If you’ve been following my journey for a little while, you would most likely have come across the term ‘autophagy’. This term comes up when we discuss topics such as intermittent fasting and prolonged fasting such as the ProLon Diet. But, we haven’t yet taken an in-depth look into what autophagy is, how our bodies do it, and what benefits we can get from inducing autophagy, so today, we are going to do exactly that.

What is Autophagy?

The term ‘autophagy’ is Greek for ‘self-eating’ and is the process your body undergoes during times of stress. While the term self-eating does sound a bit confronting, it’s not as it sounds. It doesn’t hurt at all and it’s something that our bodies already do for us on a regular basis. Autophagy is an important bodily function that involves the cleansing of defective tissues and old cells to make room for new ones. I think we’d agree that this sounds a lot better than self-eating. We can think of it like a spring clean, for your body.

Why & How Do Our Bodies Do It?

A human body contains trillions of cells and over time some of the molecules in these cells become damaged and inefficient. We really want our bodies to remove these damaged cells so that we can consistently function at our very best and this is where autophagy comes in.

During autophagy, our bodies work to clean out all the unwanted molecules of these cells, so that we can make way for new, healthy cells. Sometimes, autophagy will completely destroy these molecules and parts, and other times, the cell actually recycles the damaged part into new components. Pretty cool right?

The process of autophagy is a completely automatic and natural process that happens without us having to do anything. Our bodies will naturally spring into action when we are placed under a certain amount of stress, however, there are also ways we can induce autophagy to increase the frequency of the process which we are going to talk about below.

Some Ways to Increase Autophagy

There are a few ways in which it’s believed that we can turn autophagy ‘on’ so that we can reap the benefits more often than our body automatically provides. Essentially, we need to put our bodies under the small amount of stress required to trigger the process. These stresses are things that you may already enlist into your day-to-day routine such as fasting, exercising, and drinking coffee.

Fasting

Fasting is the most well-known way to trigger autophagy and although there is no profound research to suggest exactly how long you need to fast to induce it, most suggest you should aim for a minimum of 14 hours without food. If you really want to fire up the process, you could try the Prolon Fasting Mimicking Diet, which is a 5-day fast designed to stimulate autophagy among some other really great health benefits. If you’re not ready to try a prolonged fast just yet, incorporating intermittent fasting into your daily routine could also help to induce autophagy.

Exercise

We already know that moving our bodies is essential to a healthy lifestyle, but now we have yet another great reason to make it a priority in our daily routines. When we exercise, some components of our cells become damaged and inflamed, triggering our bodies to jump into the response with autophagy. The good news is, you don’t have to be super fit or maintain high-intensity exercise to reap this benefit as even light exercise can place our cells under enough stress to start the process.

Coffee

Before we get too excited about the prospect of coffee triggering autophagy, I’d like to mention that this effect has, so far, only been studied in mice. However, that is where many other studies on autophagy have been initially proven, so we could take it as being a high probability that coffee also induces autophagy in humans. Interestingly, decaf coffee is reported to have the same effect so it’s most likely that autophagy is triggered by the rich variety of antioxidants that coffee provides, rather than the caffeine itself.

What Are the Benefits of Autophagy?

There is still a lot of research to be conducted on the extent of benefits of autophagy and why you should aim to increase it, but so far research has shown that the process can provide benefits such as increased metabolic health, healthy aging, brain health, cancer recovery, and heart health. The two in particular that I’d like to explore further are increased metabolic health and increased brain health.

Increased metabolic health: Increased levels of autophagy have been linked to assisting in preventing the onset of Type 2 Diabetes. This is because when autophagy fails, beta cells in your pancreas accumulate damage which prevents them from being able to produce insulin. So in this case, enhancing autophagy can help to protect these crucial insulin-producing cells, thereby assisting in reversing pre-diabetes and prolonging the onset of Type 2 Diabetes.

Increased brain health: Many neurodegenerative disorders stem from the accumulation of deformed proteins in and around neurons. Autophagy can help your brain cells to clear out these deformed and toxic proteins that can contribute to the development of conditions such as dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s disease.

So, thanks to autophagy we could potentially reverse pre-diabetes, can produce more energy to fuel our bodies and generally feel better, can slow the clock down on our aging, and encourage increased brain health to protect ourselves from developing degenerative brain disorders in the future.

To Sum It All Up…

Autophagy is an essential process that our bodies do on our behalf whenever our cells come under a certain amount of stress, but inducing autophagy can help us to maintain healthy metabolic health, reduce infection, healthy aging, and encourage healthy brain function. We can induce autophagy with things like prolonged fasting, exercise, and drinking coffee. In general, autophagy is a really great way to make sure our cells are consistently biologically younger and making our bodies more efficient in everything that we do. At the end of the day, making sure our bodies are functioning their best is really the best thing we can do for ourselves and our healthy future.