The Hidden Reason Your Body Can’t Heal Itself!

What if the disease you were told to “manage forever” wasn’t your body failing you — but your cells starving, poisoned, and running out of energy? In this episode, Dr. Josh Axe reveals why your body replaces 330 billion cells every day, and why the real root of fatigue, inflammation, hormone problems, autoimmune disease, and accelerated aging may begin far deeper than your organs: at the cellular level. Uncover what’s really going on in your body with advanced biomarker testing for hormones, thyroid, and metabolism— plus a 1-hour consultation with a Senior Health Advisor! → http://mybloodwork.com Download the FREE Cellular Longevity Guide: http://guide.thehealthinstitute.com/l-361 Thank you to our sponsors! Sunlighten Sauna: https://get.sunlighten.com/axepodcast Manukora Manuka Honey: https://manukora.com/axe Caraway Home: carawayhome.com/drjoshaxe (Use code DRJOSHAXE) for an exclusive discount Watch The Dr. Josh Axe Show every Monday & Thursday on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@drjoshaxe?sub_confirmation=1 🎧 Early Access! Our listeners enjoy every episode before anyone else! Tune in below and join our exclusive group of listeners → Spotify: https://bit.ly/DrJoshAxeSpotify Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3JDvWcS Pre-order my NEW BOOK, Heal Your Cells → https://bit.ly/3QJBcQ5 Watch my free training on how to naturally balance your blood sugar and reverse your symptoms → http://DrAxeDiabetesClass.com Discover practical steps you can take today to start healing your thyroid naturally → http://DrAxeThyroidClass.com If you’re ready to start feeling like yourself again and balance your hormones, take my free class → http://DrAxeHormoneClass.com CONNECT WITH DR. JOSH AXE Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/drjoshaxe/ Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/DrJoshAxe/ TikTok → https://www.tiktok.com/@thedrjoshaxeshow/ X → https://x.com/drjoshaxe/ LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshaxe Website → http://thehealthinstitute.com Sign up for my newsletter → https://bit.ly/4oE9Jf3 Ask Dr. Axe → http://speakpipe.com/drjoshaxe 00:00 — Your Body Replaces 330 Billion Cells A Day 01:54 — Why Most Doctors Miss The Cellular Root Cause 06:41 — The Future Of Medicine: Personalized Cellular Healing 09:16 — Which Organ In Your Body Is Aging The Fastest? 12:20 — The Bloodwork That Reveals Cellular Health 13:21 — The 5 Parts Of The Cell You Must Heal 15:32 — The 9 Hallmarks Of Cellular Aging 17:22 — Methylation, MTHFR & Genetic Detox Pathways 20:34 — Glutathione, Mold Detox & Hidden Genetic Risk 23:22 — Mitochondria, ATP, NAD+ & CoQ10 Explained 25:14 — The Top Foods & Supplements For Mitochondria 27:42 — How Cell Membranes Control Oxygen And Healing 31:17 — Insulin Resistance, Hormones & Cell Receptors 33:30 — Lysosomes, Fasting, Autophagy & Cellular Detox 37:01 — Hashimoto’s Case Study: Healing The Mitochondria 39:02 — The 3-Step Cellular Healing Map 40:03 — Final Message: Your Body Was Designed To Heal DISCLAIMER This content is strictly the opinion of Dr. Josh Axe and is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice or to take the place of medical advice or treatment from a personal physician. All viewers of this content are advised to consult their doctors or qualified health professionals regarding specific health questions. Neither Dr. Axe nor the publisher of this content takes responsibility for possible health consequences of any person or persons reading or following the information in this educational content. All viewers of this content, especially those taking prescription or over-the-counter medications, should consult their physicians before beginning any nutrition, supplement or lifestyle program. MB01L4STKF7PZ0I

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Josh Axe?

  Right now, as you're listening to this, your body is replacing about 330 billion cells with brand new ones. Not this year, today alone, and you are rebuilding yourself from the inside out all day long. And in fact, every year, almost 50% of your body is new, and every seven years, anywhere from 70 to 90% of your body is new. So here's the question, what if the condition you've been told to manage for the rest of your life was never your body failing you? What if your cells have just starved, they've been poisoned, and they're running on empty, and the day you finally gave them what they needed, then they would start to heal? Here's what I've seen, is I've watched people walk away

• 0:44Josh Axe?

  from diagnoses that experts swore were permanent. You know, doctors have said you've got to be on this drug the rest of your life, your condition's irreversible, and I lived this in my own body. And today, I'm going to give you the whole map, the three pillars that bring dying cells back to life. I'll walk you through the exact foods and supplements that are going to help rebuild your body at the cellular level. And this is really important. If you want to get to the root cause of issues, you need to focus on healing your cells. This goes deeper than even trying to heal your organ systems, which is very important, focusing on healing your thyroid, or your pancreas, or your liver, or your digestive system. All of those organs are made up of cells themselves. So if we could heal every cell in your body,

• 1:28Josh Axe?

  your body can heal, and in many cases, you can reverse the irreversible. And stay with me till the end, because the piece that most people are missing comes right before the finish line. Welcome to the Dr. Axe Show.

• 1:54Josh Axe?

  Now, when you walk into most doctors' offices today, here's what happens, okay? You walk in there, and you're tired, and you're kind of foggy, and maybe your joints don't feel great, and your gut might be a mess, your hormones are off, and you walk out with something to quiet. That down. Okay. A pill for the pain, a pill for the sleep, a pill for the side effects of the first two pills. And listen, I'm not here to make you feel bad, or I'm definitely not here to bash doctors. You know, some of the finest people I know, wear a white coat, but the model itself only treats the smoke. It never looks for where the fire has started. And I found that fire is almost always burning one level down, and that is the cellular level. And you're

• 2:37Josh Axe?

  made up of around 30 trillion cells. And every single one is its own little world. It has a nucleus, a mitochondria, a cell membrane, receptor sites for hormones and nutrients, a whole city working around the clock to keep you alive. And when that city loses power, when the garbage stops getting hauled out, and when the supply trucks can't get through, your cells get sick. And this leads to autoimmune disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, cancer, different labels, the same root causes. But don't forget what I told you, your body replaces 330

• 3:19Josh Axe?

  billion of those cells every single day. So most of the time, the problem isn't that your body is broken down. The problem is that your body is not regenerating properly. Here's what's happening. You know, imagine that you were remodeling a home. Okay. And Chelsea and I just went through this in Nashville. We bought a home, we did a remodel on it. And it's kind of fun because Chelsea's parents did this growing up. And so we've done this several times now. And it's something we enjoy doing. But one thing I can tell you is, if we would go into a house, and this can happen, and there can be water damage and termite damage, and there's, there's, you know, bad materials there, we need to swap those out. Right? And so the first thing you need to do in a remodel is you need to get rid of the old and bad stuff. And you then need to order new and have good

• 4:02Josh Axe?

  materials on hand. Now imagine this, is if you were doing your project remodel, and this is how it works with your own body, think about whatever condition you're dealing with, and you put bad materials in the body, ultra-processed sugar, and ultra-processed seed oils, and a lot of these

• 4:20Josh Axe?

  You just keep eating those things, causing more and more inflammation, which is causing more and more decay. Imagine termite and water damage. That's what's happening. That's stress and damage. And, and, and you're not replacing with good materials. Well, your body is continually rebuilding itself. If you give your body the new materials it needs, your body can often heal. Now, here's another thing. You've got to do this in the right order. You have to get rid of the pathogens and the things causing the damage in the first place. You need to get the new materials. Now, here's the other key, and I'm going to get into this today. You also need to have workers there that have energy, and you need to have a whole crew coming in there and doing the teardown, putting things back together and building your new beautiful home. And what's happening with most of you is that you are not doing this process correctly.

• 5:05Josh Axe?

  You're missing something. It could be the detoxification process. It could be you don't have the right new materials. It could be the environment is problematic, or it could be that your workers don't have enough energy. And if you can focus on cellular healing, I truly believe you can heal from almost anything. So if you've been dealing with infertility, I believe your body can heal. If you've been dealing with autoimmune disease, I believe your body can heal and in most cases, reverse autoimmune disease, diabetes, blood sugar, insulin resistance, losing the weight, balancing out your hormones via perimenopause and menopause. Your body can heal. You know, your gut lining rebuilds in just days. You have completely new blood cells every three to four months.

• 5:48Josh Axe?

  You have a new liver every single year. Your body is continually renewing itself. But if you skip one of these steps, whether it be the detoxification process or getting the right building blocks in your body, or you don't have that energy for your workers, then the remodel or your body healing and regenerating, it's going to fail. And the other thing you'll notice is your body's going to start aging more quickly. Now, before we go deeper, and I'm going to walk you through the exact diet and supplements and program to start to heal your cells and reverse chronic disease. But before I do that, do me a big favor. Subscribe so you never miss a new episode. Also, hey, if you like this, click like and then share.

• 6:30Josh Axe?

  Think about one person who needs to hear this and share it with them. So thanks so much for being on mission with me here with the show. And here's a prediction I have. When we're talking about medicine for the next 20 years, we are going to be talking about cellular medicine. When you hear terms like stem cells and exosomes and a lot of these regenerative therapies around hyperbaric oxygen therapy and red light therapy, these are cellular therapies to help the body heal and they are incredibly powerful. And there's a big difference I want to mention too, when you're looking at this root cause cellular medicine, it's what I call personalized cellular medicine. In fact, in the new book that myself and Dr. Will Cole co-authored, the book's called Heal Your Cells, we walk through how to heal and

• 7:14Josh Axe?

  reverse anything with personalized cellular medicine. The personalized part is there is no one like you on the planet. You need to have something customized just for you. And the cellular component is going to the deepest root causes and helping your body heal those issues. So you can reverse and heal disease and also promote longevity. By the way, if you're interested in the book, you can go on amazon.com and just search Heal Your Cells, Dr. Axe, and check out the book there. It will be the number one book on reversing illness and then moving into longevity as well. And so the reality is all of us have two ways we can decide to take care of our health and follow through with medicine. One is symptom care. Okay, you just quiet the alarm. Okay, I remember we were in Park City here on vacation

• 7:59Josh Axe?

  here last year around Christmas and we had an alarm that went off three times for an hour both times. And so Chelsea was upset because we had our two-year-old trying to take a nap. And one of the times it was like at midnight. And, and basically, we just kept saying, okay, we just gotta, we just gotta get this alarm turned off. And so what happens most of the time is there is an alarm going off. And what happens in symptom care is you take a drug and you just silence the alarm. Okay, you just take it, the fire alarm, and you just rip it out of the wall. So it's not there anymore and it stops beeping, even though there is a fire blazing. Okay, what root cause medicine does is it fixes the source. It finds the broken cellular pathway. It restores-

• 8:40Josh Axe?

  Is what's deficient or toxic and then the body can fully heal and reverse disease. Okay. And by the way, I want to say this different areas of your body also sometimes age faster than other organs. In fact, there was a study done at Stanford and they went and they found that most people have one organ system aging faster than their other organ systems. So think about what is it for you? Let me ask you this question. What organ system is aging faster? And a lot of times, one thing that I do in my practice in Nashville Franklin, Tennessee, and my virtual practice at the Health Institute is we run advanced blood work panels to look at which organs are aging more quickly. So for instance, I just had a patient come in. It was a family member, but they came in.

• 9:22Josh Axe?

  We did an advanced blood work panel on them and their APOB number was very high. They also had a genetic marker called LPA, which was very high. And then we also noticed LDL was high. So we saw all of these markers. Omega three imbalance was happening. And so we saw this major inflammation happening in the arteries where the arteries were getting more and more and more narrow. And that was really the big marker that was off. And so when you looked at some other things going on in their body, you would say, well, okay, this person has a really pretty healthy detoxification system. Kidneys are good. Metabolic health actually doesn't look bad, but the heart and the cardiovascular system might have been 10 to 20 years older than the rest of the body. And this is really what typically takes someone's life and causes someone to die early

• 10:07Josh Axe?

  or age too quickly to where they have a major medical health issue is that they have one organ system aging more quickly than others. And this is why a lot of men, they'll turn 60 and have a heart attack, you know, sometimes their muscles will be muscles of a 35 year old, but their heart was a heart of a 90 year old. And so think about for yourself, which organ do you think is aging the fastest? Is it your brain? Which by the way, the study showed that the most detrimental organs to age too quickly were your brain in your immune system. If your brain aged too quickly, of course, there was risk of dementia there. If your immune system aged too quickly, your risk of having cancer was much higher. Your risk of coming down with chronic infection.

• 10:50Josh Axe?

  Even dying of things like pneumonia or even autoimmune disease. But having weak immunity was another big one. And then the third, which was a little further down, was really related to heart markers as well, were really detrimental to people's health. And then after that metabolic, right? Blood sugar issues, of course, very, very important. But think about for yourself, which organ is aging the fastest? By the way, if you don't know, if you're saying to yourself, I don't know which organ is aging the fastest, get some good advanced blood work done. This is something we do locally at the longevity clinic. You can go to the health institute or find a great doctor of functional medicine and then get the right type of blood work. Now, here's another important thing. If you get blood work done, it has to be analyzed properly. By the way, you also need to get the right markers ran to look at organ age. One of the problems today that a lot of doctors are doing with blood work is they're just doing

• 11:35Josh Axe?

  these big panels. Sometimes they're not big panels. Sometimes there's a few panels and they're looking at kind of the superficial markers, right? Total cholesterol, LDL, you know, TSH, you know, a few hormones here and there, you know, your AST and your, you know, all of your, your, your liver markers, but they're not looking at true cellular markers, like looking at the nutrients in your red blood cells, like magnesium and zinc and selenium and, and cellular vitamin B12, right? Those are the markers that best indicate how healthy you are. And these are the markers you can best take action on in order to heal yourself. So doing a true cellular panel is one of the greatest things you can do in order to heal your body.

• 12:20Josh Axe?

  Let me ask you a really important question. Do you feel chronically rundown, foggy and inflamed? Like your body is carrying a load it can't seem to put down and you're tired of being told everything looks normal? Now, here's the thing, when toxins and oxidative stress build up faster than your cells can clear them, it quietly drains your energy and drives symptoms head to toe. And conventional blood work simply isn't designed to catch these things. I'm currently offering a simple at home blood test designed to measure the right biomarkers, the ones that reveal what's really driving your hormones, inflammation and metabolism.

• 13:00Josh Axe?

  Also get a full hour with one of my senior health advisors to help you connect the dots between your symptoms and your cellular health and discover ways that you can work with the Health Institute to finally find lasting healing. If you want to check it out and grab one before they're gone, just go to mybloodwork.com now.

• 13:21Josh Axe?

  Now let's dive back into the cellular medicine idea and how to start to fix and repair. And I'll go through how to heal, for instance, your mitochondria and the top supplements for that. And this is really big because every one of these issues is tied to chronic diseases. And so imagine your cells as a city, right? Just like your body has organs, right? Your body has a liver and a brain and a digestive system. Your cells have organs. They're called organelles, right? And I would focus on five organelles. They have five main jobs. And if you focus on healing these, you can heal almost anything. The first part of your cell that doesn't get talked about enough, but it's the nucleus, and this really controls your epigenetics,

• 14:03Josh Axe?

  right? Those switches like the abracagene or LPA or methylation, right? If you have MTHFR gene variant, or some of the other gene variants that make you more susceptible to things like, for instance, some people don't convert vitamin D well. Some people don't convert omega-3 fats. Well, some people, 24% of the population, doesn't detoxify mold very well. So if they get exposed, they tend to get very sick. And so your nucleus of your cell is responsible for that area of your health. You know, the other areas, the mitochondria, those are the power plants of your cell. That's really what gives you energy. Your cell membrane, that's the gatekeeper, the receptor sites, which live in the cell membrane, and the lysosomes, those recycle the trash. They help detox, they're connected to the liver

• 14:47Josh Axe?

  and your detoxification organs. So you really have these five engines, these five areas of your cell, that you want to get healthy in order to reverse any health problem. And so there's three main things that we want to help these things do. One, we want to help them cleanse, right? This is imagine your body's a garden as well. Pull out the weeds, right? You got to get rid of the weeds there. We want to rebuild. We want to get your body Really good soil and environment so it can grow. Then we want energy, right? It's like the sun. Your cells need energy to function properly. And if we can start to fix these furthest upstream issues of things like poor diet, chronic stress, poor sleep, toxin exposure, loneliness. Like if you can start to address those issues, lack of movement and blood flow.

• 15:31Josh Axe?

  If we can fix those issues, okay, we can address what we call the nine hallmarks of cellular aging, which I cover in depth in the book Heal Your Cells and really walk you through. Here's exactly how to heal that. And then we can start to reverse and heal and improve heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer and lengthen your life. You know, one of the areas I find fascinating and you probably do as well when it comes to health is longevity, right? And this is how I reverse disease and illness. When I have a patient come in, I focus on improving their cellular health so they can live and be in their 90s without chronic pain as healthy as they can possibly be. Truly healing the cell not only reverses disease, it also promotes longevity.

• 16:16Josh Axe?

  And in order to do that, there are nine hallmarks of aging you need to fix. So if you're wondering, hey, what causes me to age? There are nine primary things that you need to focus on improving. And these are things in Heal Your Cells that we go over how to do. But it's altered cellular communication, right? Your cells stop talking. That's a big problem. Microbiome dysbiosis. So it's how your cells connect to your gut bacteria. There's a connection there. If that gets off, you age more quickly and you get sick. Epigenetic switches like the MTHFR and the BRCA, the LPA, those are big. Mitochondrial dysfunction, right? That's huge. Oxidative stress. This is the damage that starts to happen and rust your body and breaks it down.

• 16:58Josh Axe?

  Inflammaging, right? Not just inflammation, inflammaging the ages yourselves. Impaireritophagy where your body can't clean itself up. Cellular senescence. This is where you get all these zombie cells in your body that secrete toxins that cause you to age and then stem cell exhaustion. If your stem cells get exhausted, your body can no longer heal and repair itself. So it's absolutely critical that you Fix those things. So let me walk you through these five areas of your cell and exactly how to fix them. The first one is the nucleus. We talked about that for a minute. And one example of a pathway that's very closely tied to the nucleus is methylation, right? This is the dial for your genes. This cycle decides which genes fire. For instance, an MTHFR, it's the gatekeeper here.

• 17:42Josh Axe?

  So this is where you eat certain foods. Let's say it's spinach or red meat. Okay. And your body takes folate, this is vitamin B9. And we want to turn it into something called methylfolate. Okay. And then your body can use it, but there are certain nutrients your body needs in this full methylation cycle in order to create methylfolate. And also the secondary part of it, turn on and create glutathione. Okay. Now here's the glitch that happens for most people. A slow MTHFR variant, which 40% of people have, I'm one of those people that has this, makes your body less active that converting folate into methylfolate. So methylation runs slow and methylation is really important for certain pathways in the body.

• 18:26Josh Axe?

  It's important for your mood. It's important for creating certain neurotransmitters. It's really connected to fatigue, mood swings, faster aging. And it's not like that you can't methylate. It's you have a little bit more of a bottleneck than other people. So you need to have a steady flow and good conversion going, or your body's not going to function properly. And one of the things that indicates whether you have this issue or not is you can do an MTHFR gene test. But also, even more importantly, sometimes is if you get advanced cellular blood work, you can check for a marker called homocysteine. And this will tell you how well methylation is going in your body. Okay. And so here's the fix is you want to supplement with methylfolate, not folic acid. Okay.

• 19:07Josh Axe?

  And you want to supplement with the correct B vitamins typically methylfolate, a methylated B12, vitamin B6, vitamin B2, which is riboflavin. And you want to get more from your diet, especially green leafy vegetables. Liver is amazing for this. And then beans tend to have your highest levels of folate. And so if you can get plenty of those foods and plenty of those nutrients, and if Your GI, your gut is absorbing them properly and your cells absorb them properly. Then you'll have the proper levels of folate to function properly and create enough glutathione. So your body can detoxify and your body can age more slowly. And by the way, there are so many more of these epigenetic switches tied to your mitochondria beyond MTHFR.

• 19:49Josh Axe?

  And these are things I love to test for in my clinic is also looking at one called MTR, which is your vitamin B12 recycling. Like for a lot of people, they get low in vitamin B12 because it's not recycling properly. There's one called COMT. This is very important. It clears out stress hormones. There's MAOA, which is tied to mood neurotransmitters. By the way, COMT and MAOA, those can be important also for general hormones. Like COMT is really important for cortisol. Now this one is really important. It's called GST. It's tied to glutathione. Okay. If your body isn't creating and converting enough glutathione, all of your cells get stressed, your entire body ages more quickly.

• 20:33Josh Axe?

  That is a very, very important. Here's another big one. That is one of the main genes to where if you have that genetic risk, you do not detoxify mold very well. So taking a lot of N-acetylcysteine and liposomal glutathione and getting glutathione IVs for my patients who come in with this genetic variant changes their life in an incredible way. I've had patients who have had issues for years. They came in, we found this genetic variant. We started getting their glutathione levels up. And by the way, much higher doses than people typically take. People typically take 500, 600 milligrams of N-acetylcysteine. You tend to need to do closer to 3,000 milligrams, 1,000 milligrams, three times a day and do some IVs and then also get the other precursors like selenium. And if you do that, then for some of those people that have these, that are not detoxifying well,

• 21:17Josh Axe?

  maybe they've tried and years later, they're still sick with a chronic infection or mold. This is the thing that moves the needle the most for them. There's also the marker NQ01. This is important for chemical detoxification. SOD, that's related to glutathione and superoxide dismutase. This is a mitochondrial, it's an intracellular antioxidant. It's very important.

• 21:40Josh Axe?

  This is important for your vitamin D conversion. So for some of you, you get out in the sun a lot. You eat, you take vitamin D. You don't convert it as well as other people. This is another one I have. And so something you need to do is really support the liver by taking things like bitter herbs and oxpylon, things to support fat absorption. And then there's FDS1. This is omega 3 conversion. Some of you, you're not converting omega 3s well, so you're not reducing inflammation. And there's APOE. This is tied to cholesterol risk and of course, LPA, which is a little bit different than the others here, a different type of risk factor. But this greatly increases your risk of heart disease and cardiovascular death. But knowing what your genetic risks are is so important and powerful. And if

• 22:25Josh Axe?

  you do that, you know how to care for your nucleus of your mitochondria. Generally speaking, though, some of the best things you can do for your nucleus and for your genetics, do a lot of steamed green leafy vegetables, a lot of beets and asparagus, liver and pastured eggs, because these are high in choline and other B vitamins, broccoli sprouts, because they contain sulforaphane, which is the most powerful probably anti-cancer compound on the planet, wild salmon, berries and dark grapes, very good for the nucleus. And then getting a lot of these methylation supports and B vitamins, very important for the health of the nucleus. And then limiting excess alcohol, chronic stress, those things are very important as well. Infrared sauna tends to be great for your nucleus as well. Now

• 23:10Josh Axe?

  let's talk about your mitochondria. These are the power plants and engines that give energy to your entire body, starting with your cells. And the way things work in your mitochondria, now you might remember this from high school science class, it was called the Krebs cycle. This is where you eat food and your body takes food like fat and sugar, and it turns it into fuel, turns it into energy. Okay, that's what the Krebs cycle does. Here's the thing, though, in order for the Krebs cycle and post-Krebs cycle to work for your body to create energy, there are some very important nutrients your body has to have. One of those is coenzyme Q10.

• 23:50Josh Axe?

  CoQ10 is like the wire, acts literally like a wire carrying the charge. Imagine it as like a copper wire. And then NAD plus actually also carries the charge. Okay. So in order to create cellular energy, there's a few things you absolutely need. You need NAD plus and you need CoQ10. There's a few others before I say that, though, I do want to say if you don't have ATP, if you don't have cellular energy, your body cannot heal. It's like, imagine we talked about that home remodel metaphor earlier where you can have all of this damaged debris and you can have all the new material sitting there. Right. You're eating a healthy diet. You're getting zinc and B12 and magnesium and vitamin D and iron. You have all those nutrients, but no workers are showing up or they're so exhausted. They can't put the house back together.

• 24:34Josh Axe?

  If you do not have cellular energy or your workers don't have energy, your body cannot heal. So you must have NAD plus, CoQ10. By the way, later on, as soon as it gets out of the cell for cellular energy, you need creatine. Okay. And then in addition, you need B vitamins and you need magnesium. So if you're wondering, what are the most crucial nutrients I need for cellular energy and energy working in my cells? Again, it's NAD plus, CoQ10, magnesium, B vitamins and creatine are probably the biggest needle movers supporting energy production in your body. And the top 10 foods that help rebuild your mitochondria. First is going to be organ meats.

• 25:18Josh Axe?

  Nothing is more powerful than heart and liver. In fact, in terms of tissues in your body that are the highest in CoQ10, your heart. And so you can take heart glandular and liver glandular and it's very, very good. And in addition, if you're doing grass fed beef and you're doing organ meats, you're not only getting CoQ10, you're also getting heme iron and creatine. Again, crucial for energy. Iron is another one, by the way, very important for cellular energy because how it works with ox, creating oxygen and oxygen in your body. Number two, wild salmon and sardines. These rebuild your DHA and EPA. They help repair and create new cell membranes, which we'll get into. But that's important for mitochondria as well. Dark green leafy vegetables, avocados, wild blueberries, beets,

• 26:03Josh Axe?

  cruciferous vegetables, pastured eggs, pomegranates and berries. Very high on that list and extra virgin olive oil because these polyphenols are very important to mitochondrial function. So when you're looking at the top supplements, as we talked about for mitochondrial function, CoQ10. NAD plus creatine, magnesium, B vitamins. In addition, there's a few others that are helpful. L carnitine, PQQ. L carnitine works because it hauls fat into the cells. It helps your body burn fat for energy. PQQ kind of supports the growth of new mitochondria in your body. And then ALA, this is also important for alpha lipoic acid. This is also, this has been used for years for diabetes, for insulin resistance, also great.

• 26:46Josh Axe?

  So there are several there, but again, I really think the NAD plus, the CoQ10, the creatine and B vitamins, probably the most important for mitochondrial function. In addition, for mitochondria, red light therapy is incredible. So getting in a red light bed or doing a red light panel on your skin and body, really, really powerful for stimulating mitochondrial function. And then exercise, weight training would be the other one. So if you want to know, hey, how do you build more mitochondria? Lift weights and do red light therapy. Okay. And red light therapy also includes sunbathing. Okay. But those are the biggest ones. And then of course, just deep repair, right? Getting a really good night's sleep will also help tremendously. Now another area of your cell that's really important, by the way, I got turned on to this

• 27:30Josh Axe?

  area of the cell about 20 years ago, when my mom was diagnosed with cancer for a second time in her lungs. And I did all of this research on how do I help my mom heal? And I came across some studies and some just written research on, in order to heal, you have to create a environment that's inhospitable to cancer. And one of those things is increasing the oxygen in your cells. And in order for oxygen to get in your cells, you have to have a very fluid and healthy cell membrane. Okay. So, so, you know, as you get older, your body can get more stiff, right? When you're little, when you're young, your body's just more spongy. That's due to the cell membranes are more flexible and moldable. They let more things in and out in a healthy manner. And, and that's something you want.

• 28:13Josh Axe?

  All cells of your body are made up of fat on the outside. In fact, they have what's called a lipid bilayer, a cell membrane. Your cell membrane is made up of mostly fat and then also some proteins. Okay. But predominantly fat. And so when you hear the principle, you are what You eat, that is especially true when you're eating fat and protein. Okay. So when you're eating unhealthy fats, inflammatory fats, you are making your cells stiff and rigid. Not only that, if you're getting some of the right fats, but then in addition, you are eating or doing a lot of things that are causing inflammation and damage. You can damage those fats and they become stiff and rigid as well. Think about it like this. If you've ever had an injury, like you sprained an ankle or a knee or a shoulder,

• 28:56Josh Axe?

  or you, you tore a ligament, let's say you tore your ACL in the past. What's the thing you notice more than anything? Pain and stiffness. Right? You start to feel the stiffness. That's what happens to your cell membrane. You want to do everything you can to keep your body youthful and fluid. But if you're eating processed fats, right, these industrial seed oils that become oxidized, then that causes inflammation and that makes your cells sick versus if you're eating a diet that's really high in omega-3 fats like EPA and DHA and phospholipids like phosphatidylcholine. Those are the best things you can do to make your cells more healthy. And that fluidity is allowing toxins to exit your cells. It allows your cells to bring nutrients

• 29:41Josh Axe?

  in and there's just more oxygen there as well. So your cells function in a healthier way. And the cell membrane is really important because the cell membrane is the gatekeeper. It is letting certain things in and out of your body. And if not, let's say your cell membrane gets sick. Well, now your mitochondria and nucleus are typically not getting the nutrients they need if your cells become too stiff. And so in order to heal your, and by the way, your cell membrane, this is very closely tied to heart disease. It's very closely tied to dementia. So if you want to keep your brain healthy and your heart healthy and your liver healthy, it's very important that you take care of your cell membrane. Again, of course, it's also very important for cancer.

• 30:22Josh Axe?

  So the top foods for healing your cell membrane include number one by far would be wild salmon, sardines and mackerel, that fatty fish high in EPA, DHA. After that, pasture raised eggs could be duck eggs, chicken eggs, but that egg yolk especially has that phosphatidylcholine.

• 30:39Josh Axe?

  Things like caviar, by the way, are also amazing for getting those phospholipids. Avocados and olives are great, coconut, walnuts, flax and chia seeds, extra virgin olive oil. These are the best foods for your cell membrane. And as supplements, an omega-3 supplement, high in EPA, DHA, phosphatidylcholine, or just a phospholipid supplement, it's great. Vitamin E, astaxanthin, these are the best things for your cell membrane. And the worst things, of course, are fried foods at fast food restaurants. Okay, the absolute worst things you can have for your cell membrane. The next part of your cell here are your cell receptor sites. Now, a cell receptor site, think about it like this with diabetes and insulin, insulin resistance.

• 31:24Josh Axe?

  You have on the outer part of your cell membrane, within the cell membrane, you have these receptors, okay? And they're waiting to receive different signals like insulin. And when you have insulin kind of come there in the cell receptor sites, your cell now brings more sugar inside your cell. Okay, that's what starts to happen. But what can happen over time, let's say those cell receptors, you have so much sugar constantly, constantly, constantly. Those ports of those antennas, those cell receptors are dealing with so much traffic that over time they can get damaged and shut down. Okay, or let's say heavy metals start to take the place. So there are certain receptors for things like metals in your body, for zinc and magnesium. Well, if you have heavy metals like mercury and lead and cadmium and aluminum,

• 32:09Josh Axe?

  and you're exposed to other toxins, those can also affect the cell receptors. Or if you have a lot of oxidative stress constantly, like let's say you're a smoker, or you have a lot of environmental pollutants or some sort of toxins, those can also damage the cell receptor sites. And then that can cause things like insulin resistance or other types of hormone imbalance. This can even cause low testosterone, can cause low progesterone, but it can greatly imbalance your hormones. So really, your cell receptors are tied to hormone balance. Okay, if we can heal your cell receptors, we can now balance your hormones. Here are the best foods to heal your cell receptors. Number one, protein every meal. Okay? Balancing out insulin is key, a high protein diet.

• 32:52Josh Axe?

  More fiber, vegetables, legumes, berries, pomegranates, apples, but high fiber foods, cinnamon and apple cider vinegar, right? Very, very good for your cell receptors. Bitter greens, helping you better absorb and digest fatty acids, magnesium-rich foods, these are all excellent for your cell receptor sites. You know, some of the best supplements are, I mentioned magnesium, berberine, and also tall chromium, alpha-lipidic acid, omega-3s, are some of the best things you can have for your cell receptors. In addition, walking outside is great for your receptors, lifting weights and protecting your sleep. Now, the last area of your cells I want to talk about are your lysosomes. These are, think of them as the liver for your cells, okay?

• 33:36Josh Axe?

  Or, or the entire, or the liver and the digestive system and the kidneys, they are dealing with all of your cellular detoxification. And not only do they detox and get rid of things, they also recycle things. And so they will take, let's say, broken parts of mitochondria. Let's say you have a mitochondria and it gets damaged. It'll take part of the mitochondria that's still usable and use that to create a new mitochondria. It's absolutely incredible. So these lysosomes help your body heal through detoxification. And by the way, this is the most true, what activates or most activates your lysosomes is fasting. In addition, eating more fruits and more vegetables as a bigger bulk of your diet.

• 34:18Josh Axe?

  There's actually a pathway in your body, and this is often tied to longevity or even creation of cancer in the body, and it's called mTOR. And this pathway is also tied to growth. It's tied to regeneration. You do want mTOR on to a degree to help put on muscle and maintain muscle for longevity. But you don't want mTOR on so much or in certain areas to where cancer can proliferate or viruses in the body. And so fasting turns off mTOR and on a pathway called AMPK, which turns on something called autophagy. That means self-eating, where your body is getting rid of these senescent cells. These are cells that are damaged. Imagine, we talked about your body being acidic or your cells being

• 34:58Josh Axe?

  Imagine you have a city where people were just leaving trash in the streets and cars in the middle of the streets that were broken down and it became like a wasteland. Okay, that's what senescent cells are. They're like garbage just lining the streets to where you know the body. It's like you're trying to drive through a street and you can't get somewhere, right? Traffic starts to back up and the city starts getting sick. That's what senescent cells are. They leach poisons out as well. Again, imagine you have rotten garbage everywhere and the smell decay. It brings in pathogens. Viruses can grow more in those types of environments. And so all that being said, lysosomes help with detoxification and cleansing. The foods that are the most beneficial for supporting autophagy in your lysosomes or cellular detoxification

• 35:43Josh Axe?

  are number one is green tea. It contains a compound called EGCG, which has been shown to be very powerful for helping your lysosomes and autophagy. Mushrooms and wheat germ high in a compound called spermidine is also great. Cruciferous vegetables, especially steamed cruciferous vegetables are amazing. Those also help balance out your estrogen levels. Extra virgin olive oil, pomegranates, natto and aged cheeses actually have certain compounds like spermidine that are great for this lysosome activity. And generally, the compounds that are the most beneficial for autophagy and self-healing are spermidine, urolithin A, antioxidants like resveratrol,

• 36:22Josh Axe?

  berberine are also great. And doing the occasional fast or doing sauna sessions is also fantastic. So getting in a sauna or infrared sauna is also very healing and detoxifying. And just doing some cardio where you're sweating a bit. Maybe it's a bike ride or jogging or swimming, but doing something where you're just moving your body, doing some cardio is also amazing for that cellular cleansing activity. And I want to reference a patient here who was in conventional medicine. Then she moved into some natural medicine and she got about 30 to 40% better, still was not able to fully heal. Then we focused on helping her heal with personalized cellular medicine, completely reversed her condition, got on zero medications. Her name

• 37:08Josh Axe?

  With Hashimoto's thyroiditis and hypothyroidism. And here's what she said. She said, I'd accepted that exhausted and foggy was just going to be the rest of my life. She said, but then a few months in, I felt like myself again, my energy came back and my labs finally moved. Now she was on thyroid medication, still exhausted, foggy, gaining weight. And instead of just adjusting the dose tiers, what we did, we said, most thyroid issues are connected to the mitochondria. Okay. So we focused on healing her mitochondria. We added in CoQ10, we did ashwagandha, we did B vitamins, we focused on food-based therapy, we addressed her MTHFR variant, doing these very specific B vitamins, and she was able to

• 37:50Josh Axe?

  fully reverse and heal hypothyroidism because we focused on healing her cells. So in a nutshell, here's what you need to do to get to the root cause. Focus on healing your cells. Pull out the weeds, rebuild the soil, and then make sure you get sunlight there, right? Energize it. Or if we're using this sort of home metaphor, right? You need to get rid of the bad materials. You need a detox. You need, we need to get rid of the mold out of your system. We got to get rid of the glyphosate and toxins. We need to then get new materials in. We need to get zinc and magnesium enough, protein and fiber in the building blocks your body needs to repair itself. And then you need cellular energy, right? We got to boost up your cellular energy. And if we do that,

• 38:31Josh Axe?

  your body can finally heal. And by the way, if you want to get my complete guide on cellular healing, this is where I go through the top 25 foods for healing your cells. I go through the top 10 cellular healing supplements. Go into the show notes and you can download the free PDF for my Dr. Axe, The Cellular Longevity Guide, and you can get that there as well if you click in the show notes. And if you don't have the new book yet, it is the best book that I've ever written, Dr. Will Cole's ever written. We've both felt this, and it is very cutting edge. If you're more into advanced nutrition on how do you reverse organ age? How do you lengthen your biological age? What are the most healing foods? And going through all of that, you've got to check out the new book. It's called Heal Your Cells. You can go on amazon.com, just search Heal Your

• 39:16Josh Axe?

  Cells, Dr. Axe. You'll We have these root cause protocols. You take a quiz in the book and figure out which organ is aging the fastest and there are custom paths for reversing hormone conditions, healing autoimmune disease, healing digestive issues, healing almost anything and supporting longevity. So don't forget to download that for free. It's over a hundred dollars worth in free content you get for free. If you click the show notes and download the cellular health guide. Okay, so here's the whole map that we talked about on how to heal your cells in three words cleanse, rebuild, energize, cleanse out the toxins and damaged cells, rebuild the deficiencies your cells are starving

• 39:57Josh Axe?

  for, and energize your mitochondria. So you finally have the power to heal yourself and regenerate. And the one truth under all of it is your body replaces 330 billion cells a day. Your body is almost completely new every year. And this renewal process is happening today and your body has an incredible capacity to heal when you start doing the right things. And if you remember nothing else from today, remember this, your body was designed to heal. God wants you to heal. I don't say that to make you feel good. I say it because I've watched it happen in my own body with my mom, with thousands of patients over time that I've walked beside. Every single day, your body is fighting for you, replacing billions of cells, rebuilding itself, whether you help it or not. All right.

• 40:42Josh Axe?

  Before you go do this for me, picture one person in your head who needs to hear this information. Someone who's been told their condition is permanent, someone who's drowning in one prescription after another, someone who's quietly giving up on the idea that they can heal, share this with them. It might just save and transform their life. And also don't forget to subscribe. I want to say thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Akshay. Remember every week we're diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal physically, mentally, spiritually, and take your health and your life to the next level. I can't wait to see you on the next episode.