The Five Laws of Mitochondrial Health

Living in accordance with these laws keeps us on the path to vibrant health.

We defined health.

We’ve put our sights on the North Star.

We know how to know when we’re healthy.

But what do we do to get there?

If we have arrived at the promised land, how do we stay there?

How do we explore it more deeply to discover the riches of its treasures?

What Everyone Should Be Doing For Their Health is a collection of “the basics” that everyone should check in on from time to time to make sure they aren’t missing any of the foundational health strategies:

But what if you’re missing many of the basics? Where should you start? How should you narrow in your focus?

Or what if you’re hitting them all and you need a more advanced health strategy? How do you guide your search?

The Five Laws of Mitochondrial Health

The Five Laws of Mitochondrial Health are the compass you need to keep you following your North Star.

They are the lenses with which you should view the basics.

They are the guardrails that keep you on solid footing as you search for your next advanced strategy.

These are the Five Laws of Mitochondrial Health:

• The First Law: Always start with your mitochondria.

• The Second Law: Put food first and pharma last.

• The Third Law: Never put tech before nature.

• The Fourth Law: Remember your needs are your own.

• The Fifth Law: Observe your needs as they change with time.

Applying these five laws will require specific mitochondrial strategies and a plethora of mitochondrial tactics.

Our purpose in this article, however, is to understand the laws so that when we seek to apply them using strategies and tactics we do so from a position of wisdom and understanding.

This is educational in nature and not medical or dietetic advice. See terms for additional and more complete disclaimers.

This is a fundamentally philosophical article, so it focuses on articulating the philosophy rather than on substantiating claims with evidence from scientific literature.

The 1st Law: Always Start With Your Mitochondria

Mitochondria extract usable energy from the food you eat so you can use it to fuel the production, maintenance, repair, and distribution of everything in your body.

The amount of cellular energy your mitochondria produce drives the dial of health and disease.

As you produce more energy, the dial drives to the right and points to health.

As you produce less energy, it falls back to the left and points toward disease.

Within each range, the amount of cellular energy drives how ill we are or how healthy we are.

There are thousands of genetic variants and uncountable experiences and exposures that can drive what disease or health looks like for each one of us.

For one person, disease is diabetes. For another, it’s heart disease. For another, it’s cancer. For yet another, it’s a neurological disease. And for yet another, it’s chronic fatigue.

For one person, peak health is athletic achievements. For another, it’s business. For yet another, it’s leadership and the formation of harmony within a community. And for yet another, it’s contemplation of eternal truths and their articulation in art or writing or speech.

But whether we experience health or disease and how much of each we experience comes down to how much usable energy we can extract from food and to what extent we can use the top layer of abundant energy to fuel the commitment of the bulk of the energy toward our health and highest purpose.

Living in accordance with the first law can be achieved at many levels: one level applies to how we manage our own health; another applies to how a physician may manage the health of others; yet another applies to the scientists who study how the many things we could be exposed to impact our health.

For example, using or prescribing mitochondrially toxic antibiotics for acne before giving the skin enough vitamin B5 to allow its mitochondria to clear away the fatty acids that are fueling the growth of those bacteria violates the first law.

Consider high cholesterol. Training the liver’s mitochondria to produce abundant energy through fasting and intense exercise will improve the ability of the liver to fuel the energy-intensive clearance of cholesterol from the blood. To do this before resorting to strategies focused exclusively on micromanaging the production of the cholesterol transporters with fiber, ezetimibe, seed oils, and statins is to live in accordance with the first law.

A scientist trying to solve the protracted withdrawal syndromes of benzodiazepines and SSRIs by focusing exclusively on neurotransmitters does not walk in the way of the first law. To walk in its way, the scientist must consider how these drugs distribute through the entire body, entering cells in every tissue and altering their mitochondria.

The 2nd Law: Put Food First and Pharma Last

The second law does not say “never use a pharmaceutical.” Rather, it says “don’t solve with pharmaceuticals a problem that can be solved with food.”

The second law is built on respect for complexity.

The complexity of a system is proportional to the number of potential pairings of its components.

The more complex a system, the more safety there is in allowing it to freely consume and utilize the materials that naturally feed it, and the more likely it is that centralized and forceful interventions carry the danger of unintended consequences.

The position of a cell within the human body is roughly analogous to the position of a person within the global economy. To put it in perspective just how complex your own body is, the global economy has eight billion people while your body has 30 trillion cells.

There are 32 quintillion potential pairings in the global economy and 450 septillion potential pairings in the bodily economy, making your body 14 million times more complex than the global economy.

Food provides your body with the raw materials it was designed to use within that complexity. Your body knows how to extract all the useful things from your food and leave the rest to your pee and poop. It knows how to get more of one nutrient into your brain and more of another into your liver. It knows how to get some nutrients into one type of neuron and other nutrients into another.

Your body treats pharmaceuticals all the same way: oxidize them, conjugate them to make them more water-soluble, then either pee them out or let them pass into the stool. In short, get rid of them. This is why their effects often only last a matter of hours.

Why? Because it doesn’t know what to do with them and they pose a risk of toxicity.

A psychiatrist wants a benzodiazepine to get into the brain and work on a GABA receptor. But most of it winds up in fat tissue and skeletal muscle and the tiny little adrenal gland accumulates it six times faster than the brain.

The holy grail of SSRI development was to try to get rid of the 2-week lag in treatment efficacy by getting the drug to increase serotonin’s activity on its destination neuron while blocking its negative feedback on the neuron that released it. Pharma never succeeded because it simply doesn’t have the tools to make a drug do one thing on one neuron and the opposite on the one right next to it.

They wanted the cargo inside the lipid nanoparticle envelopes of COVID vaccines to stay in your shoulder at the injection site. They packaged it inside the lipid nanoparticles to evade the more immediate destruction your body would impose on an intrusively injected foreign substance. But lipid nanoparticles look and behave just like lipoproteins and get distributed to heart, lungs, muscle, mammary glands, reproductive glands, and more. Wherever the cargo landed became for some completely undetermined period of time a factory of the toxic spike protein that went around poking random holes in cell membranes.

Your body absolutely knows how to exert exact control over the distribution of the nutrients in the foods you eat. It does this in proportion to where the nutrients need to go.

It cannot do this with drugs because it has no “knowledge” of what to do with them.

Pharma is superior in the specificity with which a drug can have a molecular target and the intensity with which that drug can impact the target, but that is the complete opposite of what you want in a system as complex as the human body.

To boast that you’ve simplified something down to one potential pairing (molecular specificity) as you direct it to become the governing force in a system of 450 septillion potential pairings is to catastrophically lose sight of the fact that complex systems do not like to be controlled by one central command.

Pharma is inferior to food in its ability to allow the body to separate and distribute each component to where it is needed most.

Pharma has at its disposal a small handful of routes of administration: oral, topical, subcutaneous, intramuscular, intravenous, intracerebral. It has a few coatings it can use to influence distribution, like slow-release, liposomes, and lipid nanoparticles. But these are blunt tools and they can’t hold a candle to the complexity with which the body handles food.

This principle also applies to training and lifestyle strategies. For example, exercise, meditation, or altitude will all impact many hundreds of targets. But which targets are altered and how they are altered can differ between tissues, and within each tissue can differ between cells and even in different compartments within a cell. We introduce one specific, simple, natural strategy, and we experience a physiological symphony of cellular and subcellular responses to it.

This is why, for example, animal studies suggest that intermittent hypobaric hypoxia training produces an anti-depressive effect 25 times more resilient than pharmaceuticals. Because the strategy works with the complexity, not against it.

As it says in the Tao te Ching, a tree that is unbending is easily broken.

Food and natural strategies give our body a simple offering and then respect its freedom to respond with a complexity we can only partly understand.

Because we only partly understand the complexity, we certainly misunderstand much of what we think we understand. And it is that incomplete and partly misunderstood complexity that Pharma uses to develop its drugs. The drug then imposes our incomplete and partly wrong understanding of that complexity with force.

Food and natural strategies bend with the rhythms of our body. Drugs are heavy-handed but easily broken.

Working with the complexity instead of against it is the way to respect the second law.

The 3rd Law: Never Put Tech Before Nature

The third law, like the second, is built on respect for complexity.

Whereas the second law is about respecting the complexity of our own body, the third law is about respecting the complexity of what we expose it to.

The “tech” in this law is not to be construed broadly as any kind of technology. The third law is not meant to make us Luddites.

Rather, the “tech” of the third law refers to the use of technology to deliver an essential exposure our body is designed to receive from nature.

As with the second law, the third law does not say, never use such technology.

Rather, it says never replace an essential natural exposure with a technological solution that substitutes for nature rather than improving your ability to access it.

The third law provides a basis for distinguishing between the many strategies that lie somewhere between food and pharma. These include technologies like supplements, naturally occurring peptides and other mitochondrial molecules, biohacking devices, and hormones.

All of the essential nutrients are critical to mitochondrial health, so the food that provides them is the most essential of all mitochondrial medicines.

The histories of infant formula, purified medical diets, and purified rodent diets all show us that food is far superior to the collection of what we in all our scientific glory believe are its most essential components. Each of these histories contains decades of health problems and even deaths from mistakes made in conceptualizing nutritional requirements. Even after the big mistakes were fixed by the evolving science, breast-fed infants are still today healthier than formula-fed infants and rodents fed food-based “chow” diets are much healthier than rodents fed purified diets. Total parenteral nutrition used in medicine is acutely life-saving but its long-term use still incurs fatalities that could be avoided by having its nutrient composition more closely resemble natural food.

Supplements can be very valuable when added to a strong dietary foundation, but reaching first for nutritional superfoods protects against imbalances. For example, too much zinc has the capacity to create deficiencies of copper, iron, molybdenum, and most other minerals. The interaction with copper is well known, iron is less well known, and the others are essentially unknown. Oysters are zinc superfoods that are balanced with all of the other minerals.

Many nutrients have toxicity profiles, but most of these are probably poorly understood imbalances with other nutrients. Toxicities of vitamins A and D are each relative deficiencies of the other. Vitamin B6 toxicity is a relative deficiency of the other nutrients involved in amino acid metabolism.

Foods are not all perfectly balanced and using food does not guarantee you never encounter a toxicity or imbalance, but their nutritional profiles are all confined within parameters laid out by the complex physiological needs of the plants or animals from which they come, and those parameters offer us strong protection against the greatest mistakes we could easily make with supplements.

Still, some of us may have genetically rooted needs to supplement with high doses of specific vitamins or minerals. This is a very important use of supplements but also requires expertise to uncover and diligent attention to the risk of long-term imbalances.

We can generalize this principle to other less well studied exposures. For example, take sunlight. The sun contains many specific wavelengths with direct and indirect benefits to mitochondrial function:

• Red and infrared light provide direct energy inputs into the mitochondria and structure mitochondrial water in a way that makes it easier to extract useful energy from food.

• Blue light in the morning signals to your brain that it is daytime and stimulates the release of serotonin, which helps mitochondria adjust to the higher energetic demands of wakefulness.

• Blue, green, and especially ultraviolet light unbind nitric oxide from proteins, which stimulates vasodilation and improves blood flow, delivering more oxygen and nutrients to mitochondria, and which reverses the effects of excessive inflammatory and hypoxic signaling, thereby liberating energy to be used towards health-promoting purposes.

• Ultraviolet light has antimicrobial effects, strengthens the skin barrier, and counteracts fungal infections, psoriasis, and eczema. This reduces unnecessary inflammation and thereby liberates energy to be used toward health-promoting purposes.

• UV-B light helps synthesize vitamin D, which helps optimize mitochondrial metabolism of iron and sulfur, which are critical to the infrastructure of the mitochondrial engines.

There is a substantial body of evidence that kids who spend more time outdoors have a lower risk of myopia. A number of Chinese trials that randomized different schools to different amounts of outdoor time suggests that spending time outdoors directly causes the improvement in eyesight. To date, the leading candidate to mediate this effect is simply the brightness of the light, which may directly regulate the growth pattern of the eyes.

There are many tools to isolate specific parts of this spectrum but none that perfectly replicate it. Morning sunshine is very enriched in red and near infrared light, and 30-90 minutes of it can provide the equivalent of 10-20 minutes in front of a red and infrared light panel. But it also has blue light that will entrain your circadian rhythm, release serotonin to adjust your mitochondria to daytime, and provide a nudge to start freeing up nitric oxide from the protein pool.

A little bit of unprotected sunshine in the afternoon will turn up the dial on the nitric oxide effect and will round all of these benefits out with vitamin D-synthesizing, skin-optimizing, and antimicrobial wavelengths.

Spending as much time as possible in indirect natural sunlight throughout the day will give your eyes the stimulus that they need.

The likelihood that we have finished delineating the beneficial wavelengths of sunlight is minimal. This is a field that just recently started waking up from its decades-long slumber in the belief that being healthy meant staying completely out of the sun.

The third law does not say “don’t buy a red light.” It says don’t substitute the red light for natural sunlight. Use it because you believe you benefit from adding more red light to a solid sun exposure regime.

We can also supplement with compounds that are not essential nutrients but are found naturally in our bodies. Some of these like CoQ10 make up part of the infrastructure of the mitochondrial engines and are not fundamentally involved in communicating something. Others, like the mitochondrial peptide MOTS-C or hormones like thyroid hormone, estrogen, or testosterone, are fundamentally involved in communication rather than infrastructure.

All of these have the capacity to break vicious cycles of declining mitochondrial energy production, declining abundance signaling, and declining maintenance of mitochondrial infrastructure, but there are reasons to think twice in each case before use and they are not all equivalent to one another.

If you choose to supplement with a component of the mitochondrial infrastructure, why aren’t you making enough in the first place? There may be genetic reasons but you probably have suboptimal status of nutrients needed to make it. Fixing those is necessary because they will cause other problems, and fixing them will impact the dose of the supplement you need, so it is better to fix them first.

When we are considering signaling molecules found in our own body, we have additional concerns. We now have to consider the fact that they are meant to communicate something specific, and if we intervene to change what they are saying, they may not be reflecting the physiological and biochemical truth occurring within our bodies. You can use hormones to “fake it till you make it,” but the window you have opened is your opportunity to create genuine abundance with your nutrition and lifestyle. Otherwise, there’s a chance you’ll be left with a surprise bill for all the energy you used during that time.

When using any technology, the goal should be to restore normal physiology in its most excellent manifestation.

For example, using high doses of a vitamin because you have a genetic mutation in an enzyme that uses it and the vitamin normalizes the function of that enzyme serves as an extension of food within the light of the third law. But using high doses of a vitamin because those high doses do something to you that amounts you could get from food would never do — for example, say they impact some receptor that lowers your cholesterol — puts that use squarely in the realm of pharma, which the second law relegates to the last position in the hierarchy of mitochondrial strategies.

Using a hormone to make up for a deficiency of that hormone that cannot be solved through more natural and root-cause approaches is closer to nature than a drug in the light of the third law, but using a hormone to achieve an unnatural or supraphysiological state is well within the category of pharma.

Challenges For the Third Law

By evoking the relationship between technology and nature, the third law wades into some murky territory where challenges arise and much debate could be had.

The third law is not about mindless subservience to nature, demonization of technology, or dogmatic rankings of good and bad technologies. Nor is it blind to the fact that all human innovation takes the form of technology and many technologies are truly ancient.

Therefore, the third law can be used as a framework for debate and discovery.

For example, is using an exercise machine substituting for nature or is it helping you get better access to the resistance of gravity and intermolecular forces that demand you summon your strength, endurance, power, speed, and agility?

The best way to look at this, in my view, is to ask whether the exercise is improving your ability to engage in natural feats that require these skills. The degree to which it translates into functionally useful movements is the degree to which it is aiding your exposure to these natural stimuli rather than hindering it.

Much could be debated about what constitutes a “functionally useful movement,” and much could be studied about which exercise technologies translate best to those movements.

Herbs are another challenge to the third law. Herbs that have drug-like effects are much closer to pharma than food. Some people steeped in modern pharmacology have fundamental skepticism toward the safety of herbs because of their complexity — they argue that they know exactly what is in a pharmaceutical and what its risk/reward profile is, and know neither for the herb — but the third law values complexity and sees it as food-like.

Traditional herbalism has more categories than we have been using here. Herbs could at least be separated into those that are tonic or medicinal, where tonic herbs could be consumed in small amounts continuously over decades to support and refine certain energies or aspects of the person, and medicinal herbs could be used in short courses for specific reasons. Various systems had additional categories and dimensions, matching herbs to constitutional differences among individuals, to the safety of specific durations of use, and to specific situations. Even the most tonic of herbs were not simply “vegetables.” Limits were acknowledged because their impacts were strong, and natural limits were imposed on the quantities people could use by availability, cost, and sometimes seasonality.

The third law neither adopts nor rejects traditional views of herbalism, and it passes in silence over debates about whether modern pharmacology does a better job classifying herbs than traditional herbalism does.

However, the third law does see thousands of years of tradition treating something that grows in the ground as if it is safe to use indefinitely within traditional parameters as being awfully close to its own definition of “food.”

Therefore, the default view that the third law takes toward herbs is to see tonic herbs as foods if they are used within the parameters of the system that defined them as tonic, and to see medicinal herbs as drugs. One can take inspiration from the third law to view medicinal herbs as safer than pharmaceuticals because of their complexity. Given that even traditional systems recognized toxicity concerns with medicinal herbs, however, the third law does not itself adopt or endorse that position. Certainly if we lack modern pharmacological studies on medicinal herbs, one should stay within the traditional framework when using them. Where we have such studies, one should either defer to them, synthesize them with the frameworks of traditional herbal medicine, or make a conscious choice to adopt the epistemology of traditional herbal medicine over and above that of modern pharmacology. These judgments do not proceed from the third law but are left to the free choice of those who follow the third law.

The 4th Law: Remember Your Needs are Your Own

Each of us is a unique individual. My needs are not yours, yours are not mine, and ours are different from those of our neighbors.

We are all impacted in small ways by common genetic variants. In some of us, many small effects will cancel each other out. In others, many small effects might add together or synergize.

Rarely, some of us may have classical genetic disorders that respond to nutritional therapies.

Nearly all of us are impacted by heterozygous rare disease mutations. While these are often dismissed as “carrier” status as if we carry the potential for a disease but no impacts of it, they represent genuine biochemical deficits approximately equal to 50% of the biochemical impact of the disease itself. We each have one or a small handful of these that have big impacts on our biochemistry and alter our requirements in a way where we might benefit from supplementing with doses of essential nutrients or endogenously synthesized infrastructure molecules at doses that we could never obtain from food.

This is very well studied in the case of heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia. The rare, homozygous disease requires two copies of a defective gene and can cause heart disease in infants and children, with individuals having heart attacks as early as 18 months old. Having one copy of the gene instead of two is far more common and it leads to higher risks of heart disease that dominate in a person’s 40s, 50s, and 60s.

It is not well studied in any other cases, but it is certainly true. Prior to genome sequencing, the way rare disease specialists showed that a biochemical defect was heritable was to show with enzymatic analysis of each parent that they each had half the deficit of the child. There are case reports of heterozygous defects in biotin recycling causing chronic yeast infections starting in a woman’s 30s, and there are case series showing people heterozygous for Wilson’s disease have dysregulated copper metabolism in their brains.

The One Million Exome Study showed that each of us have a small handful of these heterozygous rare disease genes.

While the third law acknowledges idiosyncratic nutrient requirements as a reason to add technology (supplements) to nature (food) without replacing nature, the fourth law tells us it is almost certainly the case we will, if we look closely enough at ourselves and our responses, find at least one example that applies to us.

The fourth law takes no position on how we should go about finding our idiosyncratic needs. It simply demands recognition that we have idiosyncratic needs.

If we see that a strategy worked for someone else, assuming it will work for us is flippant disregard for the fourth law; believing it might work for us but knowing it must be tested is keeping our mind set on the fourth law.

The 5th Law: Observe Your Needs as They Change With Time

Our requirements for nutrients and natural exposures change with time.

There are a few reasons for this:

• Different stages of life have different requirements.

• As our choices change over time, we create different requirements.

• Some things in our lives are beyond our control, and events may occur that impose new demands on us. These can be major shifts to new long-term regimes, or can be acute emergencies that require a short-term resolution.

• If we are actively incorporating health strategies, they may have cumulative effects over time that are not seen in the short term.

For example, a woman may be predisposed to iron deficiency when she is young. She is missing iron from her mitochondrial engines and she is missing iron from the hemoglobin that delivers the oxygen they use to burn their fuel. She hits menopause and stops losing iron in her menstrual blood, and has a genetic predisposition to iron overload that she had never bothered looking for because her circumstantial predisposition pointed in the opposite direction. Now she is vulnerable to oxidative stress from iron overload damaging her mitochondria and inhibiting their energy consumption. Before she needed to make sure she got enough iron. Now she needs to make sure her iron stays within bounds.

Another woman could have stopped menstruating earlier because of stress, failure to eat enough food, a primary hormonal problem, or a mitochondrial deficit, and the same thing would happen to her but at a much younger age.

Stressful events could require us to operate at a higher percent body fat for a time to give our brains confidence that energy expenditure is safe.

Exercise, weight loss, or a new diet could impact our need for different nutrients if they shift us away from burning carbs and toward burning fat or vice versa.

An exercise routine could be an excellent stimulus in the short term but constitute overtraining in the medium or long term.

If we correct a deficiency rapidly with a supplement, we may wind up taking something indefinitely at much higher than our maintenance dose. We may not see the effects of imbalances until months or years down the road.

Acute events may occur in which our needs radically change, but only until the situation is resolved. This could be, for example, an injury, a life-threatening illness, a demand for greater physical or cognitive performance.

The reasons our needs could change are innumerable. The fifth law does not create a tactical prescription for finding all of them, but instead requires us to acknowledge the principle, and to incorporate it into our awareness.

To be lulled into the assumption that if something worked for you in the past it must be working for you now or will work for you in the future is to transgress the fifth law. To continue doing what is working while maintaining awareness that you may need to be flexible and change is to keep the fifth law written in your heart.

A Hierarchy of Strategies

We can synthesize these laws to form a hierarchy of what to address first. This hierarchy not only represents the sequence in which you should address problems, challenges, and goals, but also represents superiority and inferiority. If you can obtain your goals while staying toward the top of the hierarchy, your approach is better than if you need to go further down the hierarchy to get the same benefit.

Biohacking devices that provide a narrower range of a natural exposure than the natural source itself are considered the same as “supplements” in this framework.

The hierarchy assumes the first law: it organizes the types of strategies that could be used for any purpose but assumes they are used first to support mitochondrial function.

The hierarchy is applied to each circumstance in which you find yourself. These shift and change with time, as emphasized in the fifth law. You may be optimizing your health using the first level but have an acute emergency that demands a short course of something in the sixth level. This does not move you as an individual to the sixth level. It simply means that the particular circumstance demanded something from the sixth level, and when that circumstance is resolved you are back to level one.

The fourth law implies that most of us will at some point move from the first level to the third level as we learn what our idiosyncratic needs are. Whether we pass through the second level is immaterial. However, the third law does require us to address those idiosyncrasies with nutrient-rich superfoods before moving to supplements.

The fourth law may also imply for some people in rare instances a highly specific, fundamental deficit of a hormone that requires treatment with the hormone. This could move someone directly to the fifth level without necessarily passing through the others.

The fact that such needs arise only requires us to move to those levels to address the specific need. Level one remains superior to level two even if most of us get to level three for at least one nutrient and a small number of us have an idiosyncratic demand for chronic use of something from level five.

The Hierarchy

• First: Use food, exercise, and natural ancestral exposures like sunlight, fire, grounding on the natural earth or in the ocean, forrest bathing, and spending time in the mountains. Tonic herbs can be considered foods when used in a manner faithful to the traditional system that classified them as tonic.

• Second: Use supplements of essential nutrients to resolve deficiencies that food cannot, using them only at doses that can be found within nutrient-dense diets. That “food cannot” resolve the deficiency does not mean that there is no food that contains the amount needed, but rather that you do not tolerate those foods, cannot make a sustainable habit out of them, or dislike them strongly. Similarly, the second level includes the use biohacking devices to supply a stimulus that should be obtainable from nature but is not obtainable to you for similar reasons. These reasons should be compelling enough that you will consciously choose to move from the top-tier approach to a second-tier approach.

• Third: Use supplements of essential nutrients, non-essential mitochondrial infrastructure molecules (like CoQ10), or biohacking devices at doses that cannot be found in food or nature to meet idiosyncratic needs. This should be done conservatively and slowly and should be based on empirical benefit. It should be done only after trying to use natural sources of those exposures such as nutrient-dense superfoods to address the idiosyncrasy.

• Fourth: Attempt to break a vicious mitochondrial cycle by using doses of supplements or stimuli from biohacking devices above and beyond what can be found in nature for a period of time without any evidence you have a specific, genetically rooted need for such doses. By default these should be done for a limited course such as as twelve weeks unless there is a specific reason to use them for longer.

• Fifth: Bring hormones to natural physiological levels when levels one through four of the hierarchy have been unable to bring them to those levels on their own.

• Sixth: Use medicinal herbs or pharmaceuticals.

As an example, using a statin (level six) when your thyroid hormone levels are low without addressing those first violates the hierarchy because thyroid hormone is the central systemic regulator of cholesterol levels, but using thyroid hormone replacement (level five) before ensuring you have adequate protein, iodine, and antioxidant nutrients also violates the hierarchy. If you are deficient in any of these, using supplements (level two) before trying to address the deficiency with food (level one) violates the hierarchy, and megadosing iodine without evidence of an iodine transport defect (level four) instead of trying to get doses within food range (level three) violates it as well. Walking through the hierarchy in order would put natural foods and other natural exposures first, ensuring nutrient adequacy with supplements next, addressing idiosyncrasies after that, and after these have been done you would check whether you still need thyroid hormone. After thyroid status is optimized you would see if you still need to do anything about cholesterol.

The Spirit of the Laws, Not the Letter

These laws are not meant as dogmatic and rigid strangleholds, nor as impositions against anyone’s freedom.

They are, instead, discoverable truths that make up the parameters that guard our way through the journey of optimizing our mitochondrial energy production to give us the highest probability of optimal results.

It is important to be able to dynamically move through the hierarchy on an as-needed basis.

An emergency may justify quickly moving to level six in the hierarchy, and the demand for speed in an emergency may require doing so without thinking through whether it is absolutely necessary. It could be far more important to do something you know will work right now than to spend time figuring out if something higher on the hierarchy is just as good.

Pain and suffering can be a reason to move faster through the hierarchy when finding first-level or second-level strategies seems too difficult or takes too much time.

The laws do not demand tribute of any sort, and certainly do not accept homage in the form of pain, suffering, or failed emergency treatments. Rather, the spirit of the laws is to be forgiving to those who need speed but to be available for embrace to those who want sustainable, long-term solutions.

Seeking longevity should be done with strategies that themselves have longevity, and the strategies with longevity are those whose foundation is these five laws.