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by nibs 3553 days ago
In case anyone is interested in the personal implications of this, this is part the mechanism by which intermittent fasting gains it's health benefits. People have fasted for 16-48 hours and gained benefits through history but what is happening in the body is really ketosis + autophagy. Most people in the modern world eat too frequently to benefit from autophagy, but men (16 hours of fasting) and women (14 hours of fasting) can both benefit from the 3-4x faster cell recycling and potential life extension properties. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy
2 comments

Please, everyone in the IT/CS world, ridiculous health "benefit" claims are in fact the origin of the term "snake oil." There is no accepted guidance from the biomedical community regarding fasting that draws a link to autophagy. Please keep your completely unscientific and unfounded health "benefit" claims to yourself.
It seems as though many of your historical posts are similarly angry "source-your-claims" posts. Here is an article entitled "Short-term fasting induces profound neuronal autophagy": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20534972/
Thank you for stalking. The paper you cite is preclinical work in mice, and the mechanistic association between starvation conditions and autophagy induction were already well understood before this paper. (That was, in fact, the Nobel-winning work on which you commented.) Any consequential claims of autophagy are unsupported by data in that paper, even in mice. The claim that autophagy has net "health benefits" or "life extension properties" in humans is completely unsupported and not something on which there is professional medical guidance.

HN is replete with medical and health claims that should not be propagated by responsible people. Face it: IT professionals don't have expertise in this area, but that doesn't apparently stop you from having opinions and propagating them authoritatively as truth. If you'd like to do original research in this area, please do, but don't spread misinformation as if it's factual.

>"3-4x faster cell recycling"

What is "cell recycling"?

Most of the news outlets reporting on this are using that term, which must have appeared in a press release. I think it's just a layman-friendly version of "autophagy".
Thanks, your assessment agrees with mine for whatever that is worth.
Yes. It is a literal description of autophagy.