Heart Disease, Diabetes, and Quenching The Fire Within

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Hey, how are you doing, Laura?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh, so good. I’m so glad to have you here. Thank you for inviting me. This is gonna be a really special interview because you are a diabetes and heart disease expert, and you’ve been working with people for over 30 years. And here’s the fascinating thing about you, you use your systems engineering background as an MIT electrical engineer in combo with your naturopathic medicine skills to help people achieve and maintain blood sugar control and improve heart health. So that’s just fascinating to me that you have that background.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Yeah.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Amazing.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

It’s true. Putting all the pieces together.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, so you decided to change careers at some point, right? You had to keep learning.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Right. All right. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So you are a published author of “Heart Health for Black Women.” And that title, that book is a natural approach to healing and preventing heart disease.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Yes.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And you’ve also co-authored multiple books, including one with the beloved Jack Canfield, “The Soul of Success” volume two. That is such a cool, cool, cool thing. All right. You created The Yates Protocol for people who have type two diabetes or prediabetes, and your protocol helps them lower blood sugar, achieve healthy A1C and have more energy to live life the way they want to. So this is the perfect interview because we’re all about people, loving and living a big life. So we can find you all over the media. You’ve been on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, Black News Channel, Fox SiriusXM, mindbodygreen, Essence Magazine. Good Housekeeping Women’s World, literally everywhere. You’ve been everywhere. Okay, so tell me a little bit, before we get into the talk today, we’re gonna be talking about mitochondria, inflammation, heart disease, diabetes, restoration of mitochondrial function, optimizing your mitochondria. But first, real quick, how did you get into this? Tell me a little bit about that.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

How I got into all of this was through my own health journey. I had some odd health problems that we couldn’t really connect the dots through with conventional medicine. It just wasn’t helping. And it turns out I’m sensitive to mold, I didn’t know that at the time. My husband and I had rented a house and it had mold and we didn’t know it. And long story short, and I had these weird symptoms. I wound up with an allergist who just wanted to shoot me up every week with these allergy shots. And and I asked, “What’s in this stuff? I can handle the big words. I have a science background.” Well, no disclosure. And I was like, “Hold on now, you’re shooting me up with stuff. I wanna know what’s going in.” Long story short, I was not happy about that. And at the time my husband worked with a person who had wonderful experience with a naturopathic physician in Oregon, who the work I saw with him was three visits and I was dramatically better. I’m a results-oriented person. I say, do what works for you for your health. 

I couldn’t argue with the difference in my health, even though some of the things we were doing, I didn’t understand it all at the time. Like say, homeopathy, which I’d never even heard of, right? So it was transformative. It got my attention. From there I began wildcrafting with herbalist in the Pacific Northwest and heard about Naturopathic Medical School. I did some more homework, went to check it out. And I knew I could learn there about the science and the medical stuff for the human body of physiology. All of the things, theologies as I call them, along with nutrition and stress and supplements and herbs. Homeopathy, exercise, manipulation, et cetera. So I thought that was for me because it was a much more whole person, holistic integrative approach to caring for health. And that’s the difference it’s made.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

What a journey. And there is oftentimes this self-healing journey that brings us to this space where we can then heal others. We hear that over and over again on this summit.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Absolutely.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And it really positions you in a place of not just authority with your background, but also just really understanding and being able to empathize with people as they go through this because you’ve lived it.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Right, absolutely. It’s personal.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is personal. Well, we’re gonna jump into some mitochondria energy topics today and you have something that you call the fire within. So what’s the connection between mitochondria and that fire or inflammation. Why do you call it that?

Beverly Yates, N.D.

That’s a great question. Thank you, Laura. So I call it the fire within, that’s my name for inflammation. I think people aren’t always clear about why inflammation is so important. This current international health crisis has really underlined these issues with inflammation. There’s good inflammation and there’s bad inflammation. So let me give a simple example, a good kind of inflammation in the body. Something that you actually want to have happen, is like, if you get a paper cut, if you cut your finger, your body will respond, hopefully, and heal that up really quick. It’ll knit it up. There’ll be a little bit of clotting there. The skin will heal and it’ll be all good. It’ll be like the paper cut never happened. That’s a good inflammatory response. It’s not outta control, it doesn’t scar over, and it doesn’t leave you wide open and bleeding either. 

It simply did the job. That is functional inflammation. We’re all good with that. The fire within we refer to the kind of inflammation that can get out of control, whether it’s with chemicals that we’ve heard about in the news, like cytokines, other kinds of inflammation, where the body starts to go on the attack. And if the attack isn’t directed appropriately, like let’s say to a microbe that can hurt you or kill you. And it starts to attack your joints, which is what shows up in rheumatoid arthritis. If it attacks your blood vessels, which can show up with heart disease. If it attacks your circulation, broadly defined, which is the issue with diabetes, this is when a fire is out of control. You can literally think a fire engine trying to deal with things. 

And when it spirals out of control, this is where people get sick. ‘Cause the inflammation creates these big, I call them Velcro balls in the body. For instance, with diabetes, right? That high level of blood sugar, because there’s too much glucose going around in the blood, if someone has prediabetes, type two diabetes, not well control type one. What happens is that excess blood sugar attaches to the normal proteins in the blood. I’m gonna say that again, to the normal proteins in your blood, your blood has plenty of proteins that should be there. What shouldn’t be there is too much blood sugar. If it does that, these Velcro balls that form now are sticky. They are inflammatory products and they can stick to the walls of your blood vessels causing the heart attacks and strokes. They can also muck up other things just in terms of circulation. So it means your nutrients, your wonderful, healthy foods, then you break them down and digest them, you don’t get the benefit of the nutrients. They can’t get in and through the cell wall, and the other side of that is detox products, products of elimination, can’t get out of the cell. So the trash builds up inside the cell and the goodness, the clean stuff, can’t get in. It’s like spring cleaning gone wrong, gone really wrong.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I love how you… Velcro balls, the trash within. I mean all of this. It’s so easy to understand when you explain. So if you’re gonna talk about mitochondria and energy, you’ve gotta talk about inflammation and the trash within, that’s really foundational. So now, link it up for our listeners. What’s the deal with mitochondria and inflammation? So you’ve got these Velcro balls and you’ve got trash in the cells, what’s happening to the mitochondria?

Beverly Yates, N.D.

You got a mess here. Okay. So, inside the cell are all these organelles called mitochondria. Different kinds of cells in the body have a different concentration or number of mitochondria. The winners by far in terms of density of mitochondria are your heart and your brain in that order. Your cardiac tissue, your heart, it doesn’t stop. It’s working all the time. It has periods of rest I hope, when you’re sleeping and if you have calm moments in your day. If it stops it’s game over. So we want the heart to keep working. It needs to have that constant steady energy. It just does. This is not an optional thing. 

Your brain is running the show. Again, we don’t want that to stop either. It’s also a game over kind of organ. If it stops working, we’re all done there. So it’s not a surprise that those two have the most density of mitochondria, the highest numbers in each and every one of their cells. So if it’s functioning well, your energy systems reside in that mitochondria and determine a lot about your energy and how you can live your life. They are critical and we have to love them and nourish them and support them and allow them to be able to do their job. Otherwise, things start to break and we will feel symptoms typically that come from that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This again, you’ve broken it down so simply, and I love it. It is game over. If these two organs aren’t working. Makes sense that they have the most highest concentration of mitochondria. So what I’m hearing you say is take care of these little guys so these vital organs keep working. So, there’s this connection between mitochondrial depletion and how it interacts with heart disease. You are a diabetes specialist, diabetes and heart disease are like this, right?

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Right.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So talk a little bit about that connection there.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Sure, sure. So with diabetes or with heart disease that fire within and inflammation is a big deal. They both are driven by this. And some people will say this is a chicken and an egg problem. I counter it with this thought, based on research, we know that more than 50%, that’s more than half of the people who show up in the emergency room in Western medicine, from the symptoms of a heart attack. What is considered a healthy cholesterol profile in terms of the raw score of the amount of cholesterol in their blood is under 200. Clearly, if it was just about cholesterol that 50% or greater than 50% greater than half wouldn’t be true. The actual conversation that would be far more helpful with the average person, certainly with anyone who is diagnosed with heart disease or with diabetes would be, let’s talk about inflammation, that fire within and what do we do to quench it? 

Because until we quench that inflammation, until we turn back that tide throwing all kinds of pills at it is often not the solution. It doesn’t help people really heal and get better. And then they get a cascading of worsening symptoms and unfortunately live a much, much less fulfilled, much less energetic life and often die prematurely. And sometimes in horrible ways and if we were just more attentive to these foundational things around lifestyle, we could help people dramatically be healthier, live longer, live better, and it would have these cascading effects on their families. I mean think about how many people lose relationships. They lose love relationships. They lose business relationships, all kinds of relationships because they don’t feel well.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, Beverly, I wanna really highlight something that you just said, because I spent 20 years working in the Western medicine world, prescribing cholesterol drugs, and looking at an algorithm of, this is your blood sugar, your blood pressure, your cholesterol, and trying to prevent heart disease. But what you just said was you absolutely can have inflammation and heart attacks when your cholesterol level is low to under 200?

Beverly Yates, N.D.

It does happen.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So this is important because a lot of people are chasing a cholesterol number. And it’s not just about a cholesterol number. And what I’ve seen go wrong in the Western world is we give all these medications and this false sense of, this is gonna solve your problem. You wanna prevent a heart attack, take these four or five drugs.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Yeah. Yeah.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And let’s get your cholesterol below 200. So you have people come say, “Well, look, my cholesterol’s below 200. I’m good.” So-

Beverly Yates, N.D.

That’s not necessarily true. I wish it was that simple.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Right, so focus a little bit with me on that lifestyle piece, because really the magic for preventing diabetes and heart attacks is not just in this chasing a cholesterol number and prescribing a drug, the real magic is in the lifestyle piece. That’s what you are so incredible at helping people with. So can you talk a little bit about that and how you help people with that, and how that relates to supporting mitochondrial health? ‘Cause at the end of the day, that’s what we’re doing, is we’re supporting mitochondria. I mean, people, I think they don’t understand why they’re doing all this healthy stuff.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Yeah, that’s a great point. I think sometimes people think it’s the health and wellness club as opposed to, they’re actually gonna be the beneficiary of it, right? So I hope you’re able to break it down. And I love your questions. You are doing such a great job of uncovering the pieces and looking at it from the point of view for someone who’s unfamiliar with this, right? So people here on this wonderful summit, make sure you take advantage of all this goodness that Laura is offering. Your mitochondria are key. They’re inside all of yourselves. So we’re talking about the entirety of your physical self. And I would argue also your spirit and your soul are involved in your energy world, right? So with these healthy choices with nutrition, you find those foods that are on the helpful food list who also agree with you. If you’re eating healthy foods that are full of food sensitivity reactions, food intolerances for you, that could spike your blood sugar, that could also lead to increasing inflammation if you’re having an adverse reaction to particular food, even though it’s healthy. 

So if you know you don’t feel well after you eat cauliflower, or maybe you have blueberries and you have a blood sugar. You feel exhausted. Those are great clues around food sensitivity. You can do lab testing or you can pay attention to what you’re eating. So that’s one idea. Nutrition is key here. I always say, it’s the bullseye of our target. We have to eat well. Just like the physical trainers world will tell you, you can’t out exercise a bad diet, right? It’s true. You really do have to put good fuel into your body. Okay, so that’s one. Sleep is a surprising element here. People often underappreciate in our culture, how important sleep and rest are. They’re not sexy, but they’re necessary. And I would argue if you wanna have a vibrant sex life, you need to sleep to be rested and be present and not be a moody, difficult person. We could put more names on that, but I think we all get the idea, right?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Sleep, it turns out, if you don’t get good sleep, if you have poor sleep, if you have sleep apnea, if you have difficulties with insomnia, you have other issues with sleep, it raises your score. Your fire within goes up. Your inflammatory index goes up and up and there’s different markers on lab tests that can be helpful to assess that from a clinical point of view. But just know that if you are having sleep issues, you have got to find a way to solve that. Stress is another player here with inflammation. Stress is like inflammation in the sense that you need to be able to respond to stress. There’s good stress. There’s bad stress. There’s good stress where you’re happy and you’re all hyped. It’s usually not gonna be something where you’re constantly up. Your body’s probably putting out more cortisol and it’s gonna come down. It’ll reset. Here’s the key thing. If you are chronically stressed and it’s the kind of stress where it’s bad stress and you feel trapped, you feel really pulled and pushed. There’s just too much. You’re an overwhelmed. 

You release a whole host of chemicals in addition to cortisol. Your blood sugar raises, ’cause it thinks you gotta run away from that tiger of the bear. You gotta lift the car off the loved one. If there really was a loved one trapped under your car, that is a temporary, I would hope situation. And you’re gonna be superhuman in that moment. That’s how you hear these stories on the news of a woman who’s like maybe 98 pounds soak and wet, lifts the car off of her kid, right? That’s how she could do it. She was superwoman in that moment ’cause she had to be. But it’s temporary. And the body calms down, cortisol reset, your blood sugar comes down. All those things come down. If you’re chronically stressed, they don’t come down. They go up and stay there. They’re pinned. We were never designed to constantly be in that sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight, fight/flight stage. We just aren’t.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And Beverly, we are in that constant phase because we’re not maybe lifting the car off of a loved one in a traumatic accident, but we’re sitting in traffic angry. We’re mad at our kids’ math teacher. We’re angry at our coworker. Our husband put his socks on the floor next to the hamper again.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Again.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And I mean, the dog next door is barking and you can’t stand that neighbor who does X, Y, and Z. And that is what our life is now. And it’s the same. Your body doesn’t know any difference, that cortisol level is-

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Yeah.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So what’s that doing to your mitochondria and your blood sugar and your heart? Tell us about that.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Well, with the connection between these things, right? You get that raise in your blood sugar, your heart’s pumping faster. Your sympathetic, I need to be a superhero nervous system is on high-alert. Your mitochondria now are kicked in the high gear. They feel like they gotta provide the energy for all this action, right? Even if you like say superhero movies and you watch. So you notice those movies always have quiet moments. It is not nonstop action from beginning to end. Even Hollywood recognizes, you gotta chill out, okay? So your mitochondria, those energy pumps, they’re fueling this and they’re trying their best to meet that moment, but if you keep tapping them at some point, they’re like, “Look y’all, no, we’re out. This is too much.” And if you have a history where you’ve had a lot of toxic chemical exposure and who hasn’t? If you’ve ever left your house, you have been exposed to something. Could be inside your house, you’re exposed to toxins depending on your awareness of that topic, right? So your mitochondria can be struggling. You get them, it turns out genetically from your mom. So, yay mama. If you got great mitochondria and you’re the energizer bunny, you lucked out on the genetic lottery.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I know let’s talk about that for a second. I don’t think people realize that we inherit how our mitochondria work. From our genetics and also there’s that piece, and we’ll have people on this summit talking about how your genetics aren’t set in stone. So even if you inherited some bad gene-

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Don’t give up people. Don’t give up.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, you can shift that. So I want you to know there’s hope and just keep listening to the summit because we’ll bring on some people who specialize in that. But, Beverly, tell us a little bit about that inheritance of mitochondria from mama.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Yeah. So with that inheritance, it tells you what the flooring view, where you are at, what your thresholds are like. And so in your family, you may have noticed that there are some things that run there. And if you are adopted, I wanna hold out my hand in my heart to you, go get some of those genetics tests that are available in genomics tests, so you can fill in the blanks on your tree. Now you don’t have to wonder, we can take the question marks out of this for everybody. And you can find out what is your situation. Some people absolutely have a predisposition towards vulnerabilities to things. And other people are pretty much bulletproofs. They have like Teflon all over them and not in a toxic sense, but rather they can repel whatever life throws at them. You’ve probably known people like this.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh no, one of my grandmothers smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, her whole life and lived to be 94 years old. I mean, that’s one of those bulletproof people, that is the exception not the rule.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

That’s the exception, especially today.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And she was born in another time. She was born before all the toxins were in our food and she grew up on a farm where they raised their own food. And I mean, so many factors, right?

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Right.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So her epigenetics were winning from the beginning. Winning from the beginning. I just made a rhyme.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

That’s a good one.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, I mean we know people like that, but let’s be real, Beverly, that is far more the exception.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

That’s not most of us, I wish. So we’re limping along to some degree. So when we look at heart disease, we look at diabetes, we look at mitochondria, we know that there’s a lot of issues in terms of the energy. And for some people, their mitochondria are damaged, whether it was that they didn’t get a good genetic cam to begin with, or life is unfolded in a way that has been unkind and those mitochondria are damaged. These are the people who will show up with really stubborn problems around diabetes, despite doing their best efforts to make their blood sugar be at a healthy level. It’s just something that just constantly spins out from them. Others people with heart disease, if that was the predominant issue or what happened first, it could be, especially if it’s congestive heart failure, that’s almost always an issue of mitochondrial dysfunction. 

And until you attempt to and treat and address that mitochondrial dysfunction, the congestive heart failure will continue, ventricular complications, atrial complications, any of the parts of the heart, if you will, that are not working right at that cellular level. It is always a conversation about mitochondria. And that’s where clinically and therapeutically I’ve seen the best benefit, is to work on those mitochondria and really help lift people who have those difficult, problems with heart disease, difficult problems with diabetes up out of the muck so that they can return to a healthy state and stay there. That’s one of the big learnings I had from the 1990s to the 2000s in my own work. One of the things in my journey in becoming a better clinician was just my observation. This is where the MIT part of my brain takes over with data and science and observing. 

And I noticed this shift from the late ’90s into the 2000s where I would see people come into my office with bags and bags, chopping bags full of supplements. And I’m looking at these labels and some of them had things in there, like just plain old at the time, CoQ10. And I was expecting that people would be a lot better. And I think self myself, “Why are they here?” Well, I learned a few things. One, there’s quality issues in the world of supplements. Clearly, what was on the label wasn’t in a bottle. I also though had a big refinement. You’re talking about a huge aha. I think it was around the time my second child was born. So this would’ve been 2002, 2003. All these genomic studies were coming out. And I remember reading still to this day, that science paper, I was like, “Ah.” I was so excited because this gave me the clue I needed to see. There are people who don’t convert Coenzyme Q10 all the way to its most useful form, which is ubiquinol. And there was at least at the time, one laboratory in Japan that had successfully gotten that chemical and made it available as a supplement. 

And I started using that with my cardiovascular patients and then getting amazing results with them. I was like, “Oh, wow.” Then I realized the people who were coming in with the big bags of shopping for the supplements were probably genomically weak in their conversion from CoQ10 to ubiquinol. Their mitochondria were not getting nourish because they couldn’t do the six or seven biochemical conversion steps from CoQ10 to ubiquinol. That was just one insight at that time. And the more I looked at this, I was like, “Oh, these are the missing pieces of the puzzle.” And since then it’s been just revolutionary from a clinical point of view, to be able to consistently help people who otherwise would continue to struggle despite doing what seemed like really smart things.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I’m really glad you brought this up because I could get on a soapbox about supplements. I mean, everyone I work with has a graveyard of supplements, meaning they’ve got partially used bottles. They’ve spent a fortune on things that haven’t solved the problem. And so just sidebar for a minute and let’s talk about the importance of having, number one, practitioner quality supplements. And number two, a trusted guide to help you figure out what’s best because in this day and age of internet searches and Google, everyone is trying to be their own practitioner and cut a corner. And, I can figure this out on my own, which actually really creates a whole bunch of frustration and waste the time, energy and money, because you’re just trial and erroring instead of using a trusted system and a trusted product and a bit of a process and an algorithm that we know works. So can you talk for a minute, in your opinion, what’s your stand on supplements and what do you tell your your patients to look for?

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Well, my stand on supplements is that there are kinds when we need to have a specific kind of nutrient density. Often, it is evidence-based. There’s research behind it or we have lots of years with clinical experience. And we know that this is a go-to, this is something to work with in particular set of problems. Having said that, one of the best things about the pharmaceutical industry is that what is on that label is in the bottle. And when they screw up or they make a mistake, that’s when they have a recall and they can tell you clearly what batch today and time it was created, they have a way to trace it scientifically to know, “Hey, we screwed up, we gotta pull these ones back. Sorry, guys, we made a mistake.” In the world of supplements, often the quality assurance and quality control is not there. There are companies who do have fabulous quality control and quality assurance and is on the label. And they are parts of organizations that do testing that way people don’t cheat. So it’s not a one time, we pass the test, we will never again meet that standard. Rather it is an ongoing certification and those supplements often cost more because it not surprisingly, you have to pay people to do these things, right?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

The scientists in the lab who are doing the assessments to make sure that what’s on the labels, in the bottle is true are part of it, and it drives up your costs. So with that in mind, I think that supplements that are practitioner level of quality and that do have clear certification on their labels around who has certified them to actually be honest players, that they deliver what they say and that things are free of contaminants, they’re free of artificial ingredients, or they disclose it if they aren’t, then, otherwise, you just don’t know what you have. It’s Pandora’s box, good luck.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh, totally.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

It’s a huge issue, huge.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So glad we’re talking about this. I work with a particular supplement company in a lot of my programs that this is when you know you can trust a supplement company. Earlier this year, they had a batch of one of their products not meet that third party testing. And they threw away around 20,000 units of the product. We put everything on back order for a couple of months. And it made people really frustrated. People were frustrated. We can’t get this. And it wasn’t because of a supply chain issue, it was because the product didn’t pass their standards and they weren’t about to give it, to sell it. And that is a company… When you encounter that with a company, that’s a company you can trust actually. It might be inconvenient, but dang, that is really impressive.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Yeah, you got to respect it when people really have that integrity and do the right thing there to keep their customers safe. I’ve had it a few times. I can think of twice with one of the botanical medicine companies that I worked with and they did the right thing. They did a fantastic recall, and they realized that they had a contamination issue. They were apologetic. They said either send it back to us or better yet, why don’t you just destroy it and sign us so we know you got rid of it. Please don’t give this anyone. Sell it to anyone. If you have sell sold everyone, let us know. We will happily reimburse you. I mean, they just ate every possible expense associated with it. And to me, for a company to stand by their products, of course, that just makes sense. Why would that even be unusual? But we have to bring this issue up because I think a lot of people in general public are not aware of what goes on behind the scenes, in the difference in the standard to which supplement companies are held versus say pharmaceutical.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. Absolutely. I know we sidebarred here, but I know this is important information and people are always wondering about supplement and people assume that it’s FDA regulated, like pharmaceuticals.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Not the same level.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And it’s just not.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Not the same level.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So you got to be a bit cautious. And that’s why it’s important to find a trusted guide, like Beverly like myself, like the speakers on this summit who can guide you to companies that are reputable and whose products work. I mean, who knew that some people can’t convert CoQ10 into a usable form. So you go to the ubiquinol. I mean, it’s amazing, and Beverly knows that.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

It’s been a game changer. So instead of having say 70% success with my patients, it’s everyone who has a specific issue, right? Like that’s an amazing gap to close, but it’s because of understanding the science and also caring about how people live their lives so that they have that fundamental energy that mitochondria can deliver. So if someone say has congestive heart failure, where they are exhausted by their diabetes, being able to support and nourish those mitochondria and know that this helps them to unlock their natural energy, to get the cell wall to work better, to get the mitochondria transport of all of its nutrients and it’s ion chains working again means now that person can feel so much better. 

They’re off the couch. They’re up walking. They’re playing with their kids or their grandkids. They’re a member now of their faith or spiritual community. They’re able to perform at work. They’re able to have a loving relationship and be a kind and generous and emotionally stable partner. This shows up in so many ways in people’s lives. It blows me away. It’s so foundational. So those mitochondria, they deserve our love. They deserve nourishment. And otherwise, if there’s a compromise in the literal energy of the nutrients going into the cell and therefore to that mitochondria and their ability to convert it and turn it into our actual action energy, you’re gonna be so stuck. You’re gonna not live that life or your dreams ’cause you don’t have the foundation of energy. You have to have it. This is a must.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You do. And I think we’ve covered really clearly why we need to be concerned about mitochondrial deletion with diabetes, heart disease. And why we wanna focus on restoring it. Can you now give our audience some really simple, easy ways to optimize mitochondrial function as part of their healing from diabetes and heart disease. What can they do to optimize? ‘Cause I know they wanna walk away from this with, “Okay, I know what to do now.”

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Okay. So some straightforward things. One, could be to do regular deep breathing exercises. Making sure you’re getting oxygen in and that you’re involving your diaphragm. You do that belly breathing. If you’ve ever watched an infant or a toddler breath, young children naturally breathe through their entirety of their body and their bellies do in and out. You can see it when they’re asleep. You can see it when they laugh. If you watch them from the side, you’ll see that little belly go in and out, in and out. And I’m not sure when it is, but at some point it’s probably before we even hit puberty, we stop with that deep breathing. So that’s one way, right? And that’s free. It’s easy. You could do it anywhere. It’s just consciously, purposely, twice a day. Do that deep breathing for three to five minutes. 

Really let your belly expand and relax and bring it in and out. Other things that you can do. Some of the supplements that would make sense. Certainly, ubiquinol is a player here if you have a big issue with this. You have to get it from a company that actually has though that quality. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your money. Some supple events are not the same as others. That’s for sure. Additional things you can do that will help with rebuilding and restoring your mitochondria is take a good look at your own history of exposure to toxins. Whether they are toxins from cleaning products, toxins from, you grew up by like a oil refinery like I did in South Philadelphia. Delaware, Southeastern Pennsylvania, Northern Maryland, and Philadelphia area absolutely had tons of refineries and the air was awful sometimes, right? I just shutter to even think about that whole situation. 

There’s a reason why I did four cleansing programs, full-on, before becoming pregnant because I just felt like, you know what, by then I was already a naturopathician. So I knew I need to take care of this. And my husband who grew up in New Jersey saying we did it together. But that was an unfair advantage. I had the background to know the importance of this. So if you know or suspect you’ve had a lot of toxic exposure. Maybe you grew up by a golf course and someplace that where there’s just a lot of spraying. You didn’t have permission about, it just was. Maybe you had well water as a kid, and the aquifers where you live may have been contaminated as well. Same thing, you would be well-served to go through a detox program to help you get rid of that toxic burden because that will help the ungum or get rid of those Velcro balls, both floating through the blood and to ungum the cell walls. ‘Cause all cells have walls, right? Stuff comes in, goes out through. There’re nutrients in, waste products out. Similarly for the mitochondria, they too have walls and things have to transport in and transport out. These mechanisms work better when you lower that toxic burden.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

These are really helpful, helpful tips, Beverly. And we’re gonna make sure that everyone viewing knows how to get ahold of you after they view this summit. And be sure if you’re viewing that you get Beverly’s free download, we’ll have that available for you. And Beverly, I wanna really thank you for just pouring so much love. I know, right? You have a uncanny ability to make complex information, very easy for people to understand. And I know your heart as well. You’re one of the most generous, loving practitioners who I know in my circle of friends. And I’m so, so happy that you could come on here and share your wealth of knowledge. And I’m really looking forward to people connecting with you. As you’re watching this summit, find your trusted practitioner, find people on here who can help you.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

Absolutely, there are some wonderful really well-qualified, ready-to-go folks, happy to help you. And keep reaching for your best life. Everyone deserves to be well.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thank you, Beverly. You take good care now.

Beverly Yates, N.D.

You’re welcome. Bye-bye.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Bye.