Health, Aging, and Disease - It's all About Energy - Part 1

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Health, Aging, and Disease - It's all About Energy - Part 1
YouTube video by Dr. Frank Shallenberger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2-Plq-mcqA). Transcript is the auto-caption track — verbatim ASR, not a certified transcript.

hi I'm Frank shenberger I'm uh I'm a medical doctor I head up the Nevada Center for alternative and anti-aging medicine in Carson City Nevada and I've been practicing medicine for going on 40 years now uh most of that time in excess of 30 years I've devoted to the study of alternative medicine um you can also hear that referred to as integrative medicine or biological medicine or natural medicine basically it's it's when doctors focus on helping uh the patients innate healing tendencies in the patient's body to heal the body itself uh the Creator when he created our bodies U did it with a with a divine plan that allows our bodies to heal themselves in other words our bodies are able to diagnose whatever condition whatever disease whatever ailment is affecting us and to create conditions in the body where in the body will actually literally heal itself of that disease or condition and and what we as as natural alternative Physicians do is work with the patient's body to find out exactly what what we need to do to help that body heal itself of all the things that I can do to help my patients bodies heal themselves singularly by far the most important is to improve the way their bodies produce energy and so uh uh we produced this uh four-part uh video uh lecture series that is going to go into exactly that how uh how your body produces energy how that affects your health how it can make you sick when you don't produce energy adequately how it will make you well when you do produce energy adequately what you can do to maximize your energy production and very importantly how you can in fact measure your energy production so you can know if you've got a problem uh in this regard long before it actually happens so uh the title of this series is Health aging and disease it's all about energy and this is part one the importance of cellular energy production um this is the this is a uh the book on the the four-part series that we're going to do uh part two is maximizing your cellular energy production part three is measuring cellular energy production uh with bioenergy testing it's a testing device that uh uh I developed a few years ago and part four is how to use biological or bioenergy testing to maximize your health and to slow down aging uh this series this lecture series is going to be uh devoted mostly to uh professionals we're going to get into a little chemistry um however I found over the years that uh the way I present this information is is typically handled very well by lay people as well so so I think all people will will see some benefit out of this that certainly is my hope uh I have written two books which are currently available uh you know at all the major book Outlets one's called bursting with energy and the other's called called the type 2 diabetes breakthrough they're both about energy production diabetes would be an example a great example of a chronic disease that is 100% caused by decrease in energy production and is 100% prevented and healed by improving energy production so that's why I wrote that book but you can get the gist and a lot of particulars and all the references that you're going to hear on this lecture Series in those books so let's start off and and let's just uh uh look at something that is is is very basic and that is that energy production is at the center of literally everything that happens in your body energy production is by far in a way the most critical uh you know if you stop drinking water you'll do all right for a well if you stop eating you'll do all right for a while if you stop bathing you might not smell too good but you'll do all right for a while but if you stop producing energy you will die in 2 to 3 minutes that's how fundamental energy production is to your health and what this slide shows is is that um everything is dependent on energy whether it's the fun every one of your organs depends on energy production or work even your senses uh your repair system so that if you break your leg or you injure a part of your body your ability to repair it 100% depend dep on your energy systems even your thoughts so conditions say as depression uh especially attention deficit disease bipolar disorders all those kinds of conditions of thoughts are conditions primarily of energy deficiency uh the ability for the body to digest uh how about elimination and detoxification all the toxins that you get exposed to are only eliminated one way and that is through energy production and we'll look into about how all these things are factors here in the in the next few parts of this lecture series but just understand that energy production is at the center of everything there is nothing that your body does it isn't 100% dependent on energy you can't say that about any vitamin you can't say that about any food you can't even say that about any hormone uh and that's why it's so critically important so what is health well a lot of people think that health is just the absence of symptoms I feel good so I must be healthy uh or a lot of other people say you know I went to my doctor he told me I didn't have a disease so I must be healthy uh or he you know he did he did a bunch of tests on me my cholesterol and my blood sugar and all my tester normal so I must be healthy uh but the truth is health is not the absence of anything it doesn't mean just because you don't have abnormal tests or just because you don't have symptoms you're not really healthy uh he health is not the absence of anything it's the presence of something and that something is energy and you're as healthy as your amount of energy you can produce if you can produce optimal amounts of energy then I would call you optimally healthy if you could produce suboptimal amounts of energy then that's about how good your health is too uh Health how how do you know if you're healthy then if you can't tell by just an absence of symptoms or normal blood test and know well health is the presence of optimal cellular energy production and the reason that is is because it's one thing we've just said is that every biochemical and physiological reaction is dependent on cellular energy production making it the most Global biomarker for health there's nothing that is singularly as dependent on any on on the way your body functions as how well it produces energy so it's the most Global biomarker for health also cellular energy production is affected by everything else so energy production is affected by everything that goes on in your body from stress to how you eat uh and everything that goes on your body is affected by cellular energy production so health and cellular energy production are basically one and the same thing and finally decreased cellular energy production occurs long before any sign or symptom of disease and that's what we're going to go over today in just a few minutes and I'm going to show you that just because you don't have any symptoms just because you feel well just because your doctor told you your your your lab tests were within normal limits doesn't mean that you're producing energy on a cellular basis as well as you could be and that's what's necessary to prevent disease maximize your health and even slow down the aging process uh so what are diseases then so you probably figured this out by now U diseases according to the dictionary are just the names that are given to various pathological conditions in the body in which the organs or the regulating systems of the body become dysfunctional or don't work uh the pathology of all chronic degenerative disease the thing that causes all those diseases to process to happen is the direct result of free radical injury most of you have heard of free radicals they're special molecules that uh that are produced during energy production that actually end up destroying the body so that's how we get these diseases through free radical production and what I want you to understand right from the get-go is that free radical production is caused by only one thing and that is impaired cellular energy production so if you are optimally producing energy in your cells you will be producing the minimal amounts of free radicals that your body requires but to the degree that your cells are not optimally producing energy you're going to be producing many more free radicals than you should be ideally and that's what's going to cause your body to ultimately break down and for you to get sick so Health it's the presence of cellular energy production disease it's the consequence of not having adequate cellular energy production so you know during the course of this lecture series I'll I'll use a number of terms they all really refer to the same thing um cellular energy production that's the amount of energy produced in the cells is produced in a part of the cells called the mitochondria so every cell has thousands of mitochondria there little areas in the cell where oxygen is processed into energy we're going to go over all of this in the lectures to come um so cellular energy production is really the same as mitochondrial function which is the same as mitochondrial efficiency which is the same as oxidation efficiency which is the same as oxidation potential so these are all terms that scientists and doctors use all referring to the same basic thing which and for the most part I'll be referring to in this series as cellular energy production so that's the little mitochondria that's an example of the mitochondria and uh we won't spend much time here probably you're thinking that's a good thing uh but this just shows you this slide shows you that that uh today scientists are able to map out what goes on in the mitochondria to a very very uh uh detailed extent and um and these show the various biochemical processes that go on and fundamentally what I can tell you is right over here is uh oxygen and right over here is water and what's happening in this mitochondria is that oxygen which is one of the highest most energy energy dense molecules in the universe is converted into water which is the lowest energy molecule in the universe you got high energy molecule converted to low energy molecule the result is a release in energy and it's through this complex system in the mitochondria here that your body is able to harness that energy and then use it in the cell for the cell to do every single one of the things that the cell can do as long as your mitochondria can effectively process this oxygen you're going to be producing lots of energy you're going to be producing it efficiently your cells will work well you'll be at Optimal Health but as soon as that mitochondria can't produce energy from that oxygen efficiently what's going to happen is excessive production of free radicals and destruction of your tissues and of course decrease energy production along efficiency next few slides are going to kind of go into to some of the scientific literature I'll probably go through these kind of fast um uh but these are all available uh uh you know through any library or through PubMed uh you can get all this information this particular slide comes from a friend of mine's name is war deed who uh wrote one of the Premier books on aging and degenerative disease and what Ward pointed out is that nothing is as consistent as predictable as the gradual linear decline in mitochondrial functions that we see in all aging populations so here's a 30-year-old person we typically look at 30 years old as being the age at which your cells are able to produce energy with maximum efficiency and this is what happens as you get older and if you come down here to around the 70y old person you can see that roughly speaking the energy production is cut in half of what they were in the prime of their life so what we would like to do and what's possible and what you're going to learn in this lecture series is how to flatten this this curve out so that instead of energy production going down in a very linear and predictable way it stays pretty much flat now is that possible yes it's definitely possible how do I know because for the last 10 years I've been measuring energy production we have a system and you're going to learn about this a way to measure cellular energy production in my patients and I can tell you I have a lot of patients in fact I have one gentleman who's 80 years old and instead of his energy production being up here his energy production is right here around the lines of a typical someplace um I'm 62 years old that would put me right here but my energy production is as good as the average 30 years old so my energy production is up there we'll talk about how you can do that for yourself these are just some articles some Premier articles uh that have been published uh this one from the proceedings of the National Academy in 1998 uh again the same proceedings of the National Academy in 2002 what these articles basically say is impaired mitochondrial function plays the major role in the entire aging process so if you want to age gracefully if you want to have full function as you get older what you want to do is keep your cellular energy production at a maximum down here it says cellular processes affected by impaired cellular energy production include name something basically and this is kind of reminiscent of the first slide we saw your ability to detoxify to repair to uh replicate your DNA to maintain the balance of water your your body and all the higher order processes such as cognitive function the way your brain works all of these things are dependent on energy production now this is a um a slide that uh is just fantastic to me this comes out of a uh magazine called nature this was published in 2004 and this definitely proves my point and uh so what they did here in this slide is the scientists genetically modified some mice and they took the mice and divide them in two groups half the group they modified these mice so that their cells could not produce energy as efficiently as the other half and then they just watched what happened as these mice lived out their life well predictably the mice that couldn't produce cellular energy as well had a significantly reduced lifespan they also had a premature onset of all the age related phenotypes that means all the stuff that happens to us as we get older that we don't like uh such as loss of lean body mass alopecia means hair falling out kyphosis means osteoporosis and bending over all that stuff that we see with older people anemia reduced fertility heart failure all the the things that you would expect to see in somebody as they age were dramatically increased in these mice because they couldn't produce cellular energy efficiently same thing happens to us and the authors concluded on the bottom here these results provide a positive link between decreased mitochondrial function and aging basically they're telling you this is what causes your body to age now there's another study that uh was very similar to that and kind of looks at it at different way uh but but again this study also came out in 2004 in a magazine called the Aging cell um and what what these scientists did uh is they didn't genetically modify anything they just took a bunch of mice and they used the technology it's not the same as the one I use but a different kind of technology to determine how the cellular uh energy production was in these mice and what they noted was uh that some mice produce cellular energy production very effici L uh in our today's terminology we would call them fast oxidizers and somewhere in part three I'm going to go over the whole concept of fast and slow oxidizers with you but some of these mice were what we call fast oxidizers meaning they produced energy very efficiently and some of the mice were on the other end of the spectrum and we call them slow oxidizers where they did not produce cellular energy as efficiently and what they did is they just followed them over the course of a lifetime and the results were extremely dramatic and established an association between longevity and individual variations in energy production because what they found was that the mice that in the higher quartile of mitochondrial function in other words the mice that were in the quarter of the mice that produced the most resting energy cellular energy production lived the full 30% longer than the mice in the lowest cortile now that's astounding almost 40% longer simply from one thing and that is improved resting cellular energy production as you will see in the rest of this lecture series we can measure that so we can tell you what cortile you're in if you're in the lowest cortile we can then tell you how world um we're going to talk a little bit I think it's in the second part of this lecture series on how how uh cells actually uh create the free radicals I alluded to that a little bit but how cells create the free radicals that cause our bodies to age but I did want to mention this study uh that was published in 1994 again from the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and uh in this study I'll just quote the authors say oxidants generated by mitochondria appear to be the major source of oxidative lesions that accumulate with age so that's where you're getting all those free radicals is from the mitochondria and then they go on these these lesions that cause the aging process related deficits in the mitochondrial function which are associated with a general physiological decline known as aging basically what they're telling you right there is that the reason we age and will age is because we'll produce free radicals and the more efficiently our mitochondria process oxygen to produce energy the less free radicals will produce the longer we'll live and the better our quality of life now I'm going to really scoot over these next few studies very quickly I just wanted to prove a point and that is if you go to any of the medical databases and you plug in uh decreased mitochondrial function or decreased cellular energy production and the name of a disease just name any disease you'll see that there's already many articles written about the association between mitochondrial function and those diseases so I'm just going to run through these slides very quickly and just to kind of make a point and this is only a small sampling of what's available out there so here's one about mitochondrial function causing osteoporosis here's one about age related macular degeneration being caused by decreased mitochondrial function uh here's one about blood pressure being caused by decreased mitochondrial function this article here is about rheumatoid and all the reactive arthritis being caused by decreased mitochondrial function this one here is about cancer being caused by decreased mitochondrial function actually warberg won the Nobel Prize in the 1930s for just that point showing that cancer was a direct result of decreased mitochondrial function and of course diabetes I alluded to that and my my more recent book is all about that uh also Parkinson's disease caused by decreased mitochondrial function as is Alzheimer's disease the same thing heart failure there's a resurgence a heart failure these days nobody quite knows exactly why but certainly you can bet that the primary lesion for the increase in heart failure has to do with decreased mitochondrial function or decreased cellular energy production and uh uh this is all conditions of the heart from coronary artery disease to arhythmia all of this primarily caused by decreased mitochondrial function and there are many more articles exactly like that that would go on to say the same thing about any name now before we get into the next topic I just want to uh uh be clear on one thing that's often misunderstood I've been using the term cellular energy production and that's the way your cells produce energy uh but I want you to know that that's different than feeling energetic feeling energetic is another another another issue entirely so that you can have very poor cellular energy production and actually feel energetic and uh conversely you can have excellent cellular energy production and feel tired and run down let me give you an example how that would work let's take a premier athlete uh let's take Lance Armstrong for example um I'm not tested Armstrong but would be a pretty easy to say that his cellular energy production is is at an all-time high and yet if he didn't get enough sleep if he was overly stressed uh if he overtrained he may very likely be be complaining of fatigue and tiredness and weariness uh on the other end of the spectrum we see a lot of people uh who have very poor cellular energy production uh but uh can have decent energy levels that mean they feel pretty good so they're two different topics and two different things and yes it's true if you have poor cellular energy production ultimately it will lead to you feeling tired and run down but there can be a long period of time where you actually feel quite good and that's what takes us into this next concept which is the concept uh of early onset mitochondrial dysfunction this is a term that uh I developed and we just abbreviate it so I have to say all that long phrase uh eomd eomd stands for early onset mitochondrial dysfunction what it means is is is very simple actually it refers to a deterioration of the mitochondrial function or deterioration of cellular energy production that commonly occurs in the young and asymptomatic and increases with age so it can start early and it gets worse as you age this is the name of the condition so we're again to reiterate talking about a condition where the mitochondria are not producing energy well which decreased cellular energy production and this can onset so let's just ask this question uh are is a person healthy or are they just not sick I'm here to tell you eomd is for Real here's a study that we published a couple few years back where we took 50 subjects now these subjects were randomly selected as they presented to a number of different clinics uh these subjects who were between the ages of 20 and 40 years old so they're young uh they were asymptomatic which means that they weren't complaining of anything they felt great they were healthc conscious because the only reason they showed up to have their cellular energy production tested was because they were health conscious they wanted to make sure their cellular energy production was good and uh these were a group of young people from all over the world namely from clinics in Carson City Los Angeles Grand Junction Colorado and Singapore and here's what we found out in these 50 subjects 54% of them had normal mitochondrial function so that's what you'd expect right you expect young people who feel great should have normal cellular cellular energy output but that was only 54% of them all the rest had decreased cellular energy production and I find that amazing we're talking about healthy health conscious these are exercisers by the way uh young people and almost half of them are already showing that their ability to produce energy on a cellular level is starting to become compromised but let's break it down because it's even gets worse when we broke it down broke that 46% down to see you know how bad do they get in fact 36% of them had less than 90% of what would have been predicted or what would have been considered a normal cellular energy production 26% of them had less than 80% of what they had should have had 12% of them 12 out of every hundred young people who feel great had less than 60% almost half of what they should have been coming up with so these people all of these people here have what I call early onset mitochondrial dysfunction eomd now the the last thing on here to notice is going to turn out to be very important because of all the subjects that had normal healthy cellular cellular energy production none of them had impaired fat metabolism on the other hand every single one of the young people who had a deficit in their cellular energy production every single one had an impairment of their fat metabolism we're going to talk talk very much about that because this is critical to understanding how things go wrong how things went wrong with these young people and how things can go wrong with you and I so early onset mitochondrial dysfunction decrease in cellular energy production in the young in the asymptomatic it happens and it not only happens but it's very common and it doesn't give you any warning system and it's going on right now and a lot of you people that are listening to me talk right now and you'd have no idea what going on if you weren't able to test it and fortunately we are able to test it we'll be talking about how that testing process happens in some of the later lectures so what's the cost of having that problem what's the cost of having eomd here's just a partial list this just comes from the literature you you don't synthesize your DNA and RNA as well you don't synthesize protein enzymes and hormones as well you can't maintain your cell membrane potential this turns out to be a big problem uh you you have accelerated cell death and cell loss you're aging faster you have an decreased intracellular hydration your skin and the rest of your body tends to become dehydrated you have increased free radical damage we already mentioned that you you your brain isn't going to work as well as it should work you have decreased ability to throw off toxins this is huge because we live in a world that's just filled with toxins and if our ability to uh remove toxins from the body is compromised in any way shape or form this can dramatically lead to illness and finally you have a condition called mitochondrial Decay mitochondria Decay is different than uh eomd eomd just means that the mitochondria aren't working that well mitochondria mean Decay means they're dead they've been destroyed uh so all of that aging and degenerative disease these are all what eomd leads to so yes it's important to be able to diagnose that and to find out how to treat that I just mentioned this concept of mitochondrial Decay and so I kind of go over a little bit about again what the main difference is uh e just refers to deterioration in the mitochondrial function mitochondrial produce a molecule called ATP and eomd means they don't do that very well uh whereas mitochondrial Decay means that the mitochondria have actually been destroyed eomd is reversible it can be fixed where's mitochondrial Decay can't once your mitochondria destroyed you're not getting them back at least not so far with what we know eomd occurs in young and healthy people but you're not going to see mitochondrial decay in young and healthy people that's something that comes along around the sixth or seventh decade but it starts with eomd starts with EMD eomd leads to mitochondrial Decay by the and so the the idea is don't wait until you actually get mitochondrial Decay to think gez maybe I better start doing something about my energy production find out about it early before you it leads to mitochondrial Decay because eomd is what causes it and by diagnosing and treating eomd you can prevent mitochondrial Decay and the disease and the increase in the aging process that it leads to we're going to go into this in Greater detail in the third lecture where we talk about what to do about all this stuff um but there are 10 causes of eomd that I've been able to identify let's just take a look at them uh some of these are causes that happened before the oxygen actually gets to the mitochondria these are factors that have to do with not the actual mitochondrial function itself and these are factors that have to do with how the actual mitochondria are functioning uh you can kind of think of Prem mitoch you can kind of think the mitochondria is sort of being a factory okay so uh there can be problems in the factory or there can be problems with delivery of things to the factory if you got a factory that's making shoes and there's something wrong with the shoe making machine well then there's something wrong with the factory itself but if you got a factory to make shoes but the trucks that deliver the leather aren't getting there on time then that would be a preact problem so that's kind of how you want to think about these things but premitochondrial problems uh can be decreased lipolysis that means decreased break breaking down of fat this is very common uh hypoglycemia means low blood sugar uh you need sugar to produce energy optimally uh so if your blood sugar is low can't do it esea means a decrease in blood flow this is the kind of thing that would happen when your your circulation is impaired very very common in the over 50 age group hypoxia refers to not getting enough oxygen in your bloodstream uh this can be obvious from smoking cigarettes there's a main way to get hypoxia uh other ways to get hypoxia uh would be if you had a condition like asthma or if you have any other condition of the lungs allergies things like that can lead to hypoxia um carbon monoxide toxicity which is not that uncommon in today's modern buildings can lead to hypoxia uh decreased methylation I will talk about the methylation process in lecture four it's a a somewhat complex uh uh biochemical process but I think every doctor and and patient should really have an idea of what methylation is and uh and inflammation inflammation is a huge topic inflammation will generally uh decrease the ability of the mitochondria to get the get the substrates that they need to produce cellular energy production efficiently and then finally it's the mitochondria themselves mitochondria can become toxic especially heavy metals like lead and cadmium and Mercury can be very toxic to mitochondria stress I'll tell you about the case of a remarkable woman who's 64 years old and the impact of stress on her cellular energy production um nutritional deficiencies this where your B vitamins in particular especially magnesium other enzyme deficiencies this is where they act hormonal deficiencies are a huge problem especially as people get older uh they can impact on the way mitochondria work a mitochondria need certain hormones to function if they don't get those hormones they will not work efficiently and finally decreased phys Fitness so Fitness is an important aspect of keeping your mitochondria up and running so these are sort of the 10 causes on on how people do develop early onset mitochondrial dysfunction and those young people I was telling you about almost all of them the cause was low blood sugar uh and uh because they just ate very poorly and they didn't get enough sleep but but but these overall when I'm measuring my patient's cellular energy production and it's bad I'm going to look for these kinds of causes to start helping them improve uh now diagnosing eomd is important by now you probably started to figure that out and but here's why a little reiteration because through the combined Ox action of increased free radical formation and decreased antioxidant buffering eomd is the primary cause of all of this mitochondrial Decay aging and degenerative disease so if you don't want to have that you don't want to have it aging you don't want to have mitochondrial Decay and you want to get diseased don't get eomd because that's that let's skip right over to this slide does it by a combination of two factors which work together so up here I've listed many of the many of the causitive factors that we just talked about decreased fat metabolism eskee hypoxia Etc all that stuff is right up here okay that leads to decreased mitochondrial function eomd right in here okay now when the mitochondria don't work so well remember you get increased free radical formation but the other side effect of this is that you get decreased free radical buffering enzymes so let me explain this when your body makes free radicals and it will do that healthy bodies make free radicals I'm making free radicals right now as I talk to you when the body makes free radicals is not a big problem like I say our creator took care of of all of this stuff and he made sure that not only do we make free radicals but we also make special enzymes that contain those free radicals so they can't hurt us these enzyme systems are called uh free radical or antioxidant buffering systems you might have heard of some of them like catalases one superoxide dismutases one glutathione peroxidase these are all uh buffering enzymes what these enzymes are able to do is run around find the free radical grab it and neutralize it before it can do any harm and however you got to remember now that these free radical buffering enzymes they're all made from energy so you can't make these enzymes if you don't have adequate amounts of cellular energy production so think of it when you have decreased cellular energy production you get a double whammy on the one side you're producing more and more free radicals because the mitochondria inefficient on the other side because you don't have enough energy production you can't produce enough of the uh uh antioxidant enzyme systems that quch those free radicals you got too many of the bad guys not enough of the good guys that's a double ramming and what that leads to is the mitochondria actually become destroyed over time can take decades but they'll become destroyed a cell that used to have 3,000 mitochondria might have 2,000 by the time that person reaches age 55 and of course as the mitochondria destroyed that decreases the cellular energy production even more and it's just a vicious cycle and so for decades starting in your 30s and working through your 40s and 50s this is this is sort of the Vicious Cycle that's going round and round in your cells decreased cellular energy production increased free radicals decreased ability to quelch those free radicals in increased mitochondrial Decay and aging ultimately the whole system breaks down by the time you're 60 70 you start to actually see breaking down of the body we call that aging and degenerative disease all those diseases that old people get but young people don't get we call that degenerative disease that's how it starts so now you have a sense for why why it's important to know about your production so in summary oxygen is converted to water Plus energy through the process of cellular energy production free radical damage occurs to the mitochondria and inevitably occurs as a result of this process so as you're doing that you're going to get some free radical damage that's why we can't live forever if we never had any free radical damage theoretically our bodies would never break down and we'd live forever but that can't happen and uh so ultimately we will die the problem is because we're making these free radicals in excessively rapid fashion and in excessive amounts and because at the same time we're making too many of them we're not making enough of the enzymes to control them we're aging prematurely we're aging at a much more rapid rate that we need to and we're falling apart at much earlier ages than we need to there's no reason absolutely no reason on Earth why the average age of this of American population could be 10010 and I'm talking a fully functional 100 110 there's no reason the only reason that we don't see that is because of this excessive free radical damage due to a decrease in cellular energy production so Oxygen's converted to water plus energy as that happens we get free radicals this starts to destroy cells the longer you're alive the more damage you're going to get from that and the less efficient the process of cellular energy production the more and the faster that's going to happen as that accumulated free radical damage can continues to worsen it leads to mitochondrial Decay mitochondrial Decay is the central lesion we've seen that it's been published we know this in the entire aging process and in all degenerative disease aging and degenerative disease is is determined by your starting point Genetically speaking how good were you at cellular energy production even when you were born and how well are you taking care of it how rapid has been your rate of eomd my mitochondrial Decay is inevitable sooner or later you're going to get it and you're going to die what's not inevitable is the rate at which that occurs and the rate of mitochondrial Decay is determined by one thing and that is oxidation efficiency or cellular energy production so if you want to slow down aging if you're interested in not getting sick as you get older if you're interested in feeling great and functioning have full function as you get to be older uh then what you want to do is production now I'm going to go over a slide here that shows this thing in kind of a graphic process it shows the stages of the aging process as it relates to Cellular energy production here's a healthy person this right here maximum ATP again ATP is the energy molecule so if this is the maximum at production here's your healthy person he's at the maximum uh now you produce ATP you can produce energy in two ways you can produce it with oxygen and you can produce it without oxygen we know this because if you were to hold your breath your oxygen levels would go down very quickly you wouldn't die instantly would you you'd actually stay alive for a while and the reason you'd stay alive is because your body has a way of producing energy even without oxygen now it's not a very efficient way it leads to a dramatic increase in free radical production and ultimately you'll die so you can't hold your breath forever but you can't hold hold your breath for a a relatively decent amount of time before you do die and that is because your body has the ability to produce energy keep you alive at least for a little bit uh without oxygen at all and that's what this refers to on the slide where it says anerobic here your Anor robic production of energy or ATP is where you produce energy without oxygen now these where it shows glucose which means sugar and fat the only way you can produce energy from glucose and fat is with oxygen so in your Healthy guy here he can produce a lot of energy that much energy in his mitochondria so that's maximum mitochondrial ATP or energy production right here and then on top of that he can produce some additional energy without the use of oxygen you add all that up his total energy production is right there that's a healthy person let's see what happens to that person as he gets older because right in the middle here is the condition I was telling you about eomd this is where he's asymptomatic he may feel really great or he may have what we call functional symptoms those would be symptoms sort of like tiredness maybe headaches maybe allergies things that the doctor says look you know they're they're they nothing you don't have a disease there's nothing really wrong with you it's just that your body is not working as well as you would like it to work we call this functional symptoms uh and and we hear hear those words if you're in my age bracket if you're in your 60s and you complain to the doctor about about something like that he'll usually tell you something well well that's okay you're just healthy for your age what all of that means is you're not healthy but you're not sick and diseased you're in this category but you're moving that way is the point so let's see the very first thing that happens between the healthy guy and the guy that's not quite so healthy is the inability to burn fat efficiently notice that his total energy production from oxygen is maximum mitochondrial production is mitochondria working just as well but when they're working they're relying much more on glucose and a lot less on fat they can't burn fat as efficiently we'll talk about why that is but that's the very first phase that shows up as people move from healthy to not so healthy is they don't burn fat efficiently this leads to two things one is they become overweight start having more fat on their body two is because they burning more and more sugar they start to get low blood sugar your body can't store a lot of low low sugar so if you start burning it very rapidly you're going to run out pretty quickly and so they develop low blood sugar so this is the thing that we normally see in the the young people and of course as you get older is a much higher incidence of this as this continues though what's going to happen is this is this inability to produce energy well from fat is going to lead to a second phase and that's the mitochondria themselves are going to start becoming very dysfunctional they're not going to themselves work very well such that the total mitochondrial production of energy now goes down so it went down for the first time now whereas they can produce energy at least pretty well from glucose if not from fat here uh now they can't produce energy weth of glucose or fat and they're relying more and more on their Anor robic energy production now notice that their total energy production is still the same so they can still go out and do things you know they can ride up the hill and bicycle the same way they used to when they used to be this way but they're not going to do it nearly as efficiently they're going to be producing an abundance of free radicals they're going to be damaging their body they're probably not going to be able to go up the hill in the same time they used to uh but again these are quote healthy for your age people they're asymptomatic they just have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction eventually however the excess of free radical production from all of this leads to this where now the mitochondria actually is starting to get destroyed maximum energy production for the first time goes down now they have mitochondrial Decay they have disease and they're in a irreversible State here can they make this better yeah they can move here can they go all the way from here to here no not with the technology we know today so the idea is to have your self tested have your mitochondrial function tested if you you're already in the healthy column fine great we'll show you some examples of this in the lectures to come of some real people that were like that if you're not then let's talk about what we need to do to move you in that direction so that you don't continue in this downhill course of decreased cellular energy production disease so we've come up with something at the clinic that I call Cellular medicine uh and uh so cellular medicine uh starts off with this kind of thinking all disease and aging starts in the cell with decreased oxidation efficiency or decreased energy production this decrease in oxidation deficiency begins in the 30s when people are asymptomatic but they're not healthy this leads to a decrease in organ function which is the functional symptoms they don't digest as well they get heartburn etc etc they don't really have a disease they're just not working as well and then finally that in the Frailty and the symptoms of the diseasing the diseases of Aging so in my concept here with cellular energy with cellular medicine there's only one disease we're simplifying this and that disease is decreased cellular energy production and there's only one treatment which is maximizing cellular energy production so uh that's why I say that of all the things that I've learned with my patients to help them help their bodies to heal naturally and heal well of all the things I can get them to do improving their cellular energy production is the one that by far and way works the best by the way it's not just for the prevention of disease we've talked here entirely about staying healthy and preventing disease but it's also critical for doctors and patients alike to realize that once you've acquired disease if it takes a lot of energy to prevent a disease how much more energy do you think it takes to actually cure yourself of the disease a lot more so so this becomes crucial and very Central to helping any patient whether the disease is an autoimmune disorder whether it's a chronic infection such as hepatitis whether we're talking about cancer or whether it's heart disease it doesn't make any difference the ability for the body to heal itself of those diseases is is dramatically improved and enhanced when you improve the ability for that body to produce energy on a cellular level uh so that's that's it for part one here um U you can now go to part two or go to it in another time uh the subject we're going to be talking about there is maximizing cellular energy production so we talked a little bit about how cellular energy production uh leads to aging and disease but and we talked a little bit about sort of the things that cause that and so in the next section we're going to talk about how you can maximize your cellular energy production what you can do in your life and what uh your doctors can do to help you and doctors you're going to learn about how to help your patients