Paul Saladino· MD
so what we're going to talk about is the electron transport chain and peter's already kind of hinted at this in this explanation so if what we've talked about so far with nadh and fadh2 has lost you hold on we're gonna back up we'll unpack it a little bit but i love what peter said about the mainstream lipid hypothesis as you guys know last week i released a podcast with dave feldman where we talked about cholesterol and lipids i am no advocate of the lipid hypothesis nor am i an advocate for polyunsaturated fats but the mainstream medical establishment is and this is so cool that peter started from the same place we all have our bias we admit that but you generate a hypothesis from your place of bias and my place of bias is that animal foods which are rich in saturated fat are the best foods for humans but why does the cardiology community tell us otherwise why does the cardiology community tell us to eat oils pressed from seeds that we never would have had in our evolution and then when you think about evolutionary levels of uh linoleic acid like i discussed with chris kenobi the ophthalmologist we've never had levels of omega-6 or other polyunsaturated fats in our human evolution that are anything like we have now so peter and i are incidentally starting from the same bias which is that humans have had way more saturated fat both c16 palmitic acid and c18 stearic acid in our diet along with other saturated fats than these polyunsaturated fats but the cardiology community would tell you otherwise so either we're right or they're right and and we you know let's just let's just be clear about it but we're all looking for the truth and there are big consequences here which might have to be you know discussed which are atherosclerosis heart attacks uh alzheimer's disease strokes most of chronic disease so it's a very interesting conversation but let's talk about the electron transport chain so peter has a blog on his web has a blog called hyperlipid and in that blog there's a thread which i encourage many of you to read called protons the protons thread and we can talk about why it's called protons it'll make sense why it's called protons when we look at this electron transport chain but let's have i'll have you walk us through your thoughts on the etc the electron transport chain peter and then we'll go from there okay yeah that's good that's okay so so this is as peter appropriately correctly says in medical school and veterinary school um i went to medical school peter went to veterinary school they they make you learn these concepts individually but they never tie them together which is what's so cool about peter's work so tell us about the electron transport chain peter and i've got another diagram as well which is from one of the blogs which is more complex which we'll we'll show in later which shows all the inputs to the etc with um with uh glycerol three phosphate dehydrogenase uh the succinate dehydrogenase etc but let's start with the basic one for now yeah this is this is the basic one um and essentially out of the tca uh tri carboxylic acid cycle or citric acid cycle that we've got here and you the the the uh you could call it the movable um energy source which is produced is uh nadh um you can't you and you can buy um an adh as a laboratory reagent it's it's not embedded in an enzyme or anything like that it's just there and it can be produced by the tca or the citric acid cycle and you can essentially do nothing with it in terms of producing energy unless you put it through complex one so this is complex one um down at the start of the electric chart electron transport chain um well down the bottom of the picture i like that complex one down there better because we're there so if you develop an it can generate nadh that's going to go through complex one isn't going to go anywhere else at all and uh that's its target that's what's used and each time you feed complex one complex one pumps protons uh from the matrix of the mitochondrium to the uh just outside the inner mitochondrial membrane and is used to develop a almost like a hydraulic supply of protons that want to get back into the mitochondrial matrix but nadh the cofactor for many of the reactions at least three of them in the tca and an adh as produced as part of glycolysis eventually end up feeding complex one they don't really feed anywhere else in any bulk amount that you need to worry about so that's complex one that's one input to the ability to pump protons which is then used to generate atp using complex five but the atp synthase so complex one just deals with nadh and nothing else deals with nadh so i think