[Rhonda]: So first the threshold between, you know, like you're mentioning the threshold
between when you're actually getting rid of intracellular compartments through autophagy,
clearing away protein aggregates, pieces of DNA and things like that, but also, and damaged
mitochondria, but also the clearing away of complete cells, and particularly damaged cells,
which is very interesting to me, because as you mentioned, you've shown this now and there's
two different animal models for autoimmune disease, one was multiple sclerosis and the
other was the, I think type 1 diabetes.
[Valter]: Yeah, ours was not, that one particularly wasn't, was not autoimmune.
We're doing the autoimmune.
There's type 1 induced by, pharmacological induced.
[Rhonda]: Okay.
So it has potential for...
[Valter]: Yeah, but I can tell you, we've now confirmed it with all the autoimmune diseases.
So I think it's going to be applicable to many autoimmune diseases.
[Rhonda]: So this is what's so cool because, I mean, the, you know, the potential for this
type of fasting to cause cells that are preferentially damaged to be cleared away by apoptosis, which
makes sense.
I mean, I spent six years studying apoptosis and cells that are damaged preferentially
die, I can tell you from doing multiple, multiple experiments.
[Valter]: Even during development, right?
In development.
I mean, that's the way that the good and the bad are...
[Rhonda]: Right.
It's also how cancer cells are primed to die as well, because cancer cells are damaged.
They are mutated and completely damaged, and that may be also why they're very sensitive
to stress.
[Valter]: Yeah, and also, I mean, something that is a speculation but we're starting to
think more and more, or at least I'm starting to think more and more, is that...You know,
I always say if you cut yourself, it doesn't matter where you cut yourself or if you hurt
your head, the system repairs it, right?
Or repairs almost anything.
And so what about the inside?
You know, is it possible that we never developed a way to fix damaged organs and various systems?
So we're starting to think that maybe fasting represents that opportunity to fix the inside,
right?
And maybe, and just maybe, because everybody had to do it by force, they were forced to
do it because there was no food at some point of your month, almost unavoidably you probably
were with no food.
And so because it was almost unavoidable, it was probably something that...you know,
I always also think about sleep, right?
And in sleep you feel so tired that you have to sleep.
Because obviously people wouldn't have gone to sleep just on their own right?
But in the case of fasting, because it was imposed by the environment, I suspect that
maybe we never developed something that forces you to fast.
And so now that we eat all the time, which completely lost this auto-repair mode, right?
And this could be remarkable because imagine if we had this ability if you have damaged
liver, that fixes it.
If you have damaged immune cells that are autoimmune, that clears it.
And so you never develop defense against autoimmunity because fasting always took care of it.
Now all of a sudden you get rid of fasting, and all these things start building up, whether
it's insulin resistance, or liver damage, fatty liver, etc., etc., right?
So, this could be really...and people always are surprised when we say, you know, we're
publishing on all these different diseases, but if that's true, then that make sense,
right?
[Rhonda]: Right.
[Valter]: Because for example, in multiple sclerosis, you see on one side it kills the
immune cells.
It then turns on the stem cells, then turns on the oligodendrocytes, progenitor, and replace...I
mean, it's very...it's like, how the hell does it know how to do all of this?
And it does it all in such a sophisticated manner.
But if it was an evolved process, that would make a lot of sense.
[Rhonda]: The thing that's so interesting is how the stem cells, you know, the clearing
away of these damaged cells through apoptosis, activating these stem cells which then have
to repopulate whatever organ or tissue we're talking about, how they actually can make
normal life cell.
You're talking about in the case at least for autoimmunity or type 1 diabetes or multiple
sclerosis, how they make their immune cells normal, that is so...
[Valter]: Yeah, but that makes sense, right?
Because if you turn on a stem cell, you imagine now that the...you're not going to turn on
a damaged stem cell, there's got to be a selection process to pick the...So the stem cell is
now of course going to give rise to normal white blood cells, right?
They wouldn't have any way to make an autoimmune cell.
So, I mean...yeah.
So because that happens I think in the differentiated cell, the clonal, so you expand already the
differentiated cell.
So even I think theoretically that makes perfect sense that once you turn on the stem cell,
the hematopoietic stem cell, you will make a healthy...Now, you can always turn the healthy
cells into autoimmune cell, but at least initially you will make a healthy one, and that's exactly
what we see happening.