When you think of energy, a cup of coffee might come to mind. Or maybe a colorful can promising to give you wings.
The last thing you might think of? Your body’s cells. But your energy is actually generated by the mitochondria, hundreds of organelles that live inside your body’s cells, working to take the food you eat and turn it into energy.
“The mitochondria are essentially the power plants of the cell,” says Joseph Baur, Ph.D., a physiology professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine whose lab focuses on the molecular mechanisms of aging. “They are what take in the foods you eat and actually break them down chemically to generate ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is the energy currency that the cell uses.”
Mitochondria are present in the cells of animals, plants, and almost every living thing with a complex cell structure—also known as eukaryotic cell, which has a nucleus.
If your mitochondria are not functioning at their best, neither will you. And this is especially relevant as you age, when mitochondrial function starts to decline. In fact, mitochondrial dysfunction has been identified as a hallmark of aging, with research linking it to diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, muscular dystrophy, diabetes, and more. As researchers have continued to identify mitochondrial function as more relevant to overall health, interest in the study of bioenergetics (how cells transform energy) has increased, particularly on new therapies and ways to keep the mitochondria as healthy and powerful as possible.
