Fasting and autophagy: The Impact of Dry Fasting on Health and Longevity

As the sun rose high on the first day of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, my husband, and I joined a group of friends at a restaurant in New York City. The aroma of a delicious Spanish cuisine overwhelmed the air. The waiter approached our table, ready to take our orders. Our friends ordered, but we politely apologized. We explained that we are doing Ramadan fasting. One of our friends looked puzzled and asked, "Not even water?" We nodded, confirming that this was our only feeding window from dusk till dawn during this holy month. Our friend sympathized, saying, "I can't even imagine doing that."

Back then, I could not fully explain the health significance of our fasting. I have always been convinced that its influence is more spiritual. But now, after practicing intermittent fasting for losing weight and enhancing my energy, and after deep diving more into the impact of fasting on longevity and increasing cognitive skills, I am keen on learning more about the science behind dry fasting and how it contributes to processes like autophagy, cellular repair, and insulin sensitivity.

In the following lines, I am willing to explain what fasting is and how it has, both wet and dry, a significant impact on a particularly important biological process called autophagy. Furthermore, I will tell you how doing a dry fast for 30 days can make you healthier and more energetic.

Exploring the Concept of Intermittent Fasting

Fasting is not new to the modern world; it has been known and practiced since the beginning of history. Throughout human evolution, ancient hunter-gatherers lacked sophisticated tools for preserving and cooking food. As a way of natural adaptation to scarcity and hard-to-find food, humans evolved to be able to function for a prolonged period without feeding. In fact, fasting is embodied in our nature to fast more than consume food frequently during the day.

Fasting is an umbrella term that covers all the fasting categories, including intermittent fasting (IF). Intermittent fasting is a newly coined expression for an eating pattern that suggests a restricted eating window. It does not identify the type of food that you should or should not eat, but rather when you should eat it.

In this sense, intermittent fasting can be seen as a lifestyle rather than a diet. There are distinct types of IF, each with a varied length of fasting and eating periods. The most prevalent type among fasting practitioners is the 16-hour fast.

Fasting has also been practiced for religious and spiritual purposes, such as in Islam (Ramadan), Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism. These types of fasting are known as intermittent fasting, and Christian fasting, for example, includes dietary restrictions. But here is a question for which you should be excited to get the answer: What are the health consequences of fasting, regardless of the type?

Wet Vs dry Fasting

Interestingly, intermittent fasting can be wet or dry. The sole difference between the two types is the ability to drink liquids without sweetener during fasting. In wet fasting, you can drink water, tea, coffee, or herbal tea without breaking your fast. The science behind the liquid allowance is that these low-calorie drinks have no effect on blood sugar or insulin levels. So, your body can deal with them quickly. In short, you can drink liquids during your feeding restricted window and still have the intermittent fasting benefits.

On the contrary, dry fasting restricts even water. As I am going to explain in the coming sections, research shows that limiting drinks while fasting can maximize the benefits of intermittent fasting. But to understand how fasting benefits us, we should first learn about how our bodies respond to it.

How our body responds to Fasting?

Fasting has an extensive number of effects on our bodies. When you fast, your body reacts differently on cellular and molecular levels. When you fast for more than fourteen hours, your body undergoes an important process of self-repair.

On top of that, fasting helps increase your body’s insulin sensitivity by dramatically reducing insulin levels in your blood. This improves the accessibility of stored fat in the body, lowers cholesterol, and makes weight loss much easier. Your body, then, functions as a fat-burning machine. When you fast, your cells begin their cellular repair mechanisms known as autophagy.

Another benefit is that practicing fasting may lead to changes in gene expression correlated with longevity and disease prevention.

Autophagy: Your Body's Self-Cleansing Process

The body is composed of trillions of cells. These cells age and become vulnerable to oxidative stress, which can accelerate aging and cause disease. Oxidative stress occurs when the body is exposed to hazardous chemicals in the environment known as free radicals, which can cause damage if a protective mechanism is not present to reverse the process.

Autophagy is the body's way of reversing this process. The word Autophagy translates to "self-eating" in Greek. It is the process by which our bodies breakdown old or dysfunctional cells and replenish them into healthier version.

It may sound a bit odd that your body is eating itself, but it is actually quite beneficial and necessary for survival. Autophagy has a wide range of benefits, particularly in terms of its anti-aging effects. This entire process occurs naturally every day as a protective mechanism, but it needs to occur long enough to provide its intended health benefits. This is where the link between autophagy and fasting comes in.

Fasting and Autophagy

If you are interested in autophagy and fasting, here are some helpful tips to help you reap the most benefits:

You may wonder when autophagy begins, but there is no clear answer as your body takes time to prepare for autophagy and to break down all the recent food you have consumed. But what we know, that to initiate autophagy, a 14-hour fast, at least, is recommended.

One should understand that Intermittent fasting autophagy is highly individual, and more research is needed into the minimum amount required to start the body self-repair process. Proponents of dry fasting claim that it is more effective for autophagy since it starves your cells faster.

If you are wondering what to eat during autophagy fasting, there are certain drinks and foods that can help support the process during your eating windows. This includes coffee, green tea, turmeric, and polyphenol foods such as asparagus, broccoli, carrots, nuts, and seeds. These polyphenols break down into urolithin A, a compound that promotes autophagy.

Enhancing Body Repair and Boosting Metabolism with Dry Fasting

In a new study published in Metabolism Open, researchers found that dawn-to-dusk dry fasting for 30 days decreased circulating inflammatory cytokines in subjects with an increased body mass index. They found that, in contrast to wet fasting, dry fasting for 30 days prevented protein breakdown as an alternative energy source during fasting and, therefore, protected against skeletal muscle and vital body weight loss that can occur with wet fasting.

A recent study investigated the effects of Ramadan fasting on metabolic rate and the risk of chronic disease. The study was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The researchers discovered that fasting during Ramadan—a 30-day dry fast—promoted positive alterations in fourteen metabolites, including inflammatory markers and lipoprotein subclasses. These changes occurred regardless of body composition and suggest short-term benefits for chronic disease risk.

Another study recently published in the same journal evaluated the effects of time-restricted eating versus a habitual diet on inflammation markers. The researchers found that intermittent fasting was associated with reduced levels of TNF-α, an inflammatory cytokine. They also found that it led to lower leptin levels, which is another adipokine associated with obesity. These findings suggest that intermittent fasting might be effective in reducing inflammation in the general adult population.

Intermittent fasting, specifically dry fasting, appears to improve body weight, lipid profile, blood pressure, and fasting blood glucose levels. As a result, fasting throughout Ramadan may help with weight loss, lower cardiovascular disease risk, reduced blood pressure, and better glycemic management. Understanding how fasting affects our bodies at the molecular level allows us to maximize health and energy. Nonetheless, the methodological quality of the included study ranged from low to severely low, demanding caution when drawing conclusions from this data.