Autophagy & Fasting: How Long To Biohack Your Body For Maximum Health? (GKI)

Autophagy and fasting are two incredibly important and exciting topics

right now because together with a ketogenic diet they're showing great

promise in improving devastating conditions like insulin resistance and

diabetes and even cancer today I'm going to talk about how to measure those

things and I'm gonna reference a study where they managed to shrink brain

tumors both in mice and humans and where they developed something called the gki

index so we're going to talk about what that is and how you can start applying

it and know if you are in that therapeutic zone where your body is

truly healing and cleaning up coming right up

I'm doctor Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't

miss anything so fasting is pretty straightforward it's when you don't eat

but autophagy is a little bit more involved autophagy develops as a

result of not eating autophagy means self eating so when you're not adding a

lot of food when you're not putting a lot of new nutrients into the body for a

period of time then the body has to get better at using the nutrients that are

already there and one of the best methods of doing that is to get really

really good at cleaning house so that's what autophagy does when there's no

nutrients especially protein coming in it needs to find protein from other

sources so it gets really good at recycling and it starts breaking down

debris and cells that have some debris in them and cells they're about to die

and pathogens virus bacteria and even cancer cells all of that stuff all that

debris that you don't need or that's in the way the body starts looking really

hard and it becomes a resource so it's cleaning and getting resources at the

same time and as a result autophagy has shown great promise for anti-aging for

reducing cancer for reducing Alzheimer's and Parkinson because both cancer and

Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are growths they're stuff growing that shouldn't be

there and when autophagy increases the body gets better at cleaning up that

stuff your immune system improves because some of the stuff it cleans up

or virus and bacteria it gets better at detoxing because it goes and cleans a

lot it manages inflammation better and it can even

helped mitochondrial repair so mitochondria is the energy factory in

your body every cell in your body has them the brain and the heart and the

liver has the most because it needs the most energy and autophagy can even help

with mitochondrial repair mitochondria are little things inside your cells that

take oxygen and fuel and turn them into energy and your body gets about 95% of

its energy from mitochondria but mitochondria are also very sensitive

they're a little more fragile they kind of rust easier than the rest of your

cell so as they don't work so well anymore as you age your mitochondria

aged a little faster than you do very often and if we can use autophagy to

help repair them then that is a very powerful component of that anti aging

and also what can get you some more energy most cells in your body can use

different fuels for energy they can use glucose or they can use ketones and fat

but cancer cells are different they rely primarily on glucose so if you cut your

glucose way way way way back so that your body starts relying on more ketones

then you're essentially starving the cancer cells selectively and this was

known as the Warburg effect one of the more prominent modern researchers is

Thomas Seyfried and he has been looking into this cancer mechanism on how cancer

doesn't do well without glucose and he published a study where he was involved

with one study and they looked at some other studies as well where they managed

to shrink brain tumors in both mice and humans and what they did that was new

was they developed an index called the GKI index glucose ketone index which is

basically just a ratio between these two and they found that once they get

the ketones and the glucose about equal amounts in

the blood as measured by milli moles then they managed controlled and even

reversed the growth of the tumors as soon as the glucose went back up the

tumor started thriving and growing again so they developed a therapeutic zone so

let's talk about that so if we take glucose here in blue and we measure it

in milli moles so don't worry it's really simple you take whatever normal

number you get for glucose so in in the U.S. we're talking about glucose

somewhere around a hundred or around ninety so a normal glucose value of

ninety is the same as 5 milli moles we're converting milligrams per

deciliter - milli moles that's all there is to it

you divide your regular number by 18 and then you get millimoles if you live in

the rest of the world then you might already get your glucose as millimoles

ketones are typically measured in millions already so you just divide one

by the other so if you take someone who is eating the standard American diet

they're probably going to have their glucose in around a hundred hundred and

twenty so they're starting out at about a six and their ketones will be

virtually non-existent they might have a little bit of ketones in the morning but

they'll be very very low there'll be zero point something or zero point one

or two so they'll start off with the gki ratio some around 30 to 50 then as they

fast as they get into ketosis they either fast completely or just cut their

carbs way way back or eliminate them almost totally now their glucose starts

dropping as the glucose starts dropping the body has to start burning fat as an

alternative fuel source and a byproduct of the fat burning is ketones which is

also a brain fuel so the brain can use glucose or ketones for fuel and

as one goes down the other goes up and of course the ratio starts changing so

here in the beginning as time goes we might have a ratio of 30 at gki index of

30 and then as we get going it gets maybe to 9 and then 6 and then 3

and somewhere when they meet when we're in this therapeutic zone we don't have

to get quite to 1 but that's sort of the optimal place but somewhere around 1.5

glucose to one part ketones is where we enter this zone so I just copied this

graph off from the research paper and I don't know why they used different

scales on the graph but the top of the scale is 7 for glucose and five for

ketones so when we divide out the numbers we find that this optimal area

the optimal therapeutic zone is somewhere it's starting somewhere

between one to two parts of glucose two ketones so then you can keep going maybe

all the way up to about 0.7 which means that you have more ketones than glucose

but somewhere in this area you're still managing things you're still in a very

very strong high state of etaf adji so again the gki is very simple glucose

ketone index you divide the glucose by the ketones but you have to measure them

in milli moles and if you get your glucose in moles then you just divide

straight if you get it in milligrams per deciliter you take that number and you

divide by 18 and you get your your answer so once you get started what

you're going to need is a glucose meter and a ketone meter and you can get them

in the u.s. you can get them online very easily they'll run about 50 bucks and

then you'll pay a little bit for the strips but it's quite affordable these

days so you can measure every day or even three times a day once you're in

the beginning so that you see how that changes are happening so most people in

the beginning they'll have a ratio of somewhere around 30 to 50 and any ratio

over 9 means that you are not in ketosis you do not have a significant amount of

ketones so you're not really getting any of the therapeutic benefits of ketosis

orotava g but as you progress once you're in between 6 & 9 which is not a

very powerful you're not anywhere near the therapeutic zone but just you have

at this point a low state of ketosis and this can be enough for weight loss for a

lot of people a lot of people are going to get great weight loss between 6 & 9

some people aren't going to get any weight loss between 6 & 9

depends on genetics depends on how insulin resistance you are how long it's

been going physical activity etc so for people who have kind of easy or

moderately easy weight loss they can do that in this zone and it's also a great

zone for maintaining your results for just once you're healthy you're at your

ideal weight you can maintain it between 3 & 6 is a medium level of ketosis now

you're getting a lot of therapeutic benefits to reverse things like type 2

diabetes and insulin resistance and for most people who have obesity or

overweight they're also going to start shedding pounds at this level between

1.5 and 3 you have a high level of ketosis and now you're getting

therapeutic benefits from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and traumatic brain

injury so we want to understand that the transition here a little bit at the

lower levels of ketosis you're starting to change your metabolism but you're not

getting a whole lot of autophagy benefits yet you have to get into a stronger a

higher state of ketosis before the autophagy really kicks in before the body gets

so desperate that it starts cleaning house and starts breaking down some of

these unwanted growth and accumulations like cancer and Alzheimer's and so forth

so between 3:00 to 6:00 you're getting a lot of hormonal

benefits you're reversing insulin resistance you're reversing metabolic

syndrome you're you're cleaning up at a more lighter level but you're not

necessarily breaking down protein because you have to get into a longer

fast or a lower level of protein in order for autophagy to really kick in

and start working for these growths so at the high level of keto now you're

starting to get therapeutic benefits for Alzheimer's Parkinson's and traumatic

brain injury and the maximum authophagy the optimal therapeutic zone when your

body will start breaking down all kinds of things including probably brain

tumors is between 0.7 to 1.5 in the paper they said that you're starting to

get for humans they said you're probably entering this zone somewhere between a

gki ratio of one to two so that would be close to two this

this zone and then if you can maintain inside that zone then you know that

you're staying in that optimal therapeutic zone of maximum optimal autophagy

and if you're getting results and you're not particularly interested in

this then then fine but if you're not getting results or if you'd really like

to explore how far reaching your health benefits could be with a deeper state of

autophagy now you have to start measuring because a lot of people say oh

I'm on the keto diet but what does that mean if your neighbor gets into ketosis

because when when he eats 50 grams of net carbs that doesn't mean that that

diet is going to put you in ketosis and vice-versa

and an interesting thing was pointed out in the paper that they

fed these mice and mice are very different from humans so they called it

a ketogenic unrestricted diet they had standard diet unrestricted standard diet

restricted ketogenic diet restricted and ketogenic diet unrestricted and for the

mice it turned out that it didn't really matter if it was a standard diet or a

keto diet what put them into this zone was the calorie restriction and most

studies that have been done earlier on calorie restriction and longevity were

done on mice but the ketogenic diet doesn't really work on mice they're

different so when they fed them when they fed the mice a standard

unrestricted diet their gki ratios were ranging from 15 to 70 and they had no

control over the growth when they fed them a standard diet restricted meaning

calorie restrictions they fed them a little bit everything but they starved

them they got excellent results between three and four and when they fed them a

ketogenic diet restricted they also got excellent results but when they fed them

a ketogenic diet unrestricted the numbers didn't really drop much for the

mice but they do for humans so the studies that they did obviously the

people got the cancer and the the tumors from the standard diet with with a very

very high gki index so obviously to do the study they would have to feed them

something different so they gave them a ketogenic diet whether it was restricted

or unrestricted they managed to get people into this zone so that was kind

of interesting but again it points out two things that mice and humans are

quite different so we can't just lump them together as far as results the

other thing is that a ketogenic diet doesn't mean ketogenic unless you can

measure and you have actual ketone bodies in

your bloodstream and what it also means to me is that a lot of the earlier

studies where they did calorie restriction and created longevity in

mice doesn't necessarily mean that it's calorie restriction that's the primary

mechanism for humans that we can probably get the same benefits without

calorie restriction in a ketogenic diet because in humans the ketogenic diet

results in a natural calorie restriction because we eat less fat is very

satisfying for humans so after we do it for a little bit we eat less after I

found this study I got really excited and I thought hey I gotta try this out

so I'm very insulin sensitive I do want to maximize my health I want to see how

I can optimize all these things for myself and that's my my one of my major

goals in life so I decided to do a fast and I didn't know how long I was gonna

go but I was shooting for five days I didn't quite get to that point but I'll

explain so after 36 hours of a water fast I had

water and coffee and at the beginning I didn't really have any calories at all

so it's pretty much a strict water fast after 36 hours my blood sugar was 68

when you convert that into millimoles I had 3.8 in blood sugar and 2.3 in

ketones so my ratio was 1.6 I was right at the edge of of this therapeutic zone

after 36 hours and I wasn't in ketosis but I was on a low-carb diet and I've

been on the edge of ketosis and low-carb before for many years

plus I'm insulin sensitive so I'm not sure how this would translate timewise

but I think it'll give you an indication after 48 hours my fasting glucose had

gone up and my ketones hadn't chained so my GKI was 2.3 so it actually the

the ratio went up after 48 hours after 58 hours it was back down but not

because of the glucose my glucose went down a little bit but the biggest change

was that my ketones started going up so my ratio was 1.7 and then on day 3 is

when things really started happening after 63 hours of fasting and by this

time I had had a little bit of butter and MCT oil in my coffee but I hadn't

had any protein or any sugar or any carbohydrates after 63 hours my blood

sugar was up a little bit it was 81 or 4.5 million moles but now my ketones

started going up pretty quick so at ketones were 3.1 and my ratio was

1.4 so now I was inside this optimal range after 66 hours only 3 hours later

my blood sugar was about the same but my ketones were up to 3.6 my ratio was 1.2

and after 69 hours 3 hours later my blood sugar was 73 in ketones that in in

millimoles that's 4.1 and my ketones were all the way up to 4.7 so now I was

at 0.8 and I was way inside this range so three days of no calories was about

all I could take at that point I don't know if that's because I was

inexperienced or it's because I'm relatively lean or because I didn't take

enough salt but I planned to try this again and I'll let you know day four and

five I started eating a little bit I started off with some avocado and sour

cream and they I didn't eat a whole lot but I had a few meals I had two two or

even three meals but I kept them very low protein

and high fat of course so day four and day five I maintained very close to a

one-to-one ratio between glucose and ketones and I think it's very possible

to sustain this for a good long time even while you start eating or while you

do some intermittent fasting or some fasting mimicking everyone has different

experiences fasting and this was my first long fast I was slightly hungry on

the first two days not a big deal on day three I started getting really hungry

and toward the end of day three I started getting really lightheaded and

and craving so that's where I decided that I was gonna start eating again so

now of course you're wondering the next logical question is how do you get into

this zone really fast can you do it fast well I would suggest that you learn a

little bit first you learn the mechanisms you figure out how to measure

it you watch a dozen videos so you understand fasting and insulin

resistance and all these different things you read up you you've watched

some videos on autophagy so you know a little bit more while you're doing it

and then you give it a try you start with intermittent fasting you go if you

haven't done it before you lower your calories you get into ketosis you start

with intermittent fasting maybe an an 18-6 pattern or 24 and then you do

OMAD one meal a day just so you know that your body can feel good and and it's

it's still functioning even though you're fasting for a little bit then you

try a 36 or a 42 hour fast or so and then when you're still when you've done

that and you're still feeling good now is when you're ready to go for a little

bit longer fast I would not recommend that you go more than three days or a

lot more than three days I think three to five is fine as long as you've done

all this gradual trial but if you're gonna go

longer if you're not experienced I would strongly recommend that you're under a

doctor's supervision so that you know that that you're covered if something

happens if you do it gradually and you know your body then you should be fine

with three to five days then you start that you do your three to five days and

if at any time you don't feel good a little bit of hunger is good

intermittent strong hunger that goes away when you drink some water or coffee

that's fine a little bit of lightheadedness is fine because your

body's gonna go through some changes but you shouldn't feel sick you shouldn't

feel really bad that would be the time to stop the fast and eat something

figure things out and and try again later if you get through the three to

five days then you can continue you can maintain this state with intermittent

fasting with a ketogenic diet and with low to moderate protein protein is the

main thing that stops autophagy because the protein is the resource that the

body is looking for and when it the protein is scarce when you're not adding

it that's when the body goes scavenging and cleaning up inside the body you want

to if you continue this you want to do low calorie and you want to do less than

20 grams of protein that way I think you can safely sustain this comfortably

sustain this depending on the person for probably 2 3 4 weeks that would be my

goal as I get more experienced with this I'll try it again

in in a month or so and we'll see how it goes if you found that interesting

you'll probably love a lot of the other videos that we have on related topics

about insulin resistance and diabetes and fasting and intermittent fasting and

OMAD at and so forth there's a library of videos for you to check out so study and

ask me questions if you have any and we'll try to get that sorted out

give us a thumbs up and share the video with anyone that you care about and I'll

see you next time