Greetings, boy and girls. Lance here, and although it’s a little early for Halloween,
I’ve got a treat for you today. Now I’ve been struggling for several months
on a how to present the concept of balancing AMPK and mTOR
and I’ve realized that first I need to fill you in on fasting and autophagy,
because they’re all connected. So stay tuned.
For several months, I’ve been wanting to do a series on balancing AMPK and mTOR,
but that topic relies on an understanding of a lot of other subjects;
things like deregulated nutrient sensing and the nutrient sensing pathways,
on exercise, on fasting and autophagy, on a ketogenic diet,
and how much protein one should consume and when.
And since some of those subjects are about topics that I’ve never discussed before,
I decided to start there.
So this first video, and probably the next two, will be on fasting and autophagy,
the relationship between them, and their impact on both AMPK and mTOR.
And let’s start with autophagy.
Before I start, I just wanna say that I’m not an authority here.
Like I said, I’ve done a lot of research, and I think I’ve landed on a solution, but I could be wrong.
If you’ve got access to any research that disagrees with where I’ve landed,
leave a comment below and shoot me a link to the study.
Figuring out the truth is a lot more important to me than being right.
One of the reasons that it’s been so difficult to arrive at an answer
is because the whole science of autophagy is fairly new.
While the term came into existence in the 1960s,
it was pretty much a mystery until the first breakthrough came in the 1990’s,
when autophagy was discovered in starving yeast cells.
But it wasn’t until 2016, when Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize for his work on autophagy,
that a deeper level of understanding began.
That was only 4 years ago.
And to be honest, it’s still not all that well understood.
It’s a new field of study, and we still have a lot to learn about it.
OK, let’s start with the definition of autophagy, and I found several.
Here’s the dictionary’s definition:
It’s the “consumption of the body’s own tissue as a metabolic process
occurring in starvation and certain diseases.”
Here’s Wikipedia’s:
“Autophagy is the natural, regulated mechanism of the cell
that removes unnecessary or dysfunctional components.
It allows the orderly degradation and recycling of cellular components.”
And here’s a more clinical definition:
“Autophagy is a process in which a cell breaks down and destroys old, damaged, or abnormal proteins
and invading pathogens through a protective housekeeping mechanism within the cell
called lysosomal degradation.
The breakdown products, building blocks and energy are then recycled for cellular renovation
and homeostasis, especially during periods of stress or starvation.”
Alright, so the first thing that I want to say about autophagy
is that you need to be in a fasted state to trigger autophagy…
and you probably need to have been fasting for at least 24 hours, maybe longer.
When you’re in a fasted state
and you’ve used up all the nutrients that are circulating in your system from external sources like food,
also known as exogenous sources,
your body starts looking at your own cells for internal, or endogenous sources of nutrients.
This lack of nutrients activates the AMPK pathway,
which in turn shuts down the mTOR pathway, as well as the insulin and IGF-1 pathway.
And activated AMPK can also activate autophagy.
As I understand it,
autophagy happens when there's not enough amino acids available as resources
to build new proteins and new tissues.
Autophagy’s not about fats or glucose, it's about amino acids.
You need fats and glucose for fuel,
but you need amino acids for tissue repair and regeneration.
When there's not enough amino acids available for this, that's when autophagy kicks in.
Autophagy breaks down cellular debris,
damaged cellular proteins, microbes, and viruses because they're all made from proteins,
and your body is trying to recycle the amino acids that proteins are built from
in order to continue with the process of tissue repair and maintenance.
During fasting, blood glucose levels start to fall, signaling the start of a fasted state.
This leads to a decrease in insulin signaling,
liver glycogen is mobilized and broken down into glucose,
gluconeogenesis converts some of the proteins in the body to glucose,
the body start shifting from glucose metabolism to a fat-burning metabolism,
and human growth hormone levels start to rise, eventually rising to up to 5 times normal levels.
And while mTOR is shut down globally, it can be activated locally, within the muscles.
Now, it’s important to make a distinction here, and that’s between autophagy and apoptosis.
Autophagy happens inside of a cell,
and it clears out cellular waste, recycles it, resulting in a healthier, revitalized cell.
Apoptosis, on the other hand, is the programmed death of cells.
When whole cells die from apoptosis, they don’t undergo autophagy.
They get cleaned out by the immune system, and this results in inflammation.
Cells that are rejuvenated by undergoing autophagy are less likely to die from apoptosis.
So activating autophagy can lessen the burden of apoptosis…and of inflammation.
But autophagy is not just about breaking down proteins into amino acids.
It’s also about recycling those amino acids into new proteins, about building new tissue.
The whole process is one of renewal.
And it’s this renewal that lends such a profound effect on longevity and anti-aging.
OK, so what are the benefits of autophagy?
How can it improve your health?
Well, one of the benefits seems to be that it can actually extend your lifespan.
And this is backed up by a robust body of evidence.
True, it’s all in mice, flies and flatworms,
but the evidence consistently shows that with autophagy comes a dramatically extended lifespan.
One of the ways it does this is by improving impaired metabolic health,
which it achieves by clearing out a lot of toxins that build up in the mitochondria.
It can also reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases
by clearing out misfolded proteins in the brain,
which can accumulate in the form of amyloids to cause both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Autophagy can also remove certain microbes or viruses from within the cells,
and remove toxins created by infections…both of which help to fight infectious disease.
It can also help prevent the onset of cancer
by clearing away damaged proteins that contribute to tumor growth,
but this can be a double-edged sword.
If a cancer is already established,
it can allow the cancer to live longer by improving the health of all cells…cancer cells included.
There’s also a growing body of evidence that suggests that autophagy can improve heart health
by removing damaged proteins and organelles in heart cells.
Finally, when you’re in autophagy and the body is looking for resources to break down and recycle,
cells that turn over frequently are the first cells that are chosen.
And skin cells are one of the types that turn over most often,
so they’re among the first to undergo autophagy.
Then, when autophagy enters it’s renewal cycle, those damaged skin cells get rejuvenated and revitalized.
So autophagy will improve the health and look of your skin.
OK, that’s it for this video.
Watch for the next video in this series on how to trigger autophagy,
some tips, and my own personal experience with fasting and autophagy.
Want more? Check out this video.
That’s it for me, I’m outta here.