• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

Aging Well for Life

Your Guide to Living Healthier & Happier for Longer

  • Start Here
  • About
    • About Jim
      • Legal
        • Important Disclaimers
          • Fitness and Exercise Disclaimer
          • Disclaimer
          • Medical Disclaimer
          • Opinion Disclaimer
        • Imprint
        • My Affiliate Policy
        • Terms and Conditions
  • Book
    • Buy-My-Book
    • Chapter Resources
    • Leave Your Review!
  • Resources
    • Chapter Resources
      • Why We Age
      • Habit #1- Quality Sleep
      • Habit #2 – Time Restricted Eating
      • Habit #3 – EZ CARDIO Protocols
      • Habit #4 – The Dry Sauna
      • Habit #5 – Limit Your Alcohol
      • Habit #6 – Dump Refined Sugar
      • Habit #7 – Prolonged Fasting With FMD
      • Habit #8 – The Anti-Aging Sprout
      • Habit #9 – The Anti-Aging Diet
      • Habit #10 – Meditation
    • Tools For Success
    • The 10 Health Habits Success Plan Resources
    • Free PDFs
  • Blog
    • The Aging Well for Life Podcast
      • Health Span Podcasts
    • Videos
    • Just 4 Fun!
  • Help
  • Contact
    • Free Book Weekend

How Autophagy Can Add Years of Great Health for Us Boomers!

May 31, 2019 By jimwjensen Leave a Comment

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/essentialboomer/Autophagy.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | More

Hello and welcome to health bites!

 HEALTH BITES is a short podcast meant to provide you with some basic understanding of the often-times complex concepts that are central to the many biological processes responsible for extending our health span.

Today, I want to share with you the awe and mystery of autophagy.

Autophagy plays a leading role in many of the life-hacks that have a major impact on your health-span.

We touched a bit on it back when I talked about zombie cells.

Mechanism of cellular autophagy, illustration for Nobel Prize Award in Medicine 2016. 3D illustration showing fusion of lysosome with autophagosome containing microbes and molecules

Autophagy literally means self-eating and that is exactly what happens to cells when they are in the state of autophagy. They literally consume all the junk protein by-products from everyday metabolism along with other pieces of cellular components that accumulate within the cells. Your body then breaks it down and re-uses the basic components for other cellular processes.

This process is related to apoptosis, where cells commit suicide and die. In the great scheme of things autophagy is a cell’s 1st line of defense when it is damaged and becoming non-functional. If autophagy fails to get the cell back to functionality, then they throw in the towel and commit hari-kari, through the process of apoptosis. That’s a good thing because it triggers your body to produce new cells to replace them.

There are several types of autophagy. The differences are in the type of cell that the autophagy occurs and what triggers it within those cells. For those of us interested in health-span, we are more interested in two forms of autophagy.

One is mitophagy. This occurs when your mitochondria, the little engines of our cells, go through the process of autophagy. This results in our mitochondria becoming more efficient, much like a tune-up for your car. It enables our metabolism to run more efficiently without causing oxidative stress on our bodies. Mitophagy also causes our body to create new mitochondria so it’s like throwing a new engine into that car of yours. That’s a good thing. If mitophagy is diminished by age or other processes then it could lead to chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s’ disease, and kidney disease.

The other prominent anti-aging autophagy is called Xenophagy. This is how the cells of your immune system remember threats from foreign invaders such as bacteria and viruses.

Autophagy is a vital function for maintaining our health. So how do we help our bodies to increase our level of autophagy?

Autophagy is typically triggered when our bodies are in stress. This can often come from external stresses such as changes in our environment such as the heat stress produced by sitting in a hot sauna or from exercise.

Exercise has been shown to effectively trigger autophagy in the brain, and with the liver, pancreas, adipose tissues, and muscles. This is one of the reasons why exercise is so effective at increasing health-span as well as helping to protect us against chronic diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and neurodegenerative diseases.  

Fasting also triggers autophagy in our entire body. Particularly with prolonged fasting of 3 days or more.  Dr. Valter Longo, out of USC, has found that prolonged fasting with the fasting-mimicking diet, will substantially increase autophagy throughout your entire body.

The beauty of the fasting-mimicking diet is that it provides the health and anti-aging benefits of a traditional 5 -day water fast while it prevents extreme hunger cravings, along with other potential health risks.  

Incorporating exercise and periodic prolonged fasting into your lifestyle can have very powerful anti-aging affects on your life.

Come join me on my very first prolonged fast!

I also want to extend an invitation to join The Essential Boomer Members Community!

Come Join US!

The Essential Boomer Members Community

We are a small, but mighty, private Facebook group comprised of vital, active, and very smart baby boomers and honorary boomers
who are all interested in extending our healthy years to live a long and happy life.

SOUNDS GREAT! TAKE ME THERE!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Login
  • Logout
  • My Profile
  • Legal Documents

Copyright © 2023 · The Essential Boomer LLC - All Rights Reserved - All Wrongs Reversed

Manage Cookie Consent
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
Preferences
{title} {title} {title}
Manage Cookie Consent
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
Preferences
{title} {title} {title}