Today we’re talking about mitochondria and your health. My guest today is Dr. Susanne Bennett. Dr. Susanne has over 27 years of clinical experience in the fields of allergies, clinical nutrition, methyl-genetics and anti-aging medicine. She is the author of the #1 International Best-Seller, Mighty Mito – Power Up Your Mitochondria for Boundless Energy, Laser Sharp Mental Focus and a Powerful Vibrant Body and The 7 Day Allergy Makeover.
Dr. Susanne is also the host of “Wellness For Life” on RadioMD and iHeart Radio. She is devoted to sharing health strategies and providing easy to implement tips to improve your life and start feeling better today. On today’s show Dr. Susanne shares how the secret to radiant energy is in your mitochondria. We discuss why mitochondria are so important for radiant health and skin, and she shares specific foods, lifestyle choices, and supplements that improve our mitochondrial health to prevent chronic disease and premature aging.
Topics discussed today include:
- Dr. Susanne discovered the power of mitochondria about 5 years ago
- She accidently crunched her neck and received a traumatic brain injury
- She also had a swelling in the brain that blocked the pituitary gland which caused hormonal issues
- She felt like she was having a litany of health issues and aging prematurely
- She discovered that addressing the mitochondria would help with all of these symptoms by fighting the root cause
- Dr. Susanne’s book Mighty Mito focuses on the three P’s of mitochondrial health which are preventing mitochondrial damage, purging bad mitochondria, and how to protect and produce new mitochondria
- Every tissue in our bodies has mitochondria, these are subcellular organelles that live within these tissues
- ATP is a power in the mitochondria
- Dr. Susanne is going to teach us how to have bigger, healthier, and happier mitochondria
- Causes of mitochondrial impairment are free radical damage such as pollution, mold, toxins, smoking, pesticides, gmo foods, alcohol, over eating, over exercising, low oxygen and UV light.
- Mitochondria need oxygen to create ATP
- The best way to get rid of bad mitochondria is HIIT exercise or 1 minute on and 1 minute off for 10 minutes, every 2 to 3 days
- 5 steps to increase mitochondria
- Eliminate fried foods and trans-fats
- Remove 7 types of foods that trigger inflammation
- Eating natural colorful organic foods
- Supplements are a big key
- Oxygenating pudding
- L- Carnitine, Liposomal Glutathione, CoQ10, Essential Amino Acids are some of the mitochondrial supplements Dr. Susanne recommends
Key Takeaways:
Mitochondria are key building blocks within our cells. Keeping them healthy and happy through lifestyle, dietary choices and proper supplementation can be a key to maintaining health.
Mentioned on today’s show:
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***Intro***
Dr. Trevor: Hi there, I’m Dr. Trevor Cates, welcome to this podcast. Today, we’re talking about mitochondria and your health.
My guest today is Dr. Susanne Bennett. Dr. Susanne has over 27 years of clinical experience in the fields of allergies, clinical nutrition, method generics and anti-aging medicine. She is the author of the number one international bestseller, Mighty Mito and the 7 Day Allergy Make Over.
Dr. Susanne is also the host of Wellness For Life on radio MD and I Heart Radio. She’s devoted to sharing health strategies and providing easy to implement tips to improve your life and start feeling better today.
On today’s show, Dr. Susanne shares how the secret to radiant energy is in your mitochondria. We discuss why mitochondria are so important for radiant health and skin. She shares specific foods, lifestyle choices, and supplements that improve our mitochondrial health to prevent chronic disease and premature aging. So please enjoy this interview with Dr. Susanne.
***Interview***
Dr. Susanne, it’s so great to have you on my show!
Dr. Susanne: Oh I can’t tell you, Dr. Trevor, I’m so happy to see you! I haven’t seen you in ages and it’s so good just to hear your voice and feel your energy, you’re awesome! Thanks so much for having me on your show.
Dr. Trevor: Yeah, thanks. You’re back to tell us about your number one international bestseller and what you’ve learned with this, so congratulations on that, it’s called Mighty Mito, right?
Dr. Susanne: Yeah, the book is called Mighty Mito.
Dr. Trevor: What got you down that track?
Dr. Susanne: The Mighty Mito is basically mitochondrial, about your mitochondrial health. My discovery of the power of mitochondria began five years ago. You don’t know the story I don’t think, Trevor, I don’t think I’ve known you for that long. But anyway five years ago, I had an accident that’s totally took me towards another level.
Often, you hear lot of doctors asking why did you start going into this kind of work, or why did you wanna write a book about this and it has a lot to do with experiences we have to go through. What ended up happening was I sustained pretty much the most severe injury I’ve ever experienced in my life. It was a day, a regular typical work day and I’m always busy running, going to the office really quickly.
I just jumped into my refrigerator, I opened the refrigerator door for the freezer and I got something out of it and something fell out, actually it was an ice pack fell down. I picked it up and on the carpet I went down in a squatting position complete squat and I picked it up so I can put it back into the refrigerator and boom, what ended happening was that refrigerator upper door was opened, swung open to the point where my head went straight into it.
Basically, I created this kind of accordion like position of my head and neck and I crunched it really bad. I had a severe pain and I saw stars, but the little things that most scared me the most was actually the tingling, numbness and shooting pain down both my arms and my legs. I knew right away I had a tragic brain injury, a TBI. I definitely had cervical disc and neurological issues going down both arms. As a doctor you know, you have to be okay. I gotta get this taken care of.
That day I actually went back to work. I went to work I did everything, I did what I can during the day. But soon after I started seeing doctors and therapists, and physical therapy and all these different types of people to help me because not only did I have the physical injury of the neurologic symptoms, but actually within weeks I started having hormonal issues.
What ended what happening was a condition called hypopituitarism. I know you know this, but I’m gonna explain a little bit what that means. It basically means my hypopituitary ended up having a reduction in blood flow, I was squeezing the injury from the head injury, cause a swelling in my brain it was squeezing the blood flow out of the pituitary. We weren’t getting enough oxygen into the pituitary.
The pituitary is your master gland pretty much in your head that covers a lot of your hormones. The thyroid, the adrenals, your female hormones and male gonads. It has so many functions to that pituitary but what ended up happening in that four weeks of that injury, I started having all sorts of terrible hormonal symptoms. My thyroid, I was getting hypothyroid issues. I couldn’t even, I was always cold, I had cold intolerance.
I had hypotension, what that means is I have low blood pressure. When I wake up, I’m on a sitting position, I’d literally feel like I have to hold myself, embrace myself, because my low blood pressure was happening. I was urinating constantly and that was part of the reason because my adrenal glands were thrown off from the fact that my pituitary wasn’t able to stimulate my adrenal glands properly. Blood sugar issues were off. For the first time, I had inflammatory markers in my body and hemoglobin A1C issues.
We talk a lot about what pre-diabetes is, and hemoglobin A1C is a marker that shows if you’re pre-diabetic, and it was literally showing that. I was like I’ve never had it that high. It was always at five.one or five.two and you know from that number, you probably recommend to your patients listen, we got to work on this.
It wasn’t like I changed my diet, I didn’t change anything I just had this terrible injury and the stress from it, and the inflammation from it. I also couldn’t sleep. I had terrible, emotional anxiousness, the sleeping was horrible, and of course when you don’t sleep you don’t rest. All of these things started happening.
The one thing also that was physical visible was, back then I didn’t wanna talk about it, but the one thing you’re able to notice is that I was missing muscle mass. Losing muscle mass—you’re in the skin industry, we want all our muscles in our face be nice and firm and I was losing muscle mass in my face, in my muscles, in my legs. I was so tired all the time I didn’t wanna exercise.
But also when you injure yourself in that manner, when you have a neck and head problem, you really wanna work gingerly, at least for me it was that way. By not moving, that was creating a big problem. I was losing my muscles in my face so I started looking bad, my skin was kinda sagging, and it just didn’t look good. I was aging, I was basically aging rapidly from this whole experience.
I tried everything, I went to all these different doctors. I even went to Shamman, he goes to healers, tried everything.
From all the research I’ve found, the one thing that really got me to another level was addressing my mitochondria. Addressing my mitochondria because that was really the root cause of why I was having all these symptoms, why I wasn’t able to quickly rejuvenate my body and get rid of this neurological issues. I had inflammation throughout my brain and nervous system but then again, that whole pituitary issue and all my endocrine issues was causing rapid aging process.
Finding the root cause of the mitochondria, whether it was in my brain and my pituitary gland or my thyroid or my adrenals, that was the key to getting me back in shape. Everything that I put into the Mighty Mito book is all there, that’s what I’m here to share with you, how you can use and get to the root of your issues on learning how to get rid of your mitochondria impairment, how to prevent mitochondrial damage.
Number two, how can we get rid of and purge off the bad ones. We’re everyday constantly had bad mitochondria to it, we need to purge that and get rid of it which is mitophagy.
Number three, how do we protect our mitochondria and produce a new one so that you could live a healthy, longer, and a life full of energy and vibrancy. You know skin health and physically feeling good. That’s the three piece that I talk about in my book on mitochondrial health.
Dr. Trevor: Great, great. Yeah, I didn’t know about that story. It’s interesting you made the connection with the mitochondria and that’s what lead you to write this book. Let’s back up for a moment and let’s get basic, let’s talk about mitochondria. What are they specifically, why are they so important for our health and also for our skin?
Dr. Susanne: Yeah, absolutely. Every tissue in your body we have mitochondria except the red blood cells because the red blood cells, the only thing it does is carry oxygen, but every cell. Your skin, your brain, all of your organs, your muscles, your heart, everything has mitochondria. These mitochondria’s are organelles that live inside all of these tissues. The heart cell has a lot of mitochondria. Your retina back there has a lot of mitochondira. Muscles, we need a lot of mitochondria because these tissues need a lot of oxygen to optimize the function.
The mitochondria literally are these little organelles and tissue, and there’s a little side fact that one.five billion years ago, a little cells that’s called prokaryot actually joined and is really high in energy and joined into another cell for protection and symbiotically they were better because the cell actually, the microbe got energy from that little prokaryot which is now called the mitochondria.
There’s a symbiotic relationship with the cell being protected. The mitochondria got the protection of a bigger cell and now the energy that’s produced by the mitochondria gives the cell life and the ability to survive.
These are super important organelles in every one of our cells that made energy and that energy is called ATP, adenosine triphosphate.
ATP is actually the reason why I became healthier, the reason why I got rid of all the inflammation in my body, the reason why I was able to stabilize my blood sugar level better. It really is a power in the mitochondria. The power in the form is called ATP, adenosine triphosphate.
Now, if your mitochondria doesn’t function very well, just on a basic level, what you’re gonna notice, I’m sure a lot of us are going through this and a lot of people out there listening will say you know what I’m tired all the time, I’m just feeling like I don’t have that much muscle energy as much as I used to. I feel pain and soreness especially after working in front of a computer.
I actually gained weight, my belly, you know during that time when I was suffering from the injury, my belly was getting bigger. You know like that little muffin top that everyone doesn’t want. I was gaining extra fat. The reason I know this is because I have a body composition analysis machine that reads your electrical impedance and it can show you how much fat you’ve got, how much muscle you have, how much water you have.
Sure enough, those percentages were shifting. I was losing muscle like I said [00:11:11], but I was gaining fat percentage. That was something I didn’t want because we all know fat is an inflammatory organ and it can cause many other problems in the future for you.
What else can you find? If you have memory loss and you lack motivation, that could be because you’re reducing your mitochondria in your brain. If you have brain fog and depression, that can also be because you’ve got mitochondrial malfunction. Maybe your mood is changing and you’re feeling really anxious and overwhelmed, you’ve got headaches and migraines, and then if you actually have trouble healing.
You know, you cut yourself in your skin or your face, and you have an acne, a little pimple but it’s not healing and it keeps on festering and opening and it doesn’t heal very well. That may be because of mitochondria in your skin is actually reduced. Your cells may have a wholly functioned mitochondria. We can actually have mitochondria that are smaller, not big and happy and robust. Your mitochondria may be reduced in numbers.
I’m gonna teach you how to make them bigger and happier, and how to make sure that you have the higher numbers of healthy mitochondria. If you actually think about all these symptoms that I just talked about you might be having, what ends up happening over time is that you’re gonna find more diseases. Diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, autism. I shouldn’t say autism as much as, but even with kids when they have autistic issues, often it’s because they’ve been exposed to a lot of toxins. These toxins can create damage to the mitochondria.
What other conditions may you be having? You might have chronic fatigue syndrome, fiber miralgia, neurologic pain and neuropathic issues that I ended up having. Schizophrenia, bipolar disease in fact is related to mitochondrial disease. Strokes and fat, liver disease, and kidney dysfunctions, all of these diseases are all linked to mitochondrial dysfunction.
What people are talking about and you can see this more and more out there is that all diseases are linked to mitochondria. If you can get a healthier, happier mitochondria, you’re going to have a much longer life, pain free of these symptoms, you’re gonna feel a lot more physically active, you can do more things, you can be able to communicate and be with your family. Be the best you could be and of course, be in a state where you’re reversing your biological age because I love to talk about that.
Let’s feel younger, happier, even though we’re getting older. You’re a wonderful testament to that because look at you, you’re vibrant, you’ve got energy, you’re using all of the things that I’m talking about, I am sure.
Dr. Trevor: Yeah, great. Let’s talk about mitochondrial impairment. What causes it? Because you’ve mentioned environmental toxin exposure which is probably one of the things. Also, aging is one other thing that impair. What else impairs mitochondria?
Dr. Susanne: So basically the impairment of mitochondria, if you wanna look in the cellular level, it’s actually a free radical damage. Anything that we deal with, day to day, whether we breathe it, we eat it, we have it on our body, and if it’s things are gonna cause damage to our tissues, our body, our cells, our organs, and the functionality, what you’re doing is you’re actually impairing the mitochondria and that’s through free radical damage, or another name is called cell danger response.
Cell danger response is the situation that our cells go through when we’ve got free radicals. What causes free radical damage? Anything that’s in the air that can pollute your oxygen level. What I mean by that is, you know I live in LA and we’ve got pollution, there’s nothing like Los Angeles pollution. But anywhere when it comes to pollutants, mold in the environment can be very, very highly reactive and cause damage to your lung tissue, to your brain mitochondria.
Chemical fumes, you know people don’t realize that sitting in front and back of a truck or bus and you don’t press that little button that re-circulates the air in your car, well all you’re doing is sucking that air in. A lot of my patients go, you know what, I feel great in the morning but when I get to my office I’ve got a headache and I’m not feeling great at all, my energy’s low. Sometimes, you’ve got cough. Reflex of cough, and not that you’re sick but it’s because you’ve been sucking down those toxic fumes. I’ve talked about not just the fumes that are in fact in your car or from the pollution outside, but how about inside the home. I can’t tell you enough.
In my 7 Day Allergy Make Over Book, I have a whole chapter about the air inside your home, your environment. Let’s say, I literally created a brand new kitchen, I have a brand new kitchen and for the longest time I didn’t do it because there weren’t any [00:16:39] free wood for the cabinets. But I finally found a company that did [00:16:45] free, [00:16:47] cabinets and I did it and sure enough even though they say it’s BOC free, it still had out gas or fumes. I couldn’t live in my own house, I had to go and stay somewhere else for weeks just because I couldn’t live in the environment.
Other things that cause the environment, smoking, pesticides. Let’s go into things that we eat. Things that we eat such as high fertilized foods, GMO foods, alcohol, alcohol’s actually a very highly reactive toxin for the mitochondria. Not only for the liver, but for the rest of the body and brain. You know, we talked about how alcohol can cause a lot of damage but it’s really in the mitochondria. The reason why you have that hang over after having a couple of drinks, it’s because of the byproducts of alcohol which ends up being aldehyde. The byproduct plus alcohol is destroying the mitochondria in your body including in your liver.
Besides what we eat and what we drink, there’s a lot of ways that we get free radical damage. Number one, if you overeat, that causes free radical damage. People don’t understand the amount of food we eat in America. Everything is super sized. I’m always shocked how much food, as in like volume, we eat. And the volume of food, our bodies doesn’t have the capability of digesting that much of volume of food. You know, the big drinks, the big portions of pasta, the big 12 ounce steaks that a lot of people eat. The reason why we end up damaging our mitochondria that way is because you end up having a digestive problem that causes an inflammation in your gut.
On top of inflammation in the gut, you’re feeding bugs down lower in the gut such as candidiasis, bacteria, and when you have that what ends up happening is you just have more toxins in your gut not just from undigested food but from the bugs. When the bugs grow they poop more, they excrete more toxins and a lot of people get really gassy.
Did you ever get complaints from your patients about gas? When they come in, that’s one of the things they ask, How do I get rid of it? Number one, it has to do with overeating. When there’s too much gasses. One type of gas called hydrogen cas, then there’s the odorless one, that is actually a mitochondria poison. When you have more gas, that gas gets into your bloodstream and it goes to your brain and the rest of your body and it’s poison to your mitochondria. That’s the reason why when you get gassy and bloated, you don’t feel good. You’re tired all the time, you’re more irritable. You’ve seen that, right?
There are other ways that people impair their mitochondria is to over exercise. You know running for a full hour at a time, or you’re hiking for three hours or cycling that 15 mile cycle once a week during the weekend, that can also cause damage.
What else? Low oxygen, not able to breathe enough oxygen because we are shallow breathers. Shallow breathing is more like, you know, up here in the chest rather than using your girth, using your diaphragm and sucking in that oxygen where you have the maximum amount of oxygenation. Core breathing technique, you know 90% of oxygen that we breathe in actually goes to the mitochondria and that’s because our mitochondria needs oxygen to produce ATP. It uses oxygen on the food that we eat, combining it together and the energy is broken down, and what you get is ATP which is a chemical energy. Of course, UV Light, that’s another exposure.
All of these things damages your body, causes free radical damage, and then of course causes mitochondrial damage. It’s important that we address all of that. In my 7 Day Allergy Makeover Book, I talk all about the foods that you’re exposed to, toxins that you’re exposed to that you can one by one minimize. You don’t do all of it, let’s start at the easiest, is of course what you put in your body and what you eat.
Dr. Trevor: Okay, great. In addition to reducing our toxins and our air and our food, and also moderate exercise and breathing, what are some other things that we can do to help our mitochondria?
Dr. Susanne: Well, I said something about the over exercise right? To actually get rid of the bad mitochondria, sometimes mitochondria doesn’t function very well, they’re at half of the percentage to what they should be doing. And to get them to be happy and robust and really optimum functioning ones, you’ve gotta get rid of the bad ones. To get rid of the bad ones, the fastest way to get rid of them is through [00:22:16].
I don’t mean over exercising, I don’t mean stretching. I mean what I called burst to boost exercise. High intensity interval training is the best way to get rid of the bad ones. If you’re just getting rid of the bad ones, it’s called mitofusin, it cuts up all the bad parts into good ones confused together and make a good one that’s called the mitofusin. By doing this, it’s called mitophagy, that is the way we’re gonna do increase your ability to have a stronger one.
Now, what is high intensity interval training or burst to boost. My burst to boost I say you don’t need to work out but much more than 20 minutes two to three times a week. Within the 20 minutes, it’s super important that you understand you’ve gotta push yourself to a really strong intense level. When I look at that, I actually use a heart rate monitor. I use a heart rate monitor to know see how hard can I function cause I actually know my max, my max is actually higher than an average of a 54 year old. I can push my body pretty hard.
But someone who’s a sedentary person right now, you don’t have to do that. You’ve just gotta push it to the point where you can start to feel like you’re huffing and puffing and you start to feel that you’re sweating. The whole idea is you do one minute on meaning you do one minute of hard exercise. It doesn’t matter what kind of exercise it is. You want to use the ones that have bigger muscles, exercises that really recruit the big muscles like your core stomach, your buttock muscle, your biceps.
Running on a treadmill on a really steep incline, the highest you can beat. I run on that and then I rest for one minute, that’s the whole idea. You walk or run for one minute, or you can hike, you can do push ups or run upstairs. It doesn’t matter which one, again it’s gotta be enough that you enjoy it, do something you love and then one minute off. By doing that one minute on and one minute off, you’re just two minutes. You only need to do that all together ten times maximum.
When you’re a beginner, you can start up with only doing it four times because that may be all you can handle. But what you’re doing is you’re slowly building and strengthening your mitochondria, and you should only do this every two to three days, you do it two or three times which means it could be one hour or under every week.
Now, this doesn’t mean when you only do this type of exercise you’re going to be some skinny mini, and that is the only type of workout you should be doing. I don’t believe that. I believe that that’s the way you strengthen and build your mitochondria, to optimize your mitochondria so it can help you for the rest of your function in all of your organs. We all need to stretch more, we all need to have whole body movements.
Right now, I’m standing up and talking to you. It’s not like I’m sitting, I’m standing up because I like to use my body and make sure that I can increase my metabolism during a good interview like this.
But there’s other things that you can do. Right now what I like to do with whole body is aerial yoga. I have a rig in my house it’s like a trapeze rig, and I hold up these bands like a hammock that is really stretchy and I use it and I hang from it because it helps doing yoga in the air. I do it in the air and I love the feeling of being suspended in the air and doing my yoga moves. I’ll tell you the reason why I got this is because I wanna go inverted. When I invert, it’s the way I’m gonna get blood flow through my brain the fastest.
Sure, I can do it while laying down, while we sleep and lying down, we can get a lot of blood flow. But I’m telling you for me, the fastest way for me was to go inverted. I don’t want to do it where I’m doing a handstand or a headstand putting more pressure. People talk about inversion of going upside down. I didn’t wanna do that so this is my way of going upside down and getting so much blood flow. I actually love it, I love going upside down. Inversion therapy is a biggie for me. I do it in the morning so I can start my day.
Dr. Trevor: It’s probably great for your skin too.
Dr. Susanne: Yes! You know, it might be one of the reasons why my skin is so healthy and happy is because I do inversion therapy, blood goes to your skin, blood goes to your brain and you feel good. When you’ve got more blood, you feel more energy. That’s basically it. At least for me, I’m ready to go in the morning. I also do it when I come back home from work, because after a full day at work and tension, I wanna release it because it’s really, really funny. I wanna show you sometimes.
Dr. Trevor: I can’t wait to see that! Tell us what else we can do to help our mitochondria happy and robust?
Dr. Susanne: For me, it’s all about wanting to prevent disease and aging. In my book, I talked about the five steps that I created. I can go through each one but I’m only going to go on to a couple of things because I know we don’t have all the time in the world to talk about it. But I’ll give you the five steps quickly and then we can talk about a couple of them that I really feel I need to emphasize.
Number one, you just really need to eliminate the obvious. We talked a lot about the environment and the food and the chemicals that you’re exposed to. Fried foods, trans fats, super high in free radical damage. You got to work on that. Food coloring, you got to get rid of.
Number two, the second step that I talk about is that you need to remove the seven foods, seven types of food that trigger inflammation or mitochondrial stress. Now, for your audience I’m giving you the list of seven foods, and I know you’re gonna be giving out links, thank you so much for doing that. That link I’m giving you is actually a mini report on the Mighty Mito. It’s only 14 pages, it’s not like my book. Let’s just say that there’s some things on my book, that’s a summary of my book. That gives you a lot of good info, things that we went through today.
But also the seven foods that I’m talking about, there’s a whole list of do eat these foods and don’t eat these foods. I go through the seven foods, what not to eat such as dairy, gluten, sugar, of course alcohol, beans, vegetables and fruits. There’s specific beans, vegetables and fruits I ask people not to ingest because those fruit and vegetables and beans will cause inflammation and gas bloating in the gut. In the first six weeks, you want to just try to minimize that because a lot of us walk around with this in our gut and as well as small bacterial overgrowth which deceives a lot of people.
If you use that list just for six weeks and you cut down some of the foods I tell you to eat, and then there’s a huge list of food that I tell you to eat. You’re gonna find that you’ll start feeling better and you’re gonna reduce that free radical damage and all that.
Number three, the five things that I talked about, I talk about eating natural, colorful organic foods and the reason why it keeps us healthier and happier, I call NCOs, it’s because of the anti-oxidants. Remember I talked about the free radical damage is what you got to prevent to prevent the mitochondrial impairment.
Well, how do we prevent that is through anti oxidants. Antioxidants are just these nutrients that we can get from the food and supplementations that will quench that fire, that will prevent the damage and the free radicals from happening to ourselves and our mitochondrial membrane and our DNA. DNA is really, really sensitive. That’s how we’re gonna prevent damage and premature aging.
Number four, I talked about supplementations and how I believe supplements is one of the biggest key and it’s one thing I’m gonna talk to you about right now.
Before I go to the supplements, the fifth is actually I created an oxygenation [00:31:12]. That’s all in my book how to make this oxygen inputting. Like I said about when I had damage, it was all about blood flow, the lack of blood flow to my brain and that means lack of oxygen. If you don’t have blood going to your brain or other parts of your body, you lack oxygen and you’re gonna deplete your mitochondria and you’re gonna get tissue damaged.
The oxygen inputting was something I created after loads of figuring how do I get more oxygens to my brain but from certain types of foods and how do I oxygenate it and that’s the one thing that I put in my book. I hope everyone tries it, it’s really a lot of fun and tasty.
But the seven reason, the thing about supplements that I like to get into, this is an area that, people there’s a lot of doctors that say you know what you can get all your food, all your nutrients, all your vitamins and minerals in food. Yes you can, but I don’t think you can get optimal levels.
Now I wanna ask you Trevor, how much vitamin C do you have per day? In milligrams?
Dr. Trevor: You mean in my diet or in supplements?
Dr. Susanne: In supplements, I mean, how much do you think in supplements?
Dr. Trevor: Probably a few thousand milligrams a day.
Dr. Susanne: Okay. So few is like three. That’s what I do. I am the same way, few thousand milligrams. I did some research on how much does 1,000 milligrams, what do we have to eat to get that? Guess what, 11 cups of fruits and vegetables. 11, just 1,000. That means if you’re at 3,000, you need to have 33 cups of fruits and vegetables per day. If you do that, we’re both gonna be gassy if we do that.
It’s impossible to get that kind of level and I know the reason why you wanna have that amount of vitamin C is because it’s a really important for protein synthesis, really important for skin health, really important for your adrenal glands. All of these reasons why we want to take good levels. It’s super important that we need to take supplements.
What I wanna share with you, why the seven reasons we need to take supplements. Number one, we don’t eat a good enough diet. Like I said, we don’t eat enough healthy foods. We just can’t manage to get the right optimum levels of foods. Plus, we eat sometimes foods that might be called anti nutrients such as oxalates. Oxalic acid is very high in dark green vegetables. We want dark greens, but it’s considered an antioxidant because it actually prevents you from absorbing other healthier minerals and nutrients into the body. That’s the reason why you wanna take supplements.
Number two, we’ve had soil depletion, this is really well known. Our soil is depleted of the optimum levels of minerals which is what we need when we take in the healthy foods even if it’s let’s say organic, if it’s a soil depleted organic form then obviously that’s not going to be as good for you because you’re not gonna absorb as much nutrients each time you eat.
And then we gotta talk about, how about a low carb diet, low calorie diet. When you eat low calories, then you definitely need to supplement. You might be doing that so that you can lose weight and what not.
We also have a lot of toxins in our foods. Pesticides, chemicals in our environment, things that we put in our skin. If you have toxins going in to your body, you’ll need vitamins and nutrients to actually help and detoxify. To detox, it takes nutrients. In fact, the detoxification pathways in your body is all through mitochondria. That’s why you need to have supplements.
The nutrient absorptions, as we age, we don’t absorb nutrients as well. In fact when we think about protein, as we age from 20-80, 40% of that level of protein we can’t digest. Same thing, if we can’t digest our food, then how are we going to extract those nutrients? Super important that we take a supplement to replenish as we’re getting older. Now, if you’re exercising really hard, you sweat it out. If you’re pregnant, you need more nutrients and everyone knows when you’re pregnant you have to take a multivitamin, a pre natal.
If you get injured, you got hurt, then to heal those tissues you need more nutrients. If you’ve had surgery, if you got a bad cold, you need more nutrients. That’s the reason why you want to take supplements.
I’d say the last would be the meat. The grain fed meats that we eat. You know the grain fed are really low in nutrients and healthy vitamins, and it’s important that when they’re grain fed then you got more to process, and that means more mitochondrial dysfunction so you need more nutrients. Those are the reasons why we need supplements.
I told you there’s five things you can do to improve your body, or to improve your mitochondria. One of them is supplementation and that’s what I want to share. Supplements are super important. I’ll tell you about five. In my book, I wrote 20 mitochondrial enhancing nutrients but I’ll go give you five here today so you can get some real good informations.
Multivitamins for sure, often I actually tell my patients let’s go out and get a prenatal, don’t stop taking it if you’re pregnant or if you’re nursing. Even if you’re not doing any of that, these pre natal gives you the basics of nutrients. Vitamins, vital nutrients, the things that our cells need otherwise, we deteriorate. It’s important to get more nutrients and minerals. You need that double combination.
Number two, I love glutathione. Glutathione is a tripeptide, glutamate lysine and systine. Glutathione is actually super important for your mitochondria to be effective. It’s the master antioxidant that’s necessary to keep your mitochondria healthy. We all talk about why glutathione is important it’s to heal the mitochondria and to prevent the damage, especially in the mitochondrial membrane and the mitochondrial DNA. I love taking a lot of glutathione.
There’s different kinds of glutathione our there and the one that I take is the one you put under the tongue so that it absorbs up lingually. I take anywhere and I recommend depending on who you are and what kind of chronic condition you have, I recommend anywhere between 200 milligram to 500. I don’t know if you do this, but do you do any kind of glutathione injections in your office?
Dr. Trevor: I don’t personally but I will recommend them to people because that’s a great way to absorb glutathione because it’s not that easy to absorb it through supplements.
Dr. Susanne: That’s absolutely true. It does not go through as much through the gut. For anyone, when you can absorb it through the mouth, it’s like liposomal glutathione and you will put it under the mouth and it works really well, it makes a big difference.
Another nutrient that I love, is L-Carnitine. L-Carnitine is a nutrient, it’s not considered an essential or orthomolecular nutrient because our kidneys and other cells, muscles can actually make it but I find that we don’t have enough, and I found this out when I did a genetic testing. I do a lot of metagenetic analysis with my patients now and it’s like half of my practice is in defoliation now.
Anyway, I found out that I actually have two genetic genes, that prevent the Carnitine in my body to work as well going into the mitochondria and it totally makes sense why I love this for myself because I can feel the difference. L-Carnitine, what it does is it shovels the fat into the mitochondria better and faster. If you don’t have that fat in the mitochondrial, your mitochondria actually doesn’t have the best ability to process glucose. You get more energy, more ATP, from fast metabolism. Of course, don’t we all wanna lose that fat right? What I realized is the only way to do that is through getting L-Carnitine into your body.
You can get L-Carnitine if you eat red meats, but I like to take it in supplements. I personally take from high levels, I can take it from 2,000 to 3,000 a day. But everyone is different, so talk to your doctor. Most of the L-Carnitines are 500 milligrams capsules, so you can take 1-2 capsules and see how you feel.
People who already discovered about their genetic issues like I have, then you definitely want to take more. On a side note, I want to talk just briefly about cholesterol. You know like how we have a lot of problem with cholesterol in America. A lot of people are taking stats for it.
But did you know that cholesterol is converted into all the steroponiums that we need in our ovaries and our testes for testosterone, estrogens and all that. But also, it’s really important for the cholesterol to make cortisol as well as aldosterone which is a steroid that helps with water metabolism.
But the cholesterol actually, that whole conversion of cholesterol into those hormones is done in the mitochondria. If you don’t have the ability to shuttle those fats into the mitochondria, then that’s when the cholesterol ends up going up in your blood stream. This is a really important fact to people who don’t understand. Important thing is to get a healthy mitochondria, make sure you become a fat burner, L-Carnitine is one way of doing that. If you are someone who does take statins right now, then super important that you take Cocuten which is my next supplement that I’m gonna talk about. Because cocuten, when you take statins, will deplete rapidly and you can get a condition that where you cannot even walk, or can’t even use your muscles, and you get heart problems because heart disease infect because of statins. So be careful, talk to your doctors about that.
My next supplement that I love is cocuten. Cocuten is a super antioxidant and it’s a very important nutrient needed by the mitochondria. I said if you take statins, if you deplete the cocuten, but what’s going on with that is that because you don’t have cocuten, your mitochondria dies. It’s super important that you have cocuten.
I love the formula called Mito Q, I don’t know if you ever tried that Dr. Trevor, but it’s the kind of cocuten to take. You only need 10 to 20 milligrams cocuten. But if you don’t want Mito Q, just get cocuten the regular ones, you need 100 milligrams to 200 milligram per day. I like to have it separate it out so that you can have it throughout the day, getting the right amount of cocuten.
And then, what’s next I love is essential amino acid. Essential Amino Acids was key for me to reverse my schizophrenia. Remember when I was aging and my skin was losing the collagen and the muscle mass, I’m losing my muscle mass throughout my body. The only thing that saved me not only through all the things I did and all the things I taught you today, about how to build your mitochondria but it was essential amino acid.
I used a formula called Super 8 Aminos and these did eight essential amino acids that you need to build muscle, to build collagen, to stimulate your transmitter function, for thyroid function, for enzyme production, for your digestion. These amino acids were key to my recovery.
Everything that came back, all the nerve, all the pain went away. The only thing that never came back was my period, my cycle. I lost my cycle within four weeks of that injury. I think it was because, you know, I was 48, I was going through menopause, but it was just one thing that went over the edge. It’s the only thing I can tell you right now, I don’t miss it. I don’t miss having it, but it’s the one thing that tells you that you’re in the aging process.
I do use a lot of all natural nutrients. I choose for myself, I choose not to use the biogenic also. That’s a conscious choice of mine. I use other formulas and herb to help my hormones. But other than that, these are the nutrients I take and it’s help me to build my body back up and I’m so happy to get to share with you this information. You know, if everyone understands that it’s your mitochondria that you really want to stimulate and strengthen and build, that’s when you’re gonna live the longest, and happiest, and be the best you can be.
Dr. Trevor: Wow, that’s great. Well thank you so much for all of the information today Dr. Susanne, it’s really, really helpful information. Thanks for sharing all these specifics on supplements and diet and toxins exposure. You’ve covered a lot of information, thank you so much.
Dr. Susanne: You’re so welcome. Thank you Trevor, I hope everyone will start building your mitochondria today, your Mighty Mitos! I gave you the links so you can take a look at the do’s and don’ts, with all the foods, what to eat and what not to eat that’s gonna really help you feel better.
And then I got that 14 page report that also helps you on the Mighty Mito. And then when you opt in for that, hold on, because what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna get a video, so that you can actually get two more free gifts from me and that’s if you go ahead and order the book through Amazon. It’s a kindle book and it doesn’t cost much. You’re gonna find that you’ll be able to get it. You’ll get two other free gifts if you do it that way, because I gave you my BBT, The Body Balancing Technique which is five minute or under technique that you can tap your body so that you can get really a whole load of energy and brainpower. And then you’re gonna get my 10 ways to power up your Might Mito. You’ll get a lot more other stuff.
Dr. Trevor: Great, great, I’ll have the links to that on my website. So thank you for that.
Dr. Susanne: Sure! Absolutely! Thanks so much for letting me serve your amazing wellness audience, I appreciate it so much.
Dr. Trevor: Yeah! Absolutely! Thank you.
I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Susanne Bennett. To learn more about Dr. Susanne, her new book, and the bundle gift that she mentioned, you can visit my website thespadr.com. Go to the podcast page with her interview and you’ll see all of the information and links there.
While you’re there, I encourage you to join the Spa Doctor community on my website or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you get your own customized skin profile at theskinquiz.com. It’s free and based upon answer to just a few questions, you’ll get your own customized skin report.
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