1/2 Cup Cleans Cells, Stops Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Kills Tiredness

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]I'm talking that deep cellular kind of fatigue where no amount of sleep or no amount of coffee seems to fix it. The problem there isn't that you lack energy. It's that your cells can't use the energy that you're giving them.

[00:00:12]Completely different situation. But what most people miss is that simply a half a cup of bone broth can do a heck of a lot more for your fatigue than maybe having that third or fourth coffee. Now, this whole video isn't going to be about bone broth. I wanted to give you a simple solution right out the gate. Now, bone broth works well, not because of caffeine, obviously, but because bone broth has glycine, it's got magnesium, and it's got the amino acid precursors that your mitochondria actually needs to produce ATP and support the antioxidant systems, mainly like glutathione, that allow you to have a deeper energy. So, coffee is masking fatigue. I love coffee and use coffee as a performance tool and to give you energy, but not to cover up fatigue. Having some bone broth first thing in the morning actually targets it at the source. And today I'm going to show you exactly what's happening inside your cells and how you can use things other than just bone broth. That's just a simple tip to really get around this and fix it. So here's what we're going to cover. First, we're going to dive into a concept that is called spare respiratory capacity. Okay? It's also known as SRC. This explains really why you feel fine when you're at rest, but the moment there's an energy demand, you run into serious fatigue. Then we're going to talk about what's called the ROS feedback loop. This is how your mitochondria actually create a vicious cycle of inflammation and ultimately fatigue. Okay. And there's a huge meta analysis that showed what kind of diet actually breaks this whole situation and kind of fixes it. Okay. Thirdly, we're going to cover the specific micronutrient gaps that starve your electron transport chain. So, not starve your cells per se, but make it so that you cannot create energy from the electrons you extract from food. And then fourth, we're going to talk about how stress rewires your mitochondria.

[00:01:50]And then at the end, I'm going to talk about something that I was doing every single morning. Frankly, I thought it was helping my energy, but it was making things a lot worse. And it did that by keeping cortisol elevated at the wrong times. And it took me getting a cortisol test to realize that. So, before we get into the details, here's something that might help you out. Your body makes energy by moving electrons through the mitochondrial electron transport chain.

[00:02:11]That's how you make energy. Okay? You've probably heard of NAD, nicotanomide addinide ducleotide. This is one of the main electron carriers in that system.

[00:02:19]If you have no NAD, then you have very low, pretty much no electron transfer.

[00:02:24]So less electron flow means less efficient ATP production. So fatigue at the cellular level isn't necessarily just about calories. It's about how efficiently electrons are moving. And you've probably heard people talking a lot about using NAD or getting NAD IVs.

[00:02:39]And that stuff has validity, but it doesn't really survive in an oral form unless it's in a liposomaal form. So, there's a company called Row Nutrition.

[00:02:46]I put a link down below for 20% off.

[00:02:48]They have a liposomaal NAD and they're one of the first to really nail this liposal formula. Lipos has been around for a long time, but they're using it with NAD, which is really cool. It uses a phosphoipid blayer so that what happens is the cells in our body recognize the actual phospholipid billayer of the molecule. Therefore, the NAD that you're taking in actually gets absorbed into the cell itself because the NAD is bound inside this lipid layer that looks a lot like a cell layer. So, it absorbs and doesn't get broken down in the gut. Most NAD supplements do not work at a gut level. So, that link is down below. I recommend you check them out. Do your research. You have to be your own advocate here and look at what's going to work for you. But, that link is down below using code dau 20. Let's dive in.

[00:03:34]We need to reframe how we think about fatigue. Most people really assume that fatigue just means they don't have enough energy. You're not getting enough calories, not enough fuel. But there's a distinction you have to understand because energy production and energy availability, those are two really different things, okay? Because you could eat a lot of food and still be fatigued. Obviously, we see that with insulin resistance. Like eat a lot of food, but it doesn't get in the cells because those calories actually need to be accessed. Then they need to be processed and converted into ATP. So your cells actually use them. There's a whole electrochemical process. That entire conversion process happens inside your mitochondria. Think of it like you've got a car with a full gas tank, but the engine is misfiring. The fuel is there. Okay, that's not the problem. The problem is that can't burn the the fuel efficiently. Your mitochondria are that engine. They take the substrates that you give them in this case like carbohydrates, fats, amino acids from protein, and they run them through oxidative metabolism to produce energy, ATP. If any part of that process is impaired, you don't get energy. Okay?

[00:04:34]So, the fuel is sitting right there, but you your cells can't use it. Now, when you might notice this most is during transitions. And what I mean by that is going from rest to activity, from stress to low stress or low stress to high stress. Your body has this problem with energy flexibility. So, a short effort to a longer duration effort. Like those transitions demand a quick change in mitochondrial output. and you're losing this mitochondrial flexibility. So if your mitochondria can't ramp up fast enough, your nervous system compensates.

[00:05:05]So what it does is it jacks up sympathetic drive, your cortisol, your fight or flight to squeeze out energy through different stress pathways instead of the normal energy pathways that you would get from your electrons.

[00:05:15]That's what makes you feel wired and tired. You're amped up, but you're exhausted deep down at the core. And over time, relying on that stress driven energy makes the whole thing worse. So, if you find yourself crashing during transitions, like you sit up from a chair to go walk and you're like, "Oh, I'm fatigued." It takes you a second or you bust into a run from a walk. You are basically in that situation where you're having a mitochondrial signal problem, not necessarily a fuel availability problem. So, the answer isn't to just reach for more fluid or caffeine. You actually need to address the machinery.

[00:05:48]And that starts with understanding what I'm about to cover next, which is really part two, which is if it's not about calories, what is it about? And there's a concept that's very vital here, okay?

[00:05:57]It's called spare respiratory capacity, what I mentioned earlier. We're just going to call it SRC. So, think of it as your mitochondrial buffer zone, okay?

[00:06:04]It's the difference between how much energy your mitochondria produce at rest and how much they could produce if demand suddenly spiked. It's the reserve. It's your reserve tank. So, there was a mechanistic review in the FASB journal. This synthesized data from a bunch of cellular respiration studies which were situations where mitochondria are pushed under stress and they defined SRC as the maximum respiratory capacity beyond basal ATP demand. So what they found was really important was that cells that had a high SRC tolerate increased workload and oxidative stress just fine. They've got the headroom there, right? But cells that have lower SRC, they reach their maximum respiration very quick. And what's really important is they accumulate a lot more oxidative stress and reactive oxygen species in that whole process. So what that means is that when your buffer zone is depleted, you have like two bad things kind of happening. You can't produce ATP for one and the attempt to produce more is generating oxidative stress that damages your cells. And this doesn't always show up in your workouts.

[00:07:03]Like you could be someone that's fine and perfectly fit, but it's this energy issue that shows up in these kinds of situations. So it's a double hit. So fatigue from low SRC feels qualitatively different from just being sleepy. It's the deep bone level exhaustion like you feel like you're getting sick, right?

[00:07:20]Where your body feels like it's fighting itself because in a very real sense it is. Okay, so two quick things to protect your SRC. For one, it's obvious like you got to stop living at like maximal output and get out of that frame of mind. So constant high demand, right?

[00:07:34]Mental, physical, emotional stress that prevents your SRC from recovering. that is essentially even measurable with your heart rate variability. That is your buffer. That is your zone. I had Dr. Dave Rabin on my channel. We've went deep into HRV. It's so important. It's the most important measurement that we have right now for this. Okay. Your mitochondria respond best to intermittent recoverable stress, not a chronic overload. It is not cool to burn the candle at both ends. I come from a generation where our parents like we needed to perform to get love, right?

[00:08:02]You you got to show up, you got to do this, you got and I'm all about that.

[00:08:05]And it probably shows up in my content.

[00:08:07]It shows up in my physique. The reality is is that you're worthy of everything without having to perform like that. And that chronic overload is not good. Okay.

[00:08:16]The second thing we need to do is avoid these frequent blood sugar crashes. So hypoglycemia forces emergency ATP to be produced through stress signaling which burns through your buffer that SRC super fast. So we want steady fuel, lower stable blood glucose, not spikes and crashes. I'm telling you, that's why carbohydrates can be problematic in this case. It's why people that have poor metabolic function probably don't do as well with high amounts of carbs. Plain and simple. Okay, if you're an athlete, that's one thing. There's one specific morning habit that a lot of people think are helping their energy, but it's really depleting SRC by keeping corn elevated. Um, and it has to do with kind of timing a little bit. I'll talk about that in a minute because it's again that's what I noticed, right? But I want to get into this reactive oxygen species problem first because this is where that fatigue cycle kind of accelerates. So ROS doesn't just accumulate passively, it creates this feedback loop. So even under normal conditions, like your mitochondria produce ROS, it's just part of how they function and a byproduct of the electron transport chain really. But when the electron transport chain is running inefficiently, like when SRC is low and you're pushing them beyond their capacity, you ramp up ROS like crazy.

[00:09:26]Okay? And that's going to cause three specific problems. For one, the efficiency of the electron transport chain drops further. uh you have oxidative damage to your lipids and also to your proteins and even your DNA.

[00:09:36]Okay, so this is the structural components of your mitochondria getting damaged and then inflammatory signaling pathways get activated and that inflammation further impairs your mitochondria which produces even more ROS, more inflammation. You see the cycle, right? It's self-reinforcing.

[00:09:50]Okay, it could very well be the main mechanism that links mitochondrial dysfunction to chronic fatigue. Diet is your biggest lever here. Okay, there was a meta analysis in nutrition reviews looked at 33 RCTs with 3,500 people and found that a Mediterranean style diet, okay, hear me out on this. Reduced high sensitivity CRP, IL6 and IL7 compared to control. And when you look at why it makes mechanistic sense, it's not because of the carbs. It's not because of reducing saturated fat. It has nothing to do with that. It's all about the polyphenols, the antioxidants, the omega-3s, and to a certain degree, the fiber, and quite frankly, they need a fair bit of protein. I'm not saying you need to eat a Mediterranean diet. I'm saying you need to apply Mediterranean principles to a lot of the other things that I teach, and I'll talk a little bit more about those. These are the exact compounds that support glutathione, that support superoxide dismutase, that neutralize redactive oxygen species, and protect your mitochondria. So, eat close to low carb, low glycemic, prioritize protein, especially first thing in the morning. Minimize the ultrarocessed foods, and eat those olive oils. Eat those avocados. Eat those lentils for carbs every now and then. Add those healthy fats in. Eat the salmon. Look up Mediterranean spices. Look up Mediterranean diet and then ditch the grains because whatever hogwash you're going to find on the Mediterranean diet is probably not accurate for what Mediterranean regions eat. Like look at Spain. They don't eat a ton of carbs compared to like Italy, right? It's just it's the point is there's a lot of nuance there. On the lifestyle side, try grounding. 10 minutes barefoot on the grass allows electron transfer that preliminary research is suggesting reduces systemic inflammation. Do we have RCTs on it yet? We don't. But you're standing on the grass in bare feet and it looks insanely promising.

[00:11:31]There's no downside other than like a hookworm or possibly a needle if you're in California. Now then cold exposure is another great tool here, right? This is short brief cold exposure. So we get those cold shot proteins and reduction of inflammation and the half cup of bone broth that I mentioned. Okay, the glycine in it is a direct precursor to glutathione which is the main antioxidant you need. So when I say it targets fatigue at the source, this is the pathway I'm talking about. Okay, you're feeding the system that breaks the ROS cycle. Now when I create a video, I try to have a section that has a part that would really change a life, like an overlooked piece that people miss, not just the generic stuff. I think this might be the piece here because your mitochondria are complex machinery, okay? And some of their critical parts like co-actors, their structural components, their redux carriers, they come from vitamins, they come from minerals, they come from dietary components. And the thing is, you don't have to be fully deficient to run into problems. Even suboptimal levels impair mitochondrial capacity enough to cause fatigue. There was a biio medicine and phicotherapy review that looked at how nutrients influence mitochondrial function and energy metabolism. They found that many micronutrients are essential co-actors in complexes 1 through four of the electron transport chain. This is so important. Antioxidant systems, redux carriers like co-enzyme Q10, like these things matter for how energy moves through our electrons through our mitochondria, excuse me, through our electron transport chain. Deficiency at any of these points stops or impairs ATP production. It causes electron leakage and oxidative stress accumulates and compromises this whole thing. The machine breaks down because it's missing those parts. Okay, so the big four here B vitamins, okay, B1, B2, B3 and B5.

[00:13:08]These are co-actors for the TCA cycle, uh, and for NAD, like I talked about, nicotanomine, adanine, ducleotide, okay, the whole generation of that. Without them, fuel cannot get processed. It can't. So, eggs, meat, fish, um, wheat germ is a good I'm not a big whole grain guy. Lentils can be good here. Uh, second, magnesium. and a lot of people are deficient. Okay, this supports the electron transport complexes directly.

[00:13:35]It's involved in 300 plus enzyatic reactions. Okay, so dark chocolate, dark leafy greens, realistically magnesium supplements. Di magnesium malate, magnesium glycinate, magnesium torate, those are my favorites. Thirdly, iron from real food. Do not take iron supplements. Okay, this is critical that you get that heem iron because you need it in the electron transport chain complexes. The problem is that iron gets taken up and it can actually cause more oxidation, right? So, we want to get our iron from real food. So, organ meats, red meats, pumpkin seeds if you need a plant-based source. Again, don't just jump out and take an iron supplement. It can cause additional issues, especially if your copper levels are out of whack.

[00:14:15]It's a whole different story for another day. Fourthly, co-enzyme Q10. This is essential for electron transport between complexes. If you have enough ATP regeneration can happen, you have less oxidative stress. And again, organ meats are probably the best food here, followed by uh good fatty fish sources, mackerel, uh sardines, salmon, pistachios, and sesame seeds. And even sesame seed oil can actually be really good. Toasted sesame seed oil. So if fatigue is your main complaint and you haven't really addressed those four things, start there. So a good B complex, get like a methylated B complex, not B12. That is cyanocobalamin. If it has cyanocobalamin, run the other way. You want methylcobalamin. Okay? So a good B complex and CoQ10 can really move the needle more than another cup of coffee.

[00:14:57]That's real. Now if we connect all of this to stress, we start seeing a big picture. Stress and mitochondria have a birectional relationship. And when you understand it, it changes recovery a little bit because there was one study in particular. It was published in frontiers in neuroindocrinology and it laid out four key connections between stress and mitochondrial function. For one, stress responses require ATP for mitochondria. So every stress event is an energy draw. Number two, mitochondria are actually involved in producing and metabolizing stress hormones themselves.

[00:15:27]People don't realize that they deal with them for us. So we don't have to. It's like Joe Dirt. They clean the bowl so you don't have to. Right? Then three, neuroindocrine signals like cortisol influence how the mitochondria function.

[00:15:39]And the one that really kind of piques my curiosity is that when researchers experimentally manipulate mitochondrial energetics, it changes the organism's physiological and behavioral responses to stress. What that means is that your mitochondrial health determines how you experience stress. So stress isn't just draining your energy in the moment. If you have chronic cortisol exposure, it's driving up ROS. It's impairing ATP and it alters your metabolic signaling within your mitochondria. Okay? If you combine that with the depletion of the SRC we talked about, chronic stress just creates this constant lingering fatigue that never goes away ever. Like you have to deal with it. The mitochondria themselves need the right inputs to rebuild. So you need to address both physiological and psychological stress for training stress like working out.

[00:16:22]You need to eat nutrient-dense food. You need the micronutrients. You need to prioritize quality sleep above your actual training. Stop looking at it inversely. for psychological stress, nasal breathing, the usual suspects, right? Walking outside, being in nature.

[00:16:37]I've recently been using veagal nerve stimulators, right? There's one called a pulsetto, no affiliation, just a good company. Like those things work. It was a really close friend, uh, ER director, ER physician that turned me on. He said, you know, we'll use these in the ER when people come in and they're super stressed out. We can use a a veagal nerve stimulator. Actually helps calm them down. I started using a little before bed. Holy crap, this stuff actually works. And realistically, I'll be very real here. I might lose some friends and followers for saying this, but one of the things that made the biggest dent for me is actually ketamine assisted therapy. I had to deal with my stuff. I had to have some like ego dissolvement happen to realize that, wow, maybe there is this like underlying stress that's been there because I've kind of been on my own since I was like 13 years old. And I think that stuff wears on you, right? There's a lot of people, everyone has a history and you got to deal with that stuff. So just put that out there to deal with your stuff, okay? It can make a big difference.

[00:17:31]Another thing is getting morning sunlight. Okay, 10 to 15 minutes of direct sunlight within the first hour can reset your cortisol peak. So that means it's going to drop early in the evening. It's not just huberman stare into the sun stuff. It's just get some morning sun so your circadian cues and cortisol rhythms can work. Okay, it's circadian cortisol regulation and it feeds directly into that whole part I was talking about that you can do in the morning that's messing up our mitochondria. We need to talk about how this all works cuz I think this could be the single most important factor for a lot of people. Your mitochondria don't operate at the same capacity 24/7.

[00:18:04]They're not designed to do that. So, they fall under the reign of circadian control. So, when you demand energy, it matters just as much as how much you need. So, if your timing is off, you're going to feel it. Like, if you normally work out in the morning, do you realize that it's harder to work out in the afternoon? It's because your mitochondria actually are a clock. All these things matter, right? And it can affect many things if your clock is out of whack. There's a journal of molecular endocrinology study that really confirmed this. Mitochondrial respiration is rhythmic. So oxygen consumption, ATP efficiency, ROS generation all undergo very predictable oscillations throughout the day. So these genes are regulating our electron transport chain and our defense system.

[00:18:43]So when your timing is aligned, the mitochondria can anticipate the demand.

[00:18:46]When it's misaligned, they're constantly reacting under stress. like it's like a factory that's asked to produce at peak capacity during the night shift with a skeleton crew. So the study that really made this like make sense for me was in cell metabolism and it took people with pre-diabetes and it put them on either early timerestricted feeding um with a 6-hour eating window between uh before 3 p.m. essentially. So they were had to eat before 3 or a 12-hour control for 5 weeks and then they crossed over. The early feeding group showed significantly improved insulin sensitivity, beta cell responsiveness, blood pressure, oxidative stress, and appetite. All without weight loss because they didn't affect calories. Just by aligning food earlier, they improved mitochondrial substrate handling, reduced their oxidative stress, and improved metabolic efficiency. No calorie changes, no supplements. All they did is mess around with timing. Okay, but I was doing one thing that was really making me fatigue.

[00:19:33]Like for years, I was skipping breakfast pretty much every day. 16, 18, like pretty much every day was fasting. And I thought it was helping because I was leaning out. But what was actually happening is if you do this every morning, trust me, don't get the wrong idea. I love fasting. I fast 4 days a week, usually 3 to four. But if you skip breakfast every morning, cortisol is always staying elevated to maintain blood sugar in the morning. So your body is using stress hormones as a substitute for food derived fuel. And we just spent this entire video covering what chronic cortisol does to your mitochondria. So I was running my mornings on stress hormones and calling it discipline. And my mitochondria was paying the price.

[00:20:07]So, what I changed is a couple days a week, like three to four days per week, I'll eat breakfast. And on those mornings, I have a high protein meal with like 70 to 100 grams of protein within a couple hours of waking. I still usually train fasted, eggs, meat, avocados, healthy fats, a little more meat, a little more eggs, a little more meat. Okay, that signals to my body that resources are available and my cortisol drops and I've tested it and proven it.

[00:20:30]So, your mitochondria operate in performance mode rather than survival mode. So on the other three days or four days, I'll do longer fasts, 18, 20 hours. And those longer fasts give you the deep benefits. The insulin bottoms out, the cells reensitize, autophagy kicks in, and your total net hours of fasting over the week are the same. You preserve morning mitochondrial function most days while still getting the genuine fasting benefits a few days per week. So you stack that with the early timerestricted feeding a couple days per week where you like skip dinner and just mess around with it, okay? You work with your biology instead of against it. So frontload your calories earlier in the day and keep a consistent sleep wake schedule so your mitochondria can anticipate the demand. Try to avoid late night training. Try to get the morning sunlight. Don't fast every single day and see how it all kind of flows together. And then get those vitamins and minerals I talked about. Okay? Get the B vitamins. Get the co-enzyme Q10.

[00:21:22]Sip on the bone broth before your coffee. Trust me, it makes a big difference. I did a video here that talks about how you can utilize olive oil during a fast, specific kind of an olive oil fast. I would recommend you try that. It actually has some interesting effects and you need to hear me out on it. So, that video is right here on drinking just a few tablespoons of olive oil throughout the day as a form of olive oil fasting. Check it out.

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