What Can Autophagy Do For You? │Article by Jean Menegus
Introduction
Autophagy is a process by which your body breaks down old or damaged cells. The result is that your body uses the recycled components to make new cells. This is great for a number of reasons: it clears out dead or dying cells, it increases cellular turnover, and it helps you fight inflammation and oxidative stress. There's been a lot of research into how autophagy affects health, but one thing most studies agree on is that autophagy plays a role in longevity. Researchers have found links between low levels of autophagy and an increased risk of developing age-related diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease.
Clears out damaged cells
Autophagy is a cellular cleaning process that clears out damaged cells. It’s like the garbage collector that comes around on Friday to take your trash and make sure it doesn’t stink up your apartment. It takes all the junk that is cluttering up your system and hauls it away, so you can start fresh!
Autophagy clears out damaged proteins throughout the body, including in organs such as the liver, pancreas and brain. This means that autophagy is one of the best ways to stay healthy!
Reuses components from damaged cells
This means the recycling process will remove damaged organelles and proteins from the cell. In addition to getting rid of junk, autophagy also maintains cellular homeostasis by removing misfolded or damaged proteins and intracellular pathogens. This is important because if these harmful substances aren’t removed, they can lead to many chronic diseases.
The body may initiate autophagy when it senses something is wrong with its cells. For example, if you have an infection or cancerous tumor growing inside your body, then your immune system will trigger an inflammatory response in order to destroy them before they become too large or invasive (this process is called apoptosis). However, this type of damage causes inflammation, which can be detrimental for healthy cells as well. To protect itself from inflammation-induced damage caused by these types of injuries (and others), our bodies begin their own self-destruct mechanism called autophagy—a process where old cells are recycled into new ones through degradation by lysosomes, and then reabsorbed back into the cytoplasm via endocytosis (a recycling process).
Promotes cellular turnover and renewal
In addition to preventing damage from free radicals, this activity supports cellular renewal and helps your body regenerate itself on a regular basis. As you get older, autophagy becomes less efficient which can lead to various health issues such as cancer or neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease if you have not taken steps to support this natural process.
Acts as anti-inflammatory
Chronic inflammation is a major cause of aging and disease. The body has a natural defense mechanism to fight off infections and injuries, called inflammation. Inflammation is the swelling and redness you see after an injury, like when you burn yourself or strain your back. When it happens in places where there's no infection or injury—like the lining of your gut—it can be harmful and effect day to day functioning. That's because if something irritates the gut enough that it causes chronic inflammation, then cells will start breaking down faster than they heal. This can lead to irritation throughout different organs in your body as well as increased risk for developing certain types of cancer (including colorectal cancer).
Thus, autophagy is an important nutritional tool to support your body to keep inflammation to a minimum and avoid damaging healthy tissues.
Improves skin health
The production of new cells is important because it helps to prevent the breakdown of your skin and keeps the elasticity intact.
If you want healthy, radiant skin, ensure that autophagy is happening regularly in your body by eating a ketogenic diet, fasting as exercising regularly.
May help you live longer
Contrary to what you might think, longevity is not a result of a single linear process. It’s an interaction of your genes with the environment you live in, which includes things like stress and nutrition.
Longevity is defined as the rate at which aging occurs. Autophagy promotes longevity by clearing out damaged proteins and other cell waste products that would otherwise accumulate inside cells over time and cause them to malfunction or die prematurely.
So if you want to live longer, here's one simple thing that could help: keep insulin levels low. That sounds counterintuitive because insulin spikes growth factors, but since excessive growth hinders autophagy, it's actually bad for your health in the long term.
Activated by fasting and low insulin
In addition to its role in nutrient sensing, the mTOR pathway also plays a critical role in regulating autophagy. In fact, fasting has been shown to activate autophagy more than any other method of dietary restriction. This is because when you’re not eating anything (or are greatly limiting your food intake), your body releases hormones called glucagon and epinephrine which signal your liver to break down stored fat into ketones for energy. Ketone bodies—compounds that are produced when fatty acids are broken down—are known for their ability to induce autophagy.
Autophagy also increases during exercise because it requires increased glucose uptake and oxygen consumption. This means that autophagy upregulation may be an important part of weight loss strategies based on high-intensity interval training (HIIT) or low-carbohydrate diets like the ketogenic diet.
Activated by exercise
Exercise is one of the natural triggers for autophagy. It's good for you, and it can increase autophagy in your skeletal muscles.
How does exercise trigger autophagy? Exercise increases the activity of AMPK (AMP-activated protein kinase), which is an enzyme that regulates both energy use and cellular growth, by increasing fat breakdown and reducing muscle protein breakdown, both effects that lead to increased glucose availability. In addition to increasing glucose availability through exercise, combining this with fasting will also put you into deeper levels of autophagy, because fasting reduces insulin signaling in cells, which triggers AMPK activation as well. Together these two processes are a winning combination!
Metabolic pathways triggered by nutritional changes
Autophagy occurs in both plants and animals at all stages of life, but it's particularly important during periods of growth or regeneration. During autophagy, your body cleans out damaged proteins, fats and organelles like mitochondria—the powerhouses of your cells—which then get replaced with fresh materials that are better suited for maintaining cell function. This allows you to adapt to new environments quickly, so you don't have to wait forever for new cells to grow from scratch!
Foods high in protein, such as meat, beans, tofu, eggs and milk will hinder autophagy.
Foods low in calories , protein and carbohydrates, such as a few macadamia nuts, or greens, will not effect autophagy.
Conclusion
Autophagy is a process that helps your body to fight off infections and disease. It also helps remove damaged cells from your body. Autophagy is important for long-term health because it may help prevent cancer, diabetes and other age-related diseases.