Category Archives: Autophagy

Post #65 – Fasting, the old new technology and panacea for Optimal Health – Part III

03 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in Autophagy, Fasting, Ideal Body Weight, Lean Mass, Living to 120, Optimal Health, Reversing Chronic Diseases, Uncategorized, wellness

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In the Posts #63 and #64, I described that all fasting methods consist of some variations of these variables:

  1. What you eat or not eat,
  2. How much you eat or not eat,
  3. When you eat or not eat, and
  4. How frequently you repeat the process.

And, with these variables you can make all kinds of combinations. For example, you may have seen or heard of the following popular combinations:

  1. Water only Fast for, say, 1, 3, or 5 consecutive days; alternate day fasting; 5:2 fasting: fasting for 2 days and eating the other 5 days of the week.
  2. Calories Restricted Diet: 20% fewer calories per day, e.g., 1,600 calories per day when 2,000 is your regular intake
  3. Time-Restricted Feeding: 8:16 fasting: eating for 8 hours and fasting for 16 hours; 4:20 fasting, where you eat for 4 hours and fast for 20, etc.
  4. Fasting-Mimicking Diet: During fasting, you still eat but with certain restrictions on carbs and protein, so your body feels as if you are fasting.

So, what option is optimal for you or me, depends on a variety of variables including: state of your health, state of your fitness, your goals, your ability to follow the process in the short term or long term, any medicines you are taking, age, BMI.

There are a couple of important principles to remember while fasting.

Our bodies have Multiple Energy Sources: a) immediate energy from the food we eat, b) Glycogen stored in liver, and c) fat stored in the body, and d) lean body mass, and e) cellular debris. In different situations, body dips into appropriate energy source.

Chronobiology or body’s circadian clock dictates metabolism. For most people, metabolism is higher in the morning until early afternoon. So, it is better to eat heavier meals in at breakfast or lunch then at dinner.

The benefits of long-term fasting are numerous, seems almost too good to be true. But all theses have been demonstrated in research and personally I have experienced these:

  1. Lose weight
  2. Lose body fat, especially visceral fast, while retaining lean body mass
  3. Reverse diabetes, hypertension, lower LDL and many other health issues
  4. Become appreciative of tastes and smells of food
  5. Start to eat more mindfully
  6. Learn not to panic if food is not immediately available when feeling hungry
  7. Spend less time and money on food
  8. Improved mental and emotional outlook
  9. Increased lifespan and healthspan

Now for what works, what does not and how to make it work for you.

  1. Calorie Restricted Diet is the least effective for major weight loss: An important principle is that 1 pound of body weight does not always equal to 3500 calories. If you have tried to lose weight by counting calories, you know that by eating fewer calories by the same amount, you lose less weight in the second month than the first, and you less weight in the third month than the second and so on.

In fact, per Pennigton Biomedical Research Center Predictor Calculator, if I were to reduce my daily intake by 500 calories and keep it for a year, my weight loss over 12 months would look like the following:

Weight Predictor

As you can see from the chart, it gets harder and harder to lose weight by reducing number of calories and easy to hit a plateau.

  1. Calories restricted diet, however, does seem to offer benefits of both health span and lifespan 
  1. All other types for fasting are effective in weight loss and other benefits. What will work for you, depends upon your tolerance. 
  1. A good strategy often is to start with Time Restricted Feeding, work up to one or more days of water fasting or Fasting Mimicking Diets (FMD).

My wife Kimberly and I started with becoming conscious of how many hours we did not eat every day. And, then we tried to stretch that period to at least 12 hours every day and longer when possible. 

Next, we started with water only fasting for one day a week. For us, from Friday after dinner to Saturday dinner worked.

We did one-day-a-week water only fasts for about 4 to 5 weeks. We were working ourselves up to a 3-day and then a 5-day water only fast, but then we came across fasting mimicking diet programs. One such program is in the book: Grow a New Body, by Dr. Albert Villoldo.

Grow a new body

So, we moved to 5-day programs of fasting mimicking diet. We are doing the ProLon protocol that consists of prepackage food and supplements developed at the University of Southern California by Valter Longo and explained in his book, The Longevity Diet . We like the results.

The longevity Diet

Fasting does have side-effects that include headache, lethargy and low energy. But these tend to resolve themselves.  Drinking lots of water and staying hydrated really helps. On a longer fast, first day tends to be the most difficult.

And, finally, fasting is not recommended in the following situations,. It is best to check with your doctor and work under doctor’s supervision while fasting:

  1. For pregnant and lactating women or children
  2. If you are on any medications, especially for diabetes and hypertension
  3. If you are underweight
  4. If you are over 70 years old

Summary

  1. There are many benefits of fasting, from more mindful eating to reversing diseases and living longer.
  2. Several variables make up a fasting protocol: what, how, when and how frequently you eat or not eat.
  3. There are many types of fasting: water only fasts, calories restricted diet, time-restricted feeding, and fasting-mimicking diet. What is optimal for you depends on a number of factors related to your health, fitness, and goals.
  4. Three general principles that you can use as guide to choose a protocol that may best suit you are: multiple sources of energy, autophagy and chronobiology.
  5. Calories restricted diet is not the best for weight loss for long terms. However, you do get benefits of healthier and longer life
  6. You can start with time-restricted feeding, extend periods of not eating and then work up to multi-day fasting.
  7. Fasting mimicking diets are great ways to have the benefits of longer fasting.
  8. If you have any medical issues, fast only under the care of a medical doctor.

What do you think?

Have you an experience with fasting? What worked or not worked for you? What benefits or difficulties you faced while fasting?

I and the readers of this blog would love to hear from you and learn from you.

Please click on Comment to leave your comments or question so others can benefit from your input.

 

Post #64 – Fasting, the old new technology and panacea for Optimal Health – Part II

04 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by in Autophagy, Fasting, Lean Mass, Nutrition, Optimal Health, Percent Body Fat, Uncategorized, wellness

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In the last Post #63, I described that:

  1. Lysosomes in our cells collect garbage and covert that for reuse.
  2. Do more of autophagy and body heals itself. Less of autophagy leads to diseases.
  3. Fasting is currently the only way to get the body into autophagy.

Concept of fasting, of course, has been around for thousands of years.

Our hunter gatherer ancestors had to live with unpredictable access to nutrition and routinely experienced periods of fasting and eating. Most religions of the world have some concept of fasting – Lent in Christianity, Ramadan in Islam, ta’anit, taanis or taʿanith in Judaism, a variety of fasting in Hinduism and Buddhism.

However, science of fasting is relatively new, though it is  a popular subject for research these days. I just did a quick search on the word “fasting” on the National Library of Medicine PubMed site and it produced 3,392 citations.

Michael Greger, M.D., who publishes his research summaries on the website NutritionFact.org, recently read and has summarized 1,250 of these papers. I attended the first half of his summaries in a 3-hour webinar last week.

Since weight loss is a major topic of interest around the world, a lot of research has focused on fasting for weight loss and its impact on popular bio-markers such as cholesterol, glucose, blood pressure. There is some research also available on the impact of fasting on longevity., although not as much as for weight loss.

All fasting methods consist of some variations of these variables:

  • What you eat or not eat,
  • How much you eat or not eat,
  • When you eat or not eat, and
  • How frequently you repeat the process.

And, with these variables you can make all kinds of combinations. For example, you may have seen or heard of the following popular combinations:

  1. Water only Fast for, say, 1, 3, or 5 consecutive days; alternate day fasting; 5:2 fasting: fasting for 2 days and eating the other 5 days of the week.
  2. Calories Restricted Diet: 20% fewer calories per day, e.g., 1,600 calories per day when 2,000 is your regular intake
  3. Time-Restricted Feeding: 8:16 fasting: eating for 8 hours and fasting for 16 hours; 4:20 fasting, where you eat for 4 hours and fast for 20, etc.
  4. Fasting-Mimicking Diet: During fasting, you still eat but with certain restrictions on carbs and protein, so your body feels as if you are fasting.

So, what option is optimal for you or I? Well, in biology nothing seems that simple. Answer always seems be: It depends.

The answer as to what is best for you or I, depends on a variety of variables including: state of your health, state of your fitness, your goals, your ability to follow the process in the short term or long term, any medicines you are taking, age, BMI.

Here are some principles, I have been able to tease apart from various research summaries, pod-casts of experts and books I have read so far. In human biology, there is always more details. So, these are, of course, simplified versions.

Principle I: Multiple Energy Sources: Our bodies have three main energy sources: a) immediate energy from the food we eat, b) Glycogen stored in liver, and c) fat stored in the body.

On typical days, we are constantly eating multiple meals a day that equal to or exceed the energy requirement of our body. Body simply takes macro and micro nutrient content from the digested food, and stores excess in liver as Glycogen or as fat in fat cells.

If we eat less than what our body needs, body takes excess first from the glycogen store in the liver and converts into glucose for use by the cells.

When glycogen stores are depleted, body starts to convert store fat into energy, through a process called Ketosis and uses Ketones as source of energy.

Which of these stores are being used when, depends on all those variable I mentioned above. For example, when body will start dipping into glycogen store may depend upon how big the last meal you had and what you ate. Or, your body may go into ketosis relatively quickly if you are athletically trained to burn fat as fuel like distance runners.

Principle II: Autophagy: At some point after body is in ketosis, autophagy turns on more and more vigorously. In fact, different tissues in the body up-regulate autophagy at different times. In autophagy, the lysosomes start to convert garbage insides the cells, e.g., broken DNA strands, ill formed organelles, into sources of energy.

Body is always in autophagy at some level. Fasting just kicks it into higher gears. How long before autophagy goes into higher gears? You guessed it: it depends. Since autophagy happens insides the cells, it is not easy to measure.

In general, autophagy has been observed after 14 hours in time-restricted regimens. And, it is generally established that after three days of fasting autophagy definitely accelerates.

Principle III: Chronobiology: Body’s circadian clock dictates metabolism. So, metabolism is generally faster during the morning and slower in the evening. Studies have shown that in a 16:8 fasting, with same intake folks who ate between 6am to 2pm lost more weight than those who ate from 2pm to 8pm. Moreover, the bio-markers, e.g., LDL cholesterol, of the second group were worse than the first group.

So, the wisdom of eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper holds.

Not to leave you hanging, but it does looks like that it will take at least one more post to share the benefits, downsides and my experiences of fasting so far.

Summary

  1. Several variables make up a fasting protocol: what, how, when and how frequently you eat or not eat.
  2. There are many types of fasting: water only fasts, calories restricted diet, time-restricted feeding, and fasting-mimicking diet. What is optimal for you depends on a number of factors related to your health, fitness, and goals.
  3. Three general principles that you can use as guide to choose a protocol that may best suit you are: multiple sources of energy, autophagy and chronology.

What do you think?

Have you an experience with fasting? Have you learned about autophagy?

I and the readers of this blog would love to hear from you and learn from you.

Please click on Comment to leave your comments or question so others can benefit from your input.

 

Post #63 – Fasting, the old new technology and panacea for Optimal Health – Part I

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Posted by in Autophagy, Fasting, Optimal Health, wellness

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For the last few years, I have been hearing a lot about fasting from friends, family and the media. I am sure you may have been as well. The words like intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating, etc. have been becoming common place terms.

Until recently, I have pretty much ignored this topic as simply yet another fad. As you can see from my blog post, I have not even mentioned this topic even once.  There has been absolutely no mention of these terms in my posts, although I did mention that when to eat and how often to eat do play part in good health and longevity.

Well, over the last few months, I took a deep dive into fasting. I really got intrigued when I learned about the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine award of Yoshinori Ohsumi. Here is the summary of his work from  the Nobel Prize website, highlights are mine.

“In the lysosomes of our cells its components are processed for reuse. The mechanisms of this process were mostly unknown until the early 1990s, when Yoshinori Ohsumi conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments with yeast, where he detected autophagy and identified genes important for the process. Yoshinori Ohsumi’s discoveries laid the foundation for a better understanding of the ability of cells to manage malnutrition and infections, the causes of certain hereditary and neurological diseases, and cancer.”

There is a lot here, so let me unpack it. 

Autophagy is an amazing process for healing our bodies using its own intelligence that led me to the journey through this rabbit hole.

The term ‘autophagy’ is derived from the Greek meaning ‘eating of self’. The term was first coined by Christian de Duve over 40 years ago, who received his Nobel Prize for discovering subcomponent of cells (aka organelles) called lysosomes. He showed that lysosomes were the garbage collectors for the cells. Even better yet, lysosomes convert the cellular garbage into amino acids for the body to reuse just like it would protein you would eat through food.  Amazing, isn’t it?

Ohsumi’s Nobel Prize brought this concept of autophagy to the forefront and unleashed renewed interest in this topic.

Autophagy is a very important aspect of human cell’s ability to collect garbage and then allow the body to rebuild the damaged parts from stem cells. So, let us say, you break a part in your car, you leave the car alone for a little while, and it takes the old broken parts, converts them into the basic material they were made of,  turns them into any usable parts or disposable garbage, and then grabs some brand-new material off-the-shelf and 3D prints a brand new part. And, it is off and running again just like new.  Sounds, just like in the movie Transformers.

If you up-regulate autophagy, i.e., you get body to do more of it, then you get lots of healing. If you down-regulate it, i.e., your body does less of it, and you get all kinds of diseases.

So, what does fasting have got to do with all this?

Turns out, fasting is currently the only sure way known right now, to put body into the state of autophagy. And, hence my intrigue with fasting.

In the next post, I would discuss how fasting induces autophagy, other benefits or side effects of fasting, different methods of fasting and my experience so far.

Summary

  1. In autophagy, lysosomes in our cells collect garbage and covert those for reuse.
  2. Do more of autophagy and body heals itself. Less of autophagy leads to diseases.
  3. Fasting is currently the only way to get the body into autophagy.

What do you think?

Have you an experience with fasting? Have you learned about autophagy?

I and the readers of this blog would love to hear from you and learn from you.

Please click on Comment to leave your comments or question so others can benefit from your input.