136-The Cell Danger Response

Our conversation delves into the cell danger response , where we reveal the mitochondria's critical role in inflammation regulation and healing .

By probing into the stages of cellular response to threats , we expose the paradox of inflammation that it's indispensable in short bouts for survival , but ultimately detrimental when it's chronic or prolonged , leading to the host of chronic diseases that we all face .

Join us for a narrative that bridges storytelling with deep scientific insights , offering a fresh perspective on the aging process . We also scrutinize the impact of stress and energy on our body's capacity to heal .

Dr Gordon discusses the phenomenon of senescent cells and their role in aging , and how the intricate balance of the body's healing cycle is easily tipped by this sustained stress in inflammation . This episode is an eye-opener to the intricate dance between ourselves and the environment and how this delicate interplay affects our overall health and longevity .

For anyone interested in taking charge of their health , understanding the nuances of their body and embracing a personalized approach to wellness , this episode is an essential listen . Join us on this journey as we connect the dots between science , health and the art of living well .

This episode is brought to you by L Nutra , maker of the prolonged fasting-mimicking diet . Please support this podcast by checking out their website and taking a look at their amazing products . And now please enjoy this week's episode .

As I think I was telling you to begin with , I've always focused on illness rather than on wellness , because I never really knew for sure how to help the individual for wellness , because it's so individual , while once somebody was ill , it gets clearer and crisper the areas that need support .

But after doing this for a long time , I've come to learn a lot about what I think also is involved in staying well and in healing .

And all these concepts that people use , whether it's , you know , in the old days it was the oxidative stress theory , or free radicals they're all valid . They all inform us of an aspect . To me , why I focus on inflammation is because it's the way the body tries to protect itself is inflammation . There's nothing wrong with inflammation .

In fact , that's why I found the cell danger story , if you will , that Dr Robert Navio has published , you know , has put together and helped really teach the world a little bit about , as so useful , because it lets us understand that many of the things that we label as pathologic are only pathologic because they're unrestrained , okay , and the healing mechanism is

inflammatory , okay . It's just that it should be a cycle . You should start inflammation and then we slowly resolve it and go back to a more steady state of , you know , just preparation and healing . But you know , not , active inflammation , and all chronic illness is persistence of inflammation in some tissue , in some organ .

But so , and it's just to understand , I think the best way to step back is think of healing on the everyday level . You know , when we , during the day we're busy , you know eating , and at night we're busy , kind of like breaking down tissue a little bit and trying to recover from the day stresses , okay , and so that's , that's a .

But even during that time the cell , your cells , are involved in transient inflammatory episodes . You know you . But when you get sick , and this is where the cell danger response comes in , when you're sick , those transient episodes of breaking down tissue and rebuilding tissue become much greater .

I always say it's a difference between , you know patching a hole in your wall , like there were a picture was , and calling in the contractor to rebuild the whole room . You know , to tear it down . See , the cell danger response is when you're tearing down the room and rebuilding it .

So the it's broken down into three phases and three phases reflect the three , the three types of mitochondrial function . Okay , because people think of the mitochondria as creating energy , you know , through ATP and the electron transport chain , and that's what they do .

When the cell is functioning is functioning normally , but when there is a danger of viral infection or trauma or a toxin or really anything , the first thing the mitochondria does is it senses that it's not getting all the raw materials and the electrons that it's supposed to and it begins to brown out , it begins to actually make less ATP and it begins to do

something very special it puts ATP , it increases the amount of ATP , which is the energy currency of the body on the cell surface , and at this point , atp , instead of being used for energy , is being used as a signaling molecule .

Okay , just like people think of hormones , well , this is a local hormone , a very paracrine effect , a very local effect , but it signals that this is a cell that's sick , which will call in the immune system and inside the cell , once the that mitochondria is making less oxygen I mean is is is making less ATP it's also using less oxygen and this makes more

oxygen in the cytoplasm , which creates what we've always called oxidative stress , and everybody thinks oxidative stress is bad . But oxidative stress is life saving . If it's transient , okay . It's what lets your cells kill things inside of them . You know it's very important . But if you stay there you begin to have chronic inflammatory diseases .

So that's the CDR1 , where you're having the acute viral infection or trauma , you know , and both of these involve calling in the innate immune system , the neutral cells .

Okay , when you try to understand health and wellness as well as chronic illness , you need a story . When you try to just understand things at the very deep biochemical levels , you're always going to be wrong because we don't .

I mean , if you read the literature , you quickly drop into a morass of acronyms and proteins and genes that we still don't really understand what they do . But it sounds very much like people know what they're talking about , but at the end of the day , the complexity is overwhelming . So to really understand that , we need story .

And I think before we there's more to the CDR , much more . But before I go into that I think it's because people , it's too easy to get lost again in the detail Let me talk about a little more overriding picture that I think people will understand easier . Okay , and that's the difference between what we call functional illness and pathological illness .

Okay , in medicine functional illness is things like irritable bowel syndrome , where the tissue isn't broken . Okay , you can scope somebody with irritable bowel , get a colonoscopy . They look in there and it looks normal . Okay , you can have a lot of pain , a lot of diarrhea , a lot of constipation , but the tissue looks normal . So we call that functional illness .

Now , it used to have a little bit of a not such a nice meaning to it , because it used to . Functional used to be the polite word that doctors used to suggest that it was psychological , it was all in your head .

That's one of the great fallacies of medicine , I think , is to think that the psyche will allow illness to persist . But I don't believe it . It rarely will create it . It takes usually a bunch of other stuff happening at the same time , but anyways .

Okay , you can identify the injured tissue .

That's what medicine has focused on for the last at least 100 years , because we got really good at it and especially , I always say not that I , but many people have felt that medicine has been led by our experience in warfare and that's why our ability to heal trauma is so amazing , or to not maybe heal it , but to at least treat it .

Okay , so that's pathological illness . The tissue is broken , or you have an ulcer , the tissue was destroyed , you have a heart attack , you know it's local area and in that . So that's the CDR1 , in a way that local tissue destruction .

Okay , because and you know , when you have that destruction you have to get rid of you then have that CDR1 , which begins to call in the immune system and you begin to chew up the dead cells . And then you get into CDR2 , which is when you have to call in stem cells and growth factors and begin to rebuild tissue Okay , and so that's still local , okay .

And then you get to CDR3 , where that cell has to mature and the cell membrane has to normalize . Because in CDR1 , you harden your cell membrane Okay , because you want to prevent egress of the viruses or and you also want to prevent other bad things from getting in .

But in CDR3 , that cell membrane is normalizing now and the receptors for hormones and cell to cell communication is being restored Okay , and so now we're getting to that area of function . Now the cell is going to return to becoming a fully adult member of society Okay , so it knows the rules , it can begin to interact Okay .

And that's when we start getting to this area of functional medicine , because now it's about signaling . That's not working well , okay . So the tissue is kind of back to pretty much normal , but it's no longer listening as well as it should to the communication around it .

Okay , or the communicate , or it's getting persistent low level inflammatory signals , not enough to kick it back into the CDR1 , but enough to not let it mature completely . So it's still either not listening well , okay , I was going to go into senescent cells , but we're not going to do that now . Okay , but that's another part of this story .

So here we have functional medicine . The functional part is about cellular communication and that is really coming from the brain on some level . Okay , because you see you have local tissue damage , okay , and then you have the signals that the war is over . That has to come from the brain , okay , because see so .

So again , when I say aging is chronic inflammation , it's because chronic inflammation means we haven't restored full cellular communication in the body . Okay . So in a way it's really poor communication , because I mean , when you think about it from a psychological point of view , what is everyday stress in relationships about is where we're miscommunicating , you know .

That's why , when you go to the therapist , sometimes if you're lucky , if you go to family therapy , you can suddenly hear what the other person has been trying to tell you .

They stopped listening to each other , and so when we want to heal , we have to create the environment that lets cells know that they're healthy .

So , on one hand , we have the micro , which is the local , the pathology , and I love to study the pathology , and the pathology is full of these micro details of which chemical , in which which protein or enzyme or gene is off .

That is a fascinating world , but if you really want to get back to health , you also have to engage your favorite organ , which is the central nervous system , the brain , in giving the all clear signal that that it's safe , because safety is is what allows healing and is a danger signal .

So yeah , it's all just different language , that one of the dangers of always being in a place of stress is that your body goes into defense and protect and when you're in defense and protect , there isn't the energy to go into heal and maintain .

And the body's has limited resources and it's always making a choice and I think , like a cell and the cell membrane , you could think of it in a similar way , where , if there's , if it's in defense and protect , it limits the energy available for maintain and heal .

Does that play a role in your story ? That that's ?

Ok , that first step , the mitochondria is browning out and that's why , and that , and just for the details of the biochemistry that's why a lot of people who are stuck in have a lot of cells maybe not the whole body , but have a lot of cells that are stuck in the CDR one , and they're busy gobbling down CoQ , 10 and PQQ and all these good mitochondrial

supplements that don't do anything . It's because that mitochondria has turned itself off . It's not broken . It's part of that self-defense mechanism . Okay , but I digress , I apologize , just wanted to get in another little story about the CEO , wanted to understand that .

The reason I love its richness is because that was always confusing to me why some people respond really well to mitochondrial supplementations and other people . They come in with a shopping bag of mitochondrial supplements and they don't feel any better . It's because their system isn't listening .

Those mitochondria have made a decision to slow down and their cells are busy making all the energy that they can by burning sugar , and that's why they love the sugar , but anyway . But energy is the key , because what people don't understand is that it takes energy to relax .

Okay , when you close your fist , when you tighten a muscle , you're using ATP that you've already made . You're kind of falling off the cliff . Okay , when you got to open , now you have to climb back up the cliff or walk up the hill . That takes energy and it's the same thing in the brain .

People don't get that is that the highest energy use in the brain is to relax . And when we don't have enough energy , our GABA and NERGIC systems the things that tell our brain that kind of chill things , don't function well . And so the less sleep you have , the more irritable you are and the less able you are to heal .

Because , as I was saying before , the real , all clear signal , as you were saying , the real place where people can begin to heal is from a sense of safety .

And if you live like you're saying , if you live in chronic stress , if you can't find a place to remember , to open your eyes , to look out at the vista instead of looking up your butt , to use a bad analogy . But that's what most of us do . We spend our time with our heads very much stuck in places that aren't useful .

Round and round that same cycle , cause I think on some level the obsessive , compulsive thinking is really a way to try to solve a , to try to make yourself safe , and unfortunately , the universe has to be a joke . It doesn't work that way .

You're always doing a little bit of this tissue rebuilding and tissue you know break down , you know every night when you go to bed . It's all part of that . You know pathways , you know the , the , the longevity people love to talk about M tour and the MP kinase and and that's what happens every night .

But when you're in , stuck in the cell danger response , you're stuck in one part of that pathway . You might be stuck in just the breakdown part or just in the overbuilding in the cell danger in the CDR too , you're stuck in that place where you're making more tissue .

So you get scarring , you know , you get hypertrophy of blood vessels , you get hypertension , you get diabetes . These are , these are diseases and you'll also . One of the off ramps for this is senescent cells , because senescent cells , you know , are a perfect example of chronic inflammatory , low level , chronic inflammatory signaling .

Okay , that probably has a lot to do with aging , because there is , quote unquote , normal aging . It's just a question of whether , if we can control the inflammation , to age gracefully and drop dead , or , you know , age with a lot of diseases . You know , that is the . That that is . The big question Is how we go about this .

This body of ours , nature , you know we can build bridges , okay , and you know , and all engineers would probably pretty much agree , that this is a stable bridge . You know , if you gave them the mathematical formulas doesn't work like that in the body . We don't have the , we don't have the handbook .

We're making it up , we're making up stories to explain our observations and we get , you know , we , we have better and better stories because we've got better and better data , but we're still hanging them together with stories . You know , you know what ? Yeah , plato said that a lot , you know , a long time ago , 2000 years ago .

You know , science is a likely story and that's all we have . But people get so in love , you know , with their frameworks and I said this is mine , but it's got to hold it loosely . You know , don't , don't , don't fall in love with it . It's because there's exception .

You know , this is when the immune system has gone off the rails , so to speak , and is really stuck .

And what I have begun , what I have seen over the years , is that it's a combination of what I call Band-Aids , which is the use of , you know , drugs or herbs it doesn't matter what it is to kind of quiet down a symptom , to lower the inflammation in the local tissue and to change the milieu . Okay , which is to change the environment in such as . I mean .

The simple things are you know , you got to teach people how to breathe again . You got to teach people you got to work on the sleep . Sleep is really hard because it's , you know , when you , when you're chronically inflamed , you've got lots of noise going on up here and lots of systems are activated .

It's not so easy as , like sleep hygiene , I always like to laugh at the people who want to tell you to sleep hygiene . Well , you have a chronic infection . Sleep hygiene is helpful , but it's not the whole story .

You're not going to need a Band-Aid to help sleep , but so breath , sleep , sun , nature , I mean it's , it's , those are the signals , and you know , obviously , and you know clean food , the basic things , and and and and . A loving , if you can , a loving atmosphere .

I mean , you know , and these are tall orders , not easy to do , but you need all of that at some levels . Again , the beauty of the human body is none of it has to be perfect . Okay , all of us , we wouldn't be , we wouldn't be here . You don't need to be living , you know , with , you know with the Dalai Lama every day in order to heal .

You know you can still live with your slightly angry spouse and heal . It's just that it's nice to find places where you have some some feeling of love and relationship . You know perfection is not needed to heal . I think that's very important .

There's a part of me that would like to believe is just there's too much in here . But the reality is we're losing it a little bit . But the liver is one that I keep coming back to more and more , because it's true that GAI tract is where we meet the world .

But where the world really begins to , I think , hurt us is when it starts interacting with our liver . I don't know , it's 45 , maybe 50% already of Americans have fatty liver . That low-level fat infiltration in the liver is an example of chronic inflammation because of usually of the foods I mean what we've done to our gut can also be from the bad bugs .

As this chronic inflammation affects the liver , it affects the quality of what goes obviously into our blood vessels . So we start having arteriosclerosis and we start having chemicals that get into our brain and inflammatory chemicals . Each organ is affected differently by inflammation . Each organ can respond a little bit differently because they have different mitochondria .

I think to taking it back is that your heart can have 4,000 or 5,000 mitochondria per cell , while a skin cell can have like 400 . And so they'll deal differently with inflammation , and that's why we tend to get . Our heart is much more sensitive to changes in energy metabolism .

Our skin is much more sensitive to changes in hypertrophy , and that's why we have so much more of those issues with skin than we do with the heart .

But the inciting event may have been a toxic exposure years ago and your body has dealt with the toxin , it's removed it from the system , but you might have damaged some of the cells in your liver and they haven't recovered and they haven't been gotten rid of . They're in that senescent state , they're stuck . So it's just always

. But we always start with trying to look back at what was the setting . It's this standard kind of like and on one level it's a standard approach . You want to get a very good history , because the history is going to tell you most things . Were you sick since you were a kid ? Were you vigorous and healthy ? Because the genetic component is huge .

It's where the genes meet . Your environment is where your health is . So it's looking at your health , your story , your family history , your exposures , your toxin exposures , your infectious exposures and then weighing by where you are today .

What your body can tolerate Because that's the biggest thing is that many times you can find that someone has a chronic infection , but as soon as you start to treat them , they get worse . That's because their body is stuck in a place of sensing danger .

Everywhere they're stuck in chronic inflammation and once you begin to try to engage , the immune system overreacts . And that's why again , that's why inflammation and aging are connected is because it's this inability to modulate the immune response , instead of being able to go through those three stages of the CDR , you've got too many cells that are stuck .

The reason I emphasize cells is because often it's only 5 or 10% of cells in your liver , your kidney or some organ that is stuck in this inflammatory thing . That's why you're not dying . You can stay in this state and live to your 80 or 90 . It's just that you feel miserable .

You run into people with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia who are well into their late 70s and 80s and they just feel bad , but they're not dying , you know so some of the other the approaches you engage with . Well , so then you know again .

So the first step again is history , going through all the possibilities , and then we have to decide what , what pickup stick we can move . Okay , because the thing is , you know , can we just go after an old , unresolved infection because many times there are , they are present or do we have to do you have , it was your body just overreacting .

You had , like for instance , one of the DNA viruses , one of the herpes families of virus that we know , staying the B cells , you know , quiescent . But if you get stressed when those B cells decide to reproduce , you expose your body to some of those proteins again and your immune system goes nuts . So maybe we just have to quiet down the immune response .

Or many people , a big thing today is this mass cell activation , which is huge for people with chronic illness that their immune system just way overreacts a very small stimuli . You know , because you should , you're no longer discriminating . I mean , it's a failure to to to failure to communicate , to use an old line .

So we so I said this thing is looking at what we can remove , what we can quiet down . Do we need to quiet your immune response or do we need to actually pick it up a little bit , and that depends on you know , whether we have to help you kill something or help you stop killing it and just realize that you better coexist with it for a while .

Okay , and then , and be able to rebuild that sense of safety . Because if you're always reacting to a low level pathogen that's not hurting you , you're always giving your brain a message that your body is in danger .

And that doesn't let you sleep well , it doesn't let you digest well , it doesn't let your you know , it doesn't let the parasympathetic nervous and function like it should . Okay , here .

You know , there's no judgment there , just sometimes it can't go and then you have to use herbs and medications to get them to a place where there's a little less pain , a little less inflammation .

You know , I'm not talking about using opiates , but there's lots and lots of tools out there to lower the inflammation , to get the immune system to feel more comfortable , and then they can engage those healing mechanisms that are more in the quote unquote psychological realm . You know , to me there's no difference between psyche and soma .

I mean , as we , in order to think , we break things down , but at the end of the day , you know every , every , you know brain cell not almost every , but but many brain cells have the same . You know they respond to the inflammatory signals . You know that the immune signals , you know , will make you depressed or make you angry .

So it's all one bag of soup . It's just what your body can hear . So in some people we can go right to the , the , the functional we can . We can involve your brain early . In other people we have to really work with the body first , and we do a lot of physical work .

I have a lot of people who , whether body workers I hate to call it , it's no using cranial work , cranial cycle work , energy work , a lot of the different electrical machines . It just depends . You have to be careful , though , because really sensitive people can blow up from things that everybody else thinks are absolutely safe .

You know , like the , the , the electromagnetic field , the . You know the , the healthy , like the PM , the post electro electromagnetic fields would wonder us . For some people , some people , they're too much . So that's what what I do is I work through what the body can hear , okay , and we just listen . It's a dance , okay . It's not a prescription .

I wanted to believe them , because I do believe that nobody's coming to me to lie to me , but it was sounded so outlandish that these things could cause so much trouble for them . But after working with them for 30 years , yeah , it can . You just have to respect that and you have to .

You know , it's like playing chess and you feel like you're always being checkmated and you just have to keep finding a different approach . And you , you know , not all , not always , but sometimes we do . I mean , and it's funny because people who are super sensitive , you'll find that some of them , they can't take any herbs and yet they can take drugs .

You know , I mean , it's just it's mind blowing to find that . You know these people who , like herbs will make them sick as a dog or even energy medicine will blow them up and you can give them a drug and it's like , and they respond . You know , you just have to keep an open heart and an open mind on what that individual will respond to .

And it's and that's why we use a lot of , interestingly enough , that people who can tolerate them , a lot of the intravenous techniques can sometimes get the get information in in a way that kind of bypasses the body's normal , because the most of these people have become very there are window on the world .

Okay , our eyes , our ears and our you know , nose and digestive track have become so hyper that , funnily enough , if they can , if their skin isn't too sensitive and sticking a needle into their vein doesn't freak them which it can some of their sympathetic nervous systems are so wired that their veins become hypersensitive . But if they're not , we can get a .

We can get a lot of changes in people who can't tolerate anything by mouth through their veins . It's , it's just kind of the magic of dancing with this and this is , you know .

So these are the things we've learned for the chronically ill , and but you know , at the same time I'm seeing almost all of our tools being used for people who want to be , who want to stay well . You know that that that that is the magic is each one of these tools that really work and sick people in the right person . Who was interested in wellness .

It can really help them get to the next level of healing , because it's about finding where the chronic inflammatory drive is , because even people who are well often have a , you know , under the hood there's inflammation . There's that high blood sugar . You know that's all inflammation . I mean I can't think of any , any marker for aging .

That's not that I that I can't relate to persistent cell danger response .

And if we start with mindset , they often get insulted because they've already been told by too many physicians that if they would just take the antidepressant or get therapy , they would be better , they would heal . But , as I said in the beginning , this controls your immune system on a very huge level .

Again , local pathology will create inflammation , but the persistent self-defense thinking is what will maintain the inflammation . The healing message , the message that the world is safe again , comes from our brains . Okay .

So , yes , the mindset is critical , but when you feel miserable and you're not , you know you wake up in the morning and to even get out of bed either makes you dizzy , light-headed or just fatigued . It's really hard to skip , to put on a smiley face . Many of these people have learned to , but it's still hard .

So we have to go back and that's what I'm saying and find the band-aids . That can begin to help some of those physical symptoms and then allow them to engage the hope we have to find hope again . And so , yes , the mindset is crucial . But it's hard to start with mindset .

So there are many and we do use I mean , I do have people work with many biofeedback people and you know cognitive behavioral therapists and many of the programs that are out there that help realign because , like you're talking about the super sensitive people , you know , part of that is a mindset . Once you've reacted to smells , your body gets real defensive .

I mean , if every time somebody walks in , you know the office you're in and they're wearing a perfume and you get a severe headache , your body gets primed , you know , and so it does become a psychological thing as well . You can cause that severe headache by just suggesting a bad smell .

And because we always want to make sure that we're a right fit for people , you know , we really don't like to waste people's resources if we're not the right ones , so we always try to really make sure that it's going to be helpful .

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