Founder, MitochondrialHealth | 40+ years in rehabilitation | Metabolic Health • Brain Health • Strength • Healthy Aging
Clermont, FL
Joined April 2024
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I’m Ted Langdon, founder of MitochondrialHealth.
This didn’t start with social media, a podcast, or the latest longevity trend.
My journey in health, exercise, physical therapy, and rehabilitation began more than 40 years ago.
As a teenager in the early 1980s, I began volunteering and observing in hospitals, rehabilitation settings, and sports medicine. That early exposure eventually became a lifelong career working in physical therapy and rehabilitation.
Along the way, I studied exercise, fitness, prevention, rehabilitation, strength, nutrition, and metabolic health. I had opportunities to learn in respected clinical and academic environments, including UNC Chapel Hill and Duke, and to work across different areas of rehabilitation and healthcare.
But some of my greatest lessons did not come from a classroom.
They came from people.
For more than four decades, I have worked with and learned from people dealing with weakness, pain, injury, neurological conditions, chronic disease, falls, loss of mobility, and the difficult process of trying to regain function and independence.
I have watched people fight their way back after illness and injury.
I have also seen what happens when years of declining muscle, poor metabolic health, inactivity, inadequate recovery, and loss of physical capacity finally catch up with someone.
That experience changed the questions I began asking.
What if we focused more attention on preserving health before people lost it?
What if we protected muscle and strength earlier?
What if we paid more attention to metabolic health, movement, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and the cellular processes that help support human energy and resilience?
What if the goal of healthy aging was not simply living longer, but remaining strong enough and capable enough to keep living your life?
Those questions eventually helped lead me to create MitochondrialHealth.
Mitochondria are an important part of that story, but they are not the entire story.
Human health is complex.
Muscle matters.
Strength matters.
Movement matters.
Metabolic health matters.
Nutrition matters.
Sleep matters.
Recovery matters.
Brain health matters.
And the ability of our cells to produce and manage energy matters.
MitochondrialHealth brings those pieces together through evidence informed education focused on metabolic health, mitochondrial function, strength, movement, recovery, brain health, and healthy aging.
My perspective is not that of a laboratory scientist or physician.
It comes from more than 40 years around rehabilitation, physical therapy, exercise, prevention, recovery, and real people trying to remain strong or regain their independence.
That is the perspective I bring to MitochondrialHealth.
I will continue studying the research, learning from physicians, scientists, researchers, clinicians, coaches, and other experts, and translating that information into practical education people can understand and use.
No miracle promises.
No single explanation for every disease.
No one size fits all approach.
Just a continuing effort to understand the science, ask better questions, share what the evidence shows, and help people think earlier about the health and physical capacity they want to preserve for the future.
Because after decades in rehabilitation, one lesson has stayed with me:
It is much easier to protect strength, mobility, and independence than to try to rebuild them after they are gone.
That is why MitochondrialHealth exists.
Build strength.
Protect muscle.
Improve metabolic health.
Prioritize recovery.
Preserve mobility.
Protect independence.
And keep learning.
MitochondrialHealth
Education for a Healthier Tomorrow.
MitochondrialHealthLLC.com
General education only. Not medical diagnosis or treatment.
Here’s a question worth asking: Are we investing enough in preventing chronic disease, or are we spending too much managing it after the damage is done? Follow the evidence, follow the money, and always put patients first! 💪
MAHA Action President Tony Lyons says Big Pharma's lobbying money has skyrocketed in the last 18 months.
He says 100 million Americans have changed their minds about food and drugs, and Big Pharma is scared to death.
“The amount of money that pharmaceutical companies have been paying on lobbying has skyrocketed in the last 18 months.”
“They're using every trick in the book.”
“They're trying to turn people against each other.”
“They're getting their corrupt friends in the media to write stories all day, every day, because they're scared to death of the progress of MAHA.”
“And no, it's not perfect. And it's not done. It's not settled. Science is never settled.”
“But the progress is heading in the right direction.”
@Bannons_WarRoom
Cheap imported seafood isn’t much of a bargain if it comes at the expense of human health, environmental destruction, and American fishermen! Know where your seafood comes from! 🦐🇺🇸
RFK Jr. says the days of foreign companies dumping fish and shrimp loaded with toxic chemicals into American markets are coming to an end.
“Vietnam and Cambodia, they have companies that go in there, they fence off a mangrove swamp, they poison the fish in it, they grow shrimp.”
“They can do that for 5 seasons and all the mangroves are dead. They destroy the environment.”
“The shrimp are so loaded with antibiotics and disinfectants that no European country will take them.”
“So they ship them all over here.”
“Our shrimpers here… have to compete against criminal enterprises abroad.”
“President Trump is rebuilding the infrastructure. He’s reopening the markets for our commercial fishermen.”
Alzheimer’s doesn’t just steal memories. It changes entire families. After 40 years in physical therapy, I’ve seen the heartbreak firsthand. We need more research, greater emphasis on metabolic and brain health, earlier prevention strategies, and far more support for the caregivers who sacrifice so much every day. ❤️🧠
Dr. Oz shares why the fight against Alzheimer’s is deeply personal to him.
His own mother has the disease, and he knows firsthand the heartbreaking toll it takes on families and caregivers.
“I’m therefore one of the 13 million people who’s a caregiver.”
“As many of you know, it’s hard because you lose your loved one twice.”
“When they forget you and then when they leave you.”
“When you think no one’s paying attention and you feel like you’re by yourself, overwhelmed by the daunting task of taking care of someone that could still live for 10 more years.”
“You’re challenged to figure out what is the right thing to do.”
🎃 The real danger of Halloween candy isn’t kids bouncing off the walls for an hour. It’s the metabolic consequences of making excessive sugar consumption a daily habit. The sugar rush may be a myth, but insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction certainly aren’t!
💪 Losing lean mass on a DEXA scan doesn’t necessarily mean you’re losing muscle! Glycogen and water can dramatically influence the numbers. Before declaring that fasting is destroying muscle, understand what the scan is actually measuring. Muscle strength, function, and performance tell an important part of the story that DEXA alone cannot!
Something most people don't know about DEXA scans: they count the sugar stored in your muscles, and the water it holds, as "lean mass."
When trained cyclists simply loaded up on carbs for a few days, their DEXA lean mass went up 2%. That's far too fast for real muscle to grow. A water fast runs it in reverse.
So some of those 7 pounds were real muscle, and some were an empty sugar tank that refills once he eats normally again.
30 different plants every week? Where’s the clinical evidence that this arbitrary target actually prevents strokes, dementia, or heart disease? Changes in gut bacteria are not the same as improved health outcomes. We need stronger science, not another nutritional marketing slogan! 💪
The "30 plants a week" rule did not come from a study of strokes, dementia or death.
It came from the American Gut Project. Volunteers answered a survey question: "In an average week, how many different plants do you eat?" Then researchers compared the stool bacteria of people who said more than 30 with people who said fewer than 10. Tim Spector is a co-author on that paper.
That's the whole foundation. A questionnaire and a stool sample. Now it's packaged as a six-week plan and a cookbook, wrapped in the story of his stroke at 53.
Different gut bacteria is not the same as fewer strokes. That paper never showed that eating 30 plants prevents a single stroke, heart attack or case of dementia. Meanwhile meat delivers B12, heme iron, zinc and complete protein with no counting required. I've made videos on the fiber and gut microbiome hype (see below).
If 30 plants a week is so important, where is the trial showing it prevents even one stroke?
Study and my videos below...
Since when did counting 30 different plants become the gold standard for human health? Gut bacteria are interesting, but insulin sensitivity, muscle strength, and actual health outcomes matter a whole lot more! 💪
The "30 plants a week" rule sounds like settled nutrition science, but it traces back to a citizen-science stool project where volunteers reported how many plants they ate and researchers compared their gut bacteria. That's a microbiome association, and it says nothing about heart attacks, diabetes or lifespan. A person's health rests far more on enough protein, fewer refined carbs and controlled insulin than on hitting a plant count.
What if eating plants doesn’t actually mean fewer animals die? 🌾🥩
Every food system has an ecological cost. The real question isn’t whether animals die to produce our food, but how many, under what conditions, and at what environmental cost. That’s a conversation worth having!
Mike Archer stood at the edge of the wheat field as the last of the light drained out of the sky, notebook open, boots sunk a little in the loose soil. The numbers had been circling in his head for weeks, and now they were settling into something that felt unavoidable.
He had spent years around bones—fossil ones, mostly—reading the long record of life and death written into rock. Living animals were different. These were the ones still running around under the grain.
Every few years the mice arrived in force. Not a scattering, but a plague: hundreds to a thousand per hectare in the worst seasons, dense enough that you could hear the rustle when you walked the rows. Farmers poisoned them.
There was little choice; the grain would otherwise vanish into the burrows. Archer had pulled the figures together from the CSIRO data and the plague records. Average it out, account for the four-year cycle, the fraction of land baited, the kill rate once the baits went down. It came to something on the order of a hundred mice dead per hectare each year just to keep the wheat growing.
He did the protein math next, because that was the only fair comparison. A hectare of wheat, average yield, usable protein fraction. Then the same exercise for a steer raised on the rangelands that would not grow crops anyway—native grasses, sparse cover, one animal delivering a carcass that translated into tens of kilograms of protein. Two animals, maybe a couple more when you counted the occasional losses, for every hundred kilos of usable protein from the cattle. Fifty-odd mice for the same amount from the grain.
He closed the notebook. The ratio sat there, stubborn: roughly twenty-five times more sentient deaths on the grain side, at least under Australian conditions and the numbers he could defend. It was not a defense of every feedlot or every industrial barn. It was narrower than that—rangeland cattle versus the mice that died so the vegetarian plate could stay free of them. Still, it inverted the usual story.
Archer walked back toward the vehicle. The field looked empty now, the grain cut, the stubble pale. Somewhere under it, or already scavenged, were the mice that had not made it through the season. He had no particular fondness for the argument he was about to make public. It complicated things people preferred simple. But the count was the count, and he had spent too long reading the dead to pretend the living ones did not leave a record too.
The piece would run under a blunt title. Someone would call it a provocation. He already knew that. What he had not yet decided was how many of the people who read it would actually check the arithmetic before they answered.
ApoB matters, but is it the whole story? Nearly 294,000 people followed for a decade suggest cardiovascular risk is more complicated! Metabolic health matters, and we need to stop treating one biomarker as the entire diagnosis! 🫀
The King of ApoB just published data showing ApoB is not the whole story.
Allan Sniderman's team followed 293,872 UK Biobank adults for 10 years. High HDL-C was tied to lower heart disease risk even after ApoB was accounted for, and it softened the risk that came with high ApoB.
That fits what I see in clinic. High ApoB with low triglycerides and high HDL is a very different metabolic picture than high ApoB with insulin resistance. Nick and the TFP team are asking exactly the right question.
If ApoB were the whole ball game, HDL-C should have dropped out of that model. So why didn't it?
The Study and my videos below...
Parkinson’s is much more than a movement disorder! Could neuroinflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and metabolic health help explain some of the cognitive and psychiatric symptoms we see? The science is uncovering some fascinating connections! 🧠
Inflammation and neuropsychiatric symptoms in Parkinson's disease: a genetic association
"Study findings suggest that a polymorphism previously associated with increased IL-1β expression may increase the risk of certain neuropsychiatric symptoms in PD."
frontiersin.org/journals/agi…
Losing lean mass during fasting doesn’t necessarily mean you’re losing muscle! 💪 Glycogen and water shifts can distort DEXA results, while ketones help conserve protein. The goal isn’t simply to fast longer. It’s to improve metabolic health while protecting the muscle that keeps us strong and independent!
The lean mass number from a DEXA scan during a fast like this overstates muscle loss, and this post is right to flag it. Glycogen and the water stored with it are counted as lean, and that alone can move DEXA lean mass by a couple of percent.
What I'd add is that the body works to protect protein the longer a fast goes, and ketones are part of that. When researchers infused ketones into people who had fasted for weeks, the nitrogen they lost in urine dropped by about 30%. A long fast still costs some muscle, so I'd keep fasts shorter, lift during them and refeed with plenty of protein.
One of the strongest predictors of longevity isn’t your weight, cholesterol, or blood pressure. It’s your cardiorespiratory fitness! Your ability to move, work, and recover may tell us more about your future health than the number on the scale. 💪
A few years back, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic pulled the records of more than 122,000 people who’d walked onto a treadmill and pushed until they couldn’t. They weren’t looking for personal bests. They were looking for something simpler: how long those people lived afterward.
They sorted everyone by how fit they were for their age and sex — from the least fit all the way up to the rare ones who landed two standard deviations above average. Then they watched what happened over the next eight-plus years.
The pattern was blunt. The fitter people were, the longer they tended to live. And the line never flattened. The people at the very top of the fitness charts still had lower mortality than the people who were merely “highly fit.” Even past age 70. Even with high blood pressure. No plateau. No penalty for being elite.
Low fitness carried roughly the same extra risk as smoking or diabetes. Elite fitness didn’t just erase that risk — it kept lowering it further. The authors wrote the sentence that still gets quoted: there was “no observed upper limit of benefit.”
Most of the headlines about exercise talk about minutes per week and sweet spots. This one measured what your body could actually do. The people who could do more, on that treadmill, lived longer. The data didn’t find a ceiling.
Sometimes the simplest message is the one that holds up: get fitter. Then get fitter again. The treadmill doesn’t seem to care how fit you already are.
Menopause isn't just about hormonal changes. It's a major metabolic transition! Declining estrogen can increase visceral fat, worsen insulin resistance, and contribute to fatty liver disease. Protecting muscle and metabolic health should be a priority for every woman entering this stage of life!
A point I try and often make and wrote a whole book about that still confuses many in midlife and what they should eat a low carb diet but without fat being an unlimited free for all
Estrogen decline changes the liver's metabolic environment
A major 2025 review in Endocrine Reviews examined precisely this relationship.
Its findings support several important points:
Estrogen helps regulate hepatic lipid metabolism.
Estrogen deficiency is associated with greater visceral and hepatic fat accumulation.
Hepatic insulin resistance becomes more common after menopause.
The prevalence and severity of fatty liver disease increase significantly after menopause.
academic.oup.com/edrv/articl…
endocrine.org/journals/endoc…
Stop chasing a smaller body and start building a stronger one! Muscle isn't just about movement. It's one of your greatest assets for metabolic health, longevity, and independence! 💪
Charlene Andersen never set out to become a carnivore icon. She simply wanted her life back.
By the time she married Joe in August 1998, years of unexplained illness had piled up: severe fatigue, depression, chronic pain, trichotillomania, amenorrhea, and Lyme-related symptoms that doctors couldn’t resolve. Conventional advice and restrictive diets hadn’t helped. So the couple did something radical for the era—they eliminated everything that seemed to cause trouble and started with meat and water. It wasn’t an experiment in optimization. It was survival.
Healing wasn’t instant, but it was real. Once animal fat became her primary fat source, her cycle returned within weeks. Over time the pain eased, energy stabilized, and symptoms that had defined her life for decades began to fade. She carried two healthy pregnancies on the diet, had straightforward home births, and breastfed both boys. For years the family kept the approach private while raising their sons. Charlene refined what worked—mostly fatty ribeye and other fresh beef cuts, minimal extras—and stuck with it.
Nearly 28 years later, at 53, she is still thriving on essentially the same simple approach. She coaches, shares her experience, and has recently returned to something she loved as a younger woman: roller skating. The wobbles and falls are part of it, but so is the pure joy of movement and losing track of time. Weekly videos capture the lightness and freedom that once felt impossible.
Her story is one of the longest continuous real-world examples of a zero-carb, animal-based diet. No supplements, no plant foods, no special protocols—just consistent nourishment that let her body recover and keep going. Doctors never saw this coming because the solution sat outside the usual playbook. Charlene simply kept eating the food that worked and lived the life that followed.
What if taking more antioxidants actually reduced some of the benefits of exercise?
Your mitochondria need more than protection. They need the right signals to adapt, strengthen, and become more resilient.
Sometimes the stress is what makes us stronger.
MitochondrialHealthLLC.com
Exercise works partly because it's a stressor, and blocking the stress can block the benefit. In a 4-week training study in healthy young men, exercise improved insulin sensitivity on a clamp only in the men who weren't taking vitamin C and E, and the men taking the antioxidants also missed the rise in their own antioxidant defenses. The reactive oxygen species from a workout are part of the signal that tells muscle to adapt, so a person who wants the full metabolic payoff of training should think twice about mega-dose antioxidants around it.
One night of poor sleep can reduce insulin sensitivity by roughly 25%. But here’s the fascinating part: Exercise may help protect your metabolism from the damage. Your skeletal muscle is powerful metabolic medicine!
A bad night of sleep matters more for metabolism than most people think, but movement can offset a lot of it. A single night of 4 hours of sleep cut insulin sensitivity by about 25% in healthy adults, in both the liver and muscle. When young men were held to 4 hours a night for five nights, their glucose tolerance worsened, but three sessions of high-intensity interval exercise during that stretch prevented the drop. A short night isn't a reason to skip the workout, and it may be the best day to do it.
We’ve been told for decades that eating meat shortens our lives. So why did a study of 175 populations find that higher meat consumption was associated with LONGER life expectancy? Maybe it’s time to question the narrative and follow the science.
You W, et al. Total Meat Intake is Associated with Life Expectancy: A Cross-Sectional Data Analysis of 175 Contemporary Populations. Int J Gen Med. 2022.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…
My videos on this:
11 LIES about Red Meat They Want You to Believe: youtube.com/watch?v=U6n9BR2I…
The Blue Zones Are a $78 million dollar LIE [with Dr Saul Newman]: youtube.com/watch?v=hdEKEyGq…
We’ve been told meat shortens our lives. So why do countries consuming more meat often have longer life expectancies?
A study of 175 countries raises some serious questions about the anti-meat narrative.
Correlation isn’t causation, but that argument works both ways.
MitochondrialHealthLLC.com
Umm, meat shortens your life? The countries eating the most meat tend to live the longest.
This 2022 paper ran UN data from 175 countries. More meat went with longer life expectancy, and the link held after the researchers controlled for wealth, total calories, obesity, and urbanization.
The part nobody quotes: carbohydrate crops (cereals, starchy roots, sugars) showed a weak, negative link with life expectancy.
This is population data, so it can't prove meat adds years. But it's the same kind of data the Blue Zones story was built on, and it points the other way. I've made videos on this for years (see below).
If meat really shortened lives, we surely need to explain why the heaviest meat-eating countries aren't dying first, right?
Study and my videos below...
Your body was designed to burn fat and produce ketones long before anyone invented the ketogenic diet.
Ketosis isn’t a metabolic malfunction. It’s a natural human capability we’ve largely forgotten how to use.
MitochondrialHealthLLC.com
Ketosis isn't a fringe state, and the body moves toward it whenever insulin comes down. Human babies are born unusually fat, with body fat making up about 11 to 14% of their weight, and that fat is both a fuel store and the source of ketones a growing brain uses to build its own lipids. Low insulin lets fat cells release fat and lets the liver turn it into ketones, and eating carbs all day keeps insulin high enough to hold that switch off.
What if we’re overlooking one of the most important metabolic signals involved in breast cancer?
Insulin doesn’t just regulate blood sugar. It also signals cellular growth.
Research linking elevated fasting insulin with breast cancer risk and poorer outcomes raises an important question:
Why aren’t we paying more attention to insulin resistance in cancer care?
Breast cancer cells are LOADED with insulin receptors. That's important to know for preventing/treating it. Why? Read on...
In 159 breast tumors, insulin receptor content was more than 6 times higher than in normal breast tissue. And the receptors worked: they bound insulin and switched on.
Many cancer cells favor a form of the insulin receptor (IR-A) that acts mainly as a growth signal, not a sugar-handling one. Insulin tells these cells to grow.
So what happens when insulin runs high?
512 women with early breast cancer had fasting insulin checked. Highest vs lowest quarter: 2x the distant recurrence, 3.1x the death rate.
In the Women's Health Initiative, researchers measured insulin in about 1,650 postmenopausal women drawn from a cohort of 93,676. In women not on hormone therapy, the top quarter of insulin had 2.4x the breast cancer risk. And the obesity link mostly faded once insulin was accounted for.
Few doctors check fasting insulin. Fewer still know that Low-carb/Keto/Carnivore is the most direct way to bring it down. I've made videos on this (see below).
If high insulin goes with more breast cancer AND worse outcomes, why isn't fasting insulin part of every breast cancer workup?
Studies and my videos below...
