Transcription
The title is not hyperbole, and that's not only because fasting has been discovered to supercharge fat loss through a fascinating mechanism in your cells, but because it lends further evidence to something that I predicted over four years ago when I looked like this. I know, yikes. And then someone looks at me now and says, "Yikes."
Anyway, so what am I talking about? I'm talking about this brand spanking new study. Basically, it shows that fasting activates a new mechanism of fat loss. You see, your fat cells store millions of fat molecules, and when we fast, meaning no calories consumed. Our fat cells release fat molecules into the blood to be delivered to our organs to feed them. There's a lot between there, but that's the gist.
And for your fat cells to release stored fat molecules, they usually rely on a process called lipolysis. However, when researchers looked at the enzymes, the functional proteins responsible for this lipolysis process, they actually discovered the amount of the enzymes was diminished, not elevated. Which is puzzling because if they're needed for the releasing of fat, why would they not be elevated? That's because the fat cells are increasing other proteins that are not usually linked to fat breakdown. In fact, that's why the title of this study is called non-cononical because these proteins are involved in autophagy.
In fact, we can actually see it here in these microscope images. I'll add an image of a fat cell here to follow along. The blue is the nucleus of the cell. The red is the identifying marker of the fat cell. And all that black area is where the millions of fat molecules are stored. The green is an identifying marker of autophagy. If you focus on the inset at the far right, the white arrow is pointing to activation of autophagy vesicles in the fasting condition. To be clear, they also show average data corroborating this image.
So this is the exciting part for me because years ago I discussed some other research that showed that autophagy may be elevated related to fasting but specifically in immune cells involved in fasting. So I'll get into that in just a little bit. For now just know that fasting does not increase the normal fat loss mechanisms but increases autophagy to help in fat release from the fat cells.
But here's the thing. What was actually discovered through some elegant experiments is that fasting forces changes upon the body. Meaning initially fat breakdown does occur through normal lipolysis. But as the fast progresses, autophagy becomes a bigger and bigger player. Essentially there is a metabolism handoff. As the fat cells begin upregulating, producing more autophagy proteins to create autophagy vesicles to break down fat.
So one question is why? Why not just stick with the usual lipolysis pathway? Well, I have my own hypothesis and the researchers present another perspective. Essentially, they believe that the stimulus for fat loss is different between the initial period of the fast and the prolonged periods of the fast. Initially, fat loss is triggered by hormones binding to the fat cells, telling them to activate lipolysis and by releasing fat. However, as the fast progresses, the trigger changes away from a predominantly hormonal origin, which begins the handoff to the autophagy system. Basically, both fat breakdown systems respond to different stimuli. Initially, it's hormonal, later it's less so.
Now, my perspective doesn't actually contradict that, and it's even mentioned to a degree by the researchers themselves. Essentially, I think that the initial stages of a fast, your body is still partly dependent on glucose. So, sugar metabolism as it metabolizes the glycogen, stored glucose inside the tissues. However, once that is depleted, there's a much greater need to rely on fat metabolism. So, the fat cells have to dump fat like their lives depend on it. Think of it like initially they have the dam half open, but deeper into the fast, the dam fully opens. That's when these large autophagy vesicles can capture thousands of fat molecules that will be far more efficient at breaking down that fat for release. Without it, the bottleneck is the sheer amount of enzymes necessary to go through the canonical or the normal lipolysis pathway. And in essence, the lipolysis system is too slow. It requires a more powerful force to step in and help autophagy.
By the way, and just as a quick correction to myself, the true word is lipophagy, not autophagy. But autophagy is just more recognizable. I just had to get that off my chest. Okay. Fascinating.
But how does this relate to our immune cells? Remember, I alluded to some previous studies looking at autophagy on fat in immune cells during fasting. And beyond that, these results that we've gone over are only possible to be studied to this degree in animals. So, does this actually translate to humans? Now, I'd like to get more into that, especially the immune angle in a bit, but before we do that, there's some fascinating consequences of fasting caused autophagy on the liver, how it suctions fat out like a vacuum cleaner, as well as some other metabolic effects, and some more details on what happens in us mere mortals, the human folk.
If you're interested in a deeper dive on the whole topic, plus an accompanying article and all these perks right here, like I don't know, live sessions that I'm doing soon and on a regular basis, check out the Physionic Insiders. It's my personal research platform and there's a community of insiders that we all discuss together. So, consider joining. The link is in the description.
That rude interruption dismissed. The reality is that we can't do all these same experiments in humans. So, we do more exact experiments in animals and then we look for clues in humans and what clues we find. When looking at people who fast for 10 days, we discover several clues. Specifically shown here, we're looking at four genes that are tightly related to control autophagy, I mean lipophagy, in human fat tissue. In orange and gray are the gene expressions or the amount of the gene reading occurring before the fast and the red dots are the results that are after the fast. For two of the genes, the genes that were most studied throughout the study, though I've mostly spared you from the TDM, were elevated with fasting. So this creates a correlation that what we see in animals is possibly also the case in humans. That said though, they took things one step further by taking fat samples and exposing them to autophagy inhibitors. As expected, the autophagy blockers slowed fat release significantly, further substantiating these results in humans. So, the point here is that while not foolproof, there is some evidence substantiating that autophagy is heavily involved in human fasting for mass release of fat from the fat cells. I mean, come on. You can't say that isn't really freaking cool. I mean, that is so wild.
Here's the thing, though. As I alluded to, this wasn't the first study that was discussing these kinds of things, though. Other studies were focused on the fascinating cross talk between your fat cells and your immune cells. Essentially, and there's plenty more detail to this that I'll link for you, but essentially, fat cells will export their fat in vesicles as well. In doing so, immune cells invade into the fat tissue and it's assumed that they take up these fat vesicles and they deal with this potentially through increasing autophagy of their own. Now, how freaking cool is that? What a synergy.
Well, look, none of this is saying that you have to fast. And it's really not telling us anything at all applicable. It's just telling us about a fascinating discovery. And that discovery is that fasting supercharges fat loss by employing autophagy systems in our fat cells to rapidly break down stored fat.
Now, promise me you won't make fun of my hair. You pinky promise. If you'll promise, I'll link the first video on fasting and increases in inflammation. No, not a bad thing. It's based on what we went over here, but I was younger, dumber, and had fewer jokes. So, bear with me. I'll put it here and in the description. And I have a follow-up video going into even more detail on autophagy inside immune cells right here. Either that you choose will lead to the other, so it doesn't really matter which one you choose to watch first. Thanks for nerding out with me and I'll see you over.