Autophagy, what is autophagy? This word is bouncing around the internet more and more these days as something good for health, but just what is it? The word itself gives us a clue. Auto means self and phagy means eating, so self-eating. It literally means the process of eating ourselves. That sounds strange until you consider that there are no graveyards in the body in which to put old dead or wounded cells. The body does not bury its dead. Instead, it recycles the parts like an auto recycler. All the bits and pieces of the cells that don’t work anymore are disassembled and reused.
As you might guess, this is something that happens every hour of every day in the body. So why is this such a big deal and why are so many folks talking about it? Well, the body only has so much energy to do all the things it needs to do. As you might guess, just like in our big world, recycling is not a high priority for the body in our current well-fed lifestyle. Just like auto parts recycling is not a big deal when everyone has the money to buy new cars. But in times of poverty and financial stress, most folks have to figure out how to make do with what they have. That means finding used parts at the auto dismantler to fix your ailing Chevy and Fords. The body is the same. When we have plenty of food to eat all the time, the body does very little autophagy. Unfortunately, that results in lots of broken cars abandoned along the side of the road (damaged cells not being recycled and lots of junk building up inside the cells making them sick.)
What happens if the garbage truck does not pick up the trash we put out each week? This happens now and then when the sanitation engineers go on strike for better wages. What happens is that the trash piles up, things rot, rats show up, other critters throw stuff around, and things get pretty disgusting real quick. This is what happens inside our bodies when we eat and snack all the time. The level of food availability we have today in this culture has never been like this on the planet for humans ever before. Up until 1945, most humans had to experience times of zero food availability. That’s right, no eating for many days at a time. This has been normal for humans since time began. Food scarcity is a normal experience for human beings at times. Feast and famine cycles are the way our bodies are designed to function. Feasting every day is abnormal for us and the trash that builds up inside us is making us really sick. These are the illnesses of affluence. These are what kill most Americans. Even with the current pandemic, when you look at who is dying, it is those people with the most “trash” built up in their systems. This trash shows up as obesity and metabolic syndrome – the chief co-morbidities that take people down with any illness that travels around like the current one we have.
Autophagy is the garbage truck system in our body that cleans everything up. The sanitation trucks are specialized organelles (little organs inside each cell) called lysosomes and their co-workers are called autophagosomes. They eat up damaged proteins inside the cell and digest them much like how our stomach and intestines digest the food we eat. If the cell is too damaged, the lysosomes will break down the entire cell. We want this to happen on a regular basis just like we want our garbage picked up every week. So what controls this? Diet.
When we eat proteins and when we eat carbohydrates autophagy shuts down. Eating fats and fibers does not have much effect on autophagy. Eating tells your body that you have the materials to build new tissues. Autophagy is a break-down process, the opposite of building. The amino acid leucine from protein shuts off autophagy through a complex process involving something called mTOR, while carbohydrates turn into sugar which drives insulin up and insulin is a building and storing hormone. Insulin also stimulates mTOR. Autophagy comes into play when we don’t have food to eat. When there is no protein to eat, autophagy is there to break down and recycle old worn-out proteins so we still have protein to repair our bodies. When there are no carbohydrates to eat, insulin levels go down. This allows its sister hormone glucagon to rise, which triggers autophagy.
Autophagy is getting lots of positive press right now because it is essential to rejuvenating our bodies. Before you can build healthy new cells in the body, you must first dispose of the old ones. So many degenerative diseases are started because of the lack of cleanup of old damaged proteins. A good example is dementia in which brain cells get all tangled up with old proteins that were not cleaned out by the brain’s trash pickup guys; the glial cells. Our body is designed to go through phases of demolition and cleanup and then into times of rebuilding healthy new cells. This cycle is controlled by times of fasting followed by times of feasting.
Another interesting process that takes place when we don’t have food to eat is our levels of growth hormone skyrocket. Growth hormone is the signal to build those new cells to replace the old ones. But the growth hormone just waits around until you have food available to kick into action. As the building foreman, growth hormone does not want to start building until the raw materials from our diet are there to build with. Historically that means it waits until there is enough meat in the diet or other proteins high in branched-chain amino acids with which to replace the demolished old cells. This is all an amazingly well-orchestrated renewal cycle the body has which matched our lifestyle until the last hundred years or so. We have gotten out of touch with the natural cycles in life that are designed to keep us healthy.
Is there anything else that will stimulate autophagy? Actually, there is – coffee, tea, ginger, garlic, turmeric, ginseng, chaga and reishi mushrooms, pomegranate, elderberry, and the herbs berberine, bergamot, resveratrol, and both MCT oil and CBD oil. So quite a number of things in the diet can support and stimulate autophagy. A ketogenic diet stimulates autophagy all by itself. Exercise is another way of stimulating autophagy. 30 minutes of aerobic exercise is good, and HIIT is even better (high-intensity interval training.) But far and away the best way to trigger powerful autophagy is fasting. This can be water fasting or eating non-starchy veggies and salad greens with oil and vinegar dressing. The key is completely avoiding carbs/sugars and proteins. Autophagy will kick into gear in about 2 days for most people. Within that time frame, it has been found that autophagy increases 400% in the brain.
The research on the benefits of autophagy for all manner of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and so on are becoming massive. This is not just for looking better, improving your immune system, and becoming stronger, it may also save your brain. If you lose your brain, nothing else matters anymore.
So how often should you cycle in and out of strong autophagy? As I said before something is happening all the time. But as we are seeing with the huge burden of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, dementia, and cancer, we are clearly not doing near enough autophagy. (Oh, did I mention that autophagy is the best prevention for cancer we have? It may not be useful once you have diagnosable cancer, but it is great at eliminating the underlying cause of most cancers.) The answer to how often is very individual, depending upon your age and existing conditions. For myself, I believe that 4 or 5 days of fermented veggie fasting once or twice a month is about right. In my past, I would water fast for 2 weeks twice a year and do 5-day fasts all the other months. I rarely do water fasting anymore as I believe feeding my microbiome the right fermented veggies to support their diversity and health is more beneficial. Replacing bad guys with good guys seems better than just starving everybody and hoping only good guys will repopulate my gut after the fast. That way I get double duty during this time, autophagy for the body, and a gut makeover for the microbiome.
So here is a peek into how the body can rebuild itself in order to stay healthy and strong into old age.
Take care,David