A Welcome Message From Laura And Ari

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. Thanks for inviting me to be the co-host of the summit. Laura, it is a pleasure to join you here. Health is my lifelong passion. I have been doing it since I was 12 years old, obsessively. And I’m now going to turn 40 soon in a few months and it is really something I have been dedicated to my whole life. From a very young age, I was into biohacking long before there was a thing called biohacking. The original biohackers were bodybuilders, and that was my whole world for more than a decade from the time I was very young. My older brother was a personal trainer and a bodybuilder and who was being mentored by a professional bodybuilder. And so I was kind of indoctrinated into that whole world from a very young age. And the amazing thing about that is when you are in that world and in the world of athletics, I was also a martial artist and a soccer player growing up. And in that world, health is not just a set of concepts and abstract ideas and theories and biochemistry. It is practical, it is all about self-experimentation and you learn so much about health when it is actually applied in your real life, and you get to experiment with new ways of doing things and what works and what does not. 

Compared to somebody just sitting in a classroom learning about theories of how this disease, this biochemical process drives this disease, and how this drug interrupts this pathological process. These are totally different worlds and totally different kinds of knowledge that emerge from that. I went on to get a Bachelor of Science in kinesiology. I did pre-med. I went to medical school for two years. I hated it. I left medical school. I did a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology. After completing that, I decided not to be a clinical psychologist. I have done a master’s degree in human nutrition and functional medicine. I have been a personal trainer and nutritionist for many years. And then in my mid-twenties, my whole focus shifted from that largely as a result of getting Epstein-Barr virus and mononucleosis and getting very sick, chronically fatigued. I shifted my whole focus from the world of body composition and fitness and athletic performance to energy. Because, quite frankly, I could tell you a long story here, but quite frankly, I realized that no one in conventional medicine or alternative and functional medicine really understood the science of energy levels. And I thought, “Hey, you know, I know a lot about health science and I have been doing this a long time and I’m really scientifically literate.” 

And now I’m really interested because I have a self a selfish motivation to learn about the science of energy because I’m chronically fatigued. Why do not I go learn and build out the science of, the real science of understanding human energy? And within a few years, I started fixating on mitochondria and that is where I have been focused for the last ten years. Now, it is very in vogue but when I first started talking about mitochondria, I was one of very few people talking about mitochondria, and people were giving me funny looks for why I was telling everybody mitochondria was at the core of fatigue and energy regulation rather than adrenals and adrenal fatigue. Because at that time everybody was saying it is adrenals, it is cortisol and I was saying, nope, it is actually mitochondria that is at the core of that. So this has been my world for the last decade and I have written several books and founded the Energy Blueprint and five years of podcasts with lots of energy and mitochondria experts, etcetera.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. I can remember when I first found you on my own journey to functional medicine, to studying functional medicine. Ironically, we had a mutual friend that kind of she was talking about this guy, Ari, and what he was up to. And I was like, “Well, let me check this out. What is this?” And so I, I had worked in conventional medicine as a nurse practitioner for, for, when I worked in that space for 21 years before I retired and fully went to functional medicine but there was an overlap. So I was studying functional medicine while I was in the conventional medicine space, and that went on for many, many years of me just soaking up, studying, learning as much as I could. And, you know, I came from this Western philosophy of medicine and you went to pre-med. I mean, you know what this is, we deal with diseases, but we do not deal with prevention very well. Ironically, I worked in a preventive medicine capacity and my very first nurse practitioner job but looking back, what I now realize is that what we define as preventive medicine in the Western space truly is not prevention at all it is early detection medicine. 

So when we think about doing cancer screenings and blood screenings for things like diabetes, for various health problems, we are really looking for early detection in the Western space. We are not really teaching people how to prevent it in the first place. So I like to say now I practiced early detection medicine for the first part of my career and then when I built my first functional medicine protocols, you know, I built a virtual business where I could see people around the world. And when I started running my first protocols, I did not have a solution to help people with energy. And then I realized that this whole piece of mitochondria was missing. And not only just for the energy that people feel physically but for the energy that people need. The kind of what I call the invisible energy that they do not even realize they need for every organ process, for every cellular function in the body You can not go restore somebody’s gut health, for example, if you do not give them tools to have more mitochondria energy production so that they can heal. So that was kind of my journey into mitochondria was something was missing in my protocols. What was it? And I heard, I had heard about you years ago and I remember the first time you launched the Energy Blueprint, and I remember watching those classes going, “Gosh, who is this guy?” I mean, this is really incredible. Fast forward and our paths crossed. We actually met in person a few years ago and I know for me it was like, wow, I finally get to be, you know, in close proximity to Ari. We jokingly call you Professor Ari over my team, the people who work for me, we call you Professor Ari because you just have a way with teaching that is so extraordinary. So you, in a way, have been a huge impact on my bringing mitochondria awareness into my protocols. So thank you for that. I mean, your work is really important in the space and I know I’m not the only practitioner who learned from you and realized, oh, this is missing.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. Thank you so much for the kind words. You know, it is really nice to hear stuff like that. I had a conversation, an interview with Dr.Datis Kharrazian yesterday, who, as you know, is and I did it for this summit. Right. So people listening, you are going to be hearing from Dr. Datis Kharrazian. And he is a Harvard researcher, he is one of the most brilliant minds in all the functional medicine. He is one of the biggest thought leaders who train other functional medicine practitioners, on how to think and how to treat patients. And I formed a really nice connection with him over the years and I said to him, “You know, I love having conversations with you. Every time I come away from it, I feel like I come away wiser, I learn something new.” and he said, “Yeah, I feel the same about you.” And I was like, that is really, really nice to hear stuff like that from someone with your credentials and your expertise and your level of knowledge and I told him about some new research that is emerging and he is like, “Oh, yeah, send me that. I have never heard anything about that. It is so fascinating.” And it is cool to be in connection with a lot of the most leading edge, smartest, most brilliant people in the world and be able to learn from them and to be able to share ideas with them. The whole process of being in being blessed enough to be in connection with those people helps us grow and helps us, us learn and expand our ways of doing things to the leading edge much faster.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Let’s talk about what we vision for this summit when the two of us put our heads together. So this is the Mitochondria Energy Summit 2.0 last year I produced the first mitochondria summit that I did, and you were a speaker on that summit. And a couple of times I interviewed you a couple of times for that and when it came time to do this one, I reached out to you again and said, “Hey, you know, this was so incredible when you were here with me last time. How do you feel about just, you know, co-hosting it with me?”  And you and I put our heads together and we really wanted to create a different experience in the summit space than what people are used to. And that is we wanted to bring in speakers that you are not used to seeing the people who are writing the books and doing the research. The people who live in their laboratories with their face in a microscope studying cells and mitochondria and bring them in because they have really shaped what you have put out in the world. And they shape what I have put out in the world. So how is this, how is this for you? When I said, hey, let’s do this together?

Ari Whitten, MS

Well, if I can be totally blunt, summits do not excite me that much in general, because I feel like so many people are just it is the same people over and over again, kind of with the same shtick. And I said, you know, if I’m a part of this, what I really want to do is I and I know you are totally on board with this, too, Laura, which is part of the only reason I agreed to do this is because of you. And I knew you were on board on the same page with me in this regard. Is it let’s do something novel. Let’s get some really great novel people in here who are not the same usual speakers on every other summit and who really have unique, original ideas and a lot of value to give to the world. And also different kinds of like more academics, more researchers, more, more people who are leading edge thinkers. Who are really going to contribute new new angles that people are not going to find another summit. So I think that we have got a lot of those kinds of people on this summit. And I think people are going to get a lot of amazing information and a lot of value, a lot of cutting edge ideas and information from this summit that you are not going to find anywhere else.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, we sure do. And you will get some of your fan favorites. We brought back some of the people that you do see on summits who just every time without fail, they give us an amazing talk and they create so much value in the world with their work that we are bringing those people back as well. But you will see a lot of new faces that you never seen before. For some people, this is their first summit ever, so this is pretty exciting, Ari.

Ari Whitten, MS

Absolutely. Yeah. And I got, as I said, to tease Kharrazi Ann, who is one of the most brilliant minds in all of medicine. And I think people need to listen to that interview that I did with him because there is a certain paradigm shift and a certain simplicity that people will find when they listen to that conversation that I had with Dr. Kharrazi. And that I think a lot of light bulbs are going to go off. Dr. James Chestnut, who is someone who most people will not have ever heard of before, but is, in my opinion, one of the best thinkers as far as a foundation paradigm of understanding human health. I mean, in my opinion, I do not think there’s anybody better than him when it comes to that foundational paradigm. He is one of my biggest mentors and the biggest influence on my way of thinking about human health. It is an absolute must listen, talk from someone who you are not going to find on any other summit anywhere else. So many other good people, Robert Nabeel, whose research I think he is one of the most brilliant minds in all of medicine, brilliant researchers. I think he is done some of the most groundbreaking work of the last 100 years, and I do not think that is an overstatement. I have had the privilege of being able to go to his lab for mitochondrial medicine at the University of California, San Diego and get to know him in person. And because of that and because I had some mutual friends who were able to pull some strings with him, I was able to convince him to come on the summit and do a talk, even though he pretty much never does interviews anywhere else. He is extremely resistant, whether summits or any other kind of interview. He almost never does it. And a good friend of mine was able to talk him into doing this. So that is really cool. And we have so many other amazing speakers. Dr. Eric Balcavage, Stephanie Estima, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. I mean, the list goes on and on. I hesitate to name names here because there are so many amazing names in this summit. But your guys are going to just be blown away with the information here.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, one of my favorites, doctor. Dr. Stephanie Seneff from MIT does an incredible talk about glyphosate and deuterium, which is, you know, emerging science around deuterium. And these are people who, you know, they spend their lives in laboratories studying and trying to figure out the human body and disease and helping us. And then people like Ari and I like to be out in front of the camera and teaching and showing people the path. Right. So we are these are the people that we learn from. And so this has been a real passion project for both of us. And we are really excited for what you are going to learn and what you are going to experience. And here now, of course, when the summit is done, Ari and I will come together and we will have some more opportunities to learn from the two of us together. So we do not have exact dates yet. We do not have exact dates but just stay tuned because we will be hosting some masterclasses together after the summit. You and I always have fun together when we do this and so it is coming. So stay tuned for that. Everyone will have more special experiences for you after this. Any final words, Ari, as we wrap up this intro to this summit?

Ari Whitten, MS

Well, I want to, you have, you have heard me say this, Laura, so forgive me, but I want everybody else listening to hear this. I think it is really important and I know you share my view on this. In my opinion, there needs to be a shift in how we think about and approach human health and disease. Right now, the whole paradigm of the Western medical model came out of battlefield medicine, came out of treating injuries in wars, and the kind of engineering solutions to those kinds of problems in war medicine. And we had the antibiotic revolution which was an amazing breakthrough but that whole model and this focus on disease and this focus on trying to understand specific diseases and figure out the unique, specific mechanisms and abnormal physiology that underlie each different disease state, whether it is cancer or heart disease or depression or anxiety or whatever, other diabetes, whatever other kind of disease, and then trying to find drugs to interrupt those abnormal pathological processes. That whole model and way of thinking and researching and doing things is what most of the world has been stuck into for many, many decades. The truth is, for work in the context of chronic diseases and 80% of the chronic disease burden in North America and the United States, 80% of the chronic disease burden are diseases of lifestyle. And the blunt truth is that style of thinking, that paradigm has had a pretty bad track record of success when it comes to treating chronic diseases of lifestyle. We also know there is also a mass delusion that I think is taking place, which is we all are brought up in this cultural narrative that if only we had the cure to this disease if only we could cure heart disease, which is the number one killer if only we could cure cancer, which is killing so many people. If only we could cure diabetes, if only we could cure depression, if only we could cure, you know, neurological disease and this disease and that disease, then we think we would be healthy. We would live so much longer. 

The truth is, the health span has not increased for many, many decades. Healthspan is the number of healthy years that people are living. And we have had a hundred of and hundreds of new drugs, and trillions of dollars that had been poured into the research on various diseases and the development of drugs for these diseases. Healthspan. The number of healthy years of human lives on average has not budged at all. We are not healthier. We are actually humans are the sickest species on the planet by far. We are the sickest species of animal that has ever existed on planet Earth. And we and the amount of disease per capita has increased dramatically over the last several decades as we have poured trillions of dollars into research. We also know that even if we cured all heart disease or all cancer tomorrow, we still barely live any longer because most people are dying of old age, of multi-organ system failure by the age of 85, and the whole body is deteriorating.

It is not just one disease. It is not just one part of the body, the brain or the heart, or something that has a problem. It is that the whole body is aging. So we need to shift the paradigm. The whole paradigm needs to shift away from this focus on disease and trying to fix disease towards building health. And we now know that mitochondria are very much the crux of our very much central to our health span and to lifespan and our risk of developing these various diseases of lifestyle, which are 80% of the chronic disease burden. And so what I want to get across to people is if you really focus on building robust mitochondrial health, that is the real path to slowing down aging at a cellular level and extending your lifespan and more importantly, extending your health span. So this is where it is at Do not, do not rely on the experts, quote, unquote, to come to save you with drugs, to cure whatever disease that you develop, be smarter than that, build health, build a robust, resilient, healthy cellular network in your body. And that starts with mitochondria and that starts with the information you are going to get in this summit.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Well well, you just dropped a bomb that I fully agree with. It goes back to that whole problem that I saw in the Western conventional medicine space that all I was doing was dealing with diseases. I was not actually preventing anything and I was not getting to the root cause. And the reason why people have disease and you and I both know that chronic disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, advanced heart disease, it is all a function of advanced mitochondrial decline. Right? If we solved the cellular problem, if we solved the mitochondrial issue, then we solved the progression of those disease processes. And fortunately, the body gives us lots of clues along the way that things are going wrong, that things are going sideways. So you are going to hear through these talks on this summit how to know that you are getting close to that or you are getting closer to that. And then we are going to give you a whole set of tools to help you solve the problem. And age, better age. Well, protect cellular health. Our focus is not disease prevention as much as it is promoting health at the cellular level because that inherently is disease prevention. That is the definition of disease prevention. So we are going to bring you all kinds of tools. I know there is a lot of information coming at you. So take advantage of this. You know, seven days that you will have here to watch the summit. And then, you know, if this is something that resonates with you and you see that this is something completely different, a new type of summit that you have not seen before. Consider getting lifetime access to this so you can go back to it and watch it and refer to it and share it with your family members again and again and again. Because I know that there has never been anything like this produced. So thank you so much, Ari, for being such a steadfast partner in this such a stand for helping people really get the tools that they need that really solve the problems.

Ari Whitten, MS

And right back at you, Laura, I really appreciate it and I’m very happy and honored to be a part of it.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Absolutely. Well, without further ado, we should get off so everybody else can watch these interviews. Thank you so much, Ari. You take care now. Bye.