ATP not as energy,
Speaker 1: which is what we said earlier. ATP is typically known
Speaker 1: as the energy currency, but ATP is also are mitokind
Speaker 1: and ATP when it's produced.
Speaker 3: Outside of the cell.
Speaker 1: So inside the mitochondria they're producing ATP and that's energy.
Speaker 1: But then there's like, oh there's war, open your gates,
Speaker 1: get the armies outs, and all these signals. The ATP
Speaker 1: will come outside of the mitochondria, outside of the cell,
Speaker 1: and that is your equivalent of your adipokine and new miokines,
Speaker 1: and it's signaling danger.
Speaker 3: And then that's when then the you start to trigger
Speaker 3: off all that outside.
Speaker 1: The kind storm and what's called the anal r P
Speaker 1: three inflammasomes.
Speaker 2: Right, okay, which then drives lots of different conditions right
Speaker 2: from a metabolic in the body to the breeding as well.
Speaker 2: Let's talk a little bit about mital hormesis, right, So
Speaker 2: my listeners will be pretty familiar with hormesis because they
Speaker 2: know I'm a big fan and you talked about hormeteris
Speaker 2: on mistige, which is why I'm like, where have you
Speaker 2: beat all my life?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: So talk to us about just you know, go anywhere
Speaker 2: with you walk with this, just around hormesis and then
Speaker 2: diving into mityal hormesis, what it is, why it's useful,
Speaker 2: all of these sorts of things. Just give us that
Speaker 2: primer on it.
Speaker 1: So homesis when I first learned that word would be
Speaker 1: in toxicology, and as an environmental physician, my background was
Speaker 1: learning a lot about toxicology, and homesis was that word
Speaker 1: that described that J shaped curve of the dose makes
Speaker 1: the response. So loadoses, okay, high dose could kill you.
Speaker 1: But then interestingly, you know there are other fields that
Speaker 1: were overlapping, like homeopathy, which is technically not scientific, you know, yes.
Speaker 2: But that we technically woo woo.
Speaker 1: But when technically but from a home mesa's lens, they
Speaker 1: were showing that the dose makes a response as well,
Speaker 1: and that whether it's a physical low dose of a
Speaker 1: heavy metal or a plastic or radiation things that are
Speaker 1: you know, said to be bad for you in big doses,
Speaker 1: low doses did do something beneficial for the system.
Speaker 3: So the body had this.
Speaker 1: Adaptive response to learn to get a signal, learn something,
Speaker 1: and up regulate a pathway to deal with it. And
Speaker 1: if the dose is just right, then you learn that
Speaker 1: pathway to deal with it in a positive way that
Speaker 1: helps and supports biology and creates resiliendience. But if the
Speaker 1: dose is too high, then that's a J shaped curve
Speaker 1: that you fall off the other.
Speaker 3: End that's not good for you.
Speaker 1: So homemesis from the very beginning was how I learned.
Speaker 1: It was all around exposure to toxicity. But then in
Speaker 1: the last decade it's very much being around bringing it
Speaker 1: into the longevity discussions and aging discussions, and then now
Speaker 1: mityl resilience, you know, bringing it into the discussion of psychobiology.
Speaker 1: So there's that maybe we'll come to this later mitochondrial
Speaker 1: psycho biology, which I love, but all different words for
Speaker 1: the same things that we love. So yeah, mityl resilience.
Speaker 1: The whole thesis.
Speaker 3: What was not very well.
Speaker 1: Understood, like why does wholemesis exist?
Speaker 3: Like it was very strange. Nature does these things very strangely.
Speaker 1: It's like, wow, that was what they observed but could
Speaker 1: never really explain it. But we are observing more and
Speaker 1: more of these pathways and understanding it more, and in
Speaker 1: the end, you know, it's like nature exists, but science
Speaker 1: is there to try and explain nature.
Speaker 2: And can I just jump in with some real practical
Speaker 2: learnings from hormesis for people. It's kind of summed up
Speaker 2: by Frederick nietzchre right that which does not kill us
Speaker 2: makes us stronger, And he just forgot the brackets as
Speaker 2: long as you get the dose correct, right. So it
Speaker 2: was Edward Calibrizi, I think, was one of the first
Speaker 2: to discover it when he was a PhD student and
Speaker 2: he was giving levels of plant toxins what's the name
Speaker 2: of them, pesticides to plants and he was trying to
Speaker 2: work out what was the minimal effect of dose to
Speaker 2: kill a plant and he found you know, at certain
Speaker 2: doses the plant died, and then as he reduced it,
Speaker 2: the plant started to flourish and grew better than plants
Speaker 2: who hadn't had any poison. Effectively, that was where it
Speaker 2: kind of first I learned. But now we know British
Speaker 2: medical radiologists who were exposed to what they thought was
Speaker 2: dangerous levels of radiation in the sixties actually when they
Speaker 2: were followed up, had less cancer than their peers who
Speaker 2: weren't exposed to it. And there's a whole heap of
Speaker 2: things like Chernobyl accident recovery workers, not the ones who
Speaker 2: were in Chernobyl at the time of the nuclear leak,
Speaker 2: but the ones who went in to rescue them, and
Speaker 2: they thought, oh god, these guys got too much radiation.
Speaker 2: They're going to get cancer. They followed them up, they
Speaker 2: got less cancer than other workers who were the same
Speaker 2: basically the same as them, but who hadn't gone in
Speaker 2: to do the recovery so had not been exposed to
Speaker 2: the radiation. And so you know, exercises are hermetic, stress
Speaker 2: or cold hate, all of those sorts of things. So
Speaker 2: just I wanted to make gither that homies is a
Speaker 2: real world context for people right before we dive into
Speaker 2: the mito stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's fascinating what you shaid, thank you, that
Speaker 1: was yeah, just what doesn't kill you makes he's stronger.
Speaker 1: And so back to the mital resilience or mital homesis.
Speaker 1: It is a mitochondria's metabolic pathways that allows this amazing
Speaker 1: thing called homesis to actually unfold in a positive way
Speaker 1: to make you stronger and better and more adaptive and
Speaker 1: so on, and it is it is the foundation for
Speaker 1: adaptive medicine and adaptive medicine, you know, from the Russians.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's a.
Speaker 2: Nice term, adaptive medicine. That cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that the adaptive medicine really came originally from
Speaker 1: the Russians. Adaptive medicine is not used very much, but
Speaker 1: we've been using it more in our recent new practice
Speaker 1: and because it's really wanting to teach people to adapt better.
Speaker 1: But they, of course, you know, true to the Russians,
Speaker 1: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger? And is ending
Speaker 1: up the fighter pilots with no cockpit and they're up
Speaker 1: in hypoxia, Like, why do you train these guys to
Speaker 1: survive hypoxia? Well, do hypoxic training? So hypoxic training, and
Speaker 1: probably in the spots where you probably know it's altitude training,
Speaker 1: it was like, that is seriously powerful adaptive medicine a plane.
Speaker 1: Why does it work because when you when you expose
Speaker 1: your mitochondria to what it evolved in, Like, mitochondria evolved
Speaker 1: through nature knowing how to deal with cold, how to
Speaker 1: deal with not enough oxygen. So when you expose yourself
Speaker 1: to not enough oxygen, there's just all these highly conserved
Speaker 1: pathways that go, oh, I remember that kicking kickin. Let's
Speaker 1: upregulate those oxygen using oxygen efficiency pathways, and then you
Speaker 1: get these incredibly strong mitochondria from regularly exposing and training
Speaker 1: yourself in hypoxia. So intermittent hyper training is one of
Speaker 1: my favorite amazing metabolic resilience training tools, not just in sports.
Speaker 1: There's a ton of research of it in sports and
Speaker 1: NASA and the Army and all of that, but there's
Speaker 1: now thankfully increasing research in what I deal with the
Speaker 1: chronic disease end of the spectrum with chronic fatigue syndromes,
Speaker 1: long COVID for sure, metabolic syndromes. It's good literature on
Speaker 1: like reversing metabolic disease Type two diabetes, Like if you
Speaker 1: catch it early enough and you just do HT intermiddent
Speaker 1: hypoxy training, you can actually reverse metabolic syndrome.
Speaker 2: Well, because you're then stimulating the mitochondria to adapt. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I wanted to just you talked about conserves. You've mentioned
Speaker 2: a couple of times, just in case that word has
Speaker 2: slipped past our listeners. When you say conserved, you mean
Speaker 2: conserve devolutionarily, So it's been presenting for millions of years, right,
Speaker 2: So these are ancient cellular responses to mild stress that
Speaker 2: create adaptation that actually then benefits the host. Right, And
Speaker 2: that's the key thing.
Speaker 3: That's the key thing.
Speaker 1: And that's the key thing that Robert Navio was really
Speaker 1: highlighting in that in that whole new generation of mitochondrial
Speaker 1: discussions from ten years ago. It's these conserved Pathways's not
Speaker 1: just that they make u entity. There's these conserved pathways
Speaker 1: that have to be almost seen to understood where do
Speaker 1: they fit in? So then if you've got too much
Speaker 1: toxicity not enough nutrient load, then those conserved pathways take
Speaker 1: a different direction because that's how they are.
Speaker 3: That's how they are.
Speaker 2: Tell me this, how does I don't know if you've
Speaker 2: been experiencing this. But hyperbaric oxygen therapy does that play
Speaker 2: into mito horn? Miss? How are we talking a different
Speaker 2: pathway here?
Speaker 1: It does play in and it probably plays in at
Speaker 1: a different level in terms of how strong you want
Speaker 1: to get, let's say, So it does play in that.
Speaker 1: Hyperbaric oxygen is considered a hormetic stress, so that is
Speaker 1: also you know, it's like, well if you think Goldielock's
Speaker 1: not too much, not too little, just right, But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you do want to do both.
Speaker 3: So hyperbaric is a stress.
Speaker 1: And for other patient category where they are not well,
Speaker 1: there is you know, especially like tvis brain conditions, their
Speaker 1: redox pathways are not going very well, they're not recovering
Speaker 1: from exercise, things like that. Hyperbaric oxygen definitely is useful,
Speaker 1: has a role to play, and I love hyperbaric oxygen.
Speaker 3: I use it a lot in my patients.
Speaker 1: But I would say that if I was an athlete,
Speaker 1: like I wasn't a sick patient.
Speaker 3: Then I'll be doing IHT. So it's just the level
Speaker 3: of where is.
Speaker 1: Your training capacity at Your redox is pretty good and
Speaker 1: you're quite well, and you don't.
Speaker 3: Necessarily need hyperbaric.
Speaker 2: Oxygen, which it's expensive, right, and.
Speaker 3: It's a more passive thing.
Speaker 1: It's not that expensive because it's becoming more popular now.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean whether it's eighty or.
Speaker 1: One hundred and twenty dollars a session depending where you go,
Speaker 1: for sure, but intermittent hypoxic training is probably around the
Speaker 1: same cost or more depending on the systems that you use.
Speaker 1: But it's more that it's training to whether you want
Speaker 1: to call it a deeper level of getting deep into
Speaker 1: those metabolic pathways that can really be trained up and
Speaker 1: training you to DeFore deep bus higher level rather than
Speaker 1: passively helping you.
Speaker 2: Gotcha. So if you have some sort of chronic disease
Speaker 2: here spot and the hyperbaric oxygen, it can be more appropriate.
Speaker 2: But if you're functioning way out and you just want
Speaker 2: to function even better in terms of performance cellular and
Speaker 2: exercise performance, and the intermittent typoxia is the way. Is
Speaker 2: that what you're saying?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: I mean if I was an athlete, and I'm not
Speaker 1: really if I was an athlete, then I would do
Speaker 1: all that exercise that you do, and then I would
Speaker 1: I do i HT regularly and then I would recover
Speaker 1: with cold and I would recover with red light.
Speaker 2: Yes, I want to do you want to talk about red light,
Speaker 2: but before we get onto it, just because we're talking
Speaker 2: about oxygen, but so carbon dioxide, so intermittent exposure to
Speaker 2: higher levels of carbon dioxide also seems to be beneficial.
Speaker 2: Are you familiar with any of this stuff? Talk to
Speaker 2: talk us through this.
Speaker 1: Yes, I'm not sure about intermittent levels of carbon dioxide
Speaker 1: because the way I see it is, first, carbon dioxide
Speaker 1: needs to be at a particular level, or a minimal level,
Speaker 1: and when people drop below that level, then that's when
Speaker 1: we see problems. So the problems that are related, they're
Speaker 1: called they call a few different names. But some people
Speaker 1: call it hyperventilation syndrome. Some people call it hypocapnic syndrome.
Speaker 1: It's just low COEO two. So COEO two should sit
Speaker 1: probably anywhere between thirty five to forty millimeters of mercury.
Speaker 3: But a lot of people are sitting at butty one
Speaker 3: birty two.
Speaker 1: And if you're not very good and that kind of
Speaker 1: breathing very fast, quite experiencing a lot of anxiety, maybe
Speaker 1: it's chronic pain. It's not like it's just psychological, it's
Speaker 1: just it's neurophysiological. To breathe faster, and to breathe more.
Speaker 1: When you're in pain, in discomfort, in distress, feeling some
Speaker 1: level of emotional whether it's abuse or trauma or whatever,
Speaker 1: people will just breathe faster. So then that COEO two
Speaker 1: will drop when you breathe faster, And when your CEO
Speaker 1: two drops, then you lose MITO resilience. You lose resilience
Speaker 1: overall of the neurophysiology. So then that the nerve there
Speaker 1: more twitchy. Because carbon dioxide is actually a new transit,
Speaker 1: gaseous new transmits as well, a bit like nitric oxide.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, so I'm talking about here deliberate hypercapnia. So
Speaker 2: carbon dioxide COEO too tolerance training like free divers, and
Speaker 2: some athletes now are doing too, and some amazing benefits
Speaker 2: from interest. So it's a harmetic stress or intermittent hypercapnia.
Speaker 2: And I know a couple of guys who train athletes
Speaker 2: and are getting them to do carbon dioxide tolerance training
Speaker 2: and actually getting really good increases in physical performance afterwards.
Speaker 2: And it's again it's this hormetic stressor that which does
Speaker 2: not kill you makes you stronger, but you get that
Speaker 2: wrong and you die.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, Yeah, I loved read more about what the
Speaker 1: hypower capnia does just at the mitochondria level.
Speaker 3: I don't know, but I do.
Speaker 1: I do know that from the it's a bit like
Speaker 1: you know, they call it well with mito resilience and
Speaker 1: psychophysical resilience. So it's like these three divers and people
Speaker 1: you're pointing to, they're already trained up at a particular level.
Speaker 1: You can be sure they do not experience high pole capnia.
Speaker 1: You can be sure their COE two is already super good.
Speaker 1: You can be sure they're really very good at breath
Speaker 1: holding in all of this. So they're already at a
Speaker 1: very optimized like reados mitochondrial sellar level. And because they've
Speaker 1: got that, they're really they're pulling in so much capacity
Speaker 1: of their mind, so their mind, the mind mitochondria, so
Speaker 1: they can pull in so much more like focus and
Speaker 1: training and pushing like major boundaries with.
Speaker 3: Their mind and I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: And what can they do with the heart right variability
Speaker 1: and the fatal tone must be amazing and they'll be
Speaker 1: like the modern Yogis of the underworld, you know that's
Speaker 1: undersea world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's some there's some pretty cool stuff actually about
Speaker 2: carbon dioxide tolerance training. Are sorry your your carbon dioxide
Speaker 2: tolerance is actually predictive of success in special forces selection
Speaker 2: because it's a marker, a general marker of overall diychological
Speaker 2: distress tolerance, right, because it's freaking horrible doing that type
Speaker 2: of training. It's really psychologically, it's really tough as well,
Speaker 2: it's physically challenging everybody.
Speaker 5: So unfortunately that brings us to the end of Part
Speaker 5: one with doctor Cristabel and we have covered all the
Speaker 5: essentials of metabolic health and them particularly the role of
Speaker 5: the mitochondria.
Speaker 4: Make sure you tune in next week where Crystabell goes
Speaker 4: through a whole range of practical strategies that we can
Speaker 4: do to enhance our mitochondrial health and therefore our overall health,
Speaker 4: including exercise, nutritional and light strategies. Catching expert