This Increases Autophagy 3x MORE THAN FASTING | Dr. Tommy Wood

all right i've got dr tommy wood doc what did you have for breakfast uh i had a late breakfast today because i had a late dinner last night uh so i wasn't really hungry until like the middle of the day but i had a pound and a half of yogurt with a scoop of whey protein and a bunch of pineapple nice it's actually pretty similar to mine mine was just berries so instead of the pineapple interesting all right so dr tommy wood one of my favorite people in the world i know him from some mutual people that i've worked with on the department of defense side tommy can you give a quick introduction of who you are just a 500 foot aerial view of what you're all about before we just jump right into this stuff sure so i am an assistant professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at the university of washington my day job as i call it is as a basic neuroscientist trying to find ways to treat the injured brain and at multiple life stages so early in life you know i do a lot of work in a neonatal brain injury pediatric brain injury then also later life traumatic brain injury and then finally late life cognitive decline um and then i sort of have an applied side as well where i work with particularly elite level athletes and you know various other groups who are at high risk of traumatic brain injury and then some some individuals who either have or at risk of cognitive decline to try and sort of either mitigate or prevent neurodegeneration and changes in cognition as people get older so the the kind of the 30 000 foot view is i look at all the different ways that we can keep the brain healthy and functioning throughout the entire lifespan yeah man you've got a pretty wide spectrum there which is perfect just all the way down from neonatal all the way to elite athlete and that's that's pretty awesome all right so i want to jump right in because it's the way youtube is when i get right to the meat and potatoes or in this case i guess the steak and the egg exhibit but we want to talk about autophagy okay now most of the people that are probably listening to are watching this they know autophagy as something that happens when they're fasting and this probably they don't really think of it throughout the entire umbrella in which it occurs and i've tried talking about it on my channel to a lot of different degrees explaining that look at autophagy is in a lot of ways almost always occurring uh some degree whether it's in our pinky toe or in you know or liver or whatever one of the things we wanted to talk about is when you look at the world of autophagy arguably the best way to induce autophagy is actually through exercise not saying that fasting doesn't induce autophagy but can you explain this a little bit more because i found this very interesting check out today's video sponsor thrive market so if you're trying to change your life a little bit you're trying to eat better thrive market is an online membership based grocery store that has tons of better for you 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particularly when it comes to autophagy and when you look at the data both in humans and then in rodents and the reason why you might look uh rodents is because if you're interested in autophagy outside of the muscle tissue you know in we might take humans get them to exercise or fast look at autophagy we do a muscle biopsy that's not too bad but if you want to look at the liver or the brain or some other tissue right difficult to do in humans but much easier to do in animals so we kind of have to look at a bit of both but when you look at the applied literature in humans a 60 minute bout of low level intensity aerobic exercise like 50 to 60 percent of vo2 max up regulates autophagy as much as a 72-hour fast and they've even done studies where they have people fast for 36 hours before they do exercise or they have them continuously fed during exercise they give them a glucose infusion during exercise and that fasting period before the exercise doesn't augment doesn't increase the autophagy response to exercise it's all driven by the exercise itself and if you give people a glucose infusion while they're exercising that also doesn't blunt it so it's really the exercise that's driving that autophagy response rather than the nutrient availability either fasting or fed that's really interesting so does nutrient availability outside of an exercise state still influence autophagy as we've sort of suspected over the last few years though yeah absolutely um but you really have to think about the net energetics of the cell so at rest yes nutrient availability does of course regulate autophagy because we know that sort of the major initiator of autophagy ulk1 is um activated or inhibited by mtor or ampk so it's all about nutrient sensing so yes if you're in the fed state and you're rested then you know you will inhibit autophagy and you can up regulate it with fasting and up regulating ampk however if you're doing exercise the sort of the net energetics of the cell are of course you you're creating an energy deficit or energy flux through the cell and then that's much greater than the general energy availability so then that net effect is an overall in general at least initially activation of ampk and activation of autophagy during exercise regardless of the nutrient availability that makes a ton of sense you know when it comes down to types of exercise is there arguably a better type of exercise i mean aerobic exercise seems to be a big powerful driver but does it matter how much the body is moving i mean a body through space obviously moves a lot more than say just sitting on a bike or something are there are there specific kinds of exercise or resistance training or functional style training like crossfit where you're kind of combining a lot of these is there any literature on that or do we just have to take a guess or yes it's a good question some people have looked at you know relative intensities of aerobic exercise and in that setting intent you know the the more intense uh the greater the up regulation autophagy and again if you think about this as like a an energy sensing uh system then that makes sense right the the greater you tax your muscles from an energetic standpoint the the greater the activation of these processes but that's comparing 55 percent of vo2 max to 70 of vo2 max that doesn't answer your like cross crossfit or sprint training question um they've done uh studies where they had either people do sort of a steady state or add uh intermittent high intensity sprints on top of the steady state and adding the steady state didn't further increase autophagy but it also didn't decrease it so it seems like you know a prolonged-ish period of something that looks relatively aerobic but at the higher intensity end seems to be where you get the greatest activation of autophagy from an exercise standpoint but that's with i don't think anybody's really looked at um you know resistance training or sort of just uh interval sprints however we do know separately that if you do say exhaustive uh resistance training like they have studies where you do like 10 sets of 10 to failure of leg extension like something that sounds awful um and you can get significant upregulation of ampk by doing that and i think you know by sort of we can infer that you would be getting up regulation autopsy just they haven't measured they just haven't measured it in that kind of setting as far as interesting i wonder if uh at a certain rate glycogen depletion also plays a role with that you know if someone is especially when you're still looking at that high volume kind of stuff like that sounds like german volume training to me which is utterly miserable um you know a colleague and i met we were talking about this before this and if we look at that okay if autophagy is induced by exercise then in theory when you are moving a muscle for resistance training with resistance training and you have this localized activation you know mtor c1 are you potentially if mtor inhibits autophagy are you imp inhibiting mtor at a more insurance inhibiting autophagy at a muscle level when you are resistance training albeit autophagy may still be occurring within different organs and mitochondria within different organs interesting question but i'm just curious on that if there's any idea whatsoever yeah i think if we go back to that sort of similar scenario where you're doing very high intensity exhaustive resistance training as an example you get an early activation of ampk followed by a delayed activation of mtor so i think that you may get some um autophagy as an early response and and one of the reasons we undergo autophagy is because in the cell you're trying to access nutrients for energy metabolism um and this is one of the reasons why we respond to an injury where you get reduced energy production with autophagy is because what it's like we'll just start taking what we don't need because we need whatever we will take whatever we can get from an energetic standpoint to use as for energy metabolism and so there's that early response so i think you can still activate autophagy and then you get a later growth and repair response so i don't think they're necessarily antagonistic they just happen differently in sort of in sort of time scales yeah that makes a lot of sense that's really interesting to think about and just and you touched on this and there were little hints of it that i want to make sure that it's kind of coming to light more in an explained way with fasting for extended periods of time say 24 36 48 hours after those longer fasts then exercise seems to become a fasting accelerator but not necessarily prior to that is that what you're alluding to no i think that yeah the opposite the exercise um mimics fasting from an autophagy standpoint at least regardless of the the context that you that you put it in so if you take you do exercise after an extended fast or you do exercise when fed you get the same autophagy response so i think i think what i meant was are you going to get additional benefit by fasting while exercising at that rate and i think i think what you were saying before was something like the only time where exercise might add additional benefit with fasting is if it's a longer fast so it's not necessarily the fast length doesn't necessarily matter as far as how exercise is going to impact it yeah so i think there's there's two important things that come out of that when you look at fasting and i think the longest they've done is 36 hours fast f 36 hour fast prior to exercise so i i don't think i can comment beyond that but if you do 36 hours of fasting plus the exercise that that period of fasting doesn't give you a bigger autopsy response when you exercise however when we think about extended fasting in general this is kind of separate but important with with longer fasts you start to get this picture of what we call quote-unquote physiologic insulin resistance which i hate as a term but uh what it means is you're you're sort of changing how you'll then respond to certain nutrients in order to sort of prioritize where nutrients are going in the body while you're fasting if at the end of that fast you then you know have a massive blow out you're then going to have much larger responses say in blood sugar to that meal than you would have done if you hadn't fasted for several days beforehand just because of the way the body is sort of prioritizing nutrient handling during the fast however you can offset some of that by exercising during fasting so this is now separate from specifically autophagy and now we're just talking about in general sort of cell level insulin sensitivity in the muscle tissue but that makes it makes sense yeah yeah there's some benefit i think there's benefit from moving or doing exercise during extended fast but it's not necessarily directly related to autophagy it's related to maybe some other processes particularly what then might happen when you break that fast yeah and we're gonna do a separate topic specifically on that and just the fact of just it's and we'll kind of hint at it here just so you have an idea but essentially movement during fasting is probably one of the most important things and it's something that i've talked about a lot if you don't use it you lose it and that's definitely when you're in this state where you're not having nutrients coming in it just makes a lot more sense that you know you should be moving but it's counter-intuitive to what you might think initially like oh well i move i'm gonna break down all my muscle and it's gonna it's quite the opposite it's more about use it so your body doesn't see it's necessary to burn it peter tia had mentioned something a while back a couple years back about muscle protein breakdown during a fast potentially allowing for sort of a reallocation of amino acids into other areas of the body so purely hypothetical and just like theoretical here but your breakdown cells from your skin and they break down and they deaminate and you also have amino acids that could stimulate muscle protein synthesis during a fast so you kind of have this sort of regurgitation that's going on if you want to call it that or recycling in a weird way and the evidence is a little bit kind of bleak i know there's a journal applied physiology study that kind of looked at it a little bit but do you know much about that and based upon this could we argue that maybe aerobic exercise based upon this autophagy process we're talking about could actually help stimulate muscle protein synthesis as well so yeah again there are multiple potential pieces to this uh during i think during extended fasting but also during um say prolonged endurance bout so you're thinking about like ultra marathons potential longer endurance bouts this redistribution of amino acids is important for something called anaplerosis which is basically the replenishment of intermediates in the krebs cycle so that you can keep using it to generate energy because as you use the krebs cycle you know these intermediates come off and maybe they go into you know different biosynthetic pathways and things like that but you need to replenish it and amino acids are the source of that and if you're not consuming those in your food then you that needs to come from somewhere so muscle tissue or you know other other tissues that are you know undergoing some kind of proteolysis that will provide and that that's a beneficial thing that's important so that's part of that redistribution um in terms of aerobic exercise stimuli stimulating muscle protein synthesis i think it probably depends on the individual um and and again their training status because if you're completely untrained we know that aerobic exercise stimulates muscle tissue because it's just like it's a brand new stimulus right you haven't had that stimulus and it's going to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and you're going to build muscle like regardless of what that movement is or the level of intensity really later on you know if you're uh you know a well-trained individual i'm not sure that that's the case you'll get that same stimulus however it may help you to again redistribute so there are the these tissues that you no longer need you know maybe you've lost a significant amount of weight you have sort of excess skin you know there's some people who who think that extended periods of fasting or aerobic exercise may help redistribute some of that tissue so you can help you know get rid of some of that i think it's possible um i don't really know of the evidence to support it but again it might depend on on the individual and their sort of like previous previous status and how they respond to a given stimulus yeah based upon stimulus it's a good thing to bring up here because i think about people that might be listening or watching really overweight have a lot of weight to lose 30 60 minutes of aerobic exercise is not necessarily in the cards yet but what were in terms of a specific intensity that we might be talking about does the intensity level vary in terms of when that autophagy is going to begin so someone that is not trained okay so let's take me i'm i'm well conditioned for me to reach that point of autophagy that we are talking about do i potentially have to go harder and go longer that we know of so all the research has been done to date and that's one good thing about sort of the applied exercise literature is that the effort is always scaled to capacity so you're always doing work at a given percent of your usually of your either your vo2 max or your watts at vo2 max say if you're on a bike or something like that so then i think it's it's all relative right so if you are completely untrained and your vo2 max is you know somewhere between 20 and 30 mils of oxygen per kilo per minute right then it doesn't take much effort to reach that 50 or 60 percent where they've seen autophagy being up regulated i don't think anybody's like really looked across the entire scale you know you sort of like pick a level and see what happens there but i think because it's relative yes so you're going to have to push harder but it's also you you're able to push harder because you have greater capacity so i think it's you're probably i think it all sort of evens out based on an individual's current conditioning level interesting okay so that makes a lot more sense because if especially if we're talking about vo2 max then that kind of clears that up i think where i was getting possibly hung up on it is okay if someone is just resistance training and it might be you know their level of adaptation is going to be so much earlier on than say mine and we just probably just don't know the answer specifically with resistance training on how that applies since the research seems to look at more vo2 max but it's just i know that's a question that comes up as people always want to know okay how is it more custom tailored for me when do i get to this autophagy response and the unfortunate thing that we have to say it's fortunate for people that like hard work but a lot of times like these kinds of things come with effort right you have to work hard you have to be able to push it is there a line of diminishing return that we're aware of so like if we start pushing it into zone four zone five and go really heavy intensity in terms of aerobic work or or even you know or aerobic pushing into that anaerobic threshold and really going above and beyond does that have less impact or does it continue does i'm sure there's a line of diminishing return but is there actually negative impact as far as like start going so high is there so much ross that ends up elevating that you're kind of counteracting the effects of autophagy again i don't think i don't think we know um however if if we think about it as a function of if you think about it as a function of intensity and energy flux obviously if you go harder it'll be a shorter period of time but maybe sort of like the area under the curve of energy demand ends up being similar um so yes probably up to a point more intensity is better but then you'll get to a point where you can't push harder without going for a shorter period of time so then maybe my guess is it kind of averages out again if we think about you know um sort of exhaustive resistance training where you're getting this early ampk response that's kind of similar to activating ampk through aerobic exercise so you so so it's probably if you just think about it like a net flux effect like how much total energy have you required your cells to use the only time um that i'd maybe be concerned is that we know very high intensity high volume athletes are at risk sort of longer term from certain things so particularly like um afib so like the heart seems to get this like tissue level inflammation from this really high volume of high intensity endurance exercise and it's been it's been um modeled in in the lab as well where you get mice and you basically put them on a weighted treadmill and it's that kind of like high intensity hard work for long periods of time it's probably not great for all the tissues in the body and maybe the heart is the one where we've seen that the most um but equally i think if people are being sensible in terms of rest and recovery and giving themselves to adapt to the stimulus that's being put on them i it's unlikely you'd probably have other signs of either um over training or you know at least sort of the that you're you're pushing harder than you're able to recover from and then i'm probably less worried about autophagy than i am about a whole bunch of other things and you know hormones and all those all that other kind of stuff yeah and that's you know for for people like you and i that's that's on our radar and one of the but one of the concerns that i have is you know people get very hung up on the word autophagy and they get very hung up on that with with fasting and yes it's an awesome thing okay don't get me wrong but when you start fasting so much obviously there's a very clear line of diminishing return in fact a very stark line of detriment when you start going too far the same applies for exercise and definitely the same applies for exercise while also being fasted and you look at people that are overweight that start thinking okay well these benefits of autophagy are coming because i'm fasting yes they could be but a lot of times you're losing weight you're probably more active and you're probably getting more benefit from autophagy the fact that you're more active because you're losing weight but they get addicted to that autophagy sort of i say response they don't necessarily know what it feels like but they they think they do they think okay i'm fasting so i'm going to this autophagy so if i'm having this much much autophagic flux right now then a little bit more is better and how do i keep pushing it and you know there's a fine line where autophagy doesn't really matter and just like you said you're much more concerned with other things right like then you start looking at your cortisol your testosterone all these things that are plummeting because of this and who cares if you have all the autophagy in the world if that stuff is going in the toilet right another i want to kind of hit on on buzzwords because i think it's important to talk about things that people are talking about and i get really concerned because i see things in uh instagram and like short reels where people are trying to make statements in 20 seconds and it's the most frightening thing in the world and one of the things that's coming up a lot is mitophagy and it's these words come around a lot right they they someone talks about them and then they get taken and they so my tophagi obviously is autophagy happening at a mitochondrial level does do you think aerobic exercise is going to have that same impact as far as mitophagy is concerned like is autophagy sort of the big umbrella and everything is kind of happening underneath that umbrella or is my autophagy totally separate and apart it is it's so funny that you talk about this because do you know what i've i've you know i've i've done some occasional extended fast i do a lot of aerobic exercise because you know i think about the cardiovascular benefits it helps me recover faster so i can get more work done in the gym load of benefits i've literally never once thought about my aerobic exercise in my autophagy like because it's just so disconnected from like the real world that i've literally literally never thought about it but we're talking about it because you know it's interesting and and people want to hear about it um and i would kind of fit my topology into there and yes i think that broadly when autophagy is happening you're probably getting mitochondria unless you are sort of experimentally in animals manipulating specific pathways and in general when we've looked at my um autophagy in human so again it's usually in muscle and usually in response to exercise or fasting um then you know we we look at autophagy in general so we look at things like uk 1 p62 lc3 which are kind of like all the different proteins of all the different parts of autophagy but i know of one study at least where they did both they also looked at the proteins associated with mitophagy so instead of urk1 being the master regulator it's regulated by pink one and parkin and um when they looked at exercise responses to aerobic exercise they saw like general autopsy responses and then they also saw upregulation of mitophagy in a similar manner so i think that whatever you're doing where they've seen it activates autophagy in general it's probably activating mythology as well and that's i would just sort of lump that as like a subset because that's going to be you know when you're doing undergoing autophagy you're taking organelles you're taking you know proteins either that aren't required or that have aggregated perhaps and that includes mitochondria so i wouldn't think of them as separate things in general yeah okay and that's kind of what i would think as well and the weird caveat is okay there's all this twisted i don't call it research but interpretation of research where okay mitochondrial biogenesis could be a problem if you have dysfunctional mitochondria okay i'll buy that that makes sense so then if aerobic exercise is upregulating or increasing ptc1a and you're having more mitochondrial biogenesis occurring then could aerobic exercise be detrimental that's kind of the question that i've seen a couple of comments i'm like no i don't i don't see a lot of situations where aerobic exercise would be detrimental candidly and i don't think it works quite like that you know to the point where you're going to have this dysfunctional mitochondria that's going to replicate more dysfunctional mitochondria because you're exercising um but it brings up that interesting point of okay well where is that line between like mitochondrial biogenesis and also that mitophagy that's occurring um because you know you look at some of the longevity research that is a question that comes to mind although exercise isn't really the point of it this is an interesting interesting thought i don't think there's even an answer it's just something that i put out there like maybe we'll never really know the answer to that but yeah i think you know in in general biology at the cellular level is way smarter than we are and it integrates all these things over time in a way that we don't really think about it so if you you know if you do a study you measure one thing at one time and and and then you might sort of get into your head that oh you know or you have dysfunctional mitochondria and then you're stimulating mitochondrion are you making more dysfunctional mitochondria but in general i think these things sort of happen and integrate over time so exercise so say we if we think it assists in the recycling of dysfunctional if you want to call them that mitochondria which it does seem to and we know that um autophagy is unregulated with intensity so more autophagy with greater intensity and we also know that in general within the aerobic sphere the greater the intensity the greater the mitochondrial biogenesis uh in response so i think both of these things are happening you're clearing out or repairing mitochondrion that happens through both fusion and fission and then you take out the bits you don't want and you you sort of bind them together these aren't individual organelles it's like this complex network that's continuously morphing and changing and talking to itself and other organelles so so i wouldn't really think of it as in those kinds of static processes and everything that i understand about exercise from a mitochondrial standpoint would say that it both improves mitochondrial function and then stimulates um biogenesis so you can you can do both yeah we're not we're not just you know stimulating this in a petri dish this is happening in a human body that's having all kinds of other benefits occurring from yeah so with i guess kind of the golden question i mean jumping back to sort of fasted state and exercise aside from sort of the effect that you might have as far as perception how a workout is perceived and how nutrition affects your workouts in your own mind is there much of a benefit to fasted workouts or fasted cardio at that rate if it's not if autophagy is really driven by the exercise either way do you see much benefit to fasted cardio outside of hey i just like it as far as i know no um no sort of like robust beneficial physiologic mechanism that i can like point to a nice paper that says this shows why fasted cardio is beneficial um there's some nice theoretical stuff on you know uh like carb cycling approaches and maybe that drives better you know adaptations to different fuel sources but but i also think there's probably uh some personal preference and you know expectation built into that as well um i know people who are researching this question they have a hypothesis that in individuals who say are insulin resistant um or you know are changing their body composition through through diet and exercise you may accelerate those adaptive processes if you do your exercise in a fasted versus a fed state those are experiments that are being designed and will happen in the future so i may be wrong but as yeah i can't point to a single thing that says yes that's why you should do your exercise fasted yeah it's definitely an interesting one right because you talk to people it's almost split down the middle it's like 50 of people that i talk to say no i cannot even train when i have food in my system the other 50 say oh my gosh if i don't have some carbohydrates in me or have something in me i totally bonk what's interesting is i notice with the ketogenic world in that community they very clearly almost unanimously say i need to train fasted i can't stand having training with food in my system and i think well that actually kind of makes sense because you're not loading carbohydrates prior to a workout if you're eating you're eating protein and fat which is going to definitely i shouldn't say definitely but it's probably going to impact you know your workout you're going to have a lot of energy going to digestion and that's a heavy meal that's not really providing you a lot of immediate ergogenic like eight whereas someone that is a very carb driven person it's probably a different ball game for them so it's kind of interesting how you get these two camps of people that like to train fasted and people that don't like to trade fasted but then if you expand upon their diets you say ah well now it kind of makes sense you know you're this fat adapted person that's not really eating many carbohydrates so what would be the point in you eating that food if you're not getting immediate fuel from it especially when you're so good at glycogen resynthesis you know as you are in a lower carb state yeah it's kind of some of the interesting stuff i can't remember right off hand i know this thing was like a brazilian journal medicine or something like that it was pretty interesting talking about the lactate threshold sort of changing in a fasted state or lactate clearance changing in a fasted state that's not necessarily my area of expertise but i found it pretty interesting kind of talking about how when you're in a fasted state you know you clear lactate a little bit faster and my interpretation of that was okay well that that could mean a number of different things but it all is really telling me is that okay you're more efficient at probably going through the corey cycle and taking that lactate and putting it into different does it mean that training fasted is necessarily better not necessarily i mean i could find reasons for my own personal uh benefit why that would be good but i could also poke holes in it the other way i don't know if you're are you well-versed in the lactate world or is that really not your so so my um you know i've i've mainly looked at lactate from a from a like a neural protection kind of standpoint where it where it is certainly an interesting um you know metabolic precursor and maybe has some benefits after after a brain injury um and then also the co like the acute there seems to be um after after exercise sort of like an acute improvement in cognitive function that may be uh driven at least partially by lactate and or uh ketones um or both and so i i would agree with you um maybe in the fastest state you know you have higher throughput in the corr through the corey cycle and just you're generating generating glucose from that lactate and then it becomes a fuel source and that would be a beneficial thing um the reason why people can kind of spin it is beneficial is because we have this connotation that lactate is is a bad thing when of course it isn't um you know it's actually very beneficial uh during exercise for multiple reasons except you may get to a point like when you're absolutely swimming in lactate there may be this negative effect of very high lactate levels on cognitive function but very few people i think really get to the levels of lactate required to do that on a regular basis and so you know when you're doing um anaerobic exercise yes lact you know sort of lactate increases in the blood but it's not the lactate that's the problem you're there's a whole bunch you know there's changes in ion handling you are accumulating protons or cumulative acid but it's not the lactate that's driving that actually the lactate buffers some of that at least when it's first generated so i think that people might say oh yeah better your better lactate clearance is is better during fasting but actually that's not something that i would necessarily hang my hat on i can see why it's happening but i'm not sure that's better or worse one way or the other yeah that's i mean more efficient throughput through the quarry cycle doesn't necessarily mean you're going to perform better yeah i think the the situations that might it might come interesting uh because people people ask they ask these questions okay with this okay with this kind of 180s that people are doing on different ways of looking at nutrition then what are applications for this and i keep coming back okay situations ultra light backpacking something like that where you're going for you know that's where i can maybe see okay yeah if you have the ability to have greater throughput with that then that could make sense when you're going for long periods of time and you need to literally have minimal food but that's not a typical athlete scenario like a typical athlete scenario you're going to have whatever fuel available you really want to have you know or uh special operations kind of stuff like maybe you're really limited fuel that's where this kind of stuff gets a little more interesting but there's about a fraction of a fraction of a percent of people that really care about that and so it's really difficult to talk about um in the essence of time i want to be able to move on because we're going to film some other pieces so there'll definitely be part twos and part threes and probably 10 out of this but when we start looking at fasting i don't want people to get the win taken out of their sale and say hey there's no point in fasting if i'm getting more autophagy from exercise what not first of all a lot of other benefits we know of with fasting and one of the things you are obviously well-versed in everything brain that's not my wheelhouse i'm decent at it just from a periphery but when we look at like early time restricted feeding things like that there's still pretty solid concrete benefits as far as like uh you know bmal and everything like that circadian clock genes right i mean do you know much in that world yeah so i think in in general there's a body literature that that says that um overall long-term health improves if you you have aligned circadian clocks like central and uh peripheral and the the timing of food is obviously an important zeitgeist for the peripheral clocks in particular and you know probably the vast we the vast majority of evidence comes uh from mice it's difficult to interpret because mice are nocturnal so you have to be really careful about how you how you sort of translate that to humans but we also know that um in general uh individuals who work nights night shifts or swing shifts or they have some kind of circadian misalignment they are at greater risk against the resistance in certain cancers and and things like that so i think we can kind of put together this this picture that yes uh circadian rhythms are important for long-term health and that would include the alignment of light cues and nutrient cues so the there are multiple ways to to skin this cat and you can make it very complex however i think that if you just eat while it's you know during the daytime and not during the night time that probably covers it for most people um and there's certainly a number of benefits from not always having nutrients being processed in the system and what i mean by that is the in western society if we're awake we're eating um and we're usually in a caloric surplus that is the the average individual at any given time is in a caloric surplus if you're eucalypt or in a deficit i think different things come into play but for the average person you know having your body be processing nutrients essentially around the clock so there's no opportunity for you know rest and recovery and repair or at least not in a way that we would normally expect it to i think that's what's associated with certain detrimental health outcomes so it's probably you know there's always going to be caveats um but i think you know having some sort of regulation on on the timing of the food that you eat particularly in the hypercaloric state which again most people gain weight over their lifetime continuously so they're continuously in some kind of caloric surplus i think that's probably when it's most problematic but again that's what's relevant to the majority of the population yeah that makes a lot of sense because every single time i think i read something a while back it was like the average american consumes something like over 40 times per day it's like you just can't stop consuming and deficit or not i don't know if that's the best thing to be doing around the clock right i mean and it's there's a lot of theories you could pull out of this okay well then can could i eat round the clock if i was putting myself in a deficit immediately after my uh you know intense exercise and i've seen these questions come up and it just seems like okay now you're trying to manipulate in this such a complicated way where it's really pretty simple and this is an interesting question and that wasn't even intended to come up in this conversation but the aspect of a deficit is so intriguing because it's so simple but it's also so complex and you know you look at like the okinawans okay they'll say okay on average 10 to 15 caloric deficit okay well does that mean that they're continually reducing calories forever and ever know like how does someone remain in a deficit well and this is somewhat rhetorical but i mean how does someone remain in a deficit while not having to continually reduce calories while also still balancing muscle protein synthesis to maintain muscle as a glucose sink for good metabolic health as we age yeah there's an interesting question i think almost all of the so i don't necessarily i'm not a big believer in chronic caloric restriction for humans and being some like magic thing for longevity um if you look at again we have to go back to the road in literature but if you look at a whole bunch of different strains of rats and mice and you calorically restrict them like a third benefit a third see no difference and a third dies sooner and the smart people that i've you know heard from in the longevity sphere say humans are probably the same and so there's probably some genetic and other environmental backgrounds that are important so when i'm talking about enlisting a deficit this is in the scenario where somebody has adipose tissue above the level that they want and which they have accumulated over time due to some kind of prolonged caloric excess i think if you are somebody who is you know lean or at least the body composition that that they're happy with and want to maintain long term i don't think you then need to focus on any kind of deficit beyond that so almost all the benefits we've seen from humans in terms of caloric deficits are in those who are obese or have type of diabetes or some other metabolic disease which is usually associated with chronic caloric excess before then so that's when i think um the deficit is important once you've then achieved those body composition changes you know i i think there's as much risk as there is potential benefit from extending a deficit beyond that and you're right over time you'll have to work harder and harder to make that deficit because the body adapts you get smaller right so your caloric needs um diminish as well and at some point that is that is going to going to balance out yeah i mean if it's never easy to sell insurance so to speak but i mean i like a lot of the answer is you know while you are able to build muscle while your hormones are in place and why you have that do it right but it's so difficult to to sell that to somebody like hey this is going to be good for you 50 years down the line you know it's that's kind of what i've come down to it's like okay i'm not going to sit here and attempt to be in a deficit all the time i'm going to naturally sort of let it happen when it happens but i also understand that you know if i eat a tic tac right now i'm immediately in that moment not going to be in a deficit but i might be a deficit 10 minutes later right there's always a balance and it's not just about okay i have 100 being a deficit all the time it's about kind of finding those places where you can sort of enlist a deficit even if it's through exercise right yeah i'm i'm a big believer in these things integrating over over long periods of time right i mean your sort of body composition and body weight integrates over months or years it's not it doesn't happen on a daily basis although daily energy availability can be important for um you know menstruating females based on you know for the it can be important for their cycle um but sort of in general this stuff integrates over long periods of time um so now i can't remember the point that i was going to make i'm sure it was very important and very interesting um but uh yeah [Laughter] i went into a caveat and then i forgot what i was going to say it's i think i think the point is ultimately across the onus is that you know these integrating these things over time right so it's it's a deficit is not absolute it's just because i am in a let's hypothetically say a five percent deficit right now it doesn't mean i'm gonna be in a five percent if i go sit down and eat i'm not gonna be at a deficit at that point in time so like what is this cumulative effect and i always try to say like okay if if it's is it is it a dimmer switch or is it an on off switch as far as a deficit is concerned like if i'm if i am 0.025 percent in a deficit is the switch flipped and is it accelerated more if i'm in more of a deficit or is the benefit just ever so slightly being in a deficit over the aggregate of say a 30-day period of time right and that's kind of how i look at it i'm like okay well as i age my basal metabolic rate is probably going to slow down anyway and okay maybe i'll just aim to be in that ever ever ever so slight deficit when i look at my calories for the course of a year right and i'm not counting my calories for a year so good luck yeah and and i think again having the long view is the important thing and now i remember what i was going to say which is that having worked with a number of people who've either tried to or struggled to or achieved long-term body composition changes and i was talking about body composition because like your weight on a scale means literally nothing to me i couldn't couldn't care less i don't think it tells you anything at all uh basically um and because you know muscle mass like what is that what is that weight made up of you know how you know all that kind of stuff so um people who i think have successfully so if you need to successfully maintain a deficit for a long period of time obviously having the long view is important uh because i think the majority of these benefits integrate over time all you're trying to do is improve uh body composition and relative muscle mass and adiposity because that's what seems to be the major driver of long-term metabolic health um in addition to a bunch of other environmental factors but if you put your body in an environment that supports normal appetite regulation a lot of this kind of happens by itself and you don't need to micromanage it and what i mean by that is if you get adequate sleep and you eat food that isn't hyper dense calorically and sort of nutrient deficient because there's some nice data on very calorically dense foods um sort of overriding certain satiety mechanisms and then there's there's another recent paper that came out that shows that food texture has an effect as well so if you're eating very soft calorically dense foods those are the ones you're likely to overeat but if you're eating crunchy um less calorically dense foods you'll you'll eat uh less of those sort of overall but still feel similarly associated so like the food quality matters so i think having some nutrients in there not being too calorically dense having slept properly having done some exercise you know maybe not being stressed about everything all the time like if you put the body in that environment i think that some of this start stuff starts to self-regulate um and then you don't need to sort of micromanage it of course if you want more accelerated changes and or your body composition matters for your performance or your sort of professional livelihood right if you're a professional bodybuilder right you can't just like think if i sleep enough i'll get down to three percent body fat of course it doesn't work that way but um for the average individual sort of creating that supportive environment does help regulate appetite and then you you will better regulate satiety signals uh both coming from the gut coming from systemic energy stores and this stuff will start to sort of take care of itself over time for most people yeah that's that's interesting because it's just a matter of you know especially once you get yourself out of sort of that metabolic like trauma center you know that triage right and you're kind of trying to like once you break yourself out of that and systems are starting to operate more normal then it's then it just makes sense then you just come right back down to okay what is what can i surround myself with to give myself the right lifestyle that supports sleep supports a lower stress life and and whatnot so with that we'll wrap this one up man but where where can people find you uh probably easiest to find me on instagram uh at dr tommywood uh it's mainly posts of my dogs in the gym but occasionally i'll post a paper or some snarky comment about diet and nutrition uh in in uh you know in the popular media or in on social media uh so if you enjoy anything like that then that's probably the best place to find me yeah i saw something recently that they said that milk is now better than water for hydration did you see that one oh uh well i mean a couple of years ago it was beer so that was better than water for hydration so i think you pick your poison man so as always keep it locking here in the channel and dr wood thank you so much man thanks

Channel: Thomas DeLauer

Views: 299,686

Keywords: fasting, fasting weight loss, fasting benefits, fasting for a week weight loss results, fasting for a week, fasting for 3 days, fasting mimicking diet, fasting results, fasting diet for weight loss, fasting and autophagy, intermittent fasting and autophagy, prolonged fasting and autophagy, extended fasting and autophagy, fasting for autophagy, autophagy and fasting, thomas delauer fasting, does fasting increase autophagy, thomas delauer

Id: OFIDS68qegA

Length: 47min 16sec (2836 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2022