Unlocking the Body's Natural Detox: The Science of Autophagy

A groundbreaking discovery made by researcher Yoshinori Ohsumi is unveiling the body's autophagy mechanism. The word originates from Greek: auto (self) and phagy (to eat) – self-eating, referring to a process where the body's cells recycle proteins and organelles that are no longer needed, which can otherwise interfere with the body's regular function. The body gets rid of faulty cells and outdated cellular mechanisms lacking energy to sustain them, purging itself of old waste and cleansing as it goes. During short or extended fasts, this process intensifies, enabling the body to heal from chronic diseases and even cancer. This amazing mechanism, designed by Hashem, helps improve the body's metabolism, aiding in weight loss and recovery from chronic illnesses such as various inflammations, arthritis, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, and more. Autophagy peaks during fasting (including water). It doesn't happen during calorie-restricted diets, only during complete abstinence from food for many hours. Frequent meals slow down the pace of autophagy, which also declines with age.

How can you activate this process in your body effectively every day? It's rather simple.

There's no debate that we should eat dinner early, to avoid straining our bodies with food processing at night and instead consume most food during the day (eat like a pauper in the evening, says the Rambam). Essentially, if you stop eating by 6:00 PM and have breakfast the next day around 10:00 AM, you will experience a 16-hour fast. Today, people barely manage a 10-hour fast overnight, leaving insufficient time for the body to clear waste and heal. From my experience, treating people who adopt the wonderful habit of fasting for 14-16 hours at night (alongside a healthy diet, of course) saw faster recovery from chronic diseases and easy weight loss. Unfortunately, in recent generations, due to food abundance and the installation of electricity at home, people stay up late, consuming excessive amounts of food late at night. Such food is also unhealthy - processed, high-carb, and protein-rich from animal sources. All these reasons decrease the rate of autophagy. If we examine the diets of previous generations, food preparation efforts were significant. Additionally, people didn't consume snacks, cookies, pastries, or dairy desserts at all, and poultry and meats were perhaps eaten once a week, if they could afford it. In the past, people were mainly vegan for most of the week, eating little—because that's what there was. Try it for a week, and see the goodness!

(Photo: shutterstock)

In the past, people were mostly vegan for the week, eating little because that was what was available. They also consumed minimal animal food. By contrast, the daily animal protein people consume today is 2 to 3 times that of previous generations, and the same goes for carbohydrates. Our bodies cannot handle such amounts of acidic and dry food compared to basic and hydrated foods like fresh fruits and vegetables. If you reversed these proportions, eating more basic and hydrated food than dry food, you wouldn't experience constipation and its related ailments, wouldn't need to drink 2 liters of water (which is too much), and, naturally, you'd be healthier and leaner.

When looking at traditional villages in the East, in China, you'll see that they preserve the tradition in terms of the amount of protein they consume from plants, which is a third of what an average Westerner now consumes from animal sources. Accordingly, chronic Western diseases are absent in villages in China, including cancer, which is rare there (read the fascinating book "The China Study"). In conclusion, autophagy is not a new invention. In the past, everyone lived with many hours of fasting overnight. They ate during daylight hours, before darkness, and went to bed early, as there was no electricity and it was hard to live by candlelight alone. Also, many worked hard for their food in the morning, as there were no refrigerators or freezers, and it took time to prepare each dish. Consequently, most people in the world used to fast for many hours daily, eating just enough to satisfy or slightly hunger (as there wasn't the abundance of food like today), and were less ill with today's diseases.

To book home classes with naturopath Ruth Liat Or-Politz (at no cost), call 073-2221290