Enhance Heart Health: Fasting & Autophagy Tips

The problem is when we have chronically elevated insulin, so we should only have insulin at a high level for short periods of time when we’re consuming a meal. When we’re consuming many meals, multiple meals throughout the day and we’re consuming a lot of sugar and starch in our meals, we’re going to end up with higher levels of insulin. Insulin is a pro-inflammatory hormone, so it signals the upregulation of inflammatory gene pathways. Why does it do that? Well, if we look at the history of mankind, we know that chronic infections have killed more people in the history of mankind than anything else. And inflammation is the body’s way of adapting to infections and preventing infections from killing us.

When we would eat food, or really still when we eat food, we take in bacteria and other pathogens. So eating food itself promotes an inflammatory process. And part of the way it does that is by increasing insulin. And when insulin increases, the body knows food is coming in. That means pathogens are coming in. That means we need to be careful because we may have a very infectious pathogen that can kill us. So we’ll upregulate inflammation and that’s what ends up happening in our body, goes into a little bit more of a survival mode. So we get higher amounts of insulin when we’re consistently eating meals throughout the day, particularly meals that are higher in sugar and starch, and that is going to cause downregulation of liver detoxification pathways, increasing blood pressure.

So, you know, insulin alone, I should say it’s not a bad thing. Just so everybody knows, it’s the chronically elevated insulin that’s a problem. That’s because we’re eating so often. Our ancestors would only eat once or twice a day, maybe, right? And sometimes they would go days without eating. And so they kept insulin under control and their body was very insulin sensitive. But when insulin is elevated, we end up getting all these kinds of changes in our hormones, we get an aromatization for men where they have higher amounts of testosterone. We get androgenization in women when they have higher amounts of testosterone. A condition called PCOS polycystic ovarian syndrome is associated with insulin resistance, and more oxidative stress in the heart tissue and along the arterial beds, which can lay the groundwork for developing plaque, arteriosclerosis, and high blood pressure. So a lot of major issues there.

Now, how fasting improves heart health. Fasting works directly on insulin. When we fast we lower insulin by lowering insulin, we’re going to decrease inflammation, oxidative stress, and we’re going to enhance our sensitivity to insulin when we do eat food. We’re also going to improve our mitochondrial health and I’ll talk more about that. Of course, when insulin goes down, insulin is a fat-storage hormone. So it tells our body to store fat when insulin drops, we start burning fat for fuel. So we start burning up that extra fat, which only improves our insulin sensitivity. We also repair dysfunctional cells, a process called autophagy, which is extremely important for cardiovascular health. This improves blood pressure.

When we have high insulin, high insulin causes some changes, particularly in our kidneys and our blood vessels that will drive up blood pressure and also cause sodium retention. Which means we’re going to have more water because what follows sodium? Water. And so when we have high insulin, it tells us to hold on to it to sodium. And so we end up with higher blood pressure. And when we fast we actually need more sodium because our insulin drops and when we excrete more sodium so we actually need more. And then fasting also helps to strengthen blood vessels. And that’s because our body gets more resilient. So we get stronger, healthier cells with healthier mitochondria. So they’re less resistant, they’re less they’re less susceptible to stress and they’re more resilient to a stress. 

And that’s really what we’re trying to accomplish here. And so one of the key mechanisms for how the body heals, can actually heal arteriosclerosis and heal heart disease is through this process of autophagy. When we fast we activate autophagy, which is driven by these lysosomes which go in and metabolize older damaged cellular components like damaged mitochondria, damaged golgi apparatus, endoplasmic reticulum, and all the different components of the cell. We get rid of those, we recycle the raw materials and we create new healthier mitochondria and new healthier cellular organelles. And through that process, we can actually build much healthier cells and reverse the aging process and reverse the disease process. 

In fact, this interesting study here came out of the Journal of American Heart Association and it is February 2019, so very recent. And it actually talks about how intermittent fasting reverses an advanced form of cardiomyopathy and this is a rat’s study. What they actually showed was this Autophagy Lysosome Machinery and how basically intermittent fasting, upregulated this autophagy-like lysosome machinery, this ability to break down older cells and older cellular organelles. It stimulated what’s called the autophagic flux to pre-condition the heart and that reduced ischemia-reperfusion, which is basically like a low oxygen level injury and cell death. So a lot of these cells were dying due to poor oxygenation and the autophagy process was able to reverse that. 

So really powerful stuff right there showed it in rats. There’s some translation there that could be happening with humans as well. And I believe that when they do the human studies they will see a lot of changes. We’ve already seen some studies showing improvements in blood pressure in LDL, HDL, and triglyceride levels. So when you fast your triglycerides go down, your HDL goes up, and your LDL goes down typically or stays the same. And so you get the optimal ratio there with your triglyceride, HDL, and LDL. And I go over that in the article that associates this with this video that you can see in the links below. And then fasting also helps improve ketone production and it stimulates what we call mitophagy and mitochondrial biogenesis, where we produce newer, healthier mitochondria. The mitochondria produce the cell, they produce all the cellular energy within every cell. So the more healthy mitochondria we have in a cell, the more energetic the cell is, the more stress resilience it is, and the more it’s able to handle stress, respond, and adapt to it. So we get more of these mitochondria when we’re doing intermittent fasting. 

Intermittent fasting also helps to reduce oxidative stress and plaque formation in our arteries. It improves the vascular tone. So the ability, the elasticity of the collagen tissue on the inner lining of the blood vessel becomes better, becomes stronger, it becomes more flexible and more elastic. So very important there. And that’s going to help with blood pressure, helping stabilize blood pressure. And, of course, reducing atherosclerosis and arteriosclerosis where we have. Arterio is the hardening of the arteries. Athero is when we have plaque buildup, right on the arteries. And both of those are obviously big-time problems and intermittent fasting really helps with that. Now, how do we practice this? I always tell people to start small if you’ve never fasted before, master a simple fast 12 hours overnight, then move it into a brunch fast, and drink water in the morning.

Then you can proceed to a crescendo fast, which is 16-hour fast, two days per week. So this could be like from finishing dinner at 8 p.m. and not eating again until 12 p.m. the following day. Okay. And you do that twice a week. Nonconsecutive days for the crescendo fast. Then you move into the cycle fast where you’re doing that 16 hours, three times a week. Then you can extend it up to what we call a strong, fast, right where we’re doing more of a 16 to 18-hour window and you’re eating your meals in like a 6 hour eating window, like this example, 10 a.m., the person’s fasting, they’re waiting until 1:00 here and then they’re eating their food and you’re eating between 12 p.m. and 6 p.m. That would be an example of the strong fast. So whether you’re only eating in an eight-hour window each day or a six-hour eating window each day, that’s a strong, fast doing that on basically just about every day. And then you can move it into what we call OMAD, one meal a day or you’re just having one large meal and one hour timeframe every single day.

And you know, obviously, we want to make sure we’re eating nutrient-dense foods during that period of time, but that can have a profound effect on reducing overall inflammation. And, you know, if I had heart disease, this would definitely be a practice that I would do, would be tightening up that eating window, going into one to maybe two meals a day, depending on my weight, if I needed to lose weight, I would only do one meal a day and I would just have a really good healthy meal in a one-hour timeframe and eat till I was satiated. And that’s all I would do. But I didn’t need to lose weight. I would probably try doing kind of like what I do now where I do two meals a day in a six-hour eating window. So I usually eat my meals between 1 p.m. and 7 p.m., and I do that five days a week, and then two days a week I do just one meal a day. So I do what’s called a 5:2 fast. Five days of eating so two meals, two fasting days were only one meal. And that seems to work really well for me.

For some people, though, just doing one 24-hour fast per week can be really powerful. And then for others, especially if you really need to lose weight do alternate day fasting where you alternate between eating one meal and eating two meals. So maybe on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday you’re eating one meal. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday you’re eating two meals, for example. That could be some sort of an example of alternate-day fasting. So all those strategies will really work, really help your body to help heal your cardiovascular system, help prevent hardening of the arteries, help improve your blood pressure, help improve your cholesterol, triglyceride levels, your insulin, fasting, blood sugar, and really just get a powerful anti-aging effect.

So start practicing that. I know you’ll see great results. Would love to hear your questions and your comments below. So please do that. And if you haven’t subscribed to our channel, please do and hit the bell button next to Subscribe channel. That way you get all the other uploads, and immediate notifications of the uploads so you can go ahead and listen right away. I’m putting up usually 3 to 4 videos every single week on topics just like this. So you don’t want to miss these, so be sure to hit that bell button again. Hopefully, you guys got a lot out of this training and everybody be blessed.