Transcription
and I can show you how you can start to heal yourself without money, without time. We can end chronic disease; we can get people immunologically strong; we can get people metabolically fit for the first time. This is our door out of chronic disease.
Meet Dr. Mindy Pels, a top nutrition and functional health expert and a best-selling author. She is a recognized leader in the alternative health field and a pioneer in the fasting movement. In this video, we distill the essence of her teachings and highlight the top six foods she consumes to promote effective autophagy, seamlessly fitting within her fasting regimen. Nobody cures you; you cure yourself. You have to start to look at the human body as this self-healing organism that's always figuring out how to keep you alive.
Let's first understand what autophagy is. Autophagy is where the cells realize that there are no nutrients—it's nutrients and blood sugar (glucose) coming into the cell. It's like an internal mechanism where the cell goes, "Huh, nothing's coming in. Okay, we got to make sure we're a better version of ourselves." So, it'll push out viruses; it'll push out bacteria out of the cell. The other thing that it does is it will say, "Hey, you know what? This cell's going rogue. This cell's becoming a cancer cell. This is a 'zombie' cell that's going to start to age you quickly. They're a weak member of the team." In this fasted state, where no glucose is coming in and no nutrients are coming in, you're a liability, and we need to get rid of you. And so, it gets rid of those cells.
Autophagy is a natural cellular process in which cells degrade and recycle their own components. The term autophagy comes from the Greek words "auto," meaning self, and "phagy," meaning eating. Essentially, autophagy is the body's way of cleaning out damaged cells in order to regenerate newer, healthier cells. For autophagy to take place, the body needs to be in a fasted state.
Then what happens in a fasted state? What is a fasted state? It's really when that blood sugar comes down enough that it triggers the body to switch. At eight hours, you start to make the switch. By about 12 hours, your body's now starting to make a good dose of ketones; the brain is excited, so you're getting that mental clarity. Ketones turn off the hunger hormone, so when you switch over, there's going to be a point when you're not hungry, and that all happens at about 12 hours.
At 13 hours, we start to see that growth hormone goes up, which is what slows down the aging process. It helps us burn fat. We also see in men that testosterone starts to go up—a 1300% increase in testosterone with just a 15-hour time period. We see inflammation (CRP) goes down, which is an inflammatory blood marker. In fact, one of the greatest studies ever done on women took a group of women after they had traditional breast cancer treatment and had them just fast 13 hours every single day. They noticed that there was a 64% less recurrence of breast cancer in the group that all they did was fast for 13 hours a day. They didn't even change their food; they just fasted.
So check this out: research shows that at 15 hours, we see growth hormone go up. Growth hormone is the hormone that keeps you young and helps you burn fat. But if you stay in that fasted window and keep going to 17 hours, your brilliant body turns within and goes, "Wait a second, no food's coming in; we better get stronger." At 17 hours, we stimulate the cells to start to repair themselves, and old aging cells get removed. At 24 hours, your whole gut resets, and you get intestinal stem cells that come in and repair the whole inner lining of the gut.
At 36 hours, your body goes and finds that stubborn fat, specifically around the belly, and it starts to burn that for energy. At 48 hours, with no food coming in, now all of a sudden you're getting new dopamine receptor sites. Why are you getting that? Because your brain has got to get motivated to go find food, so you reboot the whole dopamine system. Then at 72 hours, the whole immune system reboots itself and recycles itself. That's without a drug; that's without a supplement. That's why I'm like this: we have to get this out to the world. This is our door out of chronic disease.
Then should I go and fast for 72 hours all the time? The answer is no. The three-day water fast twice a year is a great time to just get rid of cells that are aging you quickly or cells that are going rogue and becoming tumors. Get rid of those. The 48-hour fast once a quarter is for those who have a mental health challenge. If you are depressed and anxious and you're looking for a variety of tools to help you and boost your moods, then do a 48-hour fast once a quarter.
The 36-hour fast is really there for the person who's just so frustrated and cannot lose weight. So if you're really struggling with weight loss, throw a 36-hour fast at it once a month. Then the 24 hours and below—I have people vary those weekly, depending on where they are in their cycle. But one 24-hour fast a week can be really miraculous. Those are the one meal a day people; do it once a week, don't do it every day. Most people are doing either a combination of something between 12 hours and 17 hours on a regular basis, except the week before their cycle.
When fasting, it's crucial to be mindful of your food choices. Here are the top six foods that Dr. Mindy frequently consumes to maximize the benefits of fasting.
First, avocado—especially great for breakfast. I love breaking a fast with fat. Why would you break a fast with fat? The reason is it kills the hunger hormone, so it'll shut off the hunger hormone. You say, "Okay, I'm going to eat fat first, and then I'm going to wait an hour before I eat anything else." If you do that little trick, you're going to find within an hour you're not going to want to eat what you thought you might want to eat. That immediate desire to boomerang will go away. I often break my fast with an avocado; it's super easy—just cut it in half and eat it.
A more interesting way Dr. Mindy enjoys avocado is by eating it with probiotic foods. I do a lot of sauerkraut and kimchi. I'll take an avocado and put kimchi and sauerkraut on top, combining that probiotic-rich food with fat. That's my most common way I break a fast, but now you're replenishing these good bacteria; you're feeding these good bacteria first that are going to help you lose weight.
The next food is cacao, which is chocolate. The Mars company actually went in and did research on what chocolate does for autophagy. Now, that doesn't mean you go out and eat a Mars bar. I would prefer that you go after clean cacao sources. A couple of different things that you can look for when you're buying chocolate: you can look for the word cacao, and the number one ingredient should be cacao. The second is cacao butter. But when you do chocolate, you want to really go after the extremely dark varieties. The darker it is, the more chocolate and cacao it contains.
The study done on cacao, just for you guys that are research-minded, was published in the Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry in 2009 and was conducted on liver cells. They found that when they gave cacao to these liver cells, it stimulated autophagy.
Next is coffee. They did a study out of Cell Cycle in 2014 and found that one to four hours after you drank coffee, they noticed an increase in autophagy in the liver, muscle tissue, and heart tissue. Here are my recommendations for coffee: it needs to be organic, as we know pesticides create more cell death and more toxins in cells. The other big issue we have with coffee is that it can often have a lot of mold, so you want to make sure it's organic and mold-free. Otherwise, you're trying to stimulate autophagy, but you're adding toxins in—it doesn't really make sense to me.
For coffee lovers, you may have a question about whether you can enjoy coffee during the fasting period. Can I have my coffee in my fasting window? I would say, of the millions of people we've watched fast, for most people, black coffee is going to work in your fasting window. In the book and on my YouTube channel, I've really emphasized that you should do a blood sugar test to make sure that it does work for you, and we can talk about that in a moment. But with coffee, if it's black, it's going to be fine in your fasting window. If you add MCT oil, even better, because it'll start to move you over into this fat-burning ketogenic system quicker. Once you start adding cream, you're going to have to really do the blood sugar test and see if cream works for you.
Another drink that is great for boosting autophagy is green tea. Hopefully, you know by now that green tea is considered a health food. It's a great alternative if you don't want to get too much stimulation from coffee. The Nutrients Journal in 2019 did a study on the neuroprotective effects of green tea. They also found that it stimulates autophagy in any cell that it was exposed to. It's one of those universal stimulators of autophagy, so super cool.
Bergamot tea was actually studied in both a mice study and a human study, and they found that bergamot oil—like an essential oil—created autophagy in human neuroblastoma cancer cells. Again, this is nerve tissue; these are tumors and cancer. That study was done in 2014.
Now let's talk about olive oil, a kitchen staple. You want to make sure that it's organic and that it's never rancid. You want to smell it; it shouldn't live on your countertop or in your cupboards for a long time. If it goes rancid, it's not going to stimulate autophagy; it'll actually create cellular inflammation. The other thing you don't want to do with olive oil is heat it up. If you heat it up and put it on a pan and it starts to smoke, you've now turned it into an inflammatory fat.
The research on olive oil is also really cool in the sense that they're finding it has an effect on the beta-amyloid and tau proteins that are associated with Alzheimer's. They have also been doing studies on olive oil with cancer, specifically on metastatic osteosarcoma. Try to use as much olive oil as possible. I would even say you could take a scoop of it and have a tablespoon a day, especially if you're looking to do that within your fasting window.
The final top food on the list to boost autophagy is curcumin. Curcumin is that really magical component of turmeric. There are also a lot of different ways that you can get curcumin into your diet. You can sprinkle it on your food; we always buy our spices organic. You can also get the turmeric root at your local Whole Foods, juice it, and drink it with a green juice. It's a little woody tasting, but it can be done. You can also cut it up and put it into stir-fries as well. That is a wonderful way to get a big dose of curcumin.
The research done on turmeric shows that it increases autophagy in pancreatic cells. They also did a study in 2019 on a tick-borne disease and found that curcumin inhibited the proliferation of the disease by stimulating apoptosis, which is cell death, and by stimulating autophagy in other cells, which cleans the cell up. If you put turmeric with black pepper, it goes into the cell at a deeper level.
Now, on to the conclusion from Dr. Mindy Pels: you need to set up a long-term game to stimulate autophagy. If you're not putting any effort into stimulating autophagy, your cells are building up with toxins.