Chris Masterjohn

Why are you making more oxidative stress?

I actually think it's way more simple than anyone is thinking about it.

It's

mitochondrial energy production is producing everything in your body, it's repairing it, it's maintaining it, and it's putting it where it belongs, that means that mitochondria produce the energy that they need to produce everything in the mitochondria, right?

And so if you have a little gap in your energy production, like let's say you get

I think one way to think of aging is, well, I've suffered through so many cumulative insults.

Like, I got sick so many times.

I got injured so many times.

I had days where I didn't eat optimal nutrition so many times.

And I think what all those things are doing is like, well, that period of overtraining that you did, your mitochondria were...

were forced to help you give you the energy for, you know, that the extra set of squats that you did and they had a little bit left over for themselves and they got, you know, a half a percent worse at producing energy.

And so that sets up a vicious cycle because now now that they could not repair themselves as well, now they get a little bit worse and get a little bit worse.

And what you see in the literature is that

As people age, starting around age 18 through age 70 to 80, you're losing your mitochondrial function an average rate of 1% per year.

So by the time you're 70, you have half the energy that you started out with that baseline.

And that, I think what explains that is just the vicious cycle of the mitochondria got, they lost a quarter percent here, a quarter percent there, and they just started repairing themselves less effectively because they're the engines fueling everything, including that.

And so, but the good news is that age only explains 25% of mitochondrial function.

So it's the average that's going down at 1% per year.

The average person is half-

producing half the energy at age 70 than they were at age 18.