Mitochondria Are Maternal: A Practice of Mothers

Passed down through generations. Sold back to you at a premium.

Photo by razi pouri on Unsplash

I always felt like I had something of my mother and maternal grandmother that was hard to put into words. An energy. A drive. Something deeper.

I think I figured out what it is.

Mitochondria.

Every cell in your body contains mitochondria. These are the small structures responsible for producing the energy that powers everything you do. Your heartbeat. Your brain and thoughts. Your movement. And unlike almost everything else in your biology, your mitochondria didn’t come from both of your parents.

They come from your mother. Who got hers from her mother. Who got hers from hers.

An unbroken maternal line, stretching back further than any of us can trace. When I think about the energy I feel in my body — the drive, the capacity, the something I could never name — I now think of it as a living inheritance. Passed generation to generation from women. And carried forward in every cell.

I find that beautiful.

The Biology — an Unbroken Line

Mitochondria have their own separate DNA, and it’s completely different from the nuclear DNA you inherit from both parents.

Your nuclear DNA contains roughly 20,000 genes inherited from both your mother and father, shuffling and recombining with every generation.

Your mitochondrial DNA contains just 37 genes. It lives outside the nucleus, replicates independently, and passes essentially unchanged from mother to child. It accumulates rare, small mutations over thousands of years. Your mitochondria connect you to your mother. To her mother. To hers. And on.

Those slow mutations create haplogroups that are associated with different VO2 max capacity, different oxidative stress responses, different disease risks. Your maternal inheritance influences how your mitochondria actually function.

The biohacking world treats mitochondria as a problem to optimize. But I think it’s important we remember we are carrying something that has been selected, refined, and passed forward across generations of human survival.

What Mitochondria Actually Are

Mitochondria are often called the powerhouses of the cell, and that is accurate but I also think it undersells them. They also regulate how cells age, how they respond to stress, and when they die. Mitochondrial dysfunction is implicated in cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, neurodegeneration, and emerging evidence links mitochondrial function to fertility.

Two places in the human body stand out for their massive mitochondrial load: the heart muscle, which has the highest mitochondrial density of any organ, and the egg cell, which contains many more mitochondria than any other cell in the human body.

It’s interesting when you think about it. The heart is the organ that constantly beats to keep you alive, and the ovaries that carry the eggs that carry your children. Evolution decided these two things needed more mitochondria than anything else.

The Ovarian Connection Nobody Talks About

A mature human egg contains between 100,000 and 600,000 mitochondria. A heart cell (with huge energy demands) contains around 5,000 to 8,000. Most other cells contain just a few hundred to a few thousand. The egg is the most mitochondria-rich cell in the human body, by a lot.

This matters because mitochondrial function in eggs is linked to egg quality, fertilization success, embryo development, and reproductive aging. As women age, mitochondrial function in oocytes declines, thought to be one of the main mechanisms behind age-related fertility decline.

This also helps explain something many women notice but struggle to get answers about in perimenopause: the changes in energy, metabolism, cognition, and sleep. Mitochondrial function in the ovaries declines during the transition, and that decline is felt everywhere. The fatigue has a cellular explanation. We are not imagining it.

This is almost never discussed in primary care or really anywhere outside of reproductive medicine. But it connects directly to something every woman in her 30s and 40s should understand: mitochondrial health is reproductive health, and reproductive health is long-term metabolic health.

Mitochondrial Stewardship (Not Optimization)

There is a growing world of mitochondrial optimization — red light therapy panels, NAD+ IV infusions, expensive supplement stacks, elaborate morning protocols. NAD+ IV infusions run hundreds of dollars per session. Red light panels cost thousands. Elaborate longevity protocols can run tens of thousands annually.

The people promoting these interventions have actually done something helpful: they’ve brought mitochondrial health into the conversation and made people care about cellular biology in a way medicine has largely failed to do.

But I think they’ve missed something important about what mitochondria actually are.

These are not broken systems waiting to be upgraded. They are an ancient inheritance, passed forward through every mother who ever lived. They have been supporting us, generation after generation, through ice ages and famine and migration and childbirth. They don’t need to be hacked. They need to be respected. And the most powerful interventions are free.

Respecting them looks like giving them what they have always needed to do their work: sustained movement, deep sleep, stable blood sugar, clean air, real food, connection.

The supplements and interventions are interesting and some may prove important. But they are at the margins of a foundation that exercise, sleep, and metabolic health have already built — or not. You cannot supplement your way past a sedentary lifestyle and disrupted sleep.

Your Mitochondria Respond to How You Live

You can’t change the mitochondrial DNA your mother gave you — that’s your inheritance, and it’s yours permanently. But you can help them do their best work — by influencing the number of mitochondria in your cells, their efficiency, and how well your body maintains them. That is all responsive to your daily choices.

The evidence on mitochondrial health is pretty clear, and here is what drives it:

Exercise: especially sustained aerobic exercise. Low to moderate intensity aerobic exercise, sustained over time, is among the most powerful stimuli for mitochondrial biogenesis, which is the creation of new mitochondria. Resistance training matters too, particularly for preserving mitochondrial function in muscle as we age. This applies to the ovaries too.

Sleep. Mitochondrial repair happens during sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation impairs mitochondrial function and accelerates the kind of oxidative stress that damages mitochondrial DNA. Sleep deprivation has been shown to cause mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress directly in oocytes.

Blood sugar stability. Chronic glucose dysregulation generates oxidative stress that damages mitochondria. Keeping fasting insulin low and avoiding the blood sugar spikes that drive inflammation is mitochondrial medicine practiced every day, at every meal.

Not smoking. Cigarette smoke directly damages mitochondrial DNA. This is one of the most well-established mechanisms of smoking-related disease.

Limiting alcohol. Alcohol impairs mitochondrial function in a dose-dependent way. In the ovaries, alcohol use is associated with reduced egg quality and quantity.

That’s most of it. It doesn’t require a membership or a panel or a morning routine filmed for social media.

What the Biohackers Are Actually Talking About

Some of what’s out there in the mitochondrial optimization world is actually pretty interesting science and something to keep an eye on.

CoQ10. Coenzyme Q10 plays a direct role in mitochondrial energy production. We know statins deplete CoQ10 and people on statins may benefit from supplementation. Outside of that, the evidence for routine supplementation in healthy people is modest. But the fertility story is more interesting. CoQ10 levels in oocytes decline with age, and a 2024 systematic review of six randomized controlled trials found that CoQ10 supplementation in women with diminished ovarian reserve improved oocyte quality, fertilization rates, and embryo quality before IVF. For women navigating reproductive aging or fertility treatment, this is one of the more evidence-based mitochondrial supplements we have.

NAD+ precursors (NMN and NR). NAD+ is important for mitochondrial function. The precursor supplements: nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) and nicotinamide riboside (NR), have plausible mechanisms and some real research behind them. Human trial data is still early and effect sizes modest. A recent study shows blood levels may not fall with age like we thought, though some studies do show tissue-level decline in muscle and brain. I think this is a space worth watching, though not ready for routine clinical recommendation.

Urolithin A. Urolithin A supports mitophagy, the process by which cells clear out damaged mitochondria and replace them with healthier ones. Urolithin A is produced naturally when gut bacteria, particularly Akkermansia muciniphila and Lactobacillus species, metabolize pomegranates, walnuts, and berries. Research suggests up to 60% of Americans may not have the gut microbiome composition to produce it effectively, which supports the argument for the supplement form. Worth watching.

Red light therapy. There is a plausible mechanism — it can influence mitochondrial function at the cellular level. The clinical evidence is thin and inconsistent. Not yet sure the evidence justifies the investment for most people.

Methylene blue, hyperbaric oxygen, elaborate IV protocols. Very early, very limited. Not ready. Not recommended.

Some of these may prove important as the science matures. But they are working at the margins of a foundation that exercise, sleep, and metabolic health have already built, or not.

I think the biohacking world has inverted the hierarchy, optimizing the 5% while underselling the 95%.

Your Maternal Inheritance

I think about the maternal line. How mothers pass something forward. Not just in memory or personality or the shape of a face. But in the mitochondria that power every heartbeat I have, that powered every egg I carried my children in, that my children now carry forward themselves.

The biohacking world wants to sell you back something that was given to you by the women who came before you. Something you can protect with the same boring but powerful things your grandmother probably already knew.

My grandmother had five kids, a full social life, tons of friends, played tennis, and laughed a lot. She moved her body not because anyone told her to, but because that's just how she lived. She wasn't optimizing anything. She didn't have a protocol. She probably got some things wrong. But she moved her body, she laughed, she loved her people. Turns out that's most of it.

Sleep. Move. Eat well. Don’t smoke.

Honor what was passed to you. And pass something good forward.

The Bottom Line

Your mitochondria came from your mother. Who got hers from her mother. Who got hers from hers. The most powerful thing you can do with that inheritance is also the simplest: protect it.

The science is real. The interventions are real. But they are not new, and they are not expensive, and they did not require anyone to discover them. The women who came before you already knew. They just called it living well.