This article was published by The Egyptian Gazette on August 1st, 2019
How often do you take out the garbage from your house? Do you do it yourself or ask someone to do it
for you? How would you feel if it is
never taken out?
Sounds gross? Right?
Would you live in a house in which garbage has accumulated
for years? Of course you won't; you
won’t even take the garbage out and leave it by your door step; it has to go
for good… maybe recycling it is the best option.
Well, the analogy I am about to draw may be a bit disgusting
but it is totally true. Imagine your
body to be the house in which you live.
After all, you are a spiritual being housed into the material body you
live in. Your body is the home of your
magnificent soul and you have to keep it clean inside and out; it is the least
you can do to take care of it.
You probably know that most tissues in your body replace
their cells with new ones on a regular basis. Depending on their nature and
composition, different organs need their own time to renew completely. There
are some tissues that do not replace their cells at all. But have you ever wondered where the dead
cells of your body end up? where does
body garbage go? Is it flushed out
somehow? or recycled?
Where does the internal garbage go?
The cells of your body constantly break down and then
recycle their own parts. Dr. Yoshinori
Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist, spent years studying how human cells get rid
of their waste. In 2016, he got the
Nobel prize in physiology and medicine
for figuring out this process which is called AUTOPHAGY.
If this process in
the body doesn't work correctly, a person can develop type 2 diabetes,
Parkinson's disease, some age-related diseases, and even cancer. And it turned
out that when you fast, your cells live longer and produce more energy!
What is autophagy ?
The scientific term “Autophagy” comes
from two Greek words : “auto” meaning self and “phagein” which
translates to “eat”. Combined together,
the words make the term Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi used to describe the process
of recycling cell waste which literally
means “self-eating”. Sounds a bit scary
and uncivil … but it is a vital process for the health and wellbeing of your
body.
The first person who discovered autophagy was Belgian
biochemist Dr. Christian de Duve. For
this discovery, he got the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974.
His work dates back to the 1960’s when he started to examine
some liver cells and noticed that they have some special storing and recycling
compartments which were later called “lysosomes”. These compartments resemble the cells of the
stomach in that they contain special digestive enzymes. With the help of the enzymes in them,
lysosomes consume worn out or damaged tissues, food particles, bacteria, versus
and other junk which accumulates in the cells. All this garbage is recycled
into new cells and energy and that is simply the process of autophagy without
which you would not survive.
In short, lysosomes
enable your body to decompose different protein structures into amino acids and
use it later as the building material to create new cells. In this case, a logical question pops up:
Do you need to eat
animal protein to build new cells?
Surprisingly, studies show that people who do not consume
animal protein still have approximately the same amount of protein and
carbohydrates in their digestive system as those who ate protein.
What a mystery! Where
did the protein come from?
This mystery has a simple explanation: the body can have its
own protein in the form of dead and damaged cells and bacteria which have been
stored away and it can use them to produce new cells.
If your natural recycling mechanism doesn't work, damaged
cells and their parts start to accumulate in the body. And it ends up unable to
neutralize cancer cells and cells infected by dangerous viruses and bacteria.
As a result, this can lead to various serious illnesses.
Fasting helps your autophagy
Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi found out that autophagy gets more
intensive when the body is undergoing some stress. Such stress can be fasting,
calorie restriction, or even starvation. In all his studies, Dr. Yoshinori
Ohsumi used starvation and fasting to encourage the body to break down toxic
cells and get rid of all the garbage. If you are a Muslim, you will not need to
read the rest of the article since you already know that the month of Ramadan
is a body and mind cleansing occasion your body celebrates every year.
However, there are some other kinds of fasting that you can
try as well. Intermittent fasting, which is alternating the periods of eating
and fasting, can help your body to clean itself. Besides, it can help you to
lose weight and speed up your metabolism.
If you are a newbie in the world of fasting and the practice looks a bit
intimidating, start with skipping your meals. In general, it is enough to skip
one meal a day to boost your metabolism and trigger cleansing processes in your
body. Just remember that if you've skipped a meal, you shouldn't overeat at the
next one.
One more interesting conclusion you can draw from this
research is that, despite what some people think, vegetarians do not suffer
from a lack of animal protein. They just get it in a different way through
"self-eating". Enjoy
your very own protein…
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