AUTOPHAGY (Part Fourteen)

AN A-WORD!

Here's an A-word! It is a word I had never encountered before my father became ill. It is 'autophagy'. And it strikes me that it is an important word to understand if we want to pursue better health for ourselves and those we love.

Yoshinori Ohsumi wins Nobel prize in medicine for work on autophagy

Japanese cell biologist is named 2016 laureate for his discoveries on how the body’s cells break down and recycle their own components (read here)

Autophagy, simply put, is the process by which the body ‘hoovers up’ dead or failing cells, doing what is basically a ‘deep-clean’ housekeeping job. It also enables the recycling of cells and enables new growth!

Our over-consumption of unsuitable foods can compromise this process day by day.

Efficient autophagy can be stimulated by intermittent fasting. If you eat nothing after your evening meal, and then just delay breakfast for a few hours (call it late brunch or early lunch) then you have activated autophagy! Sixteen hours is the optimum period of fasting to do so.

I very rarely feel a need to eat on getting up in any case. In fact, I have often eaten purely because of habit or because I thought I ought to. Nowadays I do not forget that it was, in fact, the Seventh-Day Adventist, meat-hating and sugar-loving Mr Kellogg who, via his PR boys, convinced us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

Tea, coffee or water (or a wee pinch of sea salt) can keep you going in the meantime. And my gosh you will enjoy your brunch/lunch!

If I find I am hungry for breakfast, I abandon the fast and go the keto European way, with cheese and cold meat, or live plain yoghurt and blueberries. These, like all berries, contain the least sugar of all fruits.

UPDATE (March 2026)

I have just heard Dr Anthony Chaffee talking with Dr Georgia Ede (author of 'Change your Diet, Change your Mind', and during their conversation he stated that "high insulin levels suppress autophagy" and that therefore fasting is not the only route to achieving it. "If you just don't eat carbohydrates, then you're going to be going through autophagy all the time. Your body's constantly going to be recycling out these organelles and these (old) mitochondria .... keto/carnivore studies show .... after 3-4 months you have four times the number of mitochondria, and they're four times as effective ..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSCiATwJmvM

You can do a longer fast if you want to. Extended fasting has well-documented health benefits. I don't want to. But that's me.

Intermittent fasting can be supported by an accompanying change in the choosing and preparing of one’s food. Even just one simple change, the elimination of seed and vegetable oils, will ensure that at least some of the resultingly toxic free radicals will not be there to be cleaned up.

And so intermittent fasting can be seen as a tool to maintain a clean and shining temple, a smoothly-running engine, alongside a diet designed for optimum health.

Symptoms are, after all, the body's cries for help. If your car's red emergency light came on on your dashboard, would you rush to take the bulb out, or would you lift the bonnet and try and fix the problem?

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