This Anti-Aging, Health-Boosting Hack Is Like Spring Cleaning For Your Cells
Autophagy is a “spring cleaning” for your cells, which can benefit heart health, brain health + so much more.
I’m a big fan of intermittent fasting for becoming metabolically flexible, healing the gut, and overcoming weight loss resistance. But there’s another great benefit that contributes to all those great results — it triggers the process of autophagy.
No need for juicing, or weird concoctions of lemonade and cayenne pepper. This natural cleansing process provides plenty of health benefits, without having to spend a ton of money on green juices or feeling starved for days on end.
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What Is Autophagy?
Autophagy literally means “self-eating” (auto = self and phagy = eat in Greek). I know, it sounds scary, but it’s actually a totally natural process that has been found to reduce the risk of disease, support the immune system, manage blood sugar, increase longevity, and help you drop weight and keep it off. Sounds pretty great, right?
This is your body’s waste-management system for the cells. Think of it as a spring cleaning — for every cell in the body.
During this process, damaged cells are cleared out, recycled, or repaired to make room for healthy cells to proliferate. Cells can become damaged naturally through aging, by environmental pollutants, autoimmune disorders, or other issues.
It’s incredibly important for these damaged or dead particles to be cleared out to avoid health complications like organ dysfunction or even Alzheimer’s disease.
How Does Autophagy Work?
Here’s a quick hormone health lesson: when you eat and your food digests, it converts into glucose in the bloodstream, stimulating insulin secretion. Insulin’s job is to take glucose out of the blood and into your cells. That glucose is stored as glycogen.
When you’re fasting, the hormone glucagon tells your body to start using that glycogen, returning glucose back to the bloodstream to keep blood sugar levels stable.
Glucagon is also what activates the process of autophagy, so when it’s put into action, the autophagic process begins.
It sounds complicated, but I’ll keep it simple for you.
Once this self-preservation process is activated, cells bind to structures that contain enzymes and proteins that may be used to break damaged parts of the cells down into amino acids. Those amino acids can then be used for fuel or to create new proteins.
What Are The Benefits of Autophagy?
“Autophagy is the cells’ natural self-healing, recycling, and regenerating procedure,” says Jade Teta, ND, in Next Level Metabolism. “When food is not available, the cell has time to go seek out and clean up damaged cell membranes and cellular debris.”
This cellular cleaning provides many benefits, including:
- Anti-aging. When your cells go through the autophagic process, it literally keeps you young! Those old and damaged cells don’t have a chance to accumulate and contribute to aging. You can’t turn back time, but autophagy helps slow it down.¹
- Anti-inflammation. Autophagy is a natural anti-inflammatory process because it plays a role in the development and survival of inflammatory cells. This suggests that it also can be beneficial for inflammatory disorders like Crohn’s disease, cystic fibrosis, and more.²
- Protection against cancer. In animal studies, autophagy has been found to complement and potentially enhance cancer therapies.³
- Brain health. After my son, Grant, suffered a traumatic brain injury after a hit-and-run accident, I researched several options to help him recover. Intermittent fasting was a powerful therapy for his healing, likely thanks to this process. Autophagy has been found to protect against neurodegenerative diseases as well, so damaged proteins don’t accumulate and harm the brain.⁴
- Heart health. Cellular cleansing filters out damaged heart cells, too, keeping your most important organ healthy and protected against cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis, and other heart issues.⁵
How Can You Trigger Autophagy?
Intermittent fasting is a great way to get the benefits of autophagy, because the process is triggered by nutrient restriction. Those amino acids that it produces can be used as fuel (switching you away from being a sugar burner — that’s what I mean when I talk about metabolic flexibility!).
Keto diets have this benefit as well. With fat as the primary fuel source on keto, the body has limited access to sugar to use as fuel. The autophagy process is triggered so the body can form amino acids to use as energy.
Fasting also gives your digestive system a chance to rest, allowing your body more time to go through its natural repair process.
How Long Should You Fast to Induce Autophagy?
“The research [shows] that 16 hours of not eating is unbelievably effective at supporting the activation of autophagy,” according to keto diet expert and New York Times best-selling author of Glow15, Naomi Whittel.
She also recommends paying particular attention to the timing of your macros. Having fat in the morning helps balance blood sugar, while consuming carbs at night helps the body repair and get restful sleep. Practicing what she calls IFPC — intermittent fasting and protein cycling — is beneficial, too.
“When you couple that with cycling of protein, which is where every other day you have low levels of protein (25g of protein every other day, 5% of your calories), it makes a big difference in the activation of the youth within our cells,” Whittel says. “When we deprive our body of higher levels of protein, what happens is the body is then trying to utilize the protein that is there, and ultimately also the fat that’s within our cells, and that helps to get us into more of a state of ketosis, which also activates autophagy.”
Bottom Line
Our bodies have incredible technology, and we’re learning more every day about how we can take advantage of our brilliant natural processes to look and feel our best.
Biohacking strategies like activating autophagy sound more complicated than they really are, but even so, having support as you implement these tactics can help you create better habits that stick with you for life.
That’s why I created my Ultimate Health Roadmap, to help you break down your journey into small, manageable steps guaranteed to keep you moving in the right direction. Download it for FREE here.
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The views in this blog by JJ Virgin should never be used as a substitute for professional medical advice. Please work with a healthcare practitioner concerning any medical problem or concern. The information here is not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent any disease or condition. Statements contained here have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
*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.
References:
- Gelino S, Hansen M. Autophagy — An Emerging Anti-Aging Mechanism. J Clin Exp Pathol. 2012;Suppl 4:006. doi:10.4172/2161–0681.s4–006
- Qian M, Fang X, Wang X. Autophagy and inflammation. Clin Transl Med. 2017;6(1):24. doi:10.1186/s40169–017–0154–5
- de Groot, S., Pijl, H., van der Hoeven, J.J.M. et al. Effects of short-term fasting on cancer treatment. J Exp Clin Cancer Res 38, 209 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13046-019-1189-9
- Chen-Chen Tan, Jin-Tai Yu, Meng-Shan Tan, Teng Jiang, Xi-Chen Zhu, Lan Tan, Autophagy in aging and neurodegenerative diseases: implications for pathogenesis and therapy, Neurobiology of Aging, Volume 35, Issue 5, 2014, Pages 941–957, ISSN 0197–4580, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2013.11.019.
- Bravo-San Pedro JM, Kroemer G, Galluzzi L. Autophagy and Mitophagy in Cardiovascular Disease. Circ Res. 2017;120(11):1812–1824. doi:10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.117.311082
