Every cell in your body has tiny power plants inside it. They are called mitochondria. Your heart cells have thousands of them. So do your muscles and your brain. Their job is to turn the food you eat and the air you breathe into energy the cell can use.
CoQ10 works inside those power plants. Here is what it does, in plain words.
The assembly line
Inside each mitochondrion is a line of five machines. Scientists call it the electron transport chain. Think of it as a bucket brigade. Food gets broken down, and the tiny bits of energy from it get handed from one machine to the next, down the line. At the end of the line, the cell makes ATP. ATP is the fuel every cell runs on. Your heart beats on it. Your muscles move on it. Your brain thinks on it.
Where CoQ10 fits
The machines in the line are fixed in place. Something has to carry the energy from one to the next. That carrier is CoQ10. It picks up energy from the first two machines and delivers it to the third. Without it, the line stops. Nothing else in the cell can do that job.
That is why CoQ10 is found in every cell, and why the heart has more of it than any other organ. The heart never rests, so it burns more fuel than anything else you own.
The second job: putting out sparks
Making energy is a little like running an engine. It throws off sparks. In a cell, those sparks are called free radicals. Left alone, they damage the walls of the mitochondria and the cell around them. CoQ10 in its active form, called ubiquinol, catches those sparks. Most antioxidants work in the watery parts of the cell. Ubiquinol works inside the fatty walls, right where the engine runs. It is one of the few that can.
Why it matters as you get older
Your body makes its own CoQ10. Production peaks around age 20 and slides from there. By 40, the heart holds noticeably less than it did. Some common medicines, including statins, lower it further because they block the same pathway the body uses to make it.
When there is less CoQ10 to carry energy down the line, the line runs slower. The cell makes less fuel and throws off more sparks. You do not feel it on any one day. Over years, the tissues that need the most energy notice first.
Why the form matters
CoQ10 comes in two forms. The common one, ubiquinone, has to be converted by the body before it can be used. The active one, ubiquinol, is the form found in your blood and the form that does both jobs above. In a published head-to-head trial at 200 mg a day, ubiquinol raised blood levels more than ubiquinone. That is the dose and the form in Mega Restore.
If you take any prescription medication, ask the clinician who manages it before starting any supplement.
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
