Transcription
Lots of health experts are talking about ways that you can improve your mitochondrial health for a good reason. Why? Because your body contains trillions of mitochondria in all tissues except one: your red blood cells. They are responsible for muscle growth and development, insulin sensitivity, making you feel high energy, giving you mental clarity and focus, making your heartbeat, making your kidneys function, and much, much more.
Now, in this video, we're going to be talking about everything related to mitochondria: what they are, where they're located, what happens when things go wrong, and we're going to focus on four foods that not only improve mitochondrial function but can actually make new mitochondria. Most importantly, if you watch until the end, you'll walk away with a solid understanding of how your blood glucose levels and your mitochondria are deeply connected. Let's get right into it.
Now, I've been studying mitochondria for over 20 years, and I'll be the first person to admit that mitochondrial physiology is an unbelievably complex and beautiful science. When you really begin to understand how they function, it'll help you lower your blood glucose, improve your cardiovascular health, and feel like a kid again. But before we talk about the four specific foods that can increase mitochondrial number and function, let's talk about why you should care in the first place.
You see, mitochondrial dysfunction causes insulin resistance, and vice versa. It's a chicken-and-egg relationship that researchers are constantly learning more about. Insulin resistance and mitochondrial dysfunction are inseparable processes, and because mitochondrial dysfunction plays an integral role in the development of insulin resistance and vice versa, it's nearly impossible to separate one from the other. The beauty of this relationship is that regardless of whether of who is the chicken and who is the egg, improving one improves the other.
When mitochondria become dysfunctional, they take up less fatty acids and less glucose from the blood, leading to an accumulation of both of those inside of cells, which disrupts insulin action. Now, mitochondrial dysfunction can increase your risk for obesity, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular disease. That's why it's important. In case you fell asleep in high school biology class, mitochondria are the vital organelles that serve as the powerhouses of human cells. They're the primary places where ATP is generated in all cell types. They're responsible for more than 90% of all ATP generation inside of your body, and they can take up about 25% of a cell's volume, numbering anywhere from a few hundred to 2,500 per cell. Without mitochondria, human life as we know it is impossible.
Mitochondria are essential organelles that make life possible because there's not just some amount of ATP generated in the mitochondria; there are immense amounts of ATP. In the same way that your house runs on electricity, your body runs on ATP. You can think of ATP as a currency that all cells make and all cells burn or oxidize to power biochemical reactions every second that you're alive. In fact, from the moment that you were conceived in utero until the moment that you take your last breath, mitochondria have been working hard to make enough ATP to power you from a growing embryo to a developing fetus to a newborn to an adolescent to an adult. Trillions of mitochondria are generating trillions of molecules of ATP every second that you're alive—when you're asleep, when you're working, when you're watching TV, and when you're at the gym. And yes, when you're having fun.
How do they make ATP? It's a great question. They create ATP using primarily glucose and fatty acids as fuel. These two fuel sources are taken up by cells in all tissues except red blood cells. Once they're taken in, they're broken down into smaller molecules, then they're sent to the mitochondria to participate in a process known as cellular respiration. The end result is a large collection of ATP, which can then go on to power every chemical reaction in the cell.
Now, muscle tissue is densely packed with mitochondria, and there are three main types of muscle. White muscle has the lowest mitochondrial density, relying on glucose for ATP production and containing about 100 to 400 mitochondria per cell. Mixed muscle contains a medium level, relying on both glucose and fatty acids to make ATP, with about 500 to 800 mitochondria per cell. Red muscle has the highest mitochondrial density, relying primarily on fatty acids to make ATP, with anywhere from 1,000 to 2,500 mitochondria per cell.
Now, inside each muscle cell, mitochondria are located in two separate locations. There's a location known as intrafibrillar mitochondria, which are buried deep within a muscle fiber and are used mainly for muscle contraction. Then there's a sub-sarcolemmal mitochondrial population, and these are located close to the muscle fiber membrane and are responsible primarily for fuel oxidation and insulin signaling.
Why are these two populations even important in the first place? Well, I'm glad you asked. There was a paper published in 2005 that investigated the effect of obesity and type 2 diabetes on the structure and function of muscle mitochondria in a small group of about 31 adults. They found that the function of these mitochondria closest to the muscle cell surface, which are responsible for insulin signaling, were greatly reduced in subjects with type 2 diabetes and were sevenfold reduced in comparison with lean subjects. They also found that the number of mitochondria was significantly reduced in subjects with type 2 diabetes and obesity, indicating both structural and functional defects.
Now, scientists have discovered that there are many ways to stimulate the production of new mitochondria, and those ways are:
1. Hypoxia, which is oxygen deprivation that can either occur from living at high altitude or, most typically, from exercise.
2. Food. In the remainder of this video, we're going to talk about four specific foods that have the strongest impact on making new mitochondria.
3. Thyroid hormone or T3, which is a powerful inducer of mitochondrial biogenesis.
4. Cold exposure, which can stimulate the production of new mitochondria specifically in brown adipose tissue to produce more heat and raise body temperature.
Now, let's talk about food because that's the purpose of this video. A review paper published in 2023 compared the effects of many diets on mitochondrial function in both rodents and humans, and it compared the effects of five different diets: a high-fat diet, a calorie-restricted diet, a ketogenic diet, a fasting diet, and a Mediterranean diet. So what happened? Let's take a look at one diet at a time to get a full understanding of the effect that each of them had on mitochondrial function.
1. The high-fat diet: This is defined as a diet containing between 30 and 35% of calories from fat. Researchers found that a high-fat diet decreases mitochondrial abundance and contributes to insulin resistance and metabolic disorders. Not surprisingly, this in turn resulted in decreased ATP production and increased oxidative stress within the mitochondrial compartment. In addition, high-fat diets also resulted in the accumulation of damaged mitochondria. Interestingly, the authors stated that a high-fat diet is not a common everyday diet for humans but rather an experimental protocol with which to create a disease model in animals and mimic the metabolic adaptations that this creates in cellular physiology. And remember, this diet only had 30 to 35% of calories from fat, so I'll let you stew on that for a while. The take-home message: a high-fat diet impairs mitochondrial function.
2. Diet number two: Calorie restriction. This is defined as a 20 to 30% reduction in daily calories. Now, the reviewers documented that calorie restriction has multiple effects:
- It decreases mitochondrial number.
- It decreases mitochondrial enzyme activity.
- It increases ATP production.
- It reduces oxidative stress.
- It induces a process known as mitophagy, which is effectively the selective removal of damaged mitochondria. You can think of this as a housekeeping process in order to keep the mitochondrial network in good shape. The take-home message is that calorie restriction improves mitochondrial health by creating an interconnected network of mitochondria that share resources and function efficiently to maintain optimal cellular function.
3. Diet number three: The ketogenic diet. Now, researchers included multiple types of ketogenic diets, including a classic ketogenic diet, a modified Atkins diet, or a medium-chain triglyceride ketogenic diet. The ketogenic diets studied yielded several positive effects and several negative effects. The positive effects were that they increased mitochondrial number and mitochondrial function, but the negative effects were that they significantly increased the risk for pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes. Some papers referenced impaired mitochondrial biogenesis and an increase in cardiac fibrosis, which refers to the scarring of heart tissue caused by the accumulation of excess collagen. We've talked about this several times before on this channel, and it should come as no surprise that the research has clearly demonstrated that a ketogenic diet increases insulin resistance and damages mitochondria in the long term. We also wrote about it in the "Mastering Diabetes" book and thought that it was in fact so important that we took a lot of time to hand-draw a picture that describes this exact phenomenon. What you'll see in this picture is that when there is a lipid droplet in the bottom left of the photo that increases in size over the course of time due to an increased availability of lipids in the blood, that lipid droplet can then negatively affect the insulin receptor by signaling to a molecule known as IRS1. This is not the Internal Revenue Service; this, in fact, is a molecule that is downstream of the insulin receptor. So as soon as that lipid droplet begins to grow and accumulate in size, it negatively impacts the IRS1 molecule, which then makes insulin receptors less functional. As a result of that, less glucose enters the cell. The mitochondria now are reliant on fatty acids for ATP generation, and in the process, they end up manufacturing a significantly increased amount of free radicals. Free radicals are very dangerous molecules that are electronically unstable, and the more free radicals that are produced, the more inflammatory the entire cell becomes. The take-home message is that ketogenic diets yield mixed results and have both positive mitochondrial effects and negative mitochondrial effects simultaneously.
4. Diet number four: Fasting. This is defined as any dietary approach in which there's a voluntary absence of food for about 12 or more hours per day. Now, researchers that studied intermittent fasting diets discovered that they increase mitochondrial number and activity. They increase mitochondrial fission in skeletal muscle, meaning that the fasting process induces a selective degradation of damaged mitochondria, much like we saw in the calorie-restricted state. So the take-home message is that similar to calorie restriction, fasting actually improves mitochondrial health by creating an interconnected network of mitochondria that shares resources and functions extremely efficiently.
5. Diet number five: The Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean diet increases mitochondrial biogenesis and fusion events. It increases mitochondrial function in both liver and muscle tissue, and researchers suspect that the high phenolic content of the Mediterranean diet is thought to be the main contributor to improved mitochondrial health.
Now we're going to talk about polyphenols next because that's the key to understanding how to make new mitochondria using your food. But first, a take-home message: the Mediterranean diet is the optimal diet for mitochondrial health. The reason is that the Mediterranean diet, when compared to all of the other diets, is the only diet that increases all three of the functions in the top three rows of this image, which are biogenesis, function, and fusion.
Now, what exactly are these polyphenolic compounds that are present in high quantities in the Mediterranean diet? Polyphenols are a class of antioxidant compounds that have profound effects on human health and are mainly found in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beverages made from plants such as tea, chocolate, and wine. A comprehensive review on the effects of dietary bioactive compounds demonstrates that polyphenols from soybeans, cacao beans, onions, apples, blueberries, red grapes, cinnamon, and coffee seeds have measurable effects on mitochondrial function in human subjects, which have a net effect of:
1. Increasing oxygen consumption.
2. Increasing mitochondrial function.
3. Increasing ATP production.
That's why you came here today to learn about four foods that can increase mitochondrial number. Now, this leads us to food number one: soybeans. There's a compound known as genistein, which is found in soybeans. It has powerful effects at increasing insulin sensitivity in the muscle of obese subjects. In this experiment, researchers divided obese and insulin-resistant subjects into one of two groups. The first group was the placebo group, who received an inert substance with no active ingredients. The second group was the treatment group, and they received a daily supplement containing 50 milligrams of genistein for 60 days, which is the equivalent of eating about a quarter pound of soybeans per day or four ounces per day. What they found was incredible: genistein increases mitochondrial number in the muscle of these obese and insulin-resistant subjects. In other words, genistein increased mitochondrial biogenesis independent of any other variable. But these researchers found something that was even more interesting. They gave subjects an OGTT, an oral glucose tolerance test, at baseline and after 60 days of genistein supplementation. In an oral glucose tolerance test, patients are told to drink a sugary beverage containing about 75 grams of glucose in water, and then their blood glucose and insulin concentrations are measured at the beginning, at time zero, and then 30, 60, 90, and 120 minutes after consuming that beverage. The higher the glucose and/or insulin response, the more insulin resistance is present; the lower the glucose and/or insulin response, the more insulin-sensitive the patient is. What they found was that genistein supplementation didn't change the blood glucose values of patients before and after the 60-day experiment, but 60 days of genistein supplementation reduced insulin concentrations by 19.4%, indicating that they required about 19.4% less insulin to metabolize the same amount of glucose. That is a very significant finding and well worth exploring in more detail in a future video. As if that wasn't interesting unto itself, researchers also found that genistein supplementation increased the amount of fatty acid oxidation happening in muscle tissue, which suggests that there's an increase in the breakdown of fatty acids known as beta-oxidation. They also measured a decrease in the amount of triglycerides stored in the muscle of those who supplemented their diet with genistein, which is in line with an increase in insulin sensitivity that we just talked about. So the take-home message from genistein is very interesting: muscle mitochondria love soybeans, the polyphenol that you can get very easily from the grocery store every day.
Now, food number two: cacao beans. In addition to the biological effect of genistein from soybeans, cacao beans have powerful bioactive properties because they too contain polyphenol compounds, one of which is known as epicatechin. Now, epicatechin is the most abundant polyphenol found in the cacao plant and has been shown to favorably impact mitochondria under both normal conditions and pathological conditions. In this study, 20 sedentary subjects aged about 50 years old ate dark chocolate for three months, and their ability to withstand a grueling VO2 max test on a bicycle was tested. Now, I don't know if you've ever done a VO2 max test before, but I can tell you from having done it three times that it is one of the most painful and challenging exercise tests that I've ever done. Now, here's a video of me treating myself to a VO2 max test on my birthday a few years ago with a fellow masochistic friend who also likes to suffer. Now, it's a good thing my wife and daughter were there to support me just in case I passed out on the floor when my legs could not take it anymore.
Now, when the researchers compared the before and after VO2 max tests per individual, they found that three months of cacao supplementation increased VO2 max by 2.8 milliliters per kilogram per minute, which is a sizable increase in VO2. In the world of exercise physiology, data shows that even trained athletes can generally increase their VO2 max by approximately 10 to 15%. So increasing a VO2 max by 2.8 ml per kg per minute on a baseline of 22.9 is a 12% increase in only three months. This team also found that the master regulator of mitochondrial biogenesis, or the formation of new mitochondria, known as PGC-1 alpha, was significantly increased in dark chocolate-fed subjects, which suggested that improved exercise performance was made possible by increased mitochondrial function in muscle tissue. In other words, mitochondria in the quadriceps muscle of these subjects increased in number as a result of eating two squares containing about 100 calories of a Hershey bar for three months. I honestly wish that all science could be this fun. These results are shocking, and all these subjects had to do was eat dark chocolate every day for three months. Personally, I could think of worse things.
This leads us to food number three, known as resveratrol. Well, technically speaking, resveratrol is not a food; it's a polyphenol that's found in red grapes. Resveratrol has been hailed as the compound that can erase obesity off the planet and solve type 2 diabetes completely, and research shows that it's effective, but it isn't ready to solve the world's health problems yet. Now, studies in humans show that consuming an isolated resveratrol supplement of about 150 mg per kg per day reduces fasting glucose and insulin and A1C and insulin resistance in patients with type 2 diabetes, and it promotes an increase in mitochondrial function in muscle. In addition, resveratrol has been found to reduce body weight, reduce body mass index, waist circumference, and fat mass, and promote a significant increase in lean mass. These are massive results, but wait a second: how many grapes would you have to eat in order to get 150 mg per kg per day in your body? For me, at 72 kg body weight, I'd have to consume about 10,000 mg per day. So how many cups of grapes do you think that would take? Well, as it turns out, one cup of red table grapes contains between 0.25 and 1.25 mg of resveratrol, which means that I would have to eat 13,000 cups of grapes every single day. No big deal! I mean, I do that regularly; I don't know about you. According to David Sinclair, a co-author of a study on the therapeutic potential of resveratrol, he says administering a daily dose to a human weighing about 75 kg with 100 mg per kg per day of resveratrol would require about 2.7 kg of resveratrol a year, which would cost you about $6,800.
So what does all this mean? Well, resveratrol is a very powerful substance when taken in high concentrations, but since you can't get enough from food, you're better off taking a supplement if you can find one that's affordable and high quality.
Now, on to food number four: beets. You may have heard about nitrate-rich vegetables before because they have become very popular in the athletic world. Now, many athletes eat or drink them before working out and swear that it helps them breathe easier and feel less discomfort when exercising. These nitrate-rich vegetables include beets, spinach, arugula, Swiss chard, celery, and green lettuce. They're all rich in nitrate compounds, and research shows that there are two ways in which they improve athletic performance:
1. By dilating blood vessels and thereby increasing the amount of oxygen that's delivered to tissues.
2. By directly increasing mitochondrial function.
But here's the thing: hardly anybody is talking about this, so let's dig in. Now, when you consume dietary nitrate, the nitrate compounds are reduced from nitrate to nitrite by oral bacteria inside of your mouth. The nitrite compounds get into your stomach, they then are released into your small intestine, and inside of your small intestine, they are then taken up into your blood. About 25% of them are then reabsorbed back into your mouth for a second round of digestion known as salivary recycling. The rest of the nitrite molecules that have made it into your blood serve as a building block for nitric oxide, which is a gas—a very powerful gas that promotes vasodilation or the increase in the circumference of blood vessels.
Now, nitrate supplementation decreases blood pressure because dilating blood vessels are able to lower the amount of pressure inside the vessel and deliver more oxygen to tissues. Nitrate supplementation also increases work output, which means that when you are physically performing work, as you would do in exercise, you can actually perform more work per unit time. Nitrate supplementation also significantly increases oxygen delivery, not only to muscles but to all tissues in your body, and it reduces whole-body oxygen consumption during exercise, which means that you can effectively work more for less oxygen.
Now, the minimum amount of nitrate that can elicit these improvements in exercise performance is about 5 millimolar. The nitrate content found in beet products on the shelf varies greatly from summer to winter and is affected by temperature, pH, the presence of other ingredients, and more. So to keep things simple, if you were to eat about a half a pound of beets, you can expect to get about 5 millimolar of nitrate per day, which is the minimum amount necessary according to the research. Therefore, personally, I would err on the side of caution and eat or juice about one pound of beets per day to get about 10 millimolar of nitrates. When you do this, you can significantly increase the ability of oxygen to get into tissues, thus decreasing your blood pressure and improving mitochondrial function simultaneously.
Now, how do we know that it actually directly impacts mitochondrial function? Well, a study conducted by Swedish researchers in "Cell Metabolism" found that dietary nitrates increase mitochondrial efficiency by reducing the leakage or the slippage of protons across the inner mitochondrial membrane. What that means in normal speak is that it effectively makes mitochondria more efficient. They state that the fact that a relatively short-term dietary regimen can influence the expression of important mitochondrial proteins may have a profound impact on exercise physiology. What's fascinating about this result is that nitrate supplementation makes exercise easier, not only by delivering more oxygen to muscles but also by making mitochondria more efficient at the same time.
Now, this group found that a 19% increase in mitochondrial function occurred when consuming about 5 to 7 millimolar per day, which is more than any other single food ever studied. That is a very big deal. So technically speaking, this video could have called out 11 foods or 15 foods or 25 foods or more that improve mitochondrial function, and I could have listed every other nitrate-rich vegetable that we know of. But to keep things simple, I've shown you four of the most powerful foods that have direct mitochondrial effects.
So the take-home messages are:
1. Mitochondria are cellular powerhouses that produce 90% or more of the ATP in your body.
2. Mitochondria are in every single tissue, and they are densely packed in muscle.
3. Mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.
4. Foods containing phenolic and polyphenolic compounds can increase mitochondrial function.
5. Nitrate-rich vegetables directly improve mitochondrial efficiency, reduce whole-body oxygen uptake, and lower blood pressure simultaneously.
As for the specific foods:
1. Mitochondria love soybeans; all you need is 4 ounces per day.
2. Mitochondria love cacao beans; as little as two chocolate squares is all you need, although I would opt for cacao nibs because they don't contain any added sugar or dairy products.
3. Mitochondria love resveratrol, but you're going to have to take a supplement and find one that's affordable to get enough.
4. Finally, mitochondria love all nitrate-rich vegetables, but beets are my favorite because they're easy to find, they're available all year long, they're inexpensive, and they're extremely versatile. All you need is a half a pound taken 2 to 3 hours before exercise or a half a pound per day if you want to feel superhuman at all times.
Now, I hope this video was helpful in giving you insight into what foods you can eat that will have a massive impact on the hardworking mitochondria both in your muscle as well as all other tissues. Now, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to eat a minimum of one serving of these foods every day. And if you're feeling extra frisky, eat two or more servings per day. Now, polyphenols and nitrates go a long way to improve your metabolic machine, so take this information to heart and enjoy these foods every day.
If you'd like help integrating not only these foods but other foods into your daily regimen that are guaranteed to help you reverse insulin resistance, then click below to join our coaching program, and we'll set you up with a coach that can help make sure that this process is painless and effective. We can't wait to see you on the inside, and thanks for watching!