There's something that a lot of people that practice
intermittent fasting talk about.
And that's autophagy.
Now I'm going to explain what autophagy is in just a second.
But the purpose of this video is to teach you
that due to the fact that your body produces ketones
during a fast, autophagy isn't quite as important
as you might be thinking.
Okay, so autophagy is this. Autophagy is where your body
has sort of a built-in cellular recycling process.
Think of it like your cell's little Pac-Man.
And this Pac-Man opens up and eats all these old
components of the cell that don't need to be used anymore.
Now, why is this important when it comes down to fasting?
Well, think about this.
Let's say you haven't eaten for 16-20 hours.
You don't have any nutrients coming in,
so your body has no choice but to try to find
and conserve food from other places.
So it takes components of the cell that are not
really being used, or fragmented portions of DNA
that aren't being used, and uses them as fuel.
It's basically recycling its own components
in an effort to gain energy.
It's really, really powerful stuff.
But, the problem is that so many people believe
that autophagy is the end all be all.
So for example, they'll be afraid to consume something
because it might stop autophagy.
Or, they're afraid that their fast isn't going
to be as effective because they're not getting
into that stage of autophagy.
Well, I want to explain how the ketogenic diet actually
triggers autophagy, and how autophagy is not necessarily
everything you have to bank on.
You see, there's a study that is published in the journal
PNAS that found, at a 48 hour fast, autophagy tends
to decline, now, my reason in mentioning this is because,
as autophagy declines, it doesn't mean that the fast
is no longer beneficial, you see, they always
have kind of a give and a take.
When you are fasting for a long period of time,
you have an upregulation of ketones.
Okay, the longer that you fast, generally, the more ketones
that you're going to have in your blood.
Now, ketones have a world of benefits, right?
They have genetic properties, they have, ultimately,
macronutrient properties, they have abilities to fuel
the brain, they're a very powerful thing.
But, as ketones upregulate, we tend to see a little bit
of a decline in autophagy at the micro-level with fasting.
And this is simply because the ketones that are elevating
throughout the fast are actually stopping the breakdown
of proteins, now this is a good thing
in a lot of different ways, right?
The longer that you fast, the more protein you actually
conserve, it's contrary to what most people would say.
So, when you fast for a long period of time,
the ketones preserve your proteins.
And when your proteins are being preserved, you have more
protein in your bloodstream,
which actually turns off autophagy.
So my point in saying this once again is that
we can't dictate whether a fast is good or bad,
only on autophagy.
We really should be paying attention to our fast
based on our ketone levels, because that's the benefit
that we're actually getting from everything.
So, don't get me wrong, autophagy is good, and there's a lot
of ways that the ketogenic diet, in and of itself,
can actually induce autophagy through other mechanisms.
But, for the simple on-off switch
that has to do with fasting, the measurement
that you should be looking at, more than anything,
is your ketones.
You're going to drive yourself absolutely up the wall
trying to wonder if you have a high degree of autophagy
occurring or not, and the fact is, unless you have access
to a multi-million dollar lab, you're never going
to know, but the one thing that you can do,
is to actually test your blood, and test your ketones.
Higher ketones mean deeper into a fast.
Don't worry about what your autophagy level
is at that point in time.
And remember, your autophagy's going to change
from organ-to-organ.
So, just one last thing to leave you with,
just because autophagy is high in your liver
at one point in time, doesn't mean that it's not high
in your muscles at another point in time.
Always going to be changing, always revolving,
depending on what we are doing, and what our lifestyle
is at that very point in time.
But the one common denominator, the one gold standard
that we can always lean on is testing your ketones.
And that's why you leave the measuring to the meter,
and leave that guesswork out of the equation.
I'm Thomas DeLauer, and I'll see you
in the next Keto-Mojo video.