How Fasting Can Help Prevent Alzheimer’s

Autophagy is the healing magic you need

In my previous Substack, I discussed how coffee can trigger a process called autophagy, a form of cellular detox that occurs everywhere in the body. Autophagy is crucial to disease prevention, from cancer to Alzheimer’s. It’s the body’s built-in healing system.

The search for a pharmaceutical intervention that could induce autophagy in the central nervous system is actively under way. But we’re not there yet. In any case, autophagy is something that doesn’t require medication. It happens naturally — but only if we let it. No drugs required.

Coffee is great, but if you want full-on, deep autophagy, you need to fast. It’s the most direct route to mental clarity and focus.

When you give your digestive system a break, the magic begins. Conversely, when you are busy eating, digesting, and metabolising, autophagy is put on hold: the cell is otherwise engaged. Food restriction induces autophagy “in most tissues”.

“One well-recognized way of inducing autophagy is by food restriction”

You don’t have to starve yourself or become malnourished. A simple, short fast will suffice.

About fasting

Humans have practised fasting for millennia, and for numerous reasons, including health, religious observation, and weight loss. There are many different ways to fast, some much easier than others. Intermittent fasting (IF) is an increasingly popular practice, albeit one that has been around “since earliest antiquity”.

There are many variations on this theme. “Time-restricted feeding” is probably the most popular, being the easiest to adhere to. Food intake is restricted to a window of around eight hours (or fewer), for example between 11am and 7pm. “Periodic fasting” involves abstinence from food for two or more days, and is something only recommended under medical supervision. In “alternate day fasting”, food is eaten only every other day.

Fasting is normal for humans. It’s what our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, in the absence of shops and a food industry hell-bent on promoting mindless snacking. Challenges in the form of having to find food meant that pre-agricultural humans had to function well both physically and mentally when in a fasted state — they had to make critical decisions and move fast on an empty stomach.

Simply avoiding unnecessary snacking between meals, and eating only when hungry, is enough to mimic the eating patterns of your ancient ancestors and trigger autophagy. A long overnight fast, beginning with an early evening meal and ending with a late breakfast is an efficient and (for most people) manageable form of time-restricted IF.

It works like this