This series of blogs on Mitochondria is from the notes that accompany a presentation at the Vancouver Island Herb Gather June 11, 2022.

In Part one of this Blog series, we looked briefly at what a mitochondria is and its ties to both energy production and pop-culture. Here we are going to look at what happens when it start to dysfunction.

What are the symptoms of mitochondria dysfunction? 

While there are a couple of issues that will impact mitochondrial functions in the body, you will see symptoms first when there’s a problem with your mitochondria.  The symptoms can be very mild or very severe depending on the nature and severity of mitochondrial dysfunction in an individual patient. 

These symptoms might manifest in your life as: 

• Fatigue 
• Muscle cramps & weakness 
• Light headedness 
• Heartburn 
• Anxiety 
• Ataxia (abnormal, uncoordinated movement)
• Impaired vision & hearing 
• Brain fog 
• Seizures 
• Digestive issues 
• Exercise intolerance. 

The Mitochondrial Theory of Ageing

This theory argues that aging — and many of the diseases that come with it — is caused by a slow degeneration in the quality of mitochondria. This is because during normal cellular respiration — the process where the mitochondria burn up the food, we eat using the oxygen we breathe — reactive molecules called free radicals are created. These free radicals then go on to inflict damage to adjacent structures, including the DNA in both the mitochondria and nucleus.

Mitochondria Energy to Create Abundance

The first major era of life on Earth should really be considered the phase of the bacteria. It wasn’t until about 2 billion years ago (out of 4.5 billion years) that the mitochondria set up a permanent ‘home’ inside another bacteria, creating the first eukaryotic cell, with a true nucleus. Before this, all cells were single celled and bacteria-like. Then two of the bacteria decided to hangout. Both cells were separate bacteria like cells, but the new ‘marriage’ soon became a symbiotic relationship. Most of science believes that the larger cell bacteria enveloped the smaller mitochondria bacterial and ‘saw’ its usefulness and decided to keep it as a useful partner to the well-being of the larger cell. Some (a much smaller group) say that the mitochondria conquered the large cell, considering it a comfortable safe home. Neither of these really sounds like a true symbiotic relationship. What filters down to us is that they both agreed to a symbiotic relationship that can be considered the longest living marriage in the history of life on this planet. We should celebrate this long successful marriage. 

Mitochondria: They Are the Force

The mitochondria are the powerhouses or the energy factories of the cell. They break down nutrients and create energy for the cell. This process is known as cellular respiration. The mitochondria are quite small organelles, but each cell contains hundreds to several thousands of them depending on the need of the cell. The heart and brain need lots of energy, so they have substantially more than some other cells. The amount is no small amount of energy, with the estimate that gram for gram our mitochondria produce 10,000 times the energy of the sun every second. 

This means that the central idea of the Matrix series of movies is that Machines meet their energy needs by harvesting it from vast ‘human energy farms’ could have some basis in reality. OK, I will try to hold back from using too many pop-culture reference, but sometimes it is hard to restrain myself.

Metabolically active cells, such as muscle, heart, and brain, have thousands of mitochondria. The egg cell (oocyte) has a massive one hundred thousand mitochondria. By contrast the sperm has fewer than 100. Red blood cells and skin have very few if any at all.  By weight, up to 10 percent of the human body is mitochondria. In numbers, there are about ten million billion. The saying “power in numbers” seems rather fitting here.

I like to think of the mitochondria as the energy workhorses that do much of the work behind the scenes.  I envision them similar the house elves like Doby in the Harry Potter series. They accomplish most of the household magic behind the scenes so the Wizards can focus on more complex problems.

I guess they also have a similarity to the maintenance bots on Star Teck Voyeur, keeping the ship functioning at high capacity so the crew can get on with their tasks. Ok, I got caught up in Pop-culture daydreaming again.  

The mitochondria is a busy place constantly working to create the energy that runs our body. So next time someone catches you doing something like daydreaming, sitting on the porch, saying you are not doing anything, don’t worry. You can say, “On the outside I might look like I not doing anything, but on the insides my metabolism is working away at lighting speed. I am just taking a physical break for my mitochondria to catch up”.

The thing is that not only are you doing the mechanical cycle of producing energy in each mitochondrion, but you are also doing it a million times a second. This of course can be multiplied by the thousands of mitochondria in each cell, with over a trillion cells in the body. Well, that is a spin class! So, daydream on and give your mitochondria time to catch up. 

Health Conditions Linked to Mitochondrial Dysfunction (MD)

Some recent data suggests mitochondrial disease (MD) is now seen in as many as one in every 2,500 people. When you consider the following conditions, it’s realistic to predict that we could see the reported incidence of mitochondrial disease (inherited or acquired) skyrocket to more than one in twenty, or even one in ten. When you look at the fact that mitochondria issues are strongly linked to the following health issues, you can see why there has been a lot of research into this area lately.

• Type 2 diabetes 
• Cancers 
• Alzheimer’s disease 
• Parkinson’s disease 
• Bipolar disorder 
• Schizophrenia 
• Aging and senescence 
• Anxiety disorders 
• Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis 
• Cardiovascular diseases 
• Sarcopenia (loss of muscle mass and strength) 
• Exercise intolerance 
• Long term Covid
• Fatigue, including chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and myofascial pain 

I left the last bullet point to the end as it branches out into many disease syndromes that are not only hard to diagnose, but they have also been harder to treat and often ignored by a large percentage of Western Practitioners. Many consider this constellation of health issues to be the worst treated condition in Western medicine. Once a practitioner establishes the cause of these health issues, there is a clear implication for treatment. This is called diagnosis – with the cause established, the treatment follows naturally and logically. In the treatment of chronic conditions, doctors no longer diagnose. They may be good at recognizing and giving names to clinical pictures, but this now masquerades as a diagnosis. Patients feel comforted and reassured that their illness has been recognized because it has been named. 

The thing is that all of them have two things in common – fatigue and dysfunctional mitochondria. So, for our purposes we can almost substitute mitochondria dysfunction (MD) for all these issues. One of the problems with using the older names of CFS/ME, is that it leads the practitioner to prescribing the wrong medicines that include anti-depressants, beta blockers, and a whole load of medications that weaken the mitochondria more. This is kind of like ‘making the goat the gardener’ meaning the problem spirals out of control and become a long-term health issue that only helps the bottom line of Big Pharma. 

All these fatigue situations create a collapse of the energy in the body, mind and often spirit. Energy is a vital part of life but is medically neglected. Even though mitochondrial diseases are supposed to be rare in the genome, don’t think for even a minute that it can’t happen to you. In fact, the closer one looks at the full mitonuclear genomes of normal folks, the more one realizes that no one is actually normal—we are all, shall we say, temporarily asymptomatic. 

The commonest complaint I have seen in over 40 years of seeing patience is fatigue – it even has its own acronym, ‘TATT’ (tired all the time) – but it is the worst treated symptom in modern Western medicine.

We would all like to have more energy. Energy is like money – it is great fun spending it, but very hard work earning it. Think of energy as money in the bank, but our energy bank is one which we cannot go overdrawn on – we cannot borrow energy. If our bank runs out of energy, then we die. Energy is the difference between life and death. Therefore, fatigue is such an important symptom – it protects us from death. 

It is clear what our mandate is: to help people increase energy if needed, to live a full life. But it goes further than that. Mitochondrial under performance is ultimately behind many specific disease processes like the accumulation of unburnt fatty acids in fatty liver disease, or the clogging debris in degenerating tubules in renal disease, cancer is the entropic cellular eventuality for which we must all prepare. Depending on which organ, and which kind of tumor, cancer can be both a big bang and heat death of our existence—and both are controlled by mitochondrial energy.

In our next Blog – Part 3, we are going to look at items and actions that reduce the function of the mitochondria.