Curing Your Fatigue

I recently finished reading a book by Morley Robbins entitled
“[Cu]re: Your Fatigue / How balancing 3 minerals and 1 protein is the solution that you’re looking for.”

I found the book a difficult but fascinating read.

Difficult, because it was actually a “compendium of research” that was hard to wade through, winding through topics and explanations in a virtual tributary of streams and creeks that struggled to come together in one river of thought.

But also utterly fascinating, because while I have known about and studied the “3 minerals” he emphasizes, I have never completely understood their relationship to one another, or the importance (or even existence) of the “1 protein.”

You can tell while reading the book that Morley is being honest when he says he spends hours every day reading through scientific papers and literature. He seems to impressively pull them out of the air in every other paragraph, following tangents where they lead him. All his statements are backed by references and incredible testimonies of people who have been helped by his protocols.

So now after thankfully getting through the final chapter, I am going to attempt to explain what I have learned to you, our faithful readers. I truly believe the message of the book is powerful and aligns completely with what we have already been teaching you: You have the power to take control of your health and your life. Do not expect doctors to fix you, because most simply do not know how.

I also believe that implementing what Morley calls the “Root Cause Protocol” may be the very solution that those of you who live with fatigue and other chronic conditions have been searching for.

So let’s get to it.

Hopefully you have banished everything that is NOT FOOD from your life, and you are eating mostly FOOD, so you are already on a solid foundation for what comes next if you want to “cure your fatigue,” Morley-Robbins-style.

But first, some tutorials.

I’m sure you’ve heard about mitochondria, but let’s do a quick review using the book as our guide. They are usually referred to as the “energy factories” of the cell, but Morley prefers to call them “power grids” because of their ability to link together in networks. We have 40 quadrillion mitochondria in our bodies! Yeah, that’s a lot.

Much of what is termed “cellular respiration” takes place in these organelles. It is where your ATP is made (you need your body weight in ATP every day, you even need one billion ATP for every beat of your heart). ATP is made in three stages: glycolysis, the TCA/Krebs cycle, and then the electron transport chain (ETC), with the final complex being ATP synthase. Just one ATP synthase can produce 27,000 ATP every minute.

“This process is repeated continuously with the cells of our body every moment of our entire lives. How efficiently it is performed determines how much energy we will have. Alas, for most people, it is not being performed efficiently at all.”

How is the efficiency determined? By the amount and bioavailability of 2 minerals, and 1 protein. Being low in these will inevitably lead to fatigue.

As your body produces energy, it also produces exhaust, which scientists call “oxidants.” Your body has a very efficient way of dealing with this exhaust. Unfortunately, if you are low in these same key minerals, not only are you hampering your ability to make ATP, you are unable to adequately deal with the exhaust that naturally follows. Thus, leading to the oxidation of our 3rd mineral, and a cascade of inflammation and chronic conditions.

Which brings us to the term being thrown about by more practitioners and scientists every year, a term that Morley dislikes: “mitochondrial dysfunction.”

“There are thousands of articles…written about this mitochondrial condition that is rapidly becoming a pandemic on this planet. Yet,…they are akin to articles about how to drive a car, providing meticulous detail to every facet of that automotive experience with the notable exclusion of:

Forgetting to tell you that it’s really important to bring a key to start the engine

Forgetting to tell you that the engine must have fuel to keep it running.”

Both the “key” and the “fuel” are required for the car to function at peak capacity, even if the engine is built perfectly. In other words, Morley believes mitochondrial dysfunction is NOT a disease, but instead it is a “classic clinical sign of mineral dysregulation, which is the real root cause problem, pure and simple.”

This dysregulation is caused by a lack of 2 minerals:

Bioavailable Copper and Magnesium.

And 1 protein, called:

Ceruloplasmin.

“The three most essential and more valuable workhorses necessary for mitochondrial health and function, as well as optimal energy.”

Dysregulation of these will lead inevitably to the unbalanced build up in tissues and oxidation of mineral #3:

Iron.

Let’s discuss each in a bit more detail and learn from Morley their valuable roles in energy production.

Bioavailable Copper

Bioavailable copper is copper that is “complexed” in a network of proteins and enzymes that require this mineral to do their jobs. Many of these use copper to move electrons around in mitochondrial membranes and are vital to your production of ATP. Others maintain the health of the liver, thyroid, immune cells, bone, connective tissues and more. Bioavailable copper is essential to your body’s ability to combat oxidative stress. Ninety-five percent of your body’s bioavailable copper is found in what is called the “master multi-copper protein,” ceruloplasmin.

Ceruloplasmin

The Root Cause Protocol’s entire goal is designed “to help the body ‘make’…ceruloplasmin, and ‘empower’ its ferroxidase enzyme activity, in order to reduce oxidative stress and inflammation.” Morley regards this protein as “the ‘Sun’ of our bodily universe of metabolic activity.”

Without empowering the ferroxidase enzyme, one of ceruloplasmin’s most important jobs is hampered. Unfortunately it is very hard to test for this “active” state in a blood draw.

This one remarkable protein expresses over 20 enzymatic functions across our entire bodies. One of its key roles is clearing the exhaust in our mitochondria that is produced during energy production. Ceruloplasmin is also the “taxi” that delivers copper where it is needed in our bodies. It also assists in the transportation of iron into red blood cells and other proteins.

Ferroxidase (FOX), one of ceruloplasmin’s enzymatic states, “regulates iron and prevents it from causing oxidative stress, aka ‘rust,’ in the body’s tissues and organs.” Without proper bioavailable copper, which leads to hampered ceruloplasmin activity, iron starts to build up throughout our body, but especially in our liver cells and hormone glands.

“By increasing ceruloplasmin and ferroxidase action, we decrease iron dysfunction, we increase the potential to activate oxygen for energy production, and we stop the chronic loss of magnesium.”

Magnesium

We have discussed magnesium before, many of its 3000+ enzymatic functions and its vital role in controlling stress in your body. But let’s discuss how critical magnesium is in making ATP. Morley mentions that magnesium is required for the stabilization of every ATP molecule, thus he calls it Mg-ATP instead. Since we already mentioned how much Mg-ATP is made in your body every minute, you can see how a lack of magnesium can severely hamper your energy levels, and especially your heart health (and the mitochondria-dense heart cells).

Also important is the concept of “magnesium burn rate” or MBR. Magnesium is rapidly depleted in times of oxidative stress because it requires the cell to make more energy (Mg-ATP). The more energy needed, the higher the MBR. And we already discussed something that causes oxidative stress to rise: lack of bioavailable copper, which leads to a lack of ceruloplasmin, our exhaust control.

So you can see why all of these minerals must be balanced, and magnesium is, in Morley’s words, the “conductor of the body’s mineral orchestra.” You very likely need to be ingesting MUCH MORE magnesium than you ever imagined. Magnesium levels are drained rapidly as the body is dealing with a lack of bioavailable copper and rising levels of iron overload.

Iron

Morley cites an interesting quote from Mark Twain in his chapter on iron:

“It’s not what you don’t know that’s the problem. It’s what you know, for certain, that just ain’t so.”

He is referring to doctors and their hard and fast dogma that chronic fatigue and anemia are caused by iron deficiency, when in fact, it is caused by iron dysfunction. These same doctors warn that copper is toxic when in fact it is not.

“For iron to be functional, adequate levels of copper must be bioavailable.” Why?

—Bioavailable copper is required for the enzyme ferrochelatase to work, which is the enzyme that inserts iron into the 4 heme groups that make up 1 hemoglobin (There are about 270 million hemoglobin in each red blood cell, and there are 2-3 million red blood cells made every second in your body, requiring bioavailable copper for every transaction).

—Bioavailable copper is also required in the enzymes that preserve the life cyle of the red blood cell and that recycle iron to make more hemoglobin. When bioavailable copper is low, iron will become unbound from blood and will get stuck in the organs and tissues. On a blood test, this will look like anemia to a practitioner (they don’t test the tissues), but in reality bioavailable copper needs to be increased, not iron, to assist in freeing up iron to be carried back into the red blood cell recycling system.

—Bioavailable copper is required for ceruloplasmin’s active FOX enzyme to convert iron’s toxic form (ferrous Fe++) into the nontoxic, mobile form (ferric Fe+++) that can bind to proteins and be transported. So a lack of this critical protein will leave iron not only stuck in the tissue and not recycling through the blood and bone marrow, but also in the toxic oxidant form. Thus causing you all kinds of fatigue and inflammation, but causing your doctor to think you are anemic, when you aren’t.

“Increasing and maintaining bioavailable copper, magnesium, and ceruloplasmin, while keeping iron in check, are the priorities of the Root Cause Protocol, to ensure proper mineral focus for energy and exhaust management within our mitochondria.”

So how, exactly, do we do this?

More on that next time.

But I will throw out there that one of the best sources of bioavailable copper is…

…beef liver.

Just sayin.