Did mom turn herself into a hybrid?
In Mito #4, we learned this was the secret to how we survived at a cellular level after leaving Africa. It came down to how mom adapted our “powerhouses” to create heat, the energy system we required to live in the cold. Once we left the UV light of Africa, the antenna of our mitochondria started to receive some seriously different signals. There was less light, more freezing temperatures, and mom figured out a hybrid system was the way to make things happen.
Let’s take a Squint.
Haplotypes Reviewed
As we learned from 23&Me, we all have our own maternal haplotype depending on the migration patterns of our maternal ancestors. For those haplotypes that moved north, cold demanded a new energy efficient system. Our new “uncoupled” system had to sacrifice producing more ATP for energy to make way for survival energy – heat energy our bodies needed to survive.
These uncoupled northern haplotypes, such as H (from Southwest Asia), K (from Central Eurasia) and N (Finland, Lapland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Northern Russia) to name a few, respond better to cold. The Northern European haplotypes are good at making heat (and EZ water) and have learned to conserve energy to do that. Northern haplotypes are better designed to be cold than our Southern/Equatorial haplotypes. That’s why, like it or not, uncoupled Northern haplotypes, from a mitochondrial perspective, are built better for winter (even though they can be such wimps in the cold!).
Unlike northern haplotypes, southern haplotypes (L0-L3) were not forced to adapt to newer, colder surroundings and stayed tightly coupled and more energy efficient. Their mitochondria as a result are designed to experience more direct equatorial sun (and a great circadian rhythm of 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark consistently). Based on their haplotype, southern haplotypes didn’t require a hybrid system and may not be as efficient at producing lots of heat. If you are a Southern Haplotype (L1-L3), things like cold therapy may be more difficult to adapt to and living in a climate with less UV light (northern latitudes) may be more challenging to mitochondrial health? It’s worth further study, as is all mitochondrial medicine!
No matter where our ancestors migrated, we are all designed to live by nature’s rules. If you are a northern haplotype, you are meant to experience cold. Your mitochondria is built for it. When our mitochondria senses a thirty degree day, with no UV light, it’s not waiting to eat a banana, sitting in a 75-degree heated living room.
Mom’s New Environment
Regardless of haplotype, moms of today are facing modern times with modern conveniences (and toxins) that may be breaking all of nature’s rules. Just ask your New England friends about their heated home, heated car, and even heated toilets. Not saying we don’t love all this heat. It’s just a bit out of our natural rhythms.
We are designed to be seasonal, but we eat food as if we live in full UV light dawn to dusk. We walk into Whole Foods in Boston and buy blueberries in February when there is no UV light that would ever allow them to grow at that location. Strawberries in January, bananas in December…we can buy anything anytime, anywhere. The fact is, we’re gaming our natural system and our obesity is showing us its own power move. We need to align to nature’s light rhythms, and that includes aligning our food with the light that it naturally grows under.
With modern living and technological advancements, we’ve strayed far from the natural environment our mitochondria evolved to handle. As we continue to explore the role of mitochondria in our health, we must ask: have we followed nature’s rules, or have we created new artificial environments that are shutting down and mutating the genes of what we know as our mitochondria powerhouses?
Energy Plan from Mom
Our mitochondria has always served as an antenna for our environment. Our mitochondria pick up the light signals and any warning signs we need to know. Is there trouble? Do we need to adapt to something? What is sapping our metabolic energy? Mom passes on this antenna — our energy blueprint – to her children. She passes down her history of how she managed light and temperature (our maternal haplotype), and passes down to us her experience with everything else that came her way. She always wants us to be our best self, our most energy-efficient versions of ourself. Mom knows that without an effective energy management system, we will have more inflammation than energy, and that means cancer and disease. We inherit our energy plan from mom, our ability to create the most energy-efficient system to drive every body process, including energy (and weight) metabolism. Mom really wants us to be our best. However, we can inherit a well-oiled energy system, or a lemon – depending on mom’s environment.
These are the questions we love to ask at Squint.
That’s because they inspire us to use quantum biology as a method for understanding how our body’s operate. How do we make the energy we need most efficiently? We’re going to keep taking a closer Squint at our ancestors and learn how we evolved so we can figure out for ourselves how to evolve away from our sickness and back to health.
Thank you for taking a Squint with us!