#441: Why Mitochondria Matter: Preventing Age-Related Decline and Transforming Women’s Longevity With Dr. Taz Bhatia

Welcome back to the show, folks. My name is Natalie Nittum and I am your host. Before I launch into the intro for the episode, I have a very quick personal favor to ask you. As of the recording of this podcast and introduction, my Instagram account seems to have vaporized. So if you're listening to this and you've gone looking for me on Instagram under my name at Natalie Nittam and I'm not there.

then do me a big fat favor, look for me at longevity with Nat. And if you find that page, please do join and follow because I share lots of great information there as well. So that's it. That's the big favor. Let's get into the episode. Today I am joined by Dr. Taz Batia, integrative medicine physician, entrepreneur, and a leading voice in women's health and longevity.

She's here representing Countdown, an organization that I've recently become very involved with that is doing such exciting work. They are helping to accelerate mitochondrial research and bringing new attention to one of the most overlooked foundations of human health, cellular energy. We're talking about why this science matters now, especially for women's health, aging, and the future of medicine.

Now to find out more about Countdown, you can go to joincountdown dot org. And we'll have lots of other information about how you can find Dr. Taz. in the show notes. So next up, we'll thank two sponsors who make this show possible and then we get to dive in. I take my sleep pretty seriously. It's basically my favorite longevity tool.

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Honor and privilege to have you here today. Thank you for taking the time.

would have dismissed as alternative medicine. And I think now we're moving more into this space, particularly with medical doctors, of this functional model that is that is a different approach. What did you see early on that made you really think that the current system just was missing something fundamental?

you know, looking at Chinese medicine and acupuncture and herbal medicine and what that means for us, looking at Ayurveda, you know, all of these different modalities of medicine that have been thousands and thousands of years old, right? Western medicine is only about thirty to fifty years old. And just realizing that they had a different way of thinking about the body, you know, regardless of how we want to debate their therapies, they just thought about the human body in a very different way.

And that in itself was just so eye opening. And if as you start to pursue this stuff and you start to learn things and you g you know, you start to dig and dig and dig. You know, I thought answers that worked for me, but more importantly it makes you question a lot of what you've already learned and try you, you know, try really hard to put conventional medicine into its proper context.

when we think about the body as a whole. So it really started this journey of being like, there's a better way to do things. We're not serving people well. You know, there's so many answers beyond the prescription, beyond the procedure, you know, so So where and especially as an M D, you know, it's like where does all of that fit in the medical model? So that's really driven me over the last, you know, it's been probably seventeen, eighteen years, almost twenty years in the space.

you know, sixteen, seventeen years of running our clinics. So it's really driven sort of what we do and what we continue to evolve and how we grow.

And all of that is really exciting. But that what you just said, like the luxury of time, allowing time with the provider, whatever type of provider, is still something that unless you go outside of the model you can't get, you know, because the models are set up for quick quick turnaround and, you know, over you know, again, remember it's about twenty years in the space, so I've sat on a lot of

committee meetings and like, you know, company meetings and all these other things and they wanna talk about everything, but they don't want to talk about returning time back to the doctor patient relationship. They don't want to talk about that, you know. And so I think that is the biggest disservice because unfortunately what happens, you know, if you don't find that sweet spot in terms of spending time with people

you can't get the full picture, you know, and there's so many things that happen in the exam room or in a clinical encounter where it's like, oh wait, I forgot to tell you this or oh by the way or, you know, like you're digging'cause people always come in with a mask, right? Everybody comes in kind of like kinda buttoned up with what they're prepared to say. But really underneath that is where the answers are and you can't get there as a clinician, you know, unless you have time.

And I'm putting up my hands and quotation marks, efficient. The old style doctor would sit and talk with their patients. They would get to know the patient. And it was kind of like this blend of medicine with symptomatology. To really get a full picture of what was going on.

Yeah. It was kind of about this overall picture of what was going on with you.

uh the load of environmental toxins that we are exposed to today, which is very different from the past, our food quality, our stress levels, you know, there's so many different things. I feel like the cells are under attack. You know, they are expected to perform at a level that they may not be equipped to perform at. And each of those things I just mentioned, like each of those categories, they impact the cell in different ways.

But what it's essentially doing is that we're having a rapid sort of a much more rapid decline in cell health, which means cells don't live as long as they used to in the capacity that they once did. So we're seeing a lot of degeneration. And the way that looks on the outside, right, this is all happening internally, it's all happening quietly, nobody's really aware of it, you're not sitting around thinking about your cell health on any given moment.

But what it looks like externally is a gradual kind of crescendo in symptoms at younger and younger and younger ages. So for example, weight gain in children, right? The obesity crisis in kids. we are seeing like an energy crisis across the board, people complaining that they have brain fog or that they're tired or that they're weak. Uh I I would say the epidemic of inflammation that's shifting downward, the rise in autoimmune disease. And of course

kind of the downward skewing of cancer diagnoses, you know, which is now becoming more prevalent in your twenties and thirties. It's no longer a disease of your fifties and sixties and things like that, right? So all of those th those sort of diseases and symptoms, right? And we can kind of pepper through all the symptoms.

But all of those at the end of the day are rooted to the health of the cell. So the cell is is needing support but not really getting the attention, you know, that it deserves.

And it's not being measured. I think that's the other issue. Like we'll measure a lot of different things in the exam room, but we're not necessarily screening for and measuring cellular health. And I think the next frontier of medicine is really where we literally

you know, sort of evaluate a person at any age, right? Even a baby, and try to understand where they are from a cellular standpoint and then work to build them in a preventive way so we're not dealing with these diseases and conditions down the road.

And and maybe there was a time when a baby would be born and be like the perfect organism, right? They they didn't they didn't have the burden of toxins and whatnot. And what we've learned is the baby is born inheriting having lived in the environment of its mother who is probably doing the best she can, but everything that she's exposed to, that baby is exposed to, and as you've just so eloquently said, the the burden of that of that of those toxins and those those challenges.

has increased so much, I don't know that anybody has really can really mitigate them efficiently unless they're really focused on it. And that remains a privilege really of people who have access to functional medicine or live on a mountain top somewhere.

Yeah. That that organelle, that beautiful little organelle I think mitochondria are the most beautiful things. Like, you know, I w I almost want mitochondrial art on my walls. Right. But but why do you think that mitochondrial science has remained really overlooked? for so long, despite How critical it is for well, everything you've just said, including like brain health, hormones, immunity, metabolism, like there's literally not

a piece of human health that that can be looked at without looking at the mitochondria. I mean, as important as the cell is, what's happening in those little organelles becomes even more critical.

Okay, is there a connection between the heart, lung and brain problem? Is there something that's going on with all three, right? And that's where cellular health comes in in general, right? But the mitochondria in particular,'cause the mitochondria is like the engine of that cell, right? It's the one providing the energy, kind of the resources, all of that stuff.

And so I think when the mitochondria or when the cell is not getting what it needs and the mitochondria then in turn is not getting what it's need, you're having those cells collapse much earlier and lead to many of the symptoms we just talked about, you know. So I think the biggest reason it doesn't get attention honestly is because it's it's

not fitting the model of medicine that we have today where it's very organ based, right? Yeah. You're a specialist in X, you're a specialist in Y, but those special you know, those different specialties don't really cover mitochondrial health. They don't even think about it. They're just thinking about what's going on with that particular organ. So a lot of it's just how we're set up to think about the body in disconnected parts.

rather than spending a little bit more time thinking, okay, what are what's underneath that that's interconnecting all those disconnected parts that actually could be influencing what's happening overall.

What you've like if you've been talking to someone who lives in my house? Like how do you even know that? Right. You know, when they look at you suspiciously and accusingly say, When the last time you went to the bathroom? Yeah. Like, really?

modeled. Where do you do you think we'd be much further advanced?

So those numbers and stats might change because again, you're entering the conversation very late if you're gonna wait and enter it when somebody's having, you know, chronic heart disease or high cholesterol or all of these other things, right? To me, that's a late entry.

If you entered earlier and actually dealt with the mitochondrial health of the cells in the heart, then that would be a very different outcome. I think same thing with the dementia epidemic, right? The memory and dementia epidemic.

Which again is fueling God knows how many expenses across the country in terms of trying to s find support for people who are losing, you know, their memory or who are going into early onset dementia and then living longer and having dementia for longer periods of time, right? For them again, what is the essential

function of everything in the brain. It's the mitochondria. If it doesn't have the energy it needs, you are going to be more prone to memory loss, to neurological disorders, to all those different things, which on the other side, once you get that diagnosis, you know, it's it's very limited. I mean it's a lot of like care and maybe maybe a few medications, but there's really not a plan to again think about cellular health and a and attack it that way, which again

when you come back to the kind of holistic or functional model, it has ways of testing those things, but I would still argue we're still testing post diagnosis, right? Not not because

You know, all of these things are are really imbalances of mitochondrial health. And so again, because we don't think about it, we don't think about how do we optimize the cell versus optimizing something else. You'll see many things continue to progress when I think they could be turned around or like you're saying, just flattened and kind of held in a static place rather than worsening.

They look a little bit like, you know, they're not as strong or not as vigorous maybe as the word. I don't know if it's like the electronics that are doing it. But like I would say even in children we need to be assessing where they are, you know, because I think we are getting you gotta realize that mitochondria is receptive to everything, right? It's receptive to light, it's receptive to toxins, it's receptive to all of the stuff.

And so I think that they may be having decline in mitochondrial energy much earlier, you know, than what we experience as well. And we do also know the other really interesting thing about the mitochondria is that we do know it usually is coming down from the maternal line most mo mo most of the time, right? And it's not really altered. So, you know, if you've got mothers that have had disease or super stressed out or getting, you know, are have a high toxic load.

then the mitochondria of those kids is going to be weaker, you know. So I feel like there's an incredible opportunity from preconception to conception to pregnancy, postpartum, and then going through the lifespan to really optimize this in a much better way.

suboptimal for the most part, unless the parent has made a real decision to send that child to an alternative school where they're going outside. They're not sitting on screens like all the things. Right. The and all of that will compound into what you're picking up, which is this kind of I don't want to call it an aura, but it is almost like an aura of just lower energy. Yeah. Just not as not like that kid energy that you might have seen twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago.

very low energy. And then that in turn will impact their hormones. And so I think a lot of women don't understand is that You have to have energy. They talk about again, not to keep talking about Chinese medicine, but they talk about Chinese Chinese medicine is that to generate a hormone, right? Hormones come from cholesterol.

They are made, you know, when cholesterol synthesis happens properly and you have the right nutrients and then they differentiate out into the into all the different hormones. So when women don't have basic fundamental energy, right, they are not making the hormones that they need. And as they do that, then you start to see all kinds of hormone imbalances.

and those show up in different ways. So for many women, they are dropping their progesterone levels, for example, way earlier than previously. So we expect progesterone levels to go down in perimenopause, for example, as you hit

you know, kinda your mid to late thirties, that's normal. Then the estrogen follows as you get further into your forties and then both fall as you get into your fifties. All of that is very normal, you know, and nothing unusual. But I think what women today don't understand is Whether we blame again the environment or this hum of inflammation or this hum of cortisol, whatever whatever we want to blame.

they're losing progesterone levels much earlier and it's showing up as a lot of the symptomology that they are then in turn getting medicated for. So that is a part of why we've got an anxiety epidemic, part of why we have an issue with mental health and depression, you know, a part of why we have like sort of this PCOS endometriosis profile that's increasing amongst our younger women.

you know, uh that in turn is leading into the fertility and infertility issues. And then sort of these dramatic swings when we get to perimenopause and menopause that are blowing up, you know, families and people's lives and stuff like that. So this idea of building hormone, right, again is a foreign concept in the Western model. You a lot of doctors today don't even advocate for checking hormones. They think it's not necessary, right?

But again, it's another vital sign. It's a vital sign of your, you know, overall constitutional energy and and the trajectory that you're on. I always share my own story that you know, having gone through med school and residency and then ER jobs and all that other stuff, I was bottomed out when it came to progesterone in my twenties, right? Yeah. And so went on bioidentical progesterone probably from, you know, by the time I figured it out, probably from like thirty to

thirty three or thirty four, but during those years was learning a lot about my health and learning about what I needed to do. So once I had my children at like thirty four, thirty five and then thirty six, thirty seven you know, I no longer needed any supportive progesterone until now when I've hit my fifties, you know. So it's like, you know, this this sort of loss of energy is leading to something like hormonal imbalance and th that connection again.

it's not really something that's talked about. I mean, I think even, you know, as we speak, there's a lot of of talk around perimenopause and menopause, but not from sort of this holistic lens where you need to think about cellular energy, you need to think about inflammation, you need to think about cortisol, and then put the hormones in their place based off of all of those things. So to me that's one of the biggest things I see in women's health.

The other piece I see in women's health is sort of the rise in autoimmune disease and diseases of inflammation. That's another really big one. I think uh a lot of women nowadays are suffering from some sort of you know, either well defined or not yet well defined autoimmune condition. And that's a lot of this like chronic fatigue that they feel or the brain funk that they feel or not feeling like themselves.

and it's definitely impacting their self esteem and what they decide to do in the world or how much they're willing to take on. So I think that's a second one that I think is a is an issue that we need to address with women and help game plan for that much, much better. And I think the last might be the state of the female brain, you know, like I think that

I don't know. I don't know how I feel about all this ADHD stuff. I mean, I have a daughter that's on the medications as well and, you know, has been able to perform academically when we finally gave in when she was in eleventh grade and started taking the medication. But you know, you really have to sit and think, what is the long term fallout of this stuff and how is it impacting

you know, the brain. And the concern is when we look at the health of the female brain from a longevity standpoint,'cause we're living much longer than men usually, you know

are we really doing enough to protect the female brain and really thinking about it aggressively? I think those are things that, you know, I don't see women sitting And asking those questions or thinking about, you know, we are really great about dialing into our weight, you know, we're really great about like paying attention to that.

uh paying attention to maybe some of the other things that cat you know that are so obvious, right? But I think thinking proactively about the brain, about keeping diseases of inflammation away, about building hormone, these are things that are not a part of the conversation yet.

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I used to work at a CrossFit gym and I you can work as their nutritionist. And aside from beating myself up, that was the other thing I did there. At that time I was blown away that every twenty something I was seeing was on some kind of anti anxiety mint. I like and I had no clue at that point. I w I w it was just like I literally was slack jawed. And so the couple of things that you said is

And no doctor that I know of right now who's conventional. I mean, they barely want to test women's hormones in their forties. Never mind testing them in a twenty something year old. Right. But based on what you're saying, That should almost be standard of care at this point before we before an anxiety medication is prescribed, there should be a full work up looking at for sure hormones, if not all the other things that we're looking at because

I that symptom one of the symptoms of dysregulated hormones would be anxiety.

take a methylated B and feel like the world opened up for them, right? I mean the mitochondria, if we go back to mitochondria are very dependent on it. But guess what? Your hormones are dependent on that too, you know? So it's like there's so much overlap between what the body needs from an energetic standpoint and what we are actually testing and delivering. And then we've got a lot of people, you know, searching for answers.

Or just experiencing symptoms and assuming that it's normal or it's a part of X, Y, and Z, it's a part of puberty, it's a part of, you know, being in your twenties, it's a part of being pregnant, it's a part of like aging, you know, just making these assumptions. And you ask me what would happen like if we if we could learn more, right? And could implement this in a very practical, efficient way, right? Not

Not overwhelming folks, but just being like, these are the five or six things you should be checking over and over again. Then you could probably not only prevent so much chronic disease. and so many things that both men and women are dealing with today. But we could delay aging, you know what I mean? Or we could define aging, where aging isn't necessarily you losing your brain or your mobility or succumbing to a chronic disease.

But aging is more just sort of this natural evolution into a different role that over time, you know, when that role ends, you're done, you know, that type of thing. But not so much this like disease burden associated with aging that I think is what makes us fearful of aging. Most if you talk to energy, most of them are scared of aging. They don't think there's no positive connotation with aging. Which is something that I think would change if they saw a lot more vibrant, energetic

healthy people walking around. I mean, look how inspired we are now about women who are in their fifties or even in their sixties and they're strong and they're healthy and they look amazing. You know, that gives a lot of hope to younger generations. I think we need to do the same you know, uh in terms of setting up like what seventy or eighty could look like when you're paying attention to mitochondrial health.

What are the what do you think the consequences are of just the flip side, right? What do you think the consequences are of just dumping hormones into a system that is under siege?

If you look at any hormone pathway, not to geek out here, but if you look at any hormone pathway and look at the metabolism of an estrogen or a progesterone or a testosterone, it is all dependent on certain key nutrients and those nutrients being able to move that hormone through the body effectively and then presenting to the liver and being able to be moved through the liver effectively. Those are all dependent

on a healthy mitochondria that can do the work it needs to do. So for example, if you are low in B vitamins or you are low in magnesium, right? then you are not gonna metabolize estrogen effectively. You're gonna store or hold on to that hormone in your tissue. So you're getting hormone replacement therapy over here. Maybe the blood work says, yay, good job, your estrogen levels are better.

But because you are lacking nutrients and some of the key things you need, you're holding on to those metabolites of estrogen maybe in breast tissue or in your uterus or in your fat or in all these different places. which again can be a disease burden in the long term. So again, we've got to think uh not to use the word, but we've got to think holistically about even hormone replacement therapy.

and about what a hormone actually needs to be able to do its job in the right way versus the wrong way. I could say the same thing about testosterone, right? Everyone's like, okay, all the guys want testosterone. Great. But if you give testosterone to a guy whose cortisol level's out of control or who doesn't have enough zinc, right, or whose gut's not working really well.

That level just goes up, but doesn't get metabolized. The next thing you know, their hemoglobin, their hematocrit's going up as well, they're clotting, and that testosterone starts to work against them.

So everything has a sweet spot in the human body, right? Everything everything has a sweet spot and everything is dependent on something else. And so you've gotta be able to connect the dots on some of this stuff or you're really only helping people Fifty percent of the way, but not the whole way there.

I can't remember the year. Was it nineteen ninety nine or two thousand I don't know. It was as recent I think nineteen ninety nine and I could be wrong on my year, so forgive me if I'm wrong, was the first time there was a call to include women in research. But women didn't actually enter research trials. I think the years like two thousand three, two thousand four, something like that.

have all been trained on standard quote unquote everyone wants to throw standard of care in your face, right? Well that's not the standard of care. This is not the standard of care. Those standards of care have been predicated on studies done on men, primarily, not on women. So we are telling people to take this medicine, do this procedure, follow this particular thing on studies that really didn't even meet our demographic to begin with, you know.

So it's not meeting women where they are. So it's an incredible disservice when it comes to women's health. So that's a that's a big you know, sort of push and pull in the women's health community is that you want to be able to think about women individually, cyclically, but the studies are not there to maybe support that work, you know, which is why I always tell women

you know, your story is so important. Your experience is so important because if we're gonna keep falling, you know, on the sword of science. the science isn't there yet to justify a lot of what what people are recommending. So I think that's that's a big red flag and that's a a problem. And yes, there's a push now on funding on for women's health stuff.

But remember, you know, by the time you do a study, right, and by the time you present that study and try to get it published, you've got another generation of women cranking through the medical system, right? So it's almost like another fifteen, twenty years are gonna go by before like, oh my gosh.

We got it wrong. This is different. Now we saw that with the Women's Health Initiative, right? So the Women's Health Initiative was a study that looked at postmenopausal women on hormone replacement therapy of a specific kind, premrin, right? Which is horse. estrogen. And the results of that study, you know, halfway through were so problematic that everybody halted the study and said hormones were bad for everybody.

But they generalized it to everybody. Whereas the study really only looked at women. I think there were somewhere above sixty five. And not thinking about it for women in their forties or fifties or you know, all these other women. So women have suffered, a whole generation of women suffered because they couldn't take hormones because of a flawed study.

And so I think if we learn anything from the research arm of this stuff is that A, we need more research when it comes to anything, and we need varied research. We can't have research from one vantage point. And then I think B is like if we're gonna do women's health research you know, you've gotta look at the different variables when it comes to being a woman. We are not static or linear. We have cycles, you know, we cycle in so many different ways. We play different roles throughout our lives.

And you've gotta figure out a way to do research that addresses some of those variables when it just comes to being a woman.

that is a decline in cellular energy at the end of the day. It's a hormone crash caused by sort of what's happening to the cell, right? So so these two ideas are very closely linked together and very interdependent on one another. Mitochondrial health is cellular health, mitochondrial health is hormone health. You can't separate the two out from one another. Mitochondrial health is brain health, it's also muscle health.

You know, it's it's also joint health, you know, there's just so much when it comes to mitochondrial health that that interconnects the dot.

And I think when it comes to countdown, they're very focused on the mitochondrial component of this, right? Like what does mitochondrial health mean? Do you even know the word mitochondria? Do you know to ask for that? You know, what is its role in in cellular health and women's health, men's health, pediatrics? And I think, you know, historically, even doctors, you know, we were trained to think about mitochondrial health.

in the context of disease, right? We memorized all these diseases in the mitochondria that presented in pediatrics, diseases that present as adults. But we didn't think of it in terms of an option for prevention and optimization for our patients. and how if we thought ahead, right, we didn't wait till the disease pattern emerged.

But if we thought in a little bit more advanced way and in a little bit more of a preventive way, then you could really change outcomes and you can also improve prevention, optimization, hormone health, fertility, all these determinants. that we're struggling with today. So, you know, I was attracted to the organization because they were so focused and targeted.

on this very, you know, unrecognized area of health that I feel like for now and for the future and for future generations needs to really take priority.

It's becoming much more accepted as that looking at the ovaries that are this super den mitochondrial dense organ in women, which makes sense, just as the testes are in men, like help the audience to understand connect this idea of ovarian aging to an overall aging process in the individual for longevity.

Now, at the root of ovarian function is mitochondrial health. That's really what's determining it. So much so that we know that people who have had a lot of disease conditions, who have poor nutrition, have all of these things that impact, you know, mitochondrial health. usually go into perimenopause and menopause much earlier than a a counterpart who's paid attention to it. So the fact that we are understanding, you know, more than just anecdotally that we can actually reverse ovarian age

by paying attention to mitochondrial health is super exciting, you know. And we see it in procedures like, you know, PRP for the vaginal area or for the cervical area where you can literally regenerate different areas because you're replenishing it with fresh cells that have fresh mitochondria. All of these are things that, you know, are kind of on the forefront and are super exciting and mean for women we don't have to have this kind of timestamp on us, right? Like

Okay, freeze your eggs by the time you're forty, otherwise, you know, your chances of having a child are off. But it's not just about fertility. I mean remember estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, all these hormones are also about just our daily functioning, like how we think and how we feel and how we look.

So I feel like if we could understand what it takes to reverse ovarian age, you know, we have unlocked you know, the potential for women to be productive and vibrant, you know, far beyond what our expectations have been in the past.

And if we can and to your point, whether it's reversing it or even frankly slowing it down, if we get started earlier, um we could maybe have a much greater impact. It's always easier to slow down the train, I think, than to turn.

you know, understanding chronic fatigue a little bit better, understanding some of the cognitive disorders a little bit better, some of the muscle myopathies a little bit better. You know, those are incredible with some of the work that's coming out of there. So they're really funding some of this critical research.

at some of the institutions across the country that are involved in it'cause the funding has not been there. So I think that is their number one piece of the puzzle. I think the second is the next place that they are focusing is what it means

in the longevity world. What does it mean for longevity? What does it mean for optimization? And how do we improve things like pediatrics and women's health by A spreading more awareness about the mitochondria, but B coming up with ways to make it realistic to test. and to measure for the average patient in the exam room. And I think, you know, as they continue to work on both of those campaigns, right, funding research,

Spreading awareness, making sure everybody knows the word mitochondria and then knows how to translate that into a practical, you know, into practical applications. I think they're doing that work that I don't know of anyone else doing. So I'm super excited. you know, to kinda get behind this and kinda get this train moving so that it can make a difference in patients' lives.

It's what you've said all along in this episode, if there's a foundational problem in mitochondria in the body, it's going to affect every single system. Maybe one more than the other at any given time, but it's a foundationally it's an energy issue at the at that cellular level. And the other thing that you said that I think is really important when we're talking about an organization like Handown is that

that philanthropy is trying to fill. Right? Because When it comes to this early stage science, the research scholars just aren't

and our team at wholeplus dot co that's H O L P L U S dot C O where we have clinics across the nation and providers that are actually doing this work day in and day out in the exam room.