Autophagy

The human body science of life.
Yoshinori Ohsumi ~ The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016.

Discovered by Yoshinori Ohsumi a biologist in Japan in 1992, Autophagy is discovered in his lab while he was studying degradation in yeast.
This is after the discovery of Lysosome by Christian de Duve in 1955 ~ The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1974

The term “Autophagy” comes from the ancient Greek.
Meaning “self-eating”, “self-devouring”.

• ‘phagy‘ meaning eat
• ‘auto‘ meaning self.

Some articles also refer this as the “self eating cells” inside our human body.

Potential Benefits of Autophagy

• Reduce risk of chronic disease (Cancer, diabetes)
• Recycle protein
• Reduce pathogens
• Protects neurons cardiac cells
• Re-growing of brain cells
• Immune protection
• Anti-aging, reduce age, amyloid

How to activate the Autophagy in our body?

The way to activate Autophagy is through fasting. Yes, starvation induce Autophagy.

• Fasting
• Intermittent fasting

Autophagy process starts to gradually kicks into our body after about 18 hours starving our body from external food.

Fasting correct insulin resistance, keeps insulin down, and it starts to trigger this survival mechanism. Fasting will not starve or deplete your body. Instead Autophagy process kicks in and put our body into a protection mode and enhances your survival by re-using the resources in our body.

Starvation Autophagy

Autophagosome

Autophagy process

In a cell, there is something call the Lysosome. Lysosome is like a garbage collector. It is the recycler which takes all the body damage parts and breaks them down for reuse to make our body tissues.

Defective damaged cell parts, intracellular pathogens (microbes, fungi, viruses, bacteria, parasites, etc…) and misfolded proteins (Amyloid Deposits) go through the Lysosome. Lysosome will break them down into Free Fatty Acids and Amino Acids which are the building blocks to make body tissues.

Accumulation of misfolded proteins are cause by damage to Mitochondria coming from a high level of oxidative stress, usually from high insulation (insulation resistance).

4 forms of Autophagy identified

• macroautophagy,
• microautophagy,
• chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA), and
• crinophagy.

Cancer Autophagy
Muscle
Brain
Liver
Plant
caffeine
alcohol
fat cells
neurons
measuring autophagy

Reference

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv5PGfimvds
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf93JOwu57Q
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxv_5YFsSTE