 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Dr. Jill Live. Today, I have my friend and colleague, Ari Whitten, who's an expert on mitochondria and energy. I will introduce him in just a minute, but as you all know, you can find my podcast on YouTube, Stitcher iTunes, anywhere you listen to podcasts. Wherever you're listening today, would you please stop by a leave a review or if you're on YouTube, hit subscribe so you can get notification of any upcoming episodes. We really appreciate your support. And if you have looked for other episodes, you can find all of them at wherever you have heard this one. All right. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce my friend Ari. Ari Whitten, MS is the founder of the Energy Blueprint. He's the best-selling author of the Ultimate Guide to Red Light Therapy and Eat for Energy, How to Beat Fatigue and Supercharge your Metacondria for All-Day Energy. Who of us can't use that, right? He's a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology Certifications from the National Academy of Sports Medicine and a Corrective Exercise Specialist and Performance Enhancement Specialist. He's completed extensive graduate training in clinical psychology and holds a Master of Science degree in the Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine. Ari is tirelessly researching and has obsessively devoted the last 27 years of his life in the pursuit of being on the cutting edge of science on health and human energy optimization. You can find his podcast, Programs and Supplement Formulas at www.TheEnergyBlueprint.com. Ari, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to connect with you again. You're welcome. So I love story, like why we do what we do really is the driver, right? So I'd love to hear your backstory. You've got all this degree and study and I love that you've really neared into the focus, but tell us how you got to where you're at now. Yeah. Well, as my bio kind of alludes to my original background was in fitness, athletic performance, bodybuilding, body composition. That was my world since I was 12 years old. I'm going to turn 40 this year. So almost going on three decades now of studying health science very, very, very passionately and without really any stopping. You know, it's since I was a little kid, this is my area of passion. And I think there's also an important distinction between kind of, there's a lot of people like especially physicians who I think come into this and their whole background is very abstract, very conceptual, very academic. Like you're learning about health in a classroom where you're getting lectured about topics. And my background before I ever was lectured in a classroom, I had almost a decade of real world practical experience. And the original biohackers were bodybuilders. Long before biohacking was a term, bodybuilders decades before that were doing all kinds of wacky extreme stuff, injecting themselves with all kinds of chemicals in the pursuit of more muscle and less fat and subjecting themselves to all kinds of extreme things. And so I grew up in that world, fortunately, never with injecting myself with anything. But that was the culture I was brought up. And my older brother, from the time I was very young, was a bodybuilder, a personal trainer being mentored by a professional bodybuilder who was into that whole world of steroids and chemical enhancement. And, and I was also an athlete, a martial artist and a soccer player growing up. So, you know, I was I had a decade of knowledge by the time I was, you know, 22 years old coming out of college. I had already so much experience with the human body that the practical experiential aspect of how the human body works, experimenting, running my own experiments of how does my body respond to this, how does what happens if I do this and what, what, you know, what are the side effects of doing too much of this and invaluable to have that kind of base foundation of experience of knowing how to run experiments on the human body and how it responds. Did a bachelor's in kinesiology, which is movement science, a lot of emphasis on on exercise physiology and biomechanics and nutrition and things of that nature was a personal trainer and nutritionist for many years. Did a, I went to medical school for two years and despised it in large part because I had such a strong background in nutrition and fitness and health science as opposed to sickness science like pathology, like I understood how to create health. And it was very bizarre to me to be going through medical school, not being taught anything about how to be healthy, just being taught about pathology and understanding diseases and this disease requires this drug. And the paradigm just seemed very sick to me. You know, to be in the hospital seeing type two diabetics on 12 different prescription drugs being served a terrible diet, being taught nothing about nutrition. I mean, I, and I was the only one there who perceived this as insane. And that, and because I perceived it as insane, you know, the other students in the class were looking at me, if I, if I dared to say anything or to question anything that was going on, it was like, Oh, you know, Oh, he thinks he's so smart, he thinks he knows better. You know, and so then I was receiving all this judgment for questioning what was going on there and you know, it was ultimately a very toxic environment for me, chose to leave, which was a very hard decision. Went on to do a PhD program in clinical psychology, I completed all three years of course work for that and then decided I didn't want to be a clinical psychologist. And so I didn't do the years of internship, but I completed all the coursework for it. And then in my mid twenties, I got Epstein bar virus and I got mononucleosis very severely. And I was left with chronic fatigue for about a year after that. And this was a, this was a very serious transition for me as someone who had always been fit, always been super healthy and energetic. And, and really like the pinnacle of fitness and health my whole life since I was young, all of a sudden I was without energy. And, you know, I could tell you about the specific reasons why that happened. But the short of it is over exercising, sleeping in a mold rich room and sleeping only four hours a night due to a kind of a party lifestyle at that time in my life. But so this experience, and then I basically I went to see conventional doctors, initially they misdiagnosed me as having strep throat gave me penicillin, which only made me worse. And then when it was discovered that I had Epstein bar virus and mono and mononucleosis, they didn't have anything to offer. When I went to see conventional doctors with chronic fatigue, they had nothing to offer. And when I went to see alternative practitioners and functional medicine doctors with chronic fatigue, for the most part, I was the adrenal fatigue story. And something very interesting came out of that, because I started to go deep, because I was scientifically literate, because I had a strong background in health science, I started to do so much reading on my own about adrenal fatigue. And I discovered at some point that within conventional medicine, they brush off the whole concept of adrenal fatigue as pseudoscience. And it's it's not seen as a legitimate medical condition. And this is where the story kind of becomes a bit ironic. But basically what I at the time I was annoyed that conventional medicine brushed off the concept of adrenal fatigue, because I was convinced that I had adrenal fatigue. And these people that I respected had diagnosed me with adrenal fatigue. And so because I was annoyed at conventional medicine and their reaction to it, I basically said, you know, I'm going to write a book that goes methodically systematically through the science to prove that adrenal fatigue is in fact a real thing. And that's when something very interesting happened when I started to delve into the scientific literature on it, I discovered there really isn't any scientific literature on adrenal fatigue. And that and then I this this was actually it ended up being like a year of my life that I dedicated to this this this topic in particular, I basically gave myself a PhD in the science of the relationship of cortisol and adrenal function, HPA axis function and relationship to chronic stress and chronic fatigue. But I started to discover, okay, well, there's nothing on adrenal fatigue. How do I look this up? And so then I started putting in, you know, fatigue, chronic fatigue, and cortisol. And I'd come up with some studies, chronic fatigue syndrome and cortisol stress related exhaustion disorder and cortisol and adrenal function, HPA axis functions, there's some studies there. Burnout syndrome is a legitimate recognized condition. Clinical burnout is another name of a similar one. And cortisol and adrenal function. And so I started coming up with these studies. And at first I'm like, yes, I hit the jackpot. Now I can I have the scientific basis to prove adrenal fatigue is a real thing. And then I started basically seeing studies that the gist of these studies science 101 is essentially, you take a group of people that have these symptoms, adrenal fatigue type of symptoms, difficulty sleeping, low energy levels, yada, yada, yada stress related fatigue exhaustion burnout type symptoms. And you then take a similar group of people matched for age and gender and by and all the different demographics, smoking, exercise habits, etc. And you see if the group with those symptoms has abnormal adrenal function or abnormal cortisol levels. It's a very simple scientific framework experimentation model that would allow you to validate the theory of adrenal fatigue. And turns out there's many, many dozens of those kinds of studies that have been done over the last three decades. And I found them and I found them all. I mean, and I literally mean I spent a year of my life digging up every study and existence on that topic. And when I started to dig through them, basically what I found is all kinds of studies that didn't support my bias and didn't support the beliefs that I had going into it, meaning I found lots of studies that showed that the group with those symptoms had perfectly normal adrenal function and cortisol levels that were indistinguishable from healthy normal people without those symptoms. And if you want me to summarize the body of literature as a whole, 59 individual studies over over three decades and since the 1990s, basically, and of those 15 supported a link between slightly lower cortisol levels on average in the group with fatigue. 11 of them supported the opposite finding slightly higher cortisol levels and 33 of them showed no discernible difference whatsoever. So the majority of those studies, as I said, find no difference in cortisol or adrenal function. And at that point, I was like, first of all, conventional medicine is right in their judgment of the scientific basis of adrenal fatigue. They're correct in their determination of that. But at that point, I was like, okay, well, what the heck's causing my fatigue? What is the real science of human energy regulation? Did you test your cortisol levels in there? Were they high, low, or normal? I did. They were normal. And this is partly what prompted it. They were normal. And what happened was the practitioner that I was seeing still diagnosed me as having adrenal fatigue. And this is another bizarre element of the whole adrenal fatigue thing is, essentially, whether you're high, low, or normal, regardless of what the results are of your cortisol test, they will say you're in one phase or another of adrenal fatigue. And I'm like, this is actually not very scientific at all. Where else in any condition do we say, essentially, regardless of whatever your test results are, high, low, or normal, you still have the condition. Right. That's not itself as a big red flag. And I want to clarify real quick, because this is brilliant. I want to just let you go on and on. But I want to clarify for our listeners, because 20 years ago when I started functional medicine, I was one of those who talked about adrenal fatigue. And I went back just like you and looked at the research. It does not support it. And I changed everything I wrote to HPA axis dysfunction. I just want to make sure we're on the same page as far as there is such a thing as HPA axis dysfunction, correct? And again, we would agree with that. And there's also such a thing as a true adison crisis where people literally do not produce cortisol or have such a diminished thing that they could die without supplemental. And I want to clarify for our listeners, because they've heard me talk a lot about this. And I love your view, because I did the same thing. I looked at the researchers and I can't use this term anymore. And out there, there's a lot and a lot of false information. So I really like that you're bringing this to light. But I want to clarify for the audience that there still is HPA axis dysfunction. You can still have low cortisol. That makes you feel like crap. But the terminology really matters because there is no, there really isn't science to support that, the adrenal fatigue. Yes. Yes. Hey, everybody, I just stopped by to let you know that my new book, Unexpected, Finding Resilience through Functional Medicine, Science and Faith is now available for order wherever you purchase books. In this book, I share my own journey of overcoming life-threatening illness and the tools and tips and tricks and hope and resilience I found along the way. This book includes practical advice for things like cancer and Crohn's disease and other autoimmune conditions, infections like Lyme or Epstein Bar and mold and biotoxin-related illness. What I really hope is that as you read this book, you find transformational wisdom for health and healing. If you want to get your own copy, stop by readunexpected.com. There, you can also collect your free bonuses. Grab your copy today and begin your own transformational journey through Functional Medicine in Finding Resilience. Yes. Since you brought up these nuances, maybe we'll dig deeper into this before we go on to the other layers of the story like mitochondrial health in particular, which is what I think is at the center of energy regulation. So, first of all, with Addison's, yes, absolutely. Addison's is a real thing. It's possible to have truly low cortisol levels. It is possible to have a state of physiology where the adrenals truly cannot supply cortisol levels. This is absolutely a condition, and it's virtually entirely unrelated to chronic fatigue or stress-related exhaustion. It's talking about some tiny, tiny subset. There's usually some trigger that's a very specific trigger where you could have gotten an infection. You could have a viral autoimmune, or you can have an autoimmune, or you can have just failure of the gland, but again, that's a very, very, very different thing. I'm glad you said that. Right. So, Addison's, a person can have Addison's disease, but I want to be clear, all the huge chunk of the population that has chronic fatigue or stress-related burnout do not have Addison's disease. Let's say 99.99999% of them do not have Addison's disease. We know that because, well, for many reasons we know that, but this is also something that's easily distinguishable from other types of HPA-access dysfunction by measuring another hormone called ACTH. So, ACTH is coming from the brain. It's a hormone produced by the brain to tell the adrenal glands, produce more cortisol. We need more cortisol. If you've got a situation where you have lots of that hormone and still low cortisol levels, that means the adrenals truly don't have the capacity to produce enough cortisol. Secondary adrenal deficiency. Yeah. Yeah. So, it exists. It's a rare condition called Addison's disease. That's unrelated to the chronic fatigue epidemic as a whole. It is also the case. So, you brought up the distinction with HPA-access dysfunction. So, yes, HPA-access dysfunction absolutely exists. However, even just going back to the research I just cited and many of those studies actually do a more detailed assessment of CRH and ACTH also built into that to assess for hypothalamic dysfunction or pituitary dysfunction in addition to cortisol abnormalities. But just the results that I told you about actually also we can expand that to say, again, cortisol and adrenal levels, cortisol levels and adrenal function are normal in most of these people. There is a subset of that population just like there is a subset of the non-chronically fatigued population that do have cortisol abnormalities, low or high cortisol levels or a disrupted diurnal curve where it's too low in the morning and too high in the evening. These things absolutely exist. HPA-access dysfunction absolutely exists. However, it is not actually that common in people with chronic fatigue. It is not the norm in the majority of people. Now, the one thing, since you mentioned this, I also did a very deep dive in the literature on a couple of things. One is chronic stressors of various kinds. So, psychological stress could be from relationship stress, financial stress, job stress, physical stress from over-training in athletes. Mold and toxic exposures. I didn't find any studies on that in cortisol, but I'm maybe- I have. So, ketomium is a specific mold highly associated with low cortisol levels. Okay, interesting. So, trauma, what else? Various kinds of toxins, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, almost every type of stressor that you can think up. And almost without exception, trauma and mold and certain types of toxin exposures are the only real exception to this. But almost without exception, every type of stressor you can come up with, even when it exists for decades, even metabolic stressors such as disease states, obesity, diabetes, they are not associated with a state of low cortisol as a result of the chronic stress wearing out the adrenal glands. They're associated with higher than normal cortisol. And basically what's happening is- And I've seen it with mold, too. I just want to clarify, because that's actually like often people have not only, you know, if it's outside ketomium, there have been, there's more people I see with mold and high cortisol than low. So, I love that. So, almost across the board, every type of stress you look up is associated with higher than normal cortisol, which is exactly the opposite. Even when these things are present for decades, it's exactly the opposite of what the adrenal fatigue hypothesis would predict. What it would predict is that chronic stressors present over decades would exhaust the adrenal glands resulting in low cortisol. And anywhere you look in any type of chronic stressor, almost universally without exception, associated with higher than normal cortisol. And basically what's happening is there is no exhaustion of the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands are actually hypertrophying. They're growing to adapt to the chronic stress to produce more cortisol. So, basically this is a lot of different ways of saying the theory is wrong. Now, there is a demographic, a subset with true HPA axis dysfunction, or abnormal aspects of the curve, which may or may not often don't even manifest as any symptoms or illness that a person feels. And let me give you the single most powerful disruptor of HPA axis function. This is something that commonly results in low enough morning cortisol levels that if these people take a test, a salivary cortisol test in the morning, and they go see a practitioner who believes in adrenal fatigue, they will almost universally come back with a diagnosis of adrenal fatigue. It's very simple. It's being a night owl chronotype. If you are someone who simply goes to bed late at night, it has been shown in numerous studies that those night owl chronotypes versus early morning types versus morning types, I should say, have about half of the morning cortisol levels of a morning person. And they don't have any symptoms. I'm talking normal, healthy people without symptoms have half the morning cortisol levels. I'm playing it because melatonin will suppress cortisol so as they have higher melatonin probably later or earlier in the morning, they probably dry gone into 8am or whatever and then that's going to suppress the cortisol. Exactly. And they're most likely staying up with lots of artificial lights blaring into their face late into the hour. So they're suppressing melatonin and having cortisol levels elevated to a later hour. So you get this disrupted diurnal curve effect. Again, even in normal healthy people, you're just a night owl. You don't have chronic fatigue or adrenal fatigue symptoms. So anyway, that's some aspects of the story. I could talk to you about it. Well, let's talk mitochondria. That's where I want to go because you are the X for there. I want people to get like, okay, so what is it? Because I agree with you that toxin infectious burden that I see is really affecting mitochondria. And that's where longevity is too. So tell us about why mitochondria is really more of a root for our energy production. Yeah. Well, at the end of all of this search for me, I was trying to find answers to my own stuff at the end of the day. And then I saw these physicians, I did this whole deep dive and adrenal fatigue. And ultimately, I'm like, okay, well, if it's not adrenal fatigue, what the hell is it? So, you know, at that point, I spend another several years doing deep dives into, well, I know sleep is related to energy. Obviously, if you don't sleep well, we don't have lots of energy. So what are the mechanisms linking that and circadian rhythm? And so I spent a long time looking at circadian rhythm and the mechanisms there. And I know, you know, exercise is related to that. So what are the mechanisms underlying how exercise relates to energy? And what about psychological stress? How does that relate to energy? And nutrition, of course, is related to energy. What's the story? What's going on physiologically that links nutrition to energy regulation, fatigue, or good energy levels? And I spent several years going down these rabbit trails of each of these pathways and ultimately arriving at like this list of 150 different mechanisms that were in one way or another related to this energy story, neurotransmitters and hormones and AMPK and all kinds of stuff. And it was a nice list. And I had a lot of different ways to talk about the energy story. But it wasn't until I found Robert Navio's work on the cell danger response. He's a researcher, MD, PhD, who runs a lab for mitochondrial medicine at the University of California, San Diego. And I found his work on the cell danger response. And I was like, this is it. And it gave me a framework, a coherent framework to synthesize all this year's worth of information and pathways that I had figured out around energy and synthesize it and figure out what is actually regulating this energy in the human body. Because if we look at a car, there's lots of parts of a car that are important for that car to drive down the road. The engine block is important. The pistons are important. The crankshafts important. The gasoline's important. The wheels and tires are important. The axles are important. Lots of parts that you could say, if we remove that the car doesn't function. It can't drive down the road. But what is actually controlling whether or not the car is driving down the road and how fast it's going is the person in the car with the ignition switch with a key who's pushing either the brake or the accelerator and how hard they're pushing the accelerator. So what's regulating it is the question. What's the thing controlling it? And when it comes to human physiology, the evidence really suggests that mitochondria are regulating human energy levels. So we're often taught about them as these sort of mindless cellular energy generators. They just take in carbs and fats. They pump out energy in the form of ATP. But where Robert Navillot's work came in is to say it synthesized many decades of research from researchers all over the world looking at mitochondria, finding out all these pieces of the story. Oh, actually, in addition to energy generators, they're also doing this and they're also doing that. And they're also serving a role in immune health and regulating the redox status of the cell and they're all kinds of things. And basically the synthesis of all of that was mitochondria actually have two roles. They have a role as energy generators and they have a role as environmental sensors. And they're constantly asking the question, what is, I'm anthropomorphizing a little bit, but they're asking the question, is it safe for us to produce energy? Are we under attack? Is there danger present? And to the extent, as environmental sensors, to the extent that they're picking up on danger signals and threats that are surpassing their stress buffering capacity, their energy production capacity, they shift out of energy production mode towards cellular defense mode. So in other words, mitochondria aren't just the thing that produces the energy. They are also the thing that's sensing the environment and deciding whether or not to produce energy. So that fundamentally, the degree to which your mitochondria are in energy mode or in defense mode is what is regulating human energy levels. Love that. And it's funny because I remember the day I was sitting in my first lecture with Dr. Navio and same thing. It was like, my jaw dropped, my mouth opened, and I'm like, this is it. Right. And I remember my colleagues too, it was just like, okay, this is really pulling together so many of the pieces. And of course, I'm an environmental toxic specialist, right? So I see how that affects energy levels. I'm like, oh my goodness, this makes all the difference. So I love that you found his work and that you've put it all together because I feel the same. I was really, really, I mean, we owe so much to his research. So let's go to, gosh, I could talk all day and I would love to talk about how the HP gets out of the cell and then signals from the outside in of the cell response. But maybe we shift to the practical because people will listen and you're like, okay, yeah, but tell me how to get well and what to do. So what's like, I know you wrote a lot about red light. I'm a huge fan. I've got devices all over my room here. Let's talk first about light and why does light affect mitochondria? And then maybe just some practical tips on like people who have fatigue, what they could do to optimize mitochondrial function. Okay, let me, and maybe we'll come back to this later. Okay, so red and near infrared light are very interesting story. I've written a book on this. I've written the most popular book on the subject. What's the title? Just go and give that for people. The ultimate guide to red light therapy. Okay. And there are books like clinical textbooks written by researchers like Michael Hamlin, Harvard professor, but they're for academics and researchers. They're not meant for the general public. I mean, somebody in the general public who buys one will be like, why did I buy this? Or like it's just full of a wave, right? A thousand information on like 5000 studies, but with no practical advice on how to actually use it. So anyway, red and your infrared light are an amazing aspect of human health. And I think a really important and neglected aspect of human health. And there's a new discovery around this just in the last year or two that I think is going to turn out to be really important. The very quick version of this is we have over 6000 studies now showing that red and your infrared light are bioactive in the human body that light photons interact with the human body to modulate physiological process. Just that in itself is kind of an odd concept for people to wrap their head around because we're used to thinking of like light effects plants, chlorophyll and photosynthesis, but we're not so used to thinking of light affecting our physiology. And maybe we know some layers of the story. We know vitamin D interacts with our UV light interacts with our skin and creates this hormone called vitamin D. And we know that's important. So we take our vitamin D pill that in itself is a bit of a problem. And we maybe also know the circadian rhythm story. We know that blue light entering the eyes feeds back into this part of the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus that has our circadian clock that impacts on all these neurotransmitters and hormones that impact on sleep and wake cycles and energy and mood and cognitive function and physical performance and all kinds of processes. So we kind of, a lot of people are starting to have some sense of the relationship between light and human health. But now there's another layer to the story which is red and your infrared light actually penetrate into our skin beneath our skin. Unlike UV light and blue light and other wavelengths that really stop at the layer of the skin, these penetrate deeply into our body, inches into our body. And those light photons that turn out, turns out are not just inert, they actually do something when they penetrate deep into our body. They interact directly with the mitochondria in our cells throughout our body. And when they're there, there's a few different aspects of what they're doing. Number one, they're actually interacting with a photo acceptor like a receptor directly in the mitochondria called cytochrome C oxidase. These photons of light hit this photo acceptor and really facilitate energy production by the mitochondria. So photons of light allow your cells to produce energy better. But and for a long time that was thought to be sort of the most important mechanism. But it turns out that it's actually probably not. The main thing that's going on is that something called retrograde signaling by interacting with the mitochondria and acting actually as a hormetic stressor, creating a slight increase in reactive oxygen species similar to like exercise in that sense. It's the mitochondria are engaged in a process called retrograde signaling where they essentially send signals back to the nucleus of the cell and alter gene expression. And fundamentally, red and near infrared light are altering gene expression in a way that tends to suppress chronic inflammatory signals and up regulate growth factors, healing factors. So and this differs the specific factors that are expressed differs depending on the tissues in the brain. It's nerve growth factor brain derived neurotrophic factor in the muscle IGF one insulin like growth factor one and other muscle growth factors in the bone it's different growth factors in the skin it up regulates fibroblasts collagen and elastin production and so on and so forth. So we have 6000 studies showing that this type of light can do all sorts of amazing things like increase wound healing, whether it's bone or skin or muscle or tendon we have tons of studies showing that it speeds up wound healing athletes for example with sprained ankles get on the field twice as fast if they use red light to speed up their healing for a few minutes a day compared to the athletes who don't use it so it speeds up the rate of healing profoundly it has skin anti aging effects it has fat loss effects it has muscle gain and endurance enhancing effects when it's paired with exercise it amplifies the effects of whatever exercise you're doing it speeds up recovery from exercise so your tissues actually heal faster and and many there's many many different disease applications as well and you know it's used to treat oral mucositis which is a common side effect of chemotherapy drugs it's used to treat diabetic ulcers to get them to heal and all sorts of you know disease applications like that but I would say the the ones that people are most commonly interested in are things like skin anti aging fat loss and slowing down hair loss and pairing it with exercise to enhance the the the effects of exercise and wound healing I love that and I was just thinking in my head four things off the top of my head really practical examples that I use I've had a via light for years I said there's many devices but this one happens to have red lights on the scalp and one that goes up the nose through the crew form plate and I always years ago I mean there was research but there's been a lot more it would be the thing that if I wanted to get in a flow state or right I'd put on that device for 20 minutes and zoom I am on my brain is on so that's number one number two right over there I have this red bulb from sauna space that if my back or knee or something's hurting 20 minutes or something you can put on my face right behind me this is hilarious because they're all here this device is red light for the face it is my favorite people ask me all the time Dr. Jill what do you use in your skin well it's got some great skin products but that red light that is the magic and then you mentioned the teeth I'm like oh yeah my bathroom I have this device it's red and blue light for the gums and the teeth and I wear that 20 minutes every night so like I'm doing these things all day long and it's funny because I know some of the research you are far more of an expert than me but I will just stay with my end of one which means my experience every one of them are profound I'm such a huge fan but I love I wanted just for listeners to get practical ways like I use these in my everyday life yeah absolutely so um and you know it's funny I have I have this this device right next to me right now which is the mouth device right now and I have various other devices scattered around my house and I'm like putting me like all around me as those devices yeah yeah um I want to tell you about this new discovery because I think you'll enjoy it and you most likely haven't heard of it um so melatonin is a is a is a hormone that people know obviously is associated with sleep and typically the story is you know melatonin is produced by the pineal gland occasionally people will talk about a gut-derived melatonin as well but generally the story of melatonin some people don't even know it's a hormone like in the general population they think it's just a supplement right melatonin is a hormone produced by your body and um it can also be taken as a supplement interestingly enough and uh melatonin has turns out very profound effects on human physiology and um we know obviously the sleep story there's lots of emerging research now on the use of it in large doses exogenously for treatments of cancer neurological disease gut diseases all sorts of things and the research is quite positive on all of that um but there's a new layer to the story that's interesting that came from a researcher named Russell Ryder just in the last few years he's a sort of legendary melatonin research he's been doing it for decades and decades one of the most knowledgeable people in the world maybe the most on melatonin and they did some interesting experiments on rodents where they removed the pineal gland and they measured levels of melatonin at the cellular level in mitochondria and they found something unexpected they found that melatonin levels were unaltered by the removal of the pineal gland that the mice without a pineal gland still had the same levels of melatonin in their cells which means there's another source of melatonin beyond the pineal gland um and basically and and one of the other layers of knowledge that we now have around melatonin is that melatonin is not just a sleep hormone it turns out it is one of the most it's probably the most potent mitochondrial antioxidant in existence and it doesn't just act as a direct antioxidant it also interacts with our internal antioxidant defense system our what's called the ARE the antioxidant response element glutathione superoxide dismutase catalase heme oxygenase we have these powerful antioxidant systems built into our cells built into our mitochondria and melatonin which we're supposed to produce in large amounts every night before bed and during sleep basically is designed to protect mitochondria and to recharge that internal antioxidant system which is super important for our resilience in our stress buffering capacity our capacity to handle the next day's exposures to various insults and stresses so it turns out so that story was interesting i've been talking about that for years and from the frame of circadian rhythm and wanting to make sure that we produce enough pineal derived melatonin to bathe our mitochondria every night but it turns out that quite that story isn't quite accurate and the reason it's not accurate is because actually we now know that melatonin is so important to mitochondria that millions of years ago mitochondria evolved the ability to produce their own melatonin supply in each of the trillions of cells in our body so that's the big new discovery is we have lots of melatonin in our cells and that it's probably in extra my my bet is that in five or ten years from now we will discover that melatonin is probably way way more important in human physiology than we currently realize and that it is a vital molecule in maintaining redox balance means allowing the cell in the mitochondria to maintain the proper balance of oxidants and antioxidants and here's the big new discovery the main thing that stimulates production of what's called extra pineal melatonin or mitochondrial derived melatonin is red and near infrared light wow oh and where do we get red and near infrared light from an evolutionary perspective why would this be the case sunlight basically humans evolved to spend time each day getting sun on their bodies so my my belief at this point my hunch and we know from lots of other lines of evidence that sunlight is regular sun exposure greatly reduces all-cause mortality that sun avoidance there's a big study of 30 000 women in sweden where they found that the women with the lowest sun exposure had an increased risk of all-cause mortality dying from any cause that was on par with smoking a pack of cigarettes each day so sun what i my my hypothesis is that regular sun exposure is extremely important to human health and i think that a big part of the reason why is not just the vitamin d story as most people think i think it's actually the red and near infrared light melatonin story wow i love this gosh this is so packed with great information and the new research now one question to get a lot from patients and i'm sure you've done this some of the research so i'd be curious to know if you have any answer for us there was some some literature out there that said taking melatonin will suppress your own you shouldn't do it especially children i disagree with that i feel like it's powerful and i have not seen that effect but what's your comment on um could taking it long term be harmful it's a super interesting and uh controversial area um there's everything from people warning very strongly against even right you know relatively low dose use to i know certain people i've read books like um michael schellenberger's book on chronic fatigue he's recommending i i don't want to get this wrong and misrepresent this but i want to say at least 100 milligrams if not more to like everybody universe and and the the what's thought to be produced by the pineal gland each night is three milligrams um so or sorry 300.3 milligrams 300 micrograms right yeah yes so um so p what's a common supplement dose is like three milligrams five milligrams 10 milligrams so this is already 10 2050 orders of magnitude greater than the physiological dose from the melatonin from the pineal gland level um what's so you asked about the negative bio feedback loops it's common in in various kinds of hormones like the classic example is men using exogenous testosterone steroids what what happens is a negative feedback loop where your body starts producing less of its own supply if you provide more exogenously so the testes shrink start producing lower testosterone if you start injecting exogenous and that happens with lots of different hormones in the body the studies that have tested this on melatonin have found that it's not true that there is no exogenous suppression of internal production of melatonin you can take it externally it doesn't suppress your own internal supply however um anecdotally a lot of people report that when they use melatonin for a period of time and then they go off of it they don't sleep well for several days which kind of matches up with what you would expect to find if there were a negative feedback loop present but speaking purely on the research that's tested it there isn't a negative feedback loop i will also say that a subset of the population and i'm one of them interestingly enough and my dad is too so i think there's a genetic component to this um a subset of people seem to be hypersensitive to melatonin exogenous melatonin yes i do and the institution study on those of us i don't know if this is exact same sensitivity but i'm the same way and there's a study there's a genetic snip i have that creates more melatonin in the morning hours which actually creates more hyper hyperglycemia fasted so i'll look like a pre-diabetic if i'm not careful just because of my genetics around the i don't know if it's a breakdown of melatonin or just that i produce more and the same as you if i take too much i i'm really groggy so there is yes i get super groggy and my sleep is very disturbed yes yes me too so yeah i like that you're saying because again there's this amazing research and amazing power but all of these things really have to be individualized to the person because we all have genetics and environment and but the bottom line red light therapy infrared powerful stuff i love that so and and just pairing kind of wrapping that all together what my conclusion is personally is that it makes more sense to since since i'm sensitive and have negative reactions to exogenous melatonin it makes more sense to do the things that ramp up my own internal supply at the mitochondrial level so doing red and near infrared light therapy and actually that enhances my sleep instead of makes me sleep poorly oh love that because i get intuitively i think that's why i've gravitated towards that because i don't really take a lot of melatonin but i found the red light same thing my sleep is amazing all right and one one little layer i'll add to this i i see human health very much through the context of evolutionary biology and through an ancestral lens so like i always put things to that test of logic and thinking and you know so does it make sense from an ancestral perspective that i should be supplying 100 milligrams of exogenous melatonin every night probably not our ancestors didn't really do that right because it makes sense that our ancestors maybe got some red and near infrared light exposure each night oh they used to sit around a fire light maybe there's something to that maybe they got a lot of sun each day maybe there's something to that story so from an evolutionary biology lens one of those two things makes a lot of sense the other doesn't i'm not saying it's wrong or bad because especially in the context of disease models there's lots of very positive research but i i think that's a useful model to subject things to the the sort of logic test to yes oh all right you are a wealth of knowledge this has been so much fun and i could talk to you for hours what i'm really excited about is the fact that um minor country when we're seeing infection toxin all of the stuff that i do it is really a core and i love that you talk about cell danger response to and the power of infrared where can people find you if they want more information where can they get your books yeah books are on amazon the best place to follow my work is the energy blueprint dot com perfect thank you so much for your wealth of knowledge today um fascinating information and we'll have to do this again to finish up the talk on what else is new with mitochondria i would love to thanks so much for having me you're welcome