Autophagy: Regenerating The Body From The Inside

Remember what you do in a general housecleaning and understand very well what is the autophagy. Let’s say you discover that in your kitchen there are remains of a dish that you prepared days ago, some old fruit or vegetables, expired cans of canning … And you start throwing away everything that is no longer valid.

When cleaning, as if it were a miracle, you discover that you had rich foods that had gone unnoticed in that little chaos. A jar of miso, infusions that they brought you from a trip, little bottles of spices … Then you get rid of the old and put these little jewels on display to take advantage of them and give more value to your dishes. Something similar happens in your body. This is what is called autophagy.

Autophagy is a natural recycling system that serves to cleanse the body of everything that is no longer useful and could cause you harm, and to take advantage of what is still valid to generate new cellular components and thus enhance your health.

Cell digestion enhances your health

The word autophagy comes from the Greek terms autos (oneself), and phagien (to eat) and means “to eat oneself”. The term was chosen by Nobel laureate Christian De Duve, a Belgian scientist who described the main cellular component involved in autophagy, the lysosome.

Almost half a century has passed since then and today there are tens of thousands of scientific articles that delve into its relationship with health, its therapeutic use and the mechanisms underlying this process. For the latter, only a few years ago they gave the Nobel Prize to the Japanese Yoshinori Ohsumi.

Autophagy is a cellular digestion process that can be seen. When we look through a simple light microscope we can know that a cell is in autophagy because ” vacuoles” or “vesicles” appear, bubbles in the cytoplasm of cells, which correspond to those miniature washing machines in charge of crushing cell waste.

With the electron microscope, with higher magnification, it is seen in greater detail: everything begins with the formation of a membrane around the material to be digested, so that this material is isolated in a cellular compartment called the phagosome. Then a lysosome approaches the phagosome, the membranes of both fuse and the lysosome sheds its enzymes, the tools in charge of shredding the scrap.

In this way, the components to be degraded are broken down and reduced to their elemental parts. And these fragments are released into the cytoplasm of the cell, where they can be used in the recycling and synthesis of new cellular components (membranes, proteins, organelles …).

Perfect balance

The autophagy is a survival system very well calibrated: requires a perfect balance point. Both an autophagy defect and an excess could be harmful. There has to be a balance point between activated autophagy and stopped autophagy.

How do you get it? In the biochemical field, this control in the activation of autophagy is established through the balance between a metabolic pathway called mTOR, which is a protein linked to growth, and a pathway called AMP-K, a protein linked to shortage alert systems .

To make it more understandable, imagine a switch: in the mTOR branch of the circuit, when the mTOR switch is on, autophagy is inhibited; and when it’s off, autophagy kicks in. In the other branch of the circuit, the so-called AMP-K, when the AMP-K switch is on, autophagy is activated; and when AMP-K is off, autophagy stops.

Let’s now see what it is that activates one or another pathway in our body.

1. The food route

The mTOR pathway is activated by ingesting food, especially that rich in carbohydrates, by the elevation of glucose levels in the blood, by the increase in insulin and by the presence of the “insulin-like growth factor” (IGF ), and also –very important– due to the high levels of amino acids. An excess of food, carbohydrates and proteins stimulates the mTOR pathway.

2. The path of scarcity

The other route, AMP-K, is stimulated by scarcity situations, which the body identifies as difficult and alarming, in which it is necessary to save energy and activate recycling to obtain all of its own resources at the lowest possible cost, as in situations of caloric restriction, lack of oxygen, drop in temperature … And also when we fast, although in this case it is a voluntary stop in food intake, fasting allows us to make a global tuning of the organism.

Fasting and autophagy, an ancient practice

Cleansing and fasting are natural practices, common to many species. If you live with animals, you will have seen it: cats and dogs stop eating and purge when they have been intoxicated; In the wild, most animals stop eating while they heal from fractures or injuries, migratory birds do not eat for long periods of time, and bears fast during hibernation.

The human being is adapted to periods of scarcity, and naturally, man fasts when he is sick. Cleansing diets and fasts have been present throughout the history of mankind, both in the East and in the West, for religious and health reasons. In the 20th century, therapeutic fasting reappeared with force and today it is very topical due to its link with food and health.

Helps with detoxification

The current overeating, the consumption of processed foods and a sedentary lifestyle exceed our natural ability to eliminate toxins. And with fasting we facilitate the process of detoxification and purification of the body and the better functioning of the organs in charge of these processes: the intestine, liver, kidney, skin and lungs.

By fasting, we can expel toxins from outside (chemicals from the environment, toxins from food, from home …) and toxins from inside the body, caused by the assimilation process, such as urea from the metabolism of proteins or radicals free from the metabolic processes of obtaining energy.

For our safety, our body also has defense mechanisms that protect us from the harmful effect of toxins that we cannot expel, such as fluid retention (edema), fat binding ( cellulite ) or crystallization and deposition in various structures (joints or the walls of blood vessels).

How fasting works

By fasting, a person does not expend energy in the process of digestion and assimilation of nutrients, and the cells and organs responsible for these processes rest. And that energy can be used in the processes of elimination and purification of toxins, damaged cells, cell fragments, microtumors, diseased tissues and altered proteins.

• During the first 24 hours of fasting. You get energy from reserves carbohydrates (stored as glycogen in the liver and muscles).
• During the following hours and up to 40 days (in general terms). You get energy from the fat.

During fasting, hardly any protein is consumed . At the beginning, you will be able to use proteins to obtain glucose for the brain, until your body adapts to the use of ketone bodies as fuel, an alternative and highly efficient source of energy that is obtained from fats. Let’s see how.

Fats are released as fatty acids into the bloodstream; a part of them is used as a source of heat and energy generation and another part is metabolized by the liver to become ketone bodies. The Ketones are the new fuel for your cells much more efficiently than glucose.

Signs of detoxification

The debugging process goes through manifestations such as:

• Phlegm
• Dry mouth
• White tongue
• Sweating
• Strong-smelling urine
• Headache
• Soft spot
• If there is a disease, the symptoms may be aggravated.
• Weight loss, especially the first days, due to the elimination of retained water and toxins.

To help the body, you can drink water, alone or with lemon, herbal teas, vegetable broths or sea water, to replace the necessary mineral salts.