The sun appears to generate Co-Q10 in our bodies when we eat our greens – Greger April 2016

How to Regenerate Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) Naturally

6 minute video

Transcript

Chlorophyll is the green pigment that makes green leaves green. If one searches for chlorophyll in the medical literature, a lot of what you find is about fecal fluorescence, a way to detect the contamination of carcasses with feces in the slaughterhouse to reduce the risk of food poisoning from pathogens harbored within animal feces.

See, fecal matter gets on meat either with knife entry through the hide into the carcass, and also splash back and airborne deposition of fecal matter when they’re peeling off the skin. But if they’ve been eating grass, you can pick up the poo with a black light. Here’s a solution of chlorophyll. Under a UV light, though, chlorophyll lights up red. So, if you have a black light in a chicken slaughter plant, you can get a drop on the droppings. The problem is we don’t let chickens outside anymore. They’re no longer pecking at grass; so, there’s less fecal fluorescence. We could let them run around, or save money by just adding a chlorophyll supplement to their feed, so we can better identify areas of gut-spill contamination on the meat.

The reason I was looking up chlorophyll was to follow-up on the data I presented in my Eating Green to Prevent Cancer video, suggesting that chlorophyll may be able to block carcinogens. There were a few in vitro studies on the potential anti-inflammatory effects of chlorophyll. After all, green leaves have long been used to treat inflammation; so, anti-inflammatory properties of chlorophyll and these properties’ break-down products after digestion were put to the test. And indeed, they may represent valuable and abundantly available anti-inflammatory agents. Maybe that’s one reason why cruciferous veggies, like kale and collard greens, are associated with decreased markers of inflammation.

In a petri dish, for example, if you lay down a layer of arterial lining cells, this is how many inflammatory immune cells stick to them before, and after, you stimulate them with a toxic substance. We can bring that inflammation down, though, with the anti-inflammatory drug, aspirin, or even more by just dripping on some chlorophyll. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons kale consumers may live longer lives.

This is the study, though, that blew my mind. Sunlight is the most abundant energy source on this planet. So far, so good. However, only plants are really able to use sunlight directly, or so we thought. After eating plants, animals, too, may be able to derive energy directly from sunlight as well. What?! First of all, light can’t get through our skin, right? Wrong, as was demonstrated by century-old science—and any kid who’s ever shined a flashlight through their fingers; the red wavelengths do get through. In fact, if you step outside on a sunny day, there’s enough light going through to your brain, you could read a book in there. OK, so our internal organs are bathed in sunlight, and absorbed chlorophyll in the body does actually appear to produce cellular energy, but unless we eat so many greens we turn green ourselves, the energy produced is probably negligible.

However, light-activated chlorophyll in our body may help regenerate Coenzyme Q10. CoQ10 is an antioxidant our body basically makes from scratch using the same enzyme that our body uses to make cholesterol, the same enzyme that’s blocked by cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. So, if CoQ10 production gets caught in the crossfire, then maybe that explains why statins increase our risk of diabetes, by accidently also reducing CoQ10 levels. Maybe that’s why statins can lead to muscle breakdown. So, should statin users take CoQ10 supplements? No, they should improve their diets sufficiently to stop taking drugs that muck with their biochemistry. And by doing so, by eating more plant-based chlorophyll-rich diets, they may best maintain their levels of active CoQ10, also known as ubiquinol. However, when ubiquinol is used as an antioxidant, it is oxidized to ubiquinone. And for ubiquinol to act as an effective antioxidant again, the body must regenerate ubiquinol from ubiquinone, maybe using dietary chlorophyll metabolites and light.

They exposed some ubiquinone and chlorophyll metabolites to the kind of light that makes it into our bloodstream, and poof, CoQ10 was reborn, but without the chlorophyll, or without the light, nothing happened. And look, we get light, we get chlorophyll if we’re eating our veggies. Maybe that’s how we maintain such high levels of CoQ10 in our bloodstream. Maybe that explains why dark green leafy vegetables are so good for us. We know sun can be good for us; we know greens can be good for us. These benefits are commonly attributed to an increase in vitamin D from sunlight exposure and all the antioxidants from green vegetables. But maybe these explanations might be incomplete.