Who turned off the metabo-lights
The latest nutrition research is revealing the roles that previously underappreciated dietary factors play in mitochondrial health. Beyond the essential macronutrients – fat, protein and carbohydrates – and micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals, other leftover factors in food, including fibers, polyphenols, bioactive fats and fermentation products, are also key for metabolism.
Unlike a Western diet, which often lacks these bioactives, traditional diets such as the Mediterranean and Okinawan diets are rich in foods – nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fermented foods – replete with these factors. Many bioactives pass undigested through the small intestine to the large intestine, where the microbiome converts them into activated metabolites. These metabolites are then absorbed, influencing the number of mitochondria in cells and how they function.
At the most fundamental level of cell biology, metabolites turn on and off molecular switches in your genes through a process called epigenetics that can affect both you and your offspring. When the metabolic “lights” are turned on, they enliven the mitochondria responsible for a faster metabolism, effectively increasing the calories you use.
Please mind the microbiome gap
A healthy microbiome produces a full range of beneficial metabolites that support calorie-burning brown fat, muscle endurance and metabolic health. But not everyone has a microbiome capable of converting bioactives into their active metabolites.
Long-term consumption of processed foods, low in bioactives and high in salt and additives, can impair the microbiome’s ability to produce the metabolites needed for optimal mitochondrial health. Overuse of antibiotics, high stress and lack of exercise can also adversely affect microbiome and mitochondrial health.
This creates a double nutrition gap: a lack of healthy diet and a deficiency in the microbes to convert its bioactives. As a result, well-studied nutritional approaches such as the Mediterranean diet might be less effective in some people with an impaired microbiome, potentially leading to gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea and negatively affecting metabolic health.
In these cases, nutrition research is exploring the potential health benefits of various low-carb diets that may bypass the need for a healthy microbiome. While the higher protein in these diets can reduce the microbiome’s production of beneficial metabolites, the lower carbs stimulate the body’s production of ketones. One ketone, beta-hydroxybutyrate, may function similarly to the microbiome metabolite butyrate in regulating mitochondria.
Emerging microbiome-targeting approaches might also prove helpful for improving your metabolic health: butyrate and other postbiotics to provide preformed microbiome metabolites, personalized nutrition to tailor your diet to your microbiome, intermittent fasting to help repair your microbiome, and the future possibility of live bacterial therapies to restore microbiome health.
Tools to transform fat into fuel
For most people, restoring the microbiome through traditional diets such as the Mediterranean diet remains biologically achievable, but it is not always practical due to challenges such as time, cost and taste preferences. In the end, maintaining metabolic health comes back to the deceptively simple healthy lifestyle pillars of exercise, sleep, stress management and nutritious diet.
Some simple tips and tools can nonetheless help make nutritious diet choices easier. Mnemonics such as the 4 F’s of food – fibers, polyphenols, unsaturated fats and ferments – can help you focus on foods that best support your microbiome and mitochondria with “leftovers.” Bioactive-powered calculators and apps can also aid in selecting foods to control your appetite, digestion and metabolism to rebalance your calorie “ins and outs.”
