The facts of cell mitochondria and energy production

Your body needs energy whether you are walking, talking, eating, sitting around, or sleeping. Energy is the fuel for your body’s internal functions. It is needed for repairing and building cells and tissue, and it allows you to interact with the rest of the world.

Just to keep your body alive requires a basic level of energy. This is typically about 60 percent of the total energy you use every day.

This energy supports your breathing, blood circulation, digestion, and removal of toxins. Keeping your body warm requires 7 percent of your total daily energy.

Energy is released when a compound called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, gets broken down. It then gets recycled over 500 times every day. Each of us will typically use up to our body weight in ATP over the course of normal day.

How much energy you need is affected by how much muscle you have. Muscle requires more energy than body tissues to maintain itself.

Developmental changes also require more energy. So if you are growing or healing, your body needs more. Being pregnant and lactating increases the demands as well.

When you get sick this requires more energy. You could increase your energy needs 8 to 25 percent if you have an infection or fever.

What we eat also affects how much energy we need to break down food and absorb the nutrients. Carbohydrates and fat don’t take as long to digest as protein. Digestion and absorption use about 10 percent of your daily energy stores.

Even our thinking requires energy, like reading and daydreaming. Brain cells can use more than double the amount of energy that other cells in our body use. When worry and stress come into play, you can quickly start to drain energy.

Physical activity is the greatest variable for energy needs. It is the second largest user of energy in our body.

We have both obligatory demands on our physical activity, like work and studying, and discretionary needs, like skiing and playing soccer.

Energy is not a nutrient that we eat. But it is released from food through oxidation. There are little factories within each of our cells that generate energy. These are called mitochondria and there are hundreds of them. They play a critical role in our well-being and vitality.

Metabolism happens in the mitochondria. They create about 90 percent of our energy by taking the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat to process energy.

Most of the time our mitochondria can keep up with our energy needs. When they can’t we can start to feel sluggish, tired, depressed, foggy, stumble, mumble, and even get achy.

Mitochondria are very sensitive to damage. In more serious cases DNA mutations can cause them to fail. And mitochondria have other important cellular processes besides energy production, such as cell formation and differentiation.

They also help cleanse the liver and detoxify the body, metabolize cholesterol, as well as create and balance hormones.

There are some things we can do to maximize mitochondria energy production and reduce damage. Make sure you are getting a healthy amount of rest, eating an anti-inflammatory diet, and avoid high amounts of stress.

Definitely avoid toxins and infections. And don’t eat too much high-calorie, low nutrient food.

There are a couple of molecules that have been shown in lab studies to boost metabolism by making the mitochondria run better – alpha-lipoic acid and acetyl-l-carnitine. Even omega-3’s can help build mitochondrial membranes.

I’ve also been reading research that talks about increasing levels of a molecule called NAD, or nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. There is positive evidence that nicotainamide riboside is able to boost the levels of NAD in a cell and thus increase overall energy.

Addressing inflammation, having good gut health, balancing hormones, exercising, and supporting your body to detoxify itself can all be supportive of optimal mitochondria function. Come on down and we can talk more.

Scott Porter, a functional medicine pharmacist, is the director of the Center for Functional Nutrition at Sandpoint Super Drug.