What Is Autophagy? | Benefits of Autophagy | What Triggers Autophagy? | What Is Autophagy Fasting?

Autophagy

Autophagy is a condition where your body is recycling damaged or old and not needed proteins in the body.

I'm not talking just about hair and muscle, I'm talking about those little enzyme protein machines that do the work of the body. Those are the things that make body tissue and they're at the cellular level. When those are damaged, autophagy is a system to clean those out of the body and recycle them.

The word "autophagy" means self eat because your cells are basically eating up and recycling damaged proteins and malfunctioning organelles or pieces of the cell that are no longer working.

Major Health Benefits of Autophagy

A lot of benefits can occur from autophagy:

• Autophagy decreases the risk of chronic disease and it will help recycle protein as a survival mechanism. For example, one of the triggers for autophagy is fasting, that would be kind of a similar thing to starvation. So the body kicks in this mechanism to help become more efficient so as to survive longer, so it'll take the protein it doesn't need, recycle it into new tissue and even use it as fuel.
• Also the autophagy can help reduce pathogens in the body.
• Anti-aging.
• Dropping inflammation.
• Improve your immune system because part of the recycling process involves cleaning up pathogens microbes candida parasites and even viruses.
• It protects the neurons as a survival mechanism the heart cells.
• It gets rid of what's called advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), which basically means like sticky proteins that clog things up, as well as plaquing in the brain. It cleans up all this damaged protein in the cells.
• The most important function of autophagy is anti-cancer.

Difference Between a Normal Cell and a Cancer Cell

In a normal cell, you have respiration in the mitochondria. What does that mean? Well, fuel is converted through a machine to make energy currency of the bodies called ATP. So, you fuel like glucose that uses oxygen to then be burned and that's the energy currency of the body. So in a normal cell, you have something called mitochondrial respiration. 

The mitochondria is the energy Factory and respiration has to do with breathing or oxygen. A normal cell needs oxygen to generate fuel.

In a cancer cell, there's damage to this respiratory mechanism, so this motor with a carburetor that uses oxygen is broken. There's irreversible damage. So what happens when you damage that system? As a survival mechanism this cell starts to activate an ancient pathway that is able to ferment glucose which basically is a way of breaking it down differently without the use of oxygen. Now whether there's oxygen or not that has nothing to do with it. Glucose fermentation doesn't necessarily need oxygen to make its energy. So that is the difference between a cancer cell and a normal cell.

Normal cells use oxygen in the respiratory center and cancer cells basically ferment glucose without oxygen. One of the ways that they test for cancer is through a PET scan. In a PET scan, they are measuring extreme glucose consumption. Cancer cells are extremely hungry for glucose, they hog glucose more than normal cells and sometimes you will starve than normal cells. 

Now just by knowing that simple fact, right there why would anyone want to consume a lot of glucose or sugar if they have cancer? Why is there damage in this part of the mitochondria?

It has something to do with the DNA that gets damaged because what's unique about the mitochondria is that, the mitochondria has its own DNA, it's called mitochondria DNA versus the DNA in the nucleus of the cell, which is highly protective.

The DNA and the mitochondria are much more prone to mutation or alteration, because they're not as protected. Now the mitochondria can use the DNA from the nucleus of the cell but it also has its own DNA and I think that's really why it becomes damaged because it's simply not protected. You cannot get cancer in your body unless there's damage to this respiratory part of the mitochondria. What does all this mean? It means that autophagy has the ability to clean up this damage in you mitochondria, because these are protein machines. These are enzymes. The protein damage in the mitochondria that causes the cells to shift can be cleaned up by autophagy. So that makes this benefit, anti-cancer, the most important benefit of autophagy.

What Triggers Autophagy?

There are several things that can trigger autophagy that go beyond just fasting:

1. Regular exercise: and the key word is regular not like a one time thing. You do periodic exercise. It's regular consistent exercise. Not only will it trigger autophagy, but it'll increase the capacity of autophagy. So you're just gonna clean up more damage in the body. The research on exercise includes both Resistance training and aerobic type exercise. Aerobic exercise really improves autophagy of the brain.
2. Intermittent fasting: this is the one that most people know about and you'd have to fast for at least 18 hours to really see the benefits of autophagy and if you go up to 48 hours you're gonna see more and more benefits. You're basically recycling all the little damaged proteins or cellular machinery inside the cells that basically are not helping you, they're hurting you.ketones so 
3. Ketones can trigger autophagy. They also protect the neurons they feed. The neurons they can actually stimulate, autophagy in the brain clean out some of this amyloid plaquing that's involved in dementia.
4. Sleep: this is when you recover. Autophagy occurs when you're in recovery mode. This is why stress blocks autophagy but sleep can enhance autophagy. 
5. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) has the capacity of stimulating autophagy.
6. Cold and hot therapy: because it triggers certain genes that stimulate that mechanism.
7. Coffee: I'm not talking about drinking pots of coffee because you're gonna get too much caffeine. But it's polyphenols that can stimulate some autophagy.
8. Wine: which by the way I'm not recommending but it does tend to stimulate at autophagy. But it has other effects that could be damaging to the liver. 
9. Cruciferous vegetables: specifically the phytochemical called sulforaphane can trigger autophagy.
10. Green tea stimulates a certain phytonutrient that can also increase autophagy.
11. Extra-virgin olive oil has a phytochemical that has the ability to stimulate autophagy. In human studies some of these other ones are in animal studies.
12. Mushrooms shiitake and oyster mushrooms stimulate Trehalose, which has a capacity to increase autophagy.

Autophagy Fasting

In the cell you have something called the lysosome. Lysosome is like the garbage disposal. It's like the recycler, which takes all the damaged parts and breaks it down as all these enzymes and then it spits it out as free fatty acids and amino acids, which are the building blocks to make body tissue. At this point, they're pushed out to different parts of the body, in which you have cellular remodeling.

So just imagine, in your house you have a garbage disposal. You put your garbage in there and let's say it comes out as great wood, nails, raw material to then build your new kitchen, your new bathroom and other rooms in your house. Well that's exactly what autophagy is, which it takes garbage and makes it into new good raw material, so you can then build new cells. So it's very anti-aging. It's very good to protect the brain cells to regrow new brain cells and nerve cells. It's great for the heart to regrow new heart cells. So it's very protective against the immune system as well so what we'll do it'll take defective damaged parts. Push it into the garbage disposal and intracellular pathogens, like microbes and fungus, yeast, viruses and all sorts of things. It's going to recycle that in this powerful lysosome and then we have something called Misfolded proteins.

In your body, you have all these structural parts. You have different parts of the cell and they're all different types of combinations of proteins. They basically have different shapes. When these proteins are not shaped correctly that would be called a Misfolded protein. Those build up, they accumulate and develop into bigger piece of protein called Amyloid.

Amyloid deposits are what you see in the brain of an Alzheimer's patient, Parkinson's, a lot of times you see it in diabetics, with the arteries, cataracts, etc. There's a whole bunch of diseases called amyloid diseases, in which this kind of plaquing or protein packing plugs up the body. Those are basically just the accumulation of Misfolded proteins and these proteins can be very very toxic. So your cells can take these, recycle them into new raw material that can then be used for rebuilding.

What would cause an accumulation of these Misfolded proteins which would be damage to the mitochondria coming from high levels of oxidative stress usually from high insulin? Well this is why because of these proteins that get shaped incorrectly and they plug up the whole system.