Fascinating. I wonder if there will soon be a way to culture your mitochondria externally in order to give you extra, maybe it could help with diseases like chronic fatigue.
Beyond athletic performance and chronic fatigue, some neurologists and psychiatrists have recently suggested that every mental disorder (literally, the entire DSM) has a single underlying cause: mitochondrial dysfunction. If that's true, mitochondria transplants could solve the mental health crisis.
Read it earlier this year and I agree. Also, he's all over various podcasts and youtube channels if you'd rather watch.
What I got out of the book was two things:
* Mitochondria are freaking cool.
* The DSM is bollocks and metabolic dysfunction explains all mental illness.
Despite how radical the above sounds, the evidence for it is overwhelming. The book is largely an accessible tour of the evidence. It's well cited without being too academic.
And while Dr. Palmer is a prominent spokesperson for this movement, there are hundreds of other neurologists, psychiatrists and doctors on the same line.
Doesn't sound like getting them into every cell in the body would be easy. If delivering a package with genes into every cell in the body was easy, viruses would be happy, figuratively speaking.
I just mapped mine, for what it's worth. A bit odd to have the whole 16000-something base pairs stored on my computer.
We have viruses in animals that reproduce using the mitochondria already, but don’t exclusively target the mitochondria. I believed these were categorized as mitoviruses but I was mistaken.
I used family tree dna. Not really much in the way of guarantees on data privacy as you'd expect (at least not from a software developer's perspective), but I figure it's challenging enough to abuse knowledge of my exact mitochondrial haplogroup, that if someone can do that, they can do worse anyway.
"Well, eet's no use crying over speeled mitochondria..." --Ren Höek
I don't think every mental health issue is traceable to mitochondrial dysfunction. But I'm pretty sure it's implicated in cardiovascular disease. Malfunctioning mitochondria can make your arteries more prone to inflammation which leads to greater lipid deposits. I even read somewhere (sorry, can't cite rn) that a major component of arterial plaques is bits of dead mitochondria.
Dr Casey Means has a thought provoking book on this subject Good Energy. It’s about how cell metabolic dysfunction could be implicated in a wide range of health conditions.
Why transplant? Mitochondria are constantly fusing and fissioning. Wouldn't it be better to provide mitochondria with a more comfortable environment to ensure they fission?
It seems like yet another misunderstanding of a series of complex problems by promising a simple one-stop solution. Maybe it'll work for some things, but it's also making claims that something like PTSD can be sorted out via a mitochondria flush, which doesn't make any sense to me.
Maybe that would help, but the claim is that mitochondrial dysfunction is the source of every "literally, the entire DSM" mental disorder, and that is an unbelievable claim, especially when the DSM runs the gamut from PTSD to Erectile Dysfunction to Caffeine Withdrawal. It says to me that it's a poorly considered claim.
"Evidence suggests that alterations in mitochondrial morphology, brain energy metabolism, and mitochondrial enzyme activity may be involved in the pathophysiology of different neuropsychiatric disorders"
Dr. Chris Palmer's book "Brain Energy" is a good introduction to the body of research. Dozens of pages of citations, you can judge for yourself how well-considered they are. - "Mitochondrial dysfunction has been found in a wide range of diagnoses that include pretty much every symptom found in psychiatry".
"Pretty much every symptom" is not going hard enough. There has yet to be a single psychiatric symptom that isn't theoretically and empirically linked to metabolic dysfunction. The only symptoms he left out were the ones which have no published research!
Yes, I still believe that saying it will cure every single condition in the DSM is a poorly considered claim. I am in no way qualified to evaluate every study, nor do I have access to them, but the fact that there are a lot of persuasive pop science books about it makes me more dubious, not less.
All I can think of right now is mental illness being caused by mitochondrial dysfunction and Parasite Eve. With the way the 21st century has been going to far, spontaneous human combustion would just seem like par for the course.
There are some supplements that seem to cause an increase in mitochondria in the body, but if you are not deficient in mitochondria I think they won't do much good for you.
Do all these things, cultivate meaningful relationships, avoid anxiety and drug abuse and you’ll be well on your way to becoming an optimal version of yourself.
Sadly not. That mostly just covers your body and emotional well-being. You have to nurture your mind as well, which is beyond the scope of my pithy aphorisms.
Maybe the first half of the book, the second half sells her company’s services really hard, very much aimed at customizing for each patient and staving off common American health problems. She has some tests not in the standard blood screens she thinks should be in there to give you personalized nutrition advice, she does reference Robert Lustig’s work and research a lot in first half.
