Connie Ragen Green’s Intermittent Fasting Journey
Since you’ve arrived on this page, it’s most likely that you’ve picked up or been gifted a copy of my book, In Pursuit of Healthy-Ness: How I Reinvented My Life with Intermittent Fasting. While it’s true that I’ve been able to drop more than 120 pounds (about 55 kilos) by developing an intermittent fasting practice, as well as completely reversing my diagnosis of pre-diabetes, the truth is that I’m continuing with IF primarily for the anti-aging benefits, most notably autophagy.
Autophagy is an amazing topic. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy. This Nobel Laureate discovered and elucidated mechanisms underlying autophagy, a fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components.
The word autophagy originates from the Greek words auto, meaning “self”, and phagein, meaning “to eat”. Thus, autophagy denotes “self eating”. This concept emerged during the 1960’s, when researchers first observed that the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes, forming sac-like vesicles that were transported to a recycling compartment, called the lysosome, for degradation.
Difficulties in studying the phenomenon meant that little was known until, in a series of brilliant experiments in the early 1990’s, Yoshinori Ohsumi used baker’s yeast to identify genes essential for autophagy. He then went on to elucidate the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast and showed that similar sophisticated machinery is used in our cells.
Ohsumi’s discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content. This opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection. Mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease. Degradation is a central function in all living cells.
In the mid 1950’s scientists observed a new specialized cellular compartment, called an organelle, containing enzymes that digest proteins, carbohydrates and lipids (more commonly known as fats). This specialized compartment is referred to as a “lysosome” and functions as a workstation for degradation of cellular constituents.
The Belgian scientist Christian de Duve was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 for the discovery of the lysosome.
New observations during the 1960’s showed that large amounts of cellular content, and even whole organelles, could sometimes be found inside lysosomes. The cell therefore appeared to have a strategy for delivering large cargo to the lysosome. Further biochemical and microscopic analysis revealed a new type of vesicle transporting cellular cargo to the lysosome for degradation.
Christian de Duve, the scientist behind the discovery of the lysosome, coined the term autophagy, “self-‐eating”, to describe this process. The new vesicles were named autophagosomes.