The process of aging, despite what may be assumed, is actually well understood. It is simply the accumulation of damage to the body that occurs in the natural course of living. Once too much damage is sustained, then difficulties occur. All rational protocols to prolong useful life fall into one of two categories: prevent damage, or repair damage. Preventing dumb damage — don’t smoke — is easy.  Preventing the sort of damage that comes from normal metabolic activity is nearly impossible. So repairing damage is now what cutting edge medicine is increasingly looking at.
They don’t give out Nobel’s to just anyone with any sort of unproven science. It has got to be solid. Last year Yoshinori Ohsumi won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for describing autophagy. More or less, it is the process by which cells degrade and recycle unneeded or dysfunctional proteins and organelles. In other words, good cells cleaning up and eating bad cells and their byproducts. If you are at all interested in longevity, I advise a Google deep dive into autophagy.
Intermittent fasting seems to be one of the best way to activate the autophagy. Â There are a number of other benefits to intermittent fasting and we will go into various regimes in a later newsletter.
