[INTERVIEW]
Ronda Nelson: You’ve heard about methylene blue, that it is the latest and greatest supplement that improves mitochondrial function, boosts energy, supports the brain, but there is one very important distinction underneath all the hype, and once you see it, you may look at methylene blue very differently. Let’s dive in.
Welcome back to the, our new YouTube show, the podcast I was gonna say. It’s not a podcast, it’s a show. But anyway, I’m here with you. We are gonna talk all things methylene blue today. And, you know, it’s been around for a hot minute, and I’ve been kinda out on it. And so I decided to get over myself and go do some research and figure out, okay, what is it? Why are we using it? Is it good? Is it not good? And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today.
So, as you know, it’s kind of everywhere. Like, these biohackers are the ones that made it most popular, and they put it in their water, and it’s pretty, it’s blue, and all the things. And the longevity people, they’re all talking about it and taking it for brain focus and mitochondrial health. And, you know, the average person doesn’t even know what a mitochondria is. In fact, we probably hardly understand them either. But they’re taking it ’cause it wakes up your brain, and it’s anti-aging, and apparently it probably is just good for everything.
But I, as I said, have just been super, super skeptical. Why? Because it’s a dye, which we’re gonna get more into, but I’m like, “I don’t understand how we can use this in the body and make this make sense. I don’t think this makes sense.” Now, it does have a very fascinating history. It has absolute, I’ll call them pharmacologic effects in the body, and there’s some really interesting research behind it which we can’t discount.
And it was originally, as you probably know, a dye that was made to color fabric. But now, all of a sudden, we’re being told that we should put it in our bodies and it’s gonna do all these amazing things. But I wanted to know, for me, I wanted to know what is it? How does it work? Are there risks? What are the risks? Are they anything we need to be concerned about? And does it fit within my belief system about the way the body should be healing?
So let’s first talk about what it is. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you must have been under a rock if you don’t know what methylene blue is. But it is a synthetic chemical compound. It was very first created in 1876. It was developed, as I said, for, as a dye, and they used it for cotton and other textiles. It’s not a vitamin. It’s not a nutrient. It is not something that the body naturally makes. It is a synthetic — underscore, underscore, underscore — synthetic dye. It is a pharmacologically active synthetic compound.
Okay, just hold that in your mind for a minute. What that means is because it’s a synthetic and it’s pharmacologically engineered, what it does is it changes biological processes in the body, like taking a Tylenol or an Advil. It changes the normal biological process in the body, and that’s different than giving someone a nutrient or a vitamin or fatty acid, something that the body actually needs. You could be deficient in vitamin B, vitamin A, vitamin C, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go get a synthetic vitamin C.
I mean, for those of you that have been hanging around me for a long time, you know I’m not a fan. I believe the body can heal if we give it the right nutrients and we remove the obstructions, we remove the log jams that are in the way. Well, if we’ve got a nutrient deficiency, then why are we using some synthetic compound to activate a pathway in the body and do something that it should be doing on its own? I didn’t wake up this morning with a methylene blue deficiency. Sorry, newsflash, I didn’t. And if we introduce this into the body, you have to understand that it is a synthetic compound.
So how did this dye get into medicine? It started out to be a dye. The history of this is actually quite fascinating. When I was reading about it, it was created, as I said, in 1876, and the scientist that found it discovered that it could stain certain cells and tissues and microorganisms. So they would put this dye in, and they noticed that some cells and tissues picked up this dye more readily than others, and that made it really, really useful under a microscope because they could start to see differentiation in the tissues. They could see it more clearly than they could before.
And then they said, “Well,” at the time, they thought, “if it can stain a type of cell or a microorganism or a tissue, could this chemical be part of a selective targeting for disease-causing organisms without harming anything else?” In other words, if tissues and cells could take up the dye, then could a microorganism take up the dye, and then the dye could help develop drugs, or we could put the dye into something, and we could help see where that drug would be delivered.
So in 1891, they discovered, or they decided, that they were gonna use methylene blue to treat patients that had malaria, and that was one of the earliest treatments for malaria, at least documented in this conversation. And so that’s how that dye began to be used in medicine. So before it was ever used that way, it was first a synthetic dye, and then it was a stain, then we moved into the antimalarial drug, and they started to do more research on it.
In fact, there is a certain condition called the blue patient, and it’s called methemoglobinemia. And this is a condition where the patient actually gets blue, and it treats this condition exceptionally well. So this is the pharmacologic action that this methylene blue is really good for. Let me explain what this methemoglobinemia is. It’s a mouthful. So what it is, is your red cells — think about your red blood cells. They have hemoglobin in them. The hemoglobin carries the oxygen, and the iron inside there, in order to carry the oxygen, has to be in a certain state, a certain chemical state.
But if that iron becomes oxidized, it can’t transport the oxygen. So are you getting why this blue patient name would be coming in? The person looks blue because they’re not getting enough oxygen delivery, and it can be, in this particular condition, a lack of the correct type of iron in the red blood cell that can’t hold the oxygen. So we can’t get the oxygen to the patient, so they call them the blue patients. Now, this is different than the blue man thing with the silver, okay? This is completely different, different mechanism.
So what methylene blue does is it helps to shift the iron back toward the form that can carry the oxygen, and that is how it works. So great, I love that. If there is a disease state, and we don’t have anything in the herbal world, natural world that we could use, then heck yes, let’s use this. I can handle that.
But one thing that it does that’s really interesting is it moves electrons, and you may or may not have heard about that. So I wanna talk about that a little bit ’cause that’s kind of the key to the whole thing right here and what we need to know at the end. So how does it do that? What does it mean to move electrons? Well, inside the body, you know that chemical reactions depend on electrons moving back and forth. They go from one molecule to the next molecule, and this is called a redox reaction. So if one molecule passes off an electron and another molecule receives it, that movement of molecules is essential for us to live. That’s the redox reaction.
One of the most important places that this happens is inside the mitochondria. So this is how the mitochondria start getting in this conversation with methylene blue. So the mitochondria are these little structures inside the cells. You know this. They make ATP. ATP is the usable energy that the body has. It’s like money in the bank or cash in your wallet. It is the usable energy. It contracts our muscles and helps us think and repairs tissue and all the things. So the electron transport happens inside the mitochondria, these handoffs of electrons, and when that happens, it helps to move and make ATP. So it’s important. This electron movement is important.
So how does methylene blue then act or work in the mitochondria? In low doses, what it does is it participates in that electron transfer. So this is why people will take methylene blue and they report, “I have more energy.” What does ATP do? Creates energy. So they have more energy. Their brain’s working better. They are sleeping better. They feel better because the methylene blue is helping to facilitate electron transfer. And at the surface, you would think, “Well, what the heck? Why would that be a big deal?” Well, I’m gonna argue that it kind of is a big deal, but I’ll keep going.
So it moves through the parts of the electron transfer that might not be working. So think about it like a traffic jam. It just helps cars get around the traffic jam. So if there’s a traffic jam somewhere in the body and the electrons aren’t moving well, then the methylene blue kinda creates a shortcut, and it just moves the electrons around the traffic jam so that you can keep going on the road. And again, it sounds like that would be a really good thing.
But the science is not all the way settled. And so scientists now, they understand how it works and how it moves these electrons, but the pathways, the real nuances are still being discussed. So we know that it can be an alternative electron carrier around the traffic jam, and that it helps support the electron flow when normal parts of our physiology aren’t working.
So people then, patients, you know, online, some influencer — don’t even get me started — some influencer that doesn’t know nothing about nothing, and then they start talking about, “Oh, it’s gonna make you have better electron flow and more energy and better mitochondria.” And everyone who’s into longevity or health hacking, they’re like, “Yeah, that’s why we need it.” But I think that’s where we have to kinda think about a distinction. We need to put the brakes on a little bit, because that’s not the same thing. A mechanism is not the same as an outcome. Just because we understand how it works doesn’t mean that the outcome is what we want.
So yes, it’s a fascinating mechanism. It moves electrons around the traffic jam and helps the body to work better, and it’s been studied for all of those things, yes. But we don’t understand whether or not it’s really going to improve long-term health, or if this is just a short-term solution. So I think that it may be more a biohacking trick that’s just shortcutting and skipping what’s really underneath the problem.
And it became popular when they started talking about it for all of these things — brain and health and mood and longevity and sleep and all of the things — and a lot of them have rationale behind it. But I wanna know. This is just Ronda simple-brain thinking about how Ronda simple brain works. How does it go from being a cotton dye to a microscope stain, then it goes to an antimalarial drug, and then all of a sudden we’re using it as emergency lifestyle medicine, and then mitochondrial research, and now it’s become the darling of the biohacking world. I mean, that’s kind of impressive, wouldn’t you say?
But at the end of the day, it’s still synthetic, and just because it’s popular does not mean the proof is there. So my big question has been from the beginning, why would we use a synthetic dye and think that we’re making ourselves healthier? Isn’t the goal to improve overall health? Yeah, I would argue. But I don’t know that that’s what methylene blue is doing. Yes, it’s changing physiology, but the question is — this is the million-dollar question, are you ready for this? — why are the mitochondria stuck in a traffic jam? Why are they stuck? Do we really need methylene blue? Or do we just wanna bypass it and close our eyes and pretend that we don’t have, like, 27 warning lights on the dashboard? I don’t think that’s a good plan.
So the questions we have to ask are like, okay, well, what do the electrons need in order to work? What do they need in order to move around? Well, B vitamins for one thing. We know this. So does the patient have enough B1 and B2? And again, those are synthetic — I’m talking about the whole B complex. What about CoQ10? That is huge, huge for mitochondria. Like, epic. Are we using iron well? We already saw that there’s an iron correlation in the methylene blue that moves electrons, also plays a role with iron.
Are we transmitting — are we getting enough oxygen to the tissues that we need to? Is iron working well? What about circulation? Could we not be getting enough oxygen to the tissues, or do we need a better delivery system to get these molecules, these electrons, moving back and forth? What’s happening in the microcirculation? Is there maybe inflammation or damage that’s causing something to damage the mitochondria? Could that be happening? Yes. What about thyroid function? Someone has low energy — it’s not a mitochondrial, it’s not a methylene blue deficiency, I would argue. But maybe it’s the thyroid. Are they sleep-deprived? Are they under constant stress, in a sympathetic state all the time?
Mitochondrial dysfunction does not happen in a vacuum. But yet, so many people — and I’m not saying it’s you, I’m just being critical of it. I just, my spidey senses have gone off about this methylene blue thing. I just don’t get it. I don’t get why it has become the darling when no one’s asking the question — well, if it’s moving electrons, and the mitochondria are the biggest consumers of those electrons, and the mitochondria are producing ATP, and if you’re tired, then let’s get methylene blue on board. If you have brain fog, oh, definitely a methylene blue deficiency. No. Doesn’t make any sense to me.
And this is why I went down the rabbit hole, and I started to look and do the studying, because if it doesn’t repair what’s broken, then I’m out. I’m not gonna do it. So what does the body already use? Let’s just talk a little bit about these nutrients. CoQ10 is a big one. That is an electron carrier. So does it move the electron directly like methylene blue? No, because methylene blue is overriding normal body processes. We’ve already established that. But what it can do is it carries electrons. The body naturally produces CoQ10, and it’s an important part of mitochondrial function.
We need CoQ10 for the heart. The heart is the largest mitochondrial reserve in the body. But the body already has this built-in system for moving electrons around, and CoQ10 is part of that. I talked about B1 and B2, so riboflavin is part of this equation. It converts compounds — I’m not even gonna go into it, it doesn’t matter, it’s a complex thing — but the point is that we need B1 and B2. So before I would ever recommend giving a synthetic dye, I am gonna make sure that the patient has plenty of B vitamins, and I’m gonna always advocate for food, whole-food-based B vitamins. I love using either the B Stress Complex from Doctor’s Research, or I really like the Cataplex B Core from Standard Process. They’re both made from food. Now, there are other companies that have them, so you don’t have to use those. Find one that you like. There are a number of them. I just can’t know all the things about all the companies all the time.
So there are other whole food companies. You go find the one that you like, but just make sure that it’s made from food, because we don’t wanna give a synthetic riboflavin or niacin. We don’t want that. We want food. We want real. So what about herbs and food-based compounds? Well, I said we could find food-based vitamin B, but I wondered, are there any herbs that will do this? And the verdict came back — I couldn’t find any herbs that would work like methylene blue, but there are many, many herbs that will improve mitochondrial function, and they will help with energy and improve the redox reaction, that movement.
They’re not going to move it for you, but they’re gonna improve the body’s ability to do that. It’s gonna help cellular resistance, which, by default, is gonna improve mitochondria and reduce inflammation. All the things that the herbs we know and love are already going to do. So when the body needs to produce more mitochondria, we know that there are certain compounds that we can give the body that can help the body produce those mitochondria. Resveratrol is one of them. Quercetin is one. Curcumin, and even the EGCGs from green tea. The point is, give them green tea. These are going to work. They don’t copy — they’re not exactly like methylene blue. They work through a different pathway, but they’re going to support the broader environment where the mitochondria live and have to function.
So the methylene blue overrides the normal pathways. It just overrides it. It’s kinda like, I don’t know, maybe somebody that’s on the side of the road that says, “Pay me a hundred dollars and I’ll get you around the…” I don’t know, like it seems kinda slimy to me, just seems sorta slimy to me.
So we have to ask the question, what is struggling and what does it need to function normally? Why is the energy down? Why is brain fog present? Why are we not sleeping? Why are we under a stressed-out state? Why could these mitochondria — if it’s even a mitochondrial problem — why is this happening? Another thing that I really found fascinating, ’cause I love light and sound and wavelengths and frequencies, I’m very fascinated by all of that, but they found that methylene blue has an unusual relationship with light. And what they found is that there are certain types of electrons that the mitochondria will activate that actually are stimulated even more by light.
So there are some people out there that say, “Oh, well, take methylene blue and then stand in front of a red light and that’ll make it even better.” But what we know is that there are certain bacteria, fungus, viral, oral infections, et cetera, that actually could be over-stimulated with this light, and I won’t go into the big pathway about it, but it could be a problem. So then they’re out there talking about methylene blue and light, and again, no one’s asking the question, what is the underlying problem in the body? How is it that we can fix the underlying issue so that we don’t have to use something that’s overriding the natural process?
So quality, I wanna talk about that. That’s probably the biggest thing here. Like, I think you get the question, we gotta ask the question, but the quality — so when I went on Fullscript and I was looking around, there were quite a few methylene blue products. And as a patient, let’s say I had my patient hat on and I’m looking at this going, “Hmm, I actually don’t know which one to choose.” Have you ever thought about that? Supplements that the patients are choosing — they choose them, not very many of them read the label and understand how the interactions work and how it was formulated. Very few people do. We might, but they don’t. Patients don’t.
You know who wins, who wins the — is the winner, which one you pick? Branding. It’s all branding, and maybe name recognition, brand recognition, but it’s branding. Which one has the prettier label? When a patient goes into a health food store and they go through Whole Foods or wherever and they’re looking down aisles and aisles of supplements, how do they choose? All the ashwagandha all says ashwagandha. How do you choose? It’s branding. Makes me crazy, and they’re like, “Oh, I got a good one.” How do you even know? You don’t know. Anyway, that’s another topic for another day.
So the quality really, really matters, because we know that this methylene blue is a dye. It is a laboratory reagent. It’s a stain. It’s used in the aquarium industry, and it’s also a pharmaceutical ingredient. So some labels I saw said, “USP grade methylene blue.” Okay, fine, I appreciate that, that name maybe means something, I suppose. But what I found out was that just because it’s USP grade does not mean that it’s USP certified or verified, and that’s what we need, is we need it to be verified. So you wanna look for that USP — if you’re gonna ever use it, don’t, but if you did, that’s what we wanna see, is USP verified.
So if a patient comes in, they’re taking methylene blue, you could say, “Hey, listen, is this USP verified?” Hmm, there could be your secret. You wanna know, is there a lot number? Who manufactured it? Is it approved for human consumption? ‘Cause it’s got all these other uses, probably. Do we know the potency? Was it tested for impurities and was it tested for contaminants? And was the manufacturer transparent about their sourcing and testing, and do they have a certificate? Not a PDF that just says “USP verified” at the top. No, no, no. The actual test results from an independent lab. It’s called a certificate of analysis, basically — they just send it away and they get it analyzed and it comes back and it’s clean. That’s what we want.
So okay, all this — I should just stop, ’cause I could go on and on about this. But where do we land? Where do I land? My honest opinion is, I’m a big fat no on methylene blue. I always have had my radar up, and now, after doing this research, I really have my radar up. I’m not a fan. I don’t think it’s fake. I think it’s a real thing. It is a synthetic dye. They have figured out how to use it. But I don’t think that it’s beneficial for the human body, because it isn’t something that we make endogenously.
Better question is to say, how can we upregulate, fix, restore, optimize whatever might be going on with the patient’s fatigue? Do you see how we all get tricked into this? We go, “Oh, well, you’re tired and you have brain fog? Oh, get methylene blue. Take that.” And that’s how it’s been used. It’s gonna improve all these things. You’re gonna have energy like Superman. But do you really? ‘Cause what happens when you stop taking it? And it turns your pee weird colors — I’ve never tried it, but that’s what I read. Pee, green, blue pee. No, why? No. That is not normal. We’re not supposed to have that.
So better to find out where maybe there are nutrient deficiencies, maybe there’s a thyroid issue, maybe it really truly simply is that their adrenal glands are just tired. They’ve been using them and abusing them. Maybe they’re just super tired, and we just need to give them a hand up. So I’m just a big no. I’m a big no. I suppose if I was gonna play the devil’s advocate, I probably would say that there are situations where there might be a workaround, like with the methemoglobinemia — God, that was a mouthful that time — and maybe in that instance, absolutely.
I would say if you have a wicked headache, take yourself some ibuprofen and then go see your chiropractor. So sometimes we can use them, and we use it for the right reason in the right way, in the right context. So on that note, I’m good with that. But to use it as a biohack or a lifestyle hack without understanding that we’re not fixing the underlying problem — what happens when there’s a methylene blue shortage and everybody stops taking it? Then what? Now we’re back, and maybe even worse than you were before. More tired, worse traffic jam, more problems, and you never took the time to figure out is it thyroid, is it stress, is it sleep, is it a nutrient deficiency? What is it? What is the underlying problem?
That is the fair and responsible thing to do with a patient, not to give them something synthetic without asking more questions. This synthetic dye is biologically very active, but we have to ask better questions. That’s all. So I’m out. I’m a methylene blue no. I am one hundred — in fact, my husband, he was on Instagram, and he saw this thing, you know, they come through with all the ads and whatever, and he sends it to me and he goes, “Do I need this?” And I thought, “Oh, no, you do not. You do not.” But this is it. Like, people get sucked into these fancy ads that are super compelling, and I think we have to start educating the patients.
[CLOSING]
Ronda Nelson: So if this resonates with you, let me know. Leave a comment. I would love to hear your thoughts. If you have an opposing thought, I would really love to hear it, because maybe I’m wrong. I’m open to being wrong. I have been wrong so many times, but I’m open to being wrong based on what I read, what I researched, what I found. This is just the conclusion that I’ve come to, and it kinda stands with what I intuitively thought anyway. But if you have something to tell me, I would love to hear it. Shoot me a comment. I read them, I’m good.
And I would be remiss if I did not talk to you about this. If you love thinking like this, if this is how your brain works — you wanna get to the underlying cause — you need to be inside Clinical Academy. This is my repository of information. It’s basically the way that I think about so many different clinical cases and conditions, and you can learn how to process through and think through these cases the same way, logically, rather than get sucked into what’s online and what the medical establishment is giving you as far as options.
We don’t want that. We wanna take what you already know clinically and turn it into a how. How are you gonna implement this with the next patient? How are you gonna give structure to your protocol? What supplements are you going to use and give? That’s what I’ll teach you inside Clinical Academy. All you have to do is go to rondanelson.com/clinicalacademy. You’ll find all the details there. Click join. You will love it.
All right, friends, that’s all I got for you today about methylene blue. Next week, we are gonna be talking about mold illness, so stick around. See you then.
[END]