What is autophagy and its importance? Why we should care about it?
In this video, Sachiaki Takamiya highlights the significance of autophagy and its role in maintaining cellular health.
Autophagy is vital for longevity
Nick: You write that intermittent fasting is one of the most effective ways to activate autophagy, which is considered to stop or slow down the aging process. So What is autophagy? And why is it important?
Sachiaki: So autophagy is kind of a function, a cellular function to regenerate or repair itself. Autophagy means self-eating. It basically eat the kind of decayed cell to renew. We all have this function when we're young, but once we get old, this function deteriorates.
And then we need to constantly activate this function to sustain this mechanism. And this was actually… The autophagy was not discovered. But the function of the autophagy was made famous by a Japanese scholar, called Yoshinori Ohsumi, who won the Nobel Prize in 2016 in the field of physiology and medicine, and then it became very famous worldwide.
And it is one of the key words in the field of longevity — health and longevity, autophagy. Once you can activate autophagy, you can slow down aging a lot. That's what it is said.
Nick: So it almost sounds like this process of recycling damaged cells or optimizing damaged cells so they can be used to help other cells grow or activate. Yeah, that's interesting. And I'm not surprised a Japanese researcher discovered that. Japanese do love to research.