Mitochondria: you might not know what they are, but
they are vital to your health. Rhonda Patrick,
PhD is a biomedical scientist who has studied the interaction between
mitochondrial metabolism, aberrant metabolism, and cancer.
She's also
done research on aging at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La
Jolla, California.
“I’ve had a variety of experiences doing research on aging,
cancer, and metabolism,” she explains. “Now, currently, I’m in
Oakland, California, where I’m doing my post-doctoral research, working with
Dr. Bruce Ames...
The primary focus of the research is the role of nutrition in
preventing age-related diseases like cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and
different inflammatory-related diseases like obesity and type 2 diabetes.
I've been doing a lot of research currently on nutrition,
specifically what roles micronutrients play in biological processes; how
inadequacies and certain micronutrients can lead to insidious types of damage
that can accumulate over decades, [and how they] lead to things like cancer and
Alzheimer's disease."
Part of her
work involves the identification of early biomarkers of disease. For example,
DNA damage is an early biomarker for cancer. She then tries to determine which
micronutrients might help repair that DNA damage.
The Importance of Optimizing
Mitochondrial Metabolism
Mitochondria are tiny organelles,
originally thought to be derived from bacteria. Red blood cells and skin cells
have very little to none, while germ cells have 100,000, but most cells have
one to 2,000 of them. They're the primary source of energy for your body.
In order for your organs to function
properly, they require energy, and that energy is produced by the mitochondria.
Since mitochondrial function is at
the very heart of everything that occurs in your body, optimizing mitochondrial
function - and preventing mitochondrial dysfunction by making sure you get all
the right nutrients and precursors your mitochondria need - is extremely
important for health and disease prevention.
For example, one of the universal
characteristics of cancer cells is they have serious mitochondrial dysfunction
with radically decreased numbers of functional mitochondria.
"The mitochondria can
still function in cancer cells. But one of the things that occur [in cancer
cells] is that they immediately become dependent on glucose and they're not
using their mitochondria even though they have mitochondria there. They make
this metabolic switch," Patrick
says.
How
Mitochondria Produce Energy
To produce energy, your
mitochondria require oxygen from the air you breathe and fat and glucose from
the food you eat.
These two processes — breathing
and eating — are coupled together in a process called oxidative phosphorylation.
That's what the mitochondria use to generate energy in the form of ATP.
Your mitochondria have a series
of electron transport chains in which they pass electrons from the reduced form
of the food you eat to combine it with oxygen from the air you breathe and
ultimately to form water.
This process drives protons
across the mitochondrial membrane, which recharges ATP (adenosine triphosphate)
from ADP (adenosine diphosphate). ATP is the carrier of energy throughout your
body.
However, that process also produces byproducts such as reactive
oxygen species (ROS), which are damaging to your cells, and your mitochondrial
DNA, which are then transferred to your nuclear DNA.
So there's a trade-off. In producing energy, your body also ages from
the damaging aspects from the ROS that are generated. How quickly your body
ages largely depends on how well your mitochondria work, and how much damage
can be minimized by diet optimization.
Read
more to learn how to help your mitochondria keep you healthy, including
decreasing your cancer risk.
In Health,
Dr. Brad Niewierowski
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