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In the last Post #63, I described that:
- Lysosomes in our cells collect garbage and covert that for reuse.
- Do more of autophagy and body heals itself. Less of autophagy leads to diseases.
- 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:
- 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.
- Calories Restricted Diet: 20% fewer calories per day, e.g., 1,600 calories per day when 2,000 is your regular intake
- 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.
- 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
- Several variables make up a fasting protocol: what, how, when and how frequently you eat or not eat.
- 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.
- 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.
As I mentioned in my previous post #58, I consider Michael Greger’s website 
In my blog post #9 – When it comes to health, vitality and aging what is really possible?, I had discussed the book, Prevent and Reverse Hearth Disease by Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. M.D. In this book, Dr. Fuhrman’s has updated research on preventing and reversing heart disease. Case studies are mind blowing. He not only gives research but actually prescription on what you should actually eat and even very specific meal plans. Dr. Furhman promises his patients to let him decide what they eat for six weeks and then based on the result they can then decide what to eat. Most of them become converts to his prescription of nutrition after seeing the results.
I did a series for posts #51-#54 on How to Optimize Your Immune System. In this book, Dr. Fuhrman offers a lot more research and very practical ways to build immunity so your body can fight whatever comes its way – not only flues and colds, but also other infections and even cancer. Cancer after-all is just DNA mutation that body fights all day long. Only when our immune system is NOT capable of handling the mutated DNA, it starts to take over the organs unchecked. Again, the book includes nutrition meal plans, recipes to put into practice his philosophy – not just eat food that is packed with desired micro-nutrients, but eat a lot of it.
In blog post #50, I discussed how to optimize your health by maximizing your telomeres. Elizabeth Blackburh received Nobel Prize for her research in telomeres. Telomeres are the end-caps at the ends of our DNA strands like little plastic wraps at the end of shoe laces. If the little plastic wraps are damaged shoe laces become useless, so is the case with the DNA. The length of telomeres correlate with the remaining lifespan. Dr. Blackburn shares the latest research in lay-person language and shares the different methods by which we can increase the length of our telomeres. Reading this book, it should not come as surprise to you that the lifestyle choices I discussed in my Post #59, all help increase the lengths of your telomeres.
Time did a fantastic job in summarizing the latest in science of exercise in this special Time Magazine publication. If you needed any further evidence how exercise impacts health and lifespan, I believe this publication will deliver, without having to read some big tome. The issue spans many diverse topics: cardio vs. weights, high intensity interval training, running, swimming, yoga and other exercise modalities.
In my blog post #17 – Is meditation an effective antidote to stress, I talk about Transcendental Meditation or TM as a very effective and well-researched means for combating stress. Science of Being and Art of Living is book compiled based on lectures by Maharishi Mahesh, who introduced TM to the West. He also founded the TM movement that has established TM Centers pretty much in all major cities throughout the world. While first part of the book serves as evidence and motivation for TM, the later parts are more for the practitioners and advanced students of TM and Yoga.
A few months ago, I got a chance to meet and attend a work shop by Dr. Levy, who has spent all his life building bridges between Western medicine and Eastern philosophies of yoga and meditation. Dr. Levy talks about how to prevent and reverse heart diseases by tackling the most insidious of the issues that impact heart health, i.e., Stress. This manual is accompanied by CDs on which you will find and can actually use his hypnosis techniques for relieving stress and anxiety.
In this more recent publication, The Happiness Sutra, Dr. Levy further delves into the four different types of stresses humans face and how best to deal with all four types of stresses. This book also has a CD that you can listen to to get the benefit of Dr. Levy’s hypnosis methods for relieving stress.
Lissa Rankin, M.D.’s book Mind Over Medicine is a great case study of extreme stress brought on modern living and by our current medical system. Dr. Rankin, a practicing OB GYN, quit her practice of medicine because of the numerous health and personal issues brought on by stress from her profession. She eventually found ways to heal herself and then learned to apply her new found knowledge to become a true healer, without becoming slave to the medical system.
