Dr. Martin Picard

I'm in the clinic half day a week and I see patients that I've followed now for about six years who have genetic mitochondrial diseases.

So they're pretty rare, but they have a mutation or a deletion in the mitochondrial DNA.

Some of them is in the nucleus, nuclear genome, but it affects the mitochondrial energy transformation capacity.

Those people are always tired.

They don't feel well.

They avoid exercise at all costs because it just feels so terrible because their mitochondria have increased resistance to energy flow.

So if you try to push more energy through, it's really uncomfortable.

GDF-15, through the roof.

The best biomarker of mitochondrial disease is actually GDF-15, which tells us something about what GDF-15 means to the organism.

When the mitochondria don't work properly, those cells that can't flow energy properly

send out GDF-15 as a signal.

And if you do a sleep study on those individuals and you look at how well do they decrease their energy expenditure to go into this restorative state, the parasympathetic nervous system can't kick in.

So some of the biggest difference we see between mitochondrial disease and people who have normal healthy spectrum of mitochondria is this inability to slow down and to go into this restorative state at night.

So that positions mitochondria,

in the context of restoration and our ability to heal and lifespan in those people has decreased by about three decades.

Yeah, I think we've gotten things wrong for two main reasons.

One is we don't think about the individual.

We try to find

one size fit all solutions.

Carnivore is good, or keto is good, or high carb is good, or meat is bad, or all of these variations, which people feel really strongly about.