When it comes to health and disease prevention, your mitochondrial health and function simply cannot be overstated. If your mitochondria are not functioning well, nothing else will either. Optimization of mitochondria is also a central key for life extension. Dr. Lee Know, who is a naturopathic physician, has written a must-read book on this topic called “Mitochondria and the Future of Medicine: The Key to Understanding Disease, Chronic Illness, Aging, and Life Itself.”
Know has been a passionate student of mitochondria for quite some time. “I’ve always been interested in antiaging and longevity, but that was not the motivation behind the book,” he says. That motivation grew out of an interest in Coenzyme Q10. Animal research was showing that age-related female infertility was closely linked to mitochondrial dysfunction and aging mitochondria, and could be reversed through CoQ10 supplementation.
Fertility clinics in Canada started to use CoQ10, and through his work as a consultant for a supplement company working with a particularly bioavailable form of CoQ10, Know was invited as a spokesperson for the brand. He gave presentations to doctors and nurses, explaining how the supplement could benefit their patients.
“As I started to do the research, I started to understand the connection of healthy mitochondria to not just age-related female infertility but to pretty much all degenerative diseases, including the aging process,” he says.
“One of the things I came to realize is that there is a lot of good information out there, a lot of good primary research that’s been done, but I didn’t really see any one resource that summarized everything. That’s what I wanted to do — pull all these different resources together to give a starting point for anyone that is really interested in the mitochondria and understanding [their] importance.”
Mitochondria 101
So, what exactly are mitochondria, and why are they so crucial for good health? In the simplest terms, mitochondria are the powerhouse of your cells, producing about 90 percent of the energy being generated in your body. What many fail to realize is that absolutely everything that happens in your body, each and every muscle contraction, biochemical cascade, cellular regeneration, detoxification and so on requires energy. Nothing can occur in an energy vacuum.
“A lot of things happen in the cell that people don’t even think [about], like the transfer of ions across membranes, or the maintenance of the shape of the cytoskeleton. For the microtubules to maintain their shape, they require an input of energy. Literally everything that happens in the cell requires energy, and because the mitochondria is so critical to that energy supply … any time you have a decrease in that energy production, things can start to fall apart.”
Mitochondria also have other radically important functions. For example, they act as the coordinator for apoptosis, or programmed cell death — an important process that ensures the death of malfunctioning cells that might turn into tumors lest they be cleaned out. Know explains:
“Apoptosis is basically cell suicide. Over the course of a cell’s life … it’s going to [be] damaged. When that damage crosses a threshold, signals are sent to the cell that tell it, ‘You’re no longer functional, you better commit suicide for the greater good of the organism.’ What’s interesting is that the newest research has shown that it’s the mitochondria that … initiate that cell suicide program …
It’s the mitochondria that receive all those signals [and] determine whether or not that threshold has been reached … It’s also interesting to note that if your mitochondria are dysfunctional, first of all it might not be able to understand those signals properly and not give the signal for apoptosis when it’s supposed to happen.
The other thing is that all those different things that happen in the apoptosis cascade also require an input of energy. So, even though it might be able to read the signals properly and give the signal that it’s time to commit suicide, if there’s not enough energy being produced … defective cells will survive and multiply … [So] dysfunctional mitochondria are the basis behind what we know as cancer.”
Energy Production Basics
As mentioned, about 90 percent of the energy produced within your cells occurs in your mitochondria, with a small portion of that occurring outside the mitochondria. The energy process starts in the cytosol (the fluid compartment of the cell), in a process called glycolysis. Once that process is done, the end products of glycolysis then enter the mitochondria and participate in the next phase of energy production, which is called the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, better known as the Krebs cycle.
Out of that Krebs cycle comes other energy molecules that then get fed into the last part of the energy production process — the electron transport chain. This is where things can start going wrong, leading to dysfunctional mitochondria. Consumed calories are converted into electrons that then enter complex I or complex II of the electron transport chain. Those two complexes then pass on electrons to CoQ10, and then down the chain until it reaches complex IV.
“Now, complex IV is a very unique part in the cell because it’s the only place in the cell where we can take those electrons and enzymatically react them with oxygen to create water,” Know explains. “The problem is, if those electrons don’t reach complex IV and spill out of the electron transport chain prior to complex IV, it can prematurely react with oxygen, creating a free radical called superoxide.
That is where the damage can start to occur because those superoxide radicals generated at the level of the electron transport chain are created in the immediate proximity of mitochondrial DNA [which] is particularly susceptible to damage. So, any time those free radicals are generated, you can have damage to the DNA in the mitochondria. If those DNA are damaged, you can’t produce the proteins it codes for and everything starts to fall apart.”
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