Cell Danger Response – The Cause Your Doctor Doesn’t Know About

Ari Whitten, MS So with that in mind, what is defense mode and what role do the mitochondria have in that? Because as most people are taught in their high school and college and graduate school and medical school biology classes, basically mitochondria, what people know is they’re the powerhouse of the cell and most people’s knowledge stops there. And, you know, in graduate school, in medical school, it’s like it goes a little bit further and basically they’ll teach you a story that, you know, mitochondria are one of many different organelles in the cell, but they’re basically framed as these sort of mindless energy generators that just take in carbs and fats and pump out ATP. And what you’re alluding to here, very much like my work, heavily influenced by Dr. Robert Naviaux’s and the cell danger response is that mitochondria are way more important than we ever learned in biology and physiology courses in our formal educations.

Eric Balcavage, DC Yeah. I think what we’ve learned from Naviaux’s work and others is that the mitochondria have the ability to sense the energy flow through a cell and there’s a certain amount of energy that we need for the cell to run smoothly. And when there’s a drop in energy, it’s like somebody flicked the smoke detector or it’s smoke, a fire alarm in the factory. Right. And so, whoa, there’s a problem here. And now, all of a sudden, instead of making widgets, we’re going to shift to getting anybody who’s not important out of here. And everybody else is going to be focused on trying to find a threat and put out the if it’s a fire. Right.

And I think that might account what we’re learning about the mitochondria. And, you know, for anybody listening to this, we know probably this much of what we know, we think we know this much and we really probably know this much. So we all this stuff, we say we’re simplifying it, dumbing it down, but we mitochondria seem to have ability to sense energy flow. And when they sense that there’s a drop in energy flow that can initiate the change in physiology from manufacturing, making peptides and proteins and hormones and all of these other things too, saying, hey, there’s some type of energy, something stealing energy here, it’s a potential threat. And let’s shift to defense mode. Slow down the manufacturing and start into defense mode. And then Navy oh in his paper talks about a whole bunch of different steps to that cell danger physiology and that and that process. And reducing mitochondrial numbers and function is a large part of a protective cell danger response and people might consider why would that be a protective response? If you’re taking the thing that’s actually generating energy, how could it possibly be that having fewer of those, it’s better.

And the reason for that, at least in what we believe right now, is that when we have cells that are in this state of low stress, what we call homeostasis or manufacturing mode, those cells are bringing glucose and fats and other resources into the cell. They’re jamming them into the mitochondria to be converted in through the credits cycle and something called the electron transport transfer or chain to turn food energy into cellular energy. And the process of that is awesome, especially when we have oxygen to drive the process because we could take one glucose molecule and make 36 ATP, which is its energy cellular energy units. So we get great return on in our investment and any excess we can drive off as heat and create a little some other side effects that are beneficial to the cell, just cell. That process of going through that Krebs cycle, electron transport chain making that cellular energy results in a little bit of exhaust. Just like driving your car, you’re still driving a gas car is going to create a little bit of exhaust. And so that sounds bad, like it’s making some waste that comes out. Yeah, you’re making some exhaust. We call those free radicals. Well, that doesn’t sound good. Well, the good news is the cell also makes, as with many things, in cellular physiology for the free radicals we make, we also have a system inside the cell that makes anti oxidants things to kind of balance out those free radicals that are being generated so that we don’t damage the cell as part of the process of making cellular energy.

So that’s how it should work in a low stress state. But one of the defense mechanisms to find a threat, it’s a bacteria virus, an organism is to ramp up some of those free radicals and ramp up inflammatory chemicals, which could damage the cell if they were excessive. But they’re also part of the tools that we use to deal with the threat. So the cellular intelligence is pretty smart. If I have all the exhaust and I’m making this regular mitochondrial function blocks, I have more free radicals that are being generated as part of my defense response, way, way more free radicals being generated. And I have the ability to make antioxidants. And so if I don’t do something, I either have to make more antioxidants or I need to decrease the free radicals. Otherwise, we have excessive, free, radical formation.

We call that oxidative stress. And that’s what creates damage and destruction to the cell cellular intelligence. Is this smarter than that? So what it does is it says, hey, what’s the more important thing here, making cellular energy or defending myself, defending myself? So what am I going to do? I’m going to downregulate the mitochondria. I have a mate that’s cellular energy, but I’ll also make less exhaust. Then I can use those antioxidants to deal with the fallout from this defense mechanism without causing damage and destruction to the cell. My opinion, based on some of the sites.

Ari Whitten, MS So you said earlier, I loved when you were describing sort of the overview of the paradigms of how conventional medicine looks at thyroid conditions and how a lot of alternative and functional medicine practitioners look at it and how you look at it. Similarly, there’s this other layer to what you’re describing at the mitochondrial level where there’s another parallel of of what’s going on, where where, you know, when when I started talking about mitochondria ten years ago, it was it was a strange thing to be doing. And I would get a lot of funny looks. And I was saying, you know, mitochondria are really important to this energy and fatigue story. And everybody else was focused on adrenal fatigue and thought I was crazy.

Now mitochondria are in vogue and everybody’s talking about mitochondria. But there is a what I would say and I think you’d agree that there’s a very simplistic frame and understanding about mitochondria and most functional medicine practitioners basically approach it by saying, you know, they run some tests and we don’t even really have very good tests for mitochondrial function. But they run some tests, maybe organic acids tests or maybe a few other things that indirectly might indicate mitochondrial function or deficiencies of certain nutrients and cofactors needed for mitochondrial energy production. And based on that, they’ll say, Oh, you have mitochondrial dysfunction here, take this acetyl l-carnitine and de ribose and alpha lipoic acid and coke ten and PCU and boom. Now we’re solving your mitochondrial dysfunction. And what you are talking about is something considerably more sophisticated than that. So describe the difference between what your approaches to understanding and fixing mitochondrial function versus the one I just presented.

Eric Balcavage, DC Well, I think the big argument that is made when we look at tests like organic acid test and other tests or somebody says you have mitochondrial dysfunction, but anybody who’s got chronic illness, I think they I’ll make the argument or the agreement that, yes, there’s changes in your mitochondrial function that don’t make you feel awesome. But after that, I have a real issue because what somebody would say is, okay, what you have is if you have your mitochondrial not working, therefore it’s broken. And therefore the primary reason it’s broken is because it doesn’t have enough micronutrients. So I’m going to give you B12 CoQ10 up above in my argument would be first of all, if you have that many micronutrient deficiencies, then the issue is probably not that you need a mitochondrial supplement. What you need is better diet, better digestion, better gut functioning physiology, better assimilation of those things, not just more stuff, right? So that’s problem. If you have that many micronutrient deficiencies, then you’ve got to start with why? Why am I so deficient in nutrients? So that’s part one.

And then but that also goes to why I might have mitochondrial downregulation in the first place, right? Because maybe I have this chronic dysbiosis, maybe I have a leaky gut, maybe I have a dysregulated immune system. All of these dangerous things are going on. The second part of that is we make the assumption that the cell has no control. And then if I just give enough stuff with the Will of the Jedi, it is going to go into the cell and it’s going to work the way I want it to. And that’s what’s it would love if that happened. But how many you know, how many times I told my kid to go clean the room and they didn’t do it? I mean, and you expect me to get then supplement. I’m giving you to work the way I wanted to write.

I have almost no control of my kids at times, and yet I have more control of them than I have. What I give you as a supplement. Right. The other problem that goes on is we make assumptions like that sometimes based on labs that aren’t well validated in what they’re really measuring or showing. And when you really do look at mitochondrial, when somebody’s got reduced mitochondrial function like Culture ten comes up all the time. But if you look at the literature and research, Q10 is often not deficient when somebody has downregulated mitochondria. Why? Because they’re not using it. Because the mitochondria is not using the same load of CoQ10, so they don’t have sufficient deficient levels. You’ll hear that with people where they have hypothyroidism, so they’re going to have low coax. You know, when you have downregulation of T3 in the cell, you actually have more coax. You tend because they can’t use it efficiently, so they don’t need more. They need to the better thing. We need to step back and say, hmm, why is the cell working like this? You know, ultimately, could there be some mitochondrial dysfunction?

Yeah, we can make that argument and talk about things that may cause the mitochondria to truly be dysfunctional. But I don’t think it’s just as simple as just give B6 B12. I think we do that too often with stuff, and I think it’s one of the problems, the same thing we do with thyroid physiology. Well, I don’t like that number, so let me give you more of that and that’ll make it work. Well, no. It also assumes that the cell has no control. I like the cell does not get to be able to control what’s going on inside it. And I think we do have enough literature that suggests that the cells actually get to control what happens inside. There’s a level of intelligence that we don’t fully understand that cells get to determine what crosses the membrane, what gets into the mitochondria, what doesn’t go into mitochondria. So I think it’s a very naive approach when we consider that it’s as simple as that. My argument is if we think that the mitochondria is damaged or dysfunctional, then we should ask the question why? And honestly, when I look at mitochondrial tests, I when I you can look at organic acid, but one of the tests I really like to run as it’s a test if I’m looking at mitochondria is the might a swab plus from Watts I can’t think of Teresa lab name not a mess yeah but.

Ari Whitten, MS The test is called Midas swab.

Eric Balcavage, DC Yeah, it’s called a minus swab. Or might a swab plus. And essentially it’s a swab. You look at mitochondria so we can see mitochondrial density and we can see how well complex one, two, three and four work. And some of the strategies that you know, when people are on a strategy and I’m like, okay, well let’s see how it works. And we look at their mitochondria is not working any better because it’s the wrong strategy. And even when it comes to thyroid physiology, what I’ll see is people on higher levels of mitochondria are on thyroid support that are given by their physicians. They don’t have better mitochondrial capacity and function, but what they often have is higher mitochondrial density and more oxidative stress, because you’re pushing the thyroid hormone will increase mitochondrial density, but now you’re creating more mitochondria. The cell, as part of the defense missing, was trying to reduce the mitochondrial density. The fewer mitochondria now with potentially less resources coming into the cell, it’s a recipe for more oxidative stress and damage, which I’ve seen over the years.

Ari Whitten, MS I want to stress to everybody listening the importance of understanding, paradigm understanding one one’s frame, one’s lens, or the way that they understand what the problem is. As an example of this, one might understand depression and say one might look at depression and say, Oh, this is a chemical imbalance in the brain. You’ve got a deficiency of this neurotransmitter, too much of that neurotransmitter. And this has arisen just for random reasons or due to one’s personal genetics and because of this random imbalance of neurotransmitters in the brain. Here’s this chemical that will interrupt the way that these nerves function so that you produce more of this chemical or so that we prevent the re uptake of this chemical. So in other words, the paradigm is depression is the result of a randomly or genetically developed chemical imbalance in the brain that requires a drug intervention to fix it. Or alternatively, I would argue much more sophisticated and science based understanding of depression would see depression as a very natural and normal result of a person being out of harmony in some way, being not aligned with either eating healthy, living healthy.

And we know, of course, that nutrition impacts brain function and mood and depression. We know, of course, that exercise impacts that. We know sleep and circadian rhythm impacts it. We know light impacts it. We know toxins and inflammations and gut health impacts it. Right. So we start to see all these layers emerge. We know that social connection impacts it. We know that we have all of these these lay out, like also how aligned you are with, you know, if you’re working a soul sucking job that you’re not passionate about and that’s how you’re spending your days, like it’s pretty reasonable to be depressed.

Whereas if you’re spending your days doing something you love and you’re passionate about, you probably are going to be in a different mood. And we know that all of these dimensions, we have lots and lots of literature showing all of these dimensions impacting on brain function, mood and neurotransmitter balance. And ultimately, this, this whether you are depressed or a happier person. And in light of all of that knowledge, it’s actually ridiculous, absurd and totally unscientific to reduce myopically reduce depression down into just a random chemical imbalance in the brain. And this is just our unintelligent body doing this for random reasons. Here’s this drug to fix your chemical imbalance. And so what you’re talking about is essentially the same thing at the level of the body. You have a lot of people who are in a rush to do chemical interventions and treat the body as unintelligent and what you are arguing in favor of is seeing the body through a lens that says, why is the body why is the intelligent body doing this and responding in this way? And that totally changes the types of interventions that you will do, the types of approaches you’ll use to try to fix that.

Eric Balcavage, DC Yeah, well and I think based on what you said, we’d say, hey, that if you have better gut physiology, you have probably better neurotransmitter function. Okay, so I have a potentially compromised neurotransmitter function. Okay, well, then what are the things that can influence it? Well, your gut. Well, maybe we should take a look at that. I forget about that. Let’s just give you this drug. Let’s just bypass the thing. And it’s. But we do that with everything we know. Exercise increases, mood increases, dopamine levels. Right. Makes us feel good. Increased serotonin makes us feel well. But I’m depressed. Do you exercise? No. Well, maybe the issue isn’t that you need a drug. Maybe the issue is you need to do the things that are going to create that positive environment. You may be doing a lot of things or have a lot of things going on in your environment that are creating not. It’s still, in my opinion, it’s still an appropriate response, at least at the onset, right? If you have a bad gut, the appropriate response might be, well, I’ve got an infection. I need to move serotonin away from or move tryptophan away from me making serotonin and drive it down. The Clinton lytic acid pathway and makes them maybe things that can be used as more toxin to deal with this organism or that threat. Right. Feeling stressed? Oh, I’m. I’m. I have insomnia.

Well, maybe the reason you have insomnia is because you have this stress response going on. Your body’s like, whoa, we’re in danger. We don’t need to take a deep sleep. I don’t really need that level of melatonin. I really need my body to be more alert. So I’m going to drive that tryptophan away from serotonin and make more stimulatory chemicals. So, you know, I think it’s sometimes we just assume that the body intelligence isn’t working. I think it is work if it’s responding or adapting to whatever is going on in that environment. So that’s where we have to ask what’s going on in your environment that’s creating this to manifest. So we have to, but that’s hard, right? That takes more than five or ten or 15 minute visit every four months or a couple times a year. And it doesn’t leave us too much room to not take care of ourselves.

Okay. I mean, we know other model allows it to be like it’s an external, it’s a disease or disorder. I’m not in control. It just happened to me in the model that we’re talking about is more where somebody has to say, not my fault, it’s not fully my fault. There’s a lot of things that could have happened, but it’s my responsibility to make the change. And I think that’s the really important part. I think sometimes people hear the message like, Oh, you telling me I did. It’s my diet, did this or whatever. It’s not necessarily your fault, but it is your responsibility. Once you’re educated that you have to take care of yourself. You just can’t do the catch on the dashboard and say, Take me wherever and expect that you’re going to get to where you want your path to plan the strategy. If you want to be healthy and be functional and most people aren’t, they’re not worried about their health and, well, their well-being until they’re in a state of chronic illness and disease. Unfortunately.