[thebeastie]

Proponents of fasting will love this, since the idea is that not eating for a while will cause the body to scavenge for this old / damaged cell material.

[highwaylights]

And is that nonsense or is there evidence that backs it up?

[sendfoods]

I am sure fasting proponents promise way too many things, but the underlying cell cleanup mechanism [0] is very real and received the Nobel Prize in 2016 [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27912049/

[smt88]

I have multiple relatives who are aging researchers.

Fasting is healthy and normal. Many humans historically regularly "fasted" by today's standards just by going 12+ hours between modest meals.

We know that it slows signs of aging, but it can also depress the immune system (which might be why it slows aging), so it can still cause you to die young.

The effects of fasting on all-cause mortality are generally positive, but it's unclear right now whether that means people need to do uncomfortable levels of fasting or if most of us are just killing ourselves with eating too much and too often.

[flir]

FYI: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/fasting...

But as to the mechanism... not a scooby.

[DFHippie]

But here we want cells to eat themselves, not damaged organelles. I believe nuclear DNA isn't among the things cleaned up by autophagy.

[Maursault]

> I believe nuclear DNA isn't among the things cleaned up by autophagy.

The ProNukes have gone too far this time.

[FollowingTheDao]

Spermidine does this as well.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15548627.2018.1...

If you want to know how to increase it ask me how.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Dietary spermidine is rapidly resorbed from the intestine and distributed in the body without degradation [37].

[sendfoods]

> If you want to know how to increase it ask me how.

how?